Science and Exploration

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Ebon

You know I hate being right because I can't help but to be dick about it.

Except you aren't right, Ebon. If you had bothered to read the actual story (or even better the actual papers the story is based on) you would have noticed the following:

A startling mix of human and primitive traits found in the brains, hips, feet and hands of an extinct species identified last year make a strong case for it being the immediate ancestor to the human lineage, scientists have announced.

You would have also noticed this in the next immediate paragraph:

These new findings could rewrite long-standing theories about the precise steps human evolution took, they added, including the notion that early human female hips changed shape to accommodate larger-brained offspring. There is also new evidence suggesting that this species had the hands of a toolmaker.

Note that this is not, in the least bit, saying that Darwin was wrong (Darwin actually did not specify the steps that humans took after we split from chimps because he didn't have access to the evidence). Rather, it is saying that the time frame in which certain modifications that led to us having the bodies and brains we do may have started earlier than we had believed.

This find means that, just to take two modifications, that changes in the size of brain toward the currently colossal brain in our heads and the hips necessary for a woman to give birth to a baby with one of these large heads, may have started earlier than we had previously thought. Prior to this, the thinking was that the change in female hips as well as the brain size that was pushing those hips to change shape occurred much later but now it looks as if it started up to a million years earlier. What's more, it also seems to suggest that tool use may have appeared *before* Homo habilis and that by the time that precursor to us had appeared we were well down the road to tool use.

This is *not* even in the same ballpark as:

"Let's just say I was right about not betting my life on Darwin's little theory of evolution. Don't get me wrong I'm not a creationist or anything I just always thought of it as more of a suggestion but some people just take that sort of stuff as absolute fact. That's all I'm saying.

So if you are going to, as you say, 'be a dick about it' when you're right it would help if you're *actually* right. In this case, you thought you were right when you weren't and had you bothered to read the article, you would've realized that. Given that you haven't read Darwin (don't even try to play it off that you have because no one who has read Origin of Species or The Descent of Man would say that Darwin was making 'a suggestion') and it's damn clear that you haven't read any of the modern, very accessible popular science books on the subject because, once again, you would recognize that the theory of evolution is about as established as *anything* in science.

Don't be so quick to crow about how right you are because when it's shown that you're wrong, as I've just done, you don't look like a dick you look like an ass.

Cheers
Aj