CDarwin

Well the Mayans are pretty talented at knowing when they're screwed. They should be, they've had some experience. Oooh, ethnological slam. I'm very bored; I'm sorry.

Well, for one there are other option besides genuine and fraud. It could just be a geological mix-up. The dating on the rocks of the fossil was wrong, it got intruded into an earlier layer, something along those lines. But assuming that that wasn't the case, either, it depends on what you mean by 'fish.' If palentologists found a trout in the Pre-Cambrian, yes, that'd be a problem. But if it was just an Ostracoderm then it would be huge, make Nature, all the newspapers, but it wouldn't do any real damage to evolutionary theory. We would just have underestimated how long primitive fish have been around. So I'll allow that the discovery could be so ridiculous that it reach a threshold where it challenges evolution as a theory.

Classical, quite a bit, especially Russians. Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, etc. I really like Bach and baroque music too. And some Haydn (I just got finished listening to his Cello Concertos), Beethoven, Liszt, Vaughan-Williams, others, mostly Romantics. I don't like Wagner at all, though. As for other music, the only genre I have fairly consistently explored is probably bluegrass and Appalachian folk (old-time, if anyone knows what that is, which I am listening to now), and folk music generally, especially Russian and British (I love my bagpipes). The rest is just random people I've heard and liked. They Might be Giants, Queen, Katie Melua (another obscure one), Steppenwolf, The Eagles, and I used to listen to The Wall a lot. Oh, and Frank Sinatra when I'm in the mood.

Western Europe, maybe. But countries in South America, South Asia, and Africa are quite pleased with Bush on trade generally. Most bemoan if anything his lack of emphasis on his own trade policies as terrorism and what-not has taken over American attentions. Canada (and the US, of course) benefits a good deal from NAFTA, too, which Obama is threatening to "renegotiate."

Or fish just lived a lot earlier than we thought. Evolution doesn't work by "pure randomness." You're playing into Creationists' bad arguments when you say things like that.

Honestly, that's probably not the best test, because it relies on such a subjective value. If we found a fish in the pre-Cambrian, I have a feeling that it would radically restructure our view of vertebrate history but wouldn't unseat evolution. The reality of evolution is almost one of those "the sky is blue" statements. It's obviously falsifiable, but the evidence that is already known is so evident that future evidence isn't likely to overturn it. Tests of evolution are things like the distribution of characteristics of living organisms in a branching, connected network and the presence of fossils to fill in the paths between nodes of common ancestry. An old fish won't undo that. When I think of it, something like a fish with fur might do the trick to overturn common descent, or some other bizarre combination of obviously derived features from different lineages in a single organism. Maybe modern evolutionary theory could still be overturned, or at least a big chunk of it, but needless to say the probability is vanishingly low.

I don't know that I would call a lot of Fox News 'journalism' at all, but I don't see the connection.

Anyone have a few months to spare? You can apparently help NASA by searching high resolution images to find the wreckage of the failed Mars Polar Lander. http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn13884-volunteers-asked-to-help-find-dead-spacecraft-on-mars.html So, get to it.

McCain is also a strong free-trader. That was most countries' favorite thing about Bush and its an issue he really was courageous on (when he wasn't distracted by being the savior of goodness, democracy, and the American way). It's a balancing act between fears of American imperialism which Republicans tend to represent and fears of American protectionism which Democrats tend to represent. Which I think is sad evidence how little American politics has grown up since the Gilded Age.

Oho, good idea.

I was referring to Amud 1 principally. It's a Neanderthal skull quite obviously, not a hybrid really you're correct, but it has some sapiens-like features that perplexed me. It's perhaps nothing. http://www.modernhumanorigins.net/amud1.html You see the projecting midface and occipital bun of a classic Neanderthal, which is why it is classified as such, but notice there is a chin. You don't see that in other Neanderthals or in earlier hominids.

The will ignore everything mentioned above and demand angrily why you aren't talking about the holes in evolution and instead trying to attack Cdesignism.

Which is honestly why Lucaspa is right and you're arguing a theological issue by pointing out imperfections in the design of various organisms. It's still a good argument, but you should be aware when you use it that you're referencing a specific theological belief that most ID adherents just happen to hold.

It just struck me as funny that that was coming from Egypt, which is a country that has been under emergency rule for the last few decades and where literally they "don't let" candidates win. It doesn't matter how well Islamists do in elections, they're never allowed to take power. Oh, irony. But anyway, as to the drift of your comment, I think a lot of it depends on how much Obama delivers on what people around the world seem to be expecting of him. If he actually strikes in Pakistan to get at Al Quaeda, the honeymoon is going to end pretty quickly.

Europe is a place very different from North America. It's a truism but it is very important to remember that. The European Union is a compensation for the nation-splitting that has been occurring on the European continent for hundreds of years. Nation-states are great for the dominant ethnicity, but they fracture large economies into smaller, less efficient ones. As American competition became unbearable after WWII the obvious solution came to be to unite the economies while maintaining the nation-states. That what the European Union is. North America lacks that history.

Here are some numbers: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/abioprob.html

With the new Leopard OS you can install Windows on a Mac and run the PC games. It's called Boot Camp.

CarolAlynn, let me try to dicipher what you mean. You're saying that belief in the action of an intelligent agent creating life is not incompatible evolution per se. Well in that you're quite correct. But A) "Intelligent Design" as a movement claims much more than that, and you have intimated some sympathy with those claims in your statements on human origins, for example, which is what I at least was arguing with; and B) in assuming an intelligent agent to the exclusion of natural explanations for certain mysteries in the origin of life, you risk dangerously curtailing the scientific endeavor. If we assume we've already got an answer, "God did it," then there's not incentive to look for more useful, testable solutions, which is how science advances. "Intelligent Design" is nothing more than "God did it." GDI might be a more appropriate set of initials. I'm probably stating your position too strongly, but the overkill makes my point all the same.

Old debate, there. Erik Trinkaus at Washington University is convinced that modern humans and Neanderthals interbred, and its him who has described that skeleton you're talking about. It's far from sure. Trinkaus is basing his analysis largely on limb proportions, and that's not much of a basis when mitochondrial DNA evidence seems to pretty much shut the door on Neanderthal contributions to modern human DNA. There are some odd Neanderthal skulls from the Middle East that seem to have some features reminiscent of modern humans' though. They give me the most pause. Neanderthals certainly weren't brutish idiots. But that doesn't necessarily mean they interbred substantially with modern humans when they arrived on the European scene.

Exactly. ID is the young 'theory,' so the onus is on it to show that it can make real, testable predictions with greater explanatory power than evolutionary theory. Thus far, it has not. Instead, IDists spend millions and millions a year on court battles to get their ideas inserted into text books and whine on documentaries about academic persecution. Darwin never did that. He worked, he experimented, and he convinced his peers of the quality of his ideas. That's how science is done. Through work, not PR. For bipedality to have evolved more than once among a group of primates that can already be linked together by dental characteristics would be highly unlikely. Australopithecus was almost certainly either a direct or collateral human ancestor. If you want Lucy to sing an opera, well then no luck there, as I'm sure you know. You're setting the goal posts impossibly. Obviously the first humans weren't fully modern in their mental abilities; then there wouldn't have been such a thing as human evolution, now would there? What we do have is a marvellous record of primates stretching back into the early Pliocene that paint a very clear picture of an emerging family of bipedal, increasingly intelligent apes. And what do you know, around 100,000 years ago those apes start looking exactly like us. If that's not enough evidence of human evolution for you, then you're just determined not to believe in it. Neanderthal's teeth weren't that different from modern human dentition. Just a bit tougher, and it has been proposed that even that all boiled down the different use patterns during development. Neanderthals used their teeth as vices to hold things more.

In the sense that humans have never been proven any more than apes, yes. But Australopithecus was obviously bipedal, as can be told from the shape of its pelvis, the angle at which its femur meets its tibia, the position of its spinal attachment, and most beautifully actual footprints found in association with Australopithecus fossils. Pelvis and knee comparisons; A. afarensis footprints: Sorry there aren't any of A. africanus in there, but it seems not to get as much coverage on Google images. The teeth of Australopithecus are also significantly different from those of a modern ape's. You can tell them apart on that basis alone.

With women, it would seem to be that you can be too young. Women elected as national leaders (Margaret Thatcher, Anglela Merkel, Cristina Kirchner) tend to be of post-menopausal age.

'Condi' was what I was referring to.

What about the governor of Kansas, Kathleen Sebelius? She delivered the Democratic response to the State of the Union and I remember then that they were talking about her possibly being a VP candidate this time around. She's 60. And what ever happened to Condi? We had a diminutive named picked out for her and everything. She can't just fade into obscurity.