The 6th Mass Extinction

[Digby]

And at some point science though the world was flat so how do we know they're right now?

Are you sure about that? certainly no seafaring nation ever did.
Ancients of Egypt and Greece certainly recorded the workd as being spherical; the Greeks with remarkable accuracy.
[align=center]Sorry, I know what you're trying to say; I'm just pathologically incapable of letting that one pass.[/align]

True enough, though I'm sure it's a statement/question which would be made in support of uncritical thinking that goes along with much of creationism.

[Which Tyler]

True enough, though I'm sure it's a statement/question which would be made in support of uncritical thinking that goes along with much of creationism.

Well, given that the Egyptians knew the shape of the Earth before the Earth was even created... maybe that evidence is considered insubmissable?

[rowan]

certainly no seafaring nation ever did.

The greatest sea-faring 'nation' of the first millenium (AD), namely the Polynesians, believed the world was a giant shellfish.

[Digby]

True enough, though I'm sure it's a statement/question which would be made in support of uncritical thinking that goes along with much of creationism.

Well, given that the Egyptians knew the shape of the Earth before the Earth was even created... maybe that evidence is considered insubmissable?

This sounds highly unreliable

[Which Tyler]

And at some point science though the world was flat so how do we know they're right now?

Are you sure about that? certainly no seafaring nation ever did.
Ancients of Egypt and Greece certainly recorded the workd as being spherical; the Greeks with remarkable accuracy.
[align=center]Sorry, I know what you're trying to say; I'm just pathologically incapable of letting that one pass.[/align]

Are you thinking of Eratosthenes? He was born in Ancient Egypt, yes (well, 276 BCE) but the city he was born in, Cyrene, was a Greek city.

Rings a bell as the Greek, yeah

Though I have a feeling I'm confusing Egyptian and Chinese going further back; I can't really remember though.

[morepork]

They need to get some DNA out of that mutha,sequence it, and run the homology. More data with which to cock slap creationism.

I'm not sure it would make much of a difference. After all, God planted that as a test of our faith

Now, if I had posted that, the response would have been something like:

How do you know God planted it?

What evidence do you have for that claim?

Which God are you talking about anyway?

What proof do you even have that God exists?

Why are you so obsessed with religion?

What do you have against science anyway?

Wait - don't delete that! I know you edited something.


ad infinitum . . .

Stop being such a little bitch.The more data we have, the less water anecdote/analogy holds.

[rowan]

How much will they be able to learn from DNA testing on that feathered tail? Does anyone know? What most of us would really like to know is whether the dinos were warm-blooded like birds or cold-blooded like reptiles. I believe the current consensus is they were cold-blooded, unlike birds...

[rowan]

Looking to the future, it's pretty much a given that vegetables are far healthier for humans than meat, and that we could actually get along without meat, and certainly red meat, without too much difficulty at all. I'm guessing by the end of this century red meat will have all but disappeared from the human diet, and that by the end of the next we may be off meat altogether. And then we will come to regard meat-eating the way we regard cannibalism today, and look back upon these times as horribly barbaric.

[Vengeful Glutton]

And at some point science though the world was flat so how do we know they're right now?

Are you sure about that? certainly no seafaring nation ever did.
Ancients of Egypt and Greece certainly recorded the workd as being spherical; the Greeks with remarkable accuracy.

Mediaeval muslins produced a few clever scientician eggheads.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_o ... #Al-Biruni

[rowan]

And at some point science though the world was flat so how do we know they're right now?

Are you sure about that? certainly no seafaring nation ever did.
Ancients of Egypt and Greece certainly recorded the workd as being spherical; the Greeks with remarkable accuracy.

Mediaeval muslins produced a few clever scientician eggheads.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_o ... #Al-Biruni

Understatement of the century. Medieval Andalusia was the genesis of the European Renaissance.

[Vengeful Glutton]

Which episode of Lord Of the Rings were they in?

[rowan]

Which episode of Lord Of the Rings were they in?

The one where the Andalusian Muslims bring science and enlightenment to the primitive backwoods of Europe, obviously.

[Which Tyler]

[rowan]

Fascinating story about the first Australians here:



Many researchers have previously argued that the megafauna became extinct soon after the arrival of the First Australians.

For example, it has been argued that perhaps firing of the landscape dramatically altered ancient Australia’s ecology. One species in particular, the giant flightless bird Genyornis newtoni was investigated and shown to have succumbed to significant habitat change and direct predation.

But the hypothesis for Genyornis‘ extinction has come under significant criticism due to the emergence of counter evidence. Firstly the egg shells thought to be from Genyornis are considered by leading palaeontologists to perhaps be from a much smaller megapode.

The evidence for firing of the landscape, as studied through the genomes of fire sensitive plants, shows no record of plants going through genetic bottlenecks as a result of significant firing events.

It seems that Aboriginal populations may not have been that large until much later in prehistory. Our genomic research has revealed that significant demographic changes did not occur until some 10,000 years ago. The genomic evidence suggests that for tens of thousands of years, Aboriginal populations were not that large.

More careful analysis of the record often reveals a very different picture.

https://theconversation.com/aboriginal- ... gn_monitor

[morepork]

Australia is a big place and you don't get to clock up 30 000+ years of history by scorching the earth.

[BBD]

True, but what happens when you regard anything that walks, crawls or squirms as "good eatin" ?

[rowan]

Antarctica aside, Australia was the only continent not connected to the great landmass (Africa-Eurasia-Americas) during the last Ice Age. But it was connected to New Guinea, while Indonesia was basically a sub-continent, and primitive man was able to cross the straits by raft or canoe (taking his dog but apparently no livestock) and finally reach Australia. At the time (approx. 40k BC) it remained a teeming grassland with abundant wildlife and a moderate climate. In other words, a hunter-gatherers' paradise. (Migration and trade remained active in the Torres Strait region right up to the colonial period, incidentally). But over the millenia man's impact coupled with climatic changes devastated flora and fauna and the native Australians adapted accordingly.

[rowan]

[rowan]

[morepork]

That seems a lot of new age stating of the obvious. The cartoons of space age vessels gliding through the oceans seems totally legit.

[Len]

Scientology FTW

[kk67]

Couldn't find anywhere else to put this but it seems apt as we await the inauguration of yet another moron.
It deals with the US industrialists profiteering from the Nazi war machine.

[rowan]

Yeh, the original Zeitgeist movie (which is brilliant) also makes reference to the Bush family's links with the Nazis:

[rowan]

No, there is a fair bit in that Zeitgeist video I dodn't buy into, like the 9/11 conspiracy theories. I think the Americans may have allowed that to happen, just as they may have allowed Pearl Harbor to happen, and almost certainly allowed the Lusitania to be sunk, but I would stop short of suggesting it was an inside job and don't see any credible evidence for that. But I still think Zeitgeist is a fascinating video, it explains religion very well, and the piece on the Bush family and the international billionaires club that runs the world is really interesting. Of course a lot of things have been whitewashed, and even buried entirely, since WWII and the holocaust, and of course a lot of business was being done between America, Britain and France et al with the Nazi regime right up until the outbreak of that conflict (and probably well into it in the former's case). Prescott Bush's dealings with the Germans seems fairly-well documented, in fact. This has even been published in mainstream publications such as the Guardian and Washington Times.

[morepork]

So a thread about the effects of human activity on speciation has morphed with a depressing inevitability into a monologue on 'Murrica.

Well done.