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An international team of researchers has announced the discovery of Afrasia djijidae, a new fossil primate from Myanmar that illuminates a critical step in the evolution of early anthropoids -- the group that includes humans, apes, and monkeys. The 37-million-year-old Afrasia closely resembles another early anthropoid, Afrotarsius libycus, recently discovered at a site of similar age in the Sahara Desert of Libya. The close similarity between Afrasia and Afrotarsius indicates that early anthropoids colonized Africa only shortly before the time when these animals lived. The colonization of Africa by early anthropoids was a pivotal step in primate and human evolution,...

Mention creationism, and many scientists think of the United States, where efforts to limit the teaching of evolution have made headway in a couple of states1. But the successes are modest compared with those in South Korea, where the anti-evolution sentiment seems to be winning its battle with mainstream science. A petition to remove references to evolution from high-school textbooks claimed victory last month after the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) revealed that many of the publishers would produce revised editions that exclude examples of the evolution of the horse or of avian ancestor Archaeopteryx. The move has...

...many of the greatest scientists in history have been metaphysical dualists who accepted the existence of matter and spirit. Why this idea should be considered “unscientific” is never fully explained. It is sufficient to know that materialism is the dominant philosophy of today’s scientific establishment. Any scientists who dare to publicly disagree with materialism aren’t going to gain any career advantage. Materialism, in fact, has become a political power in the academic world

What the heck... it's been a while since we last opened up the flood gates on this topic and according to Gallup surveys, we're no closer to a consensus now than we ever were. The subject at hand is our old friend, evolution vs. creation. Forty-six percent of Americans believe in the creationist view that God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years. The prevalence of this creationist view of the origin of humans is essentially unchanged from 30 years ago, when Gallup first asked the question. About a third of Americans believe...

PRINCETON, N.J., June 2 (UPI) -- The percentage of U.S. residents who believe God created human beings less than 10,000 years ago has changed little in the past 30 years, a Gallup poll says. In a report Friday, the Gallup organization said 46 percent held that view in the most recent poll. In 1982, when Gallup first asked the question, the percentage was 44 percent and the average over the years has been 45 percent. The poll was conducted for USA Today. Almost one-third, 32 percent, said humans have evolved over millions of years with divine guidance, down from an...

May 25, 2012 By Cindy Weiss EnlargeThomas C. Blum, Associate Professor, Physics. Credit: Daniel Buttrey/UConn (Phys.org) -- An international collaboration of scientists, including Thomas Blum, associate professor of physics, is reporting in landmark detail the decay process of a subatomic particle called a kaon – information that may help answer fundamental questions about how the universe began. Ads by GoogleSix Sigma — Black Belt - Get Trained & Six Sigma Certified. Flexible, Top Program 100% online. - www.VillanovaU.com/SixSigmaThe research, reported online in the March 30, 2012 Physical Review Letters, used breakthrough techniques on some of the world’s fastest supercomputers to...

Richard Leakey predicts skepticism over evolution will soon be history. Not that the avowed atheist has any doubts himself. Sometime in the next 15 to 30 years, the Kenyan-born paleoanthropologist expects scientific discoveries will have accelerated to the point that "even the skeptics can accept it." "If you get to the stage where you can persuade people on the evidence, that it's solid, that we are all African, that color is superficial, that stages of development of culture are all interactive," Leakey says, "then I think we have a chance of a world that will respond better to global challenges."

This article is a modified version of the main page at http://www.anonymousconservative.com. On the site, we are also promoting a book, examining how our two political ideologies evolved, and all of the science supporting this mechanism. Here on FR, I wanted this post to provide the relevant information from the site, so that Freepers might look it over, and these concepts might begin to enter the realm of political science. I have deleted all the references to the book here, so as to not seem as if I am spamming. In truth, if you pull the free paper that is...

[dc]O[/dc]n May 14, noted philanthropist and neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson is scheduled to give the commencement address at Emory University and receive an honorary degree. But there is a problem. In recent weeks Emory faculty and students have asked the University to disinvite Dr. Carson because he is a critic of evolutionary theory and advocate of creationism. Faculty and staff have written that Dr. Carson’s “great achievements in medicine allow him to be viewed as someone who ‘understands science’” poses a direct threat to science that “rests squarely on the shoulders of evolution.” The anti-Carson letter describes how there is...

Obama supports guay marriage!

A letter signed by about 500 Emory University faculty, students and alumni seeks to bring attention to the anti-evolution views of Dr. Ben Carson. The world-renowned Johns Hopkins University neurosurgeon will be the Atlanta university's May 14 commencement speaker. The letter does not ask that Carson be dis-invited. Rather, it seeks to bring attention to the issue. It notes Carson's accomplishments as a neurosurgeon and philanthropist, then adds, "But, as those students, their families, and the Emory Community listen to his speech, we ask you to also consider the enormous positive impact of science on our lives and how that...

Our solar system is four and a half billion years old, but its formation may have occurred over a shorter period of time than we previously thought, says an international team of researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and universities and laboratories in the US and Japan. Establishing chronologies of past events or determining ages of objects require having clocks that tick at different paces, according to how far back one looks. Nuclear clocks, used for dating, are based on the rate of decay of an atomic nucleus expressed by a half-life, the time it takes for half of...

Cosmologists use the mathematical properties of eternity to show that although universe may last forever, it must have had a beginning kfc 04/24/2012 38 Comments The Big Bang has become part of popular culture since the phrase was coined by the maverick physicist Fred Hoyle in the 1940s. That's hardly surprising for an event that represents the ultimate birth of everything.However, Hoyle much preferred a different model of the cosmos: a steady state universe with no beginning or end, that stretches infinitely into the past and the future. That idea never really took off.In recent years, however, cosmologists have begun...

The sky is falling! Many interest groups and journalists raced to tell that to the public when a modest but important bill became law in Tennessee early in April. The law instructs teachers and administrators to "create an environment within public elementary and secondary schools that encourages students to explore scientific questions, learn about scientific evidence, develop critical thinking skills, and respond appropriately and respectfully to differences of opinion about controversial issues." What's not to like? The law, similar to one in Louisiana, also protects teachers who help students (I'm quoting from the official legislative summary) "understand, analyze, critique, and...

Tennessee was the center of the national debate when it prosecuted John Thomas Scopes for the crime of teaching evolution. Now, 87 years after the Scopes “monkey trial,” Tennessee is once again a battleground over the origins of man. This month, it enacted a controversial new law — dubbed the “monkey bill” — giving schoolteachers broad new rights to question the validity of evolution and to teach students creationism. The Tennessee legislature has been on a determined campaign to impose an ideological agenda on the state’s schools. Last week, the house education committee passed the so-called “Don’t say gay” bill,...

DNA and RNA molecules are the basis for all life on Earth, but they don't necessarily have to be the basis for all life everywhere, scientists have shown.

The scientific community is atwitter about recent reports documenting the sharp rise in retractions of articles published in scientific journals. To wit, The New York Times published a chart this week showing that such retractions have increased from a mere three instances in 2000 to a whopping 180 in 2009. The chart indicated that 235 of the articles retracted over that ten-year span were attributable to “scientific mistake.” Another 196 were attributable to “fraud or fabrication.” And the remaining 311 to “other.” That brings to mind what arguably is history’s most glaring example of scientific mistake, fraud and fabrication all...

Members of the anti-Christian, communist Left are obsessed with banishing the presence of Christian expression from all areas of the public square. They are probably the most fervent in this crusade in the government-run public school classrooms, where teachers are persecuted for displaying even a hint of Christianity. I have written before about a California teacher, Brad Johnson, who is fighting back against a tyrannical school district that ordered him to remove patriotic banners from his classroom walls—banners that simply included the name of God in their sayings. These banners had long been hanging in his classroom, but the God-hating...

Here is evolution for you: http://upressonline.com/2012/03/fau-student-threatens-to-kill-professor-and-classmates/ This is very sad. And it seems crazy at first. BUT THINK ABOUT IT. It is obvious to me what is going on here. Yes, I am guessing / reading between the lines. But I think it is very clear. The class was being taught about EVOLUTION: A fellow classmate, Rachel Bustamante, was sitting behind Carr prior to her outburst and noticed she had been avoiding looking at the professor until 11:35 a.m. — that’s when she snapped. The classmate reported that Kajiura was discussing attraction between peacocks when Carr raised her hand to...

A few people asked me to write this, after a couple of comments I made on another thread. The first few chapters of Genesis are, with minimal mental gymnastics, a clear and accurate statement of science, as we understand it today. I am not talking from any particular creed here. Though a Catholic, (and without any authority!), I am from a background of a devout Protestant and much less devout Jewish culture who is, like many people, simply looking for answers. My training was as a Biochemist, at a time when we were first starting to map the genome. So,...