Over at Jerry Coyne’s blog ‘Why Evolution is True’ he is writing of the death of Intelligent Design (ID). It’s about time I say. Creationist Muggles have kept the stupid sham going far beyond its sell by date
“There is no longer any pretense that ID is science. It’s been reduced, as have all forms of creationism, to simpleminded criticism of evolutionary theory, without any predictions or insights of its own. Twenty years on, ID has offered us not a single insight into nature.” -Jerry Coyne
I was recently checking on one of the blogs that I follow and came upon this little excerpt from a scientific paper and it got me going on a hunt for more information. See blog link below and thanks to Mathildas Anthropology blog for the brain jog. http://mathildasanthropologyblog.wordpress.com/
“The depositional position of the tephra in the Jurreru River Valley, together with new chronometric and geochemical evidence, indicates that the ash is a product of the 74,000 year old YTT event (Petraglia et al., 2007). The recovery of Middle Paleolithic assemblages in dated deposits below and above the ash provides the first firm archaeological association, helping to resolve some of the uncertainty about archaeological associations in India. The recovery of Middle Paleolithic industries without major technological changes after the ashfall, indicate that populations survived the super-eruption. We have suggested, based on a variety of datasets, that modern humans were present in the Indian sub continent before the super-eruption, and that these populations survived this event.”
Searching a little further I found this Paper from the University of Oxford
“An area of widespread speculation about the Toba super-eruption is that it nearly drove humanity to extinction. The fact that the Middle Palaeolithic tools of similar styles are found right before and after the Toba super-eruption, suggests that the people who survived the eruption were the same populations, using the same kinds of tools, says Dr Petraglia. The research agrees with evidence that other human ancestors, such as the Neanderthals in Europe and the small brained Hobbits in Southeastern Asia, continued to survive well after Toba.” University of Oxford, UK http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_releases_for_journalists/100222_1.html
Continuing my search a bit more I found the following information on the dating of the YTT (Toba event), and for you Young Earth Creationist’s (YEC’s) who erroneously think that C-14 dating is wrong, you will notice it didn’t make use of this particular bit of science.
“Toba ash has been dated using theK-Ar, the 40Ar/39Ar and oxygen isotope/biostratigraphic methods. The abrupt drop in sea water temperature was determined with the oxygen isotope (O18/O16) method. The diverse methods used on a variety of Toba materials are in rough agreement as to the dating of the event: it definitively took place sometime between 77,000 and 69,000 years ago.” George Weber @ http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/originals/Weber-Toba/textr.htm
So basically what all of this stuff is saying is that modern type Homo sapiens were living in India sometime before about 75,000 years ago, and they were making tools and procreating and in general doing what humans do, and we have proof of this. And then this same info is saying that after the Mt. Toba eruption—which is thought to have cooled off the earth and caused a 1000 year lengthening of a ongoing cold snap that the earth was undergoing at the time, and caused a human population bottleneck where breeding pairs, on earth, may have fallen to as low as 10,000 people. In other words, near extinction of the human race—We were still around, albeit in smaller numbers. Whew!
This is pretty reliable data and it shows once more that humans have been walking the earth for many tens of thousands of years and leaving evidence behind that men can find, research, and interpret to determine that we were not placed on a newly created earth by some sky-god only 6,000 or so years ago, and also confirms that the Adam and Eve story is just myth…they never existed.
The Catholic Church faces a real conundrum; on the one hand they do accept much of evolution and the things that it implies. They do accept that much of the Old Testament is nothing but allegory, the Noachian Flood was not real, the earth (and universe) is billions of years old…not 6000, etc.. These tales […]
The things that the Reverend Barber is railing against here are the favorite projects of the Republican Party nowadays. They do not help America anymore, they are destroying it piece by piece. “It is extreme and immoral to suppress the right to vote,” It is extreme and immoral to deny Medicaid for millions of poor […]
“. . .because all the major religions in fact blaspheme one another, and ought by their principles to engage in crusade or jihad each against the others – a profoundly disturbing thought. They blaspheme each other in numerous ways. All non-Christians blaspheme Christianity by their refusal to accept the divinity of Christ, because in […]
Today is Darwin’s 205th. birthday. He turned our world upside down, and was one of the greatest scientists of all time. I raise my glass and drink to his memory. Ramen
The latest moral crisis to ruffle the feathers of both the common man and celebrities is the recent leaks regarding the NSA’s surveillance programs. Under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the agency is given the power to collect Americans’ phone metadata in bulk, and not even the rich and powerful are immune. Read more at: […]
Security check now starts long before you fly. “The Transportation Security Administration is expanding its screening of passengers before they arrive at the airport by searching a wide array of government and private databases that can include records like car registrations and employment information,” according to the New York Times. “While the agency says […]
British cardiologist Aseem Malhotra writes in a stinging “Observations” column in the British Medical Journal): Virtually all the truths about preventing heart attacks that physicians and patients have held dear for more than a generation are wrong and need to be abandoned, Malhotra writes. He musters a passel of recent research that suggests that the “obses […]
We live in the golden era of surveillance; every phone is designed to be tapped, the Internet passes through snooping equipment of agencies that are so vast and unaccountable that we hardly know their bounds. Corporations are forced (though some are willing enough!) to hand over our data and data of those whom we love. […]
The Most Honest Three Minutes In Television History http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML3qYHWRIZk Jeff Daniels Extreme caution: there is VERY STRONG language in this video from YouTube
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