CDarwin

I would put it down to half dumb-luck and half high reproductive capacity. Smaller animals tend to breed faster and this gives them an edge when you have a rapidly and radically changing environment. The population can survive hits well and still maintain enough genetic diversity to adapt. When ever you have lots of change, it's called an r-selective regime, and whenever you have a more stable environment with more competition it's called K-selective, in case you're interested. "r" refers to the reproductive capacity of a species while "K" refers to the carrying capacity of the environment.

Ash I'd imagine. You don't really use Potassium-Argon on artifacts, its more of a way of dating pyroclasts. That article makes the bad leap of saying that "semi-permanent settlement = giving up hunter-gathering = Neolithic Revolution". There are plenty of food collecting cultures that have villages and the like. All this article says is that there is sketchy evidence that Homo erectus might have stayed in one place long enough to build shelters and accrue large bone assemblages occasionally. Not that big of a deal really. The revolution 10,000 years ago wasn't building shelters it was agriculture. Show me evidence that Homo erectus was growing millet and I'll be excited.

I have a feeling that by the time the earth gets around to needing moving, the cockroaches won't care very much about the wild speculation of billion year old human scientists.

I'd say 47 would be an excellent guess... Humans don't differ that fundamentally physiologically from the other primates.

Read that as "I'm too tired right now." I'll be more substantive later I guess. You should note however that the forum's official position is counter to your particular opinion and there are indeed a plethora of arguments plastered all over the site, in the FAQ no less. There's also the ever useful Talk Origins Index.

Yes and they've been pointed to all through this thread, and all over this forum, in fact.

Yes and no. On the one hand, culture is a manifestation of behavior, which is itself partially influenced by biology and partially by the environment, and is thus a manifestation of an organism's phenotype according the the Wikipedia definition at least. On the other hand, culture is as Lucaspa said part of the environment that molds phenotypes. It almost comes down to how you want to define culture, or even to what sense you want to use the word in. Culture is said to be both the most important and meaningless word in anthropology for its ubiquitousness of use and plethora of definitions.

I can't say that I've actually read that last page and a quarter of posts, but it seems that once again semantics has brought the discussion to a halt. When I say ID at least, I'm referring to the political movement trumpeted by the Discovery Institute. The confusion over what ID is just underscores my and Paranoid's point. People think that the idea that intelligence was involved in the universe is the same as Intelligent Design the political movement, but its not.

Phil and Paranoia, I think you're both saying basically the same thing, you're just communicating imprecisely so you can't understand each other. If you believe in God, as I do, and you believe in evolution, as I do, then you needn't believe that God held the collective hand of all life in the universe on its journey to modernity. There are various options to this belief: A. God set into motion a chain of cause and effect in the beginning of time that simply resulted in what we see now; B. God exists completely passively and has nothing to do with the universe; C. God doesn't have anything to do with the physical universe and is only involved with metaphysical creation; and onward, onward, et cetera, ad nauseum. I think you can both agree with that. The problem is that so many people who believe in both God and evolution think that that's Intelligent Design, and vote accordingly. I think you're confusing the terms 'literal' and 'literary.' Erm... in the philosophical sense perhaps. Not really in the scientific.

There are a lot more things out there than those, four... Ethics, metaphysics, logic, philology et cetera.

Friedrich Engels in particular was very interested in seeing class relationships from an evolutionary perspective, and the science he used was really quite cutting edge for the time. He even accurately predicted that bipedalism and tool use probably predated expanded brain size in hominid evolution.

A. You might want to tell that to the Chinese Academy of the Sciences... they're doing work great work on primate evolution and paleontology. B. The Communist Manifesto has nothing to do with evolution and little more to do with Soviet or Chinese Communism. According to the Manifesto, the revolution shouldn't have even happened in either country. C. Lysenko didn't have a problem with organisms changing over time or anything like that. He mistrusted theoretical genetics. Lysenkoism's real appeal to both Stalin and Mao was that it was compatible with collective farming, and that's how Lysenko billed himself, an agronomist. Any effects on Soviet evolutionary science were unfortunate but not really by design.

Communism is tied in the atheism which is tied in with evolution, etc. Marx also personally admired Darwin. That's where people get connections between evolution and Communism. As for the role of evolution in scientific racism, it was really rather minor and cosmetic. Science was racist long before Darwin. Just look at the work of Agassiz.

I said something about primate evolution.

Oh, well then.

That is odd... perhaps a typo. Atheists/agnostics might cover people who are simply non-religious too. This is from the same site:

This struck me whilst eating peas this night. Is there anything special that chlorophyll does or that happens to chlorophyll once ingested? I gather it doesn't make sugar.

I go to Subspace Comms Network (its a Star Trek board) and occasionally my friend's site Fish and Chips. Of course there's Myspace.

"God guided evolution" is a nice, pretty Oprah answer, and if it helps people live with the science, who are we to begrudge them that. However that feeling lends itself as much to a scientifically compatible notion of theistic evolution as it does to ID, and I'm afraid most people just aren't scientifically and philosophically sophisticated enough to tell the difference (wow thats sounded pretentious... I don't know any other way to put it, though). Theistic evolution can also dangerously limit the range of questions that actual scientists feel equipped to examine. If you're going to start assigning things simply to the hand of God, then you stop questioning them. I think the best science is always agnostic. I must say I'm a bit surprised that everyone has this much trouble with there being that many Creationists in the US. I know of a grand total of 4 non-theistic evolutionists out of school of 1000. There are probably more, and certainly many theistic evolutionists, but I have no doubt that the majority of the school is strait young-earth Creationist. Obviously its where I live. As for the validity of that poll: There are also the Gallup polls listed here. There's this. There's this too. Are Gallup polls valid enough? Special Creationists may not be a true majority, but they're the single largest group. The point isn't that there is necessarily a statistical majority of Creationists in the US, its that there are too bloody many, enough to be a significant voting block. I do think it is safe to say that a lot people don't care much, though.

That's reasonable of course. I'm just asking which position you would defend if caught in a debate.

Geoguy was just saying as an aside that he doesn't know much about teeth. It didn't really have anything to do with my original post. I think that's what he meant, at least.

The only way to prevent a civil war is to get the Iraqi government serviceable.

Well, you have to take into account the fact that the US has absolutely universal education. Most countries won't even bother with the idiots, so they aren't covered in surveys like that.

I think we definitely need a primate paleontology expert on here. >.>

55% of Americans believe in special Creation; 37% would rather see it taught exclusively in schools. As I have said. The courts and the states are more important, and Presidents don't appoint that many federal judges, nor do that they have that much control over the ones they appoint. See Sandra Day O'Connor.