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Key Discoveries in the History of Science

You did not come from your cousin.

We came from our direct ancestors, however, who from the mid-Oligocene until the early Miocene, were all quite straightforwardly monkeys. We are all apes, and all apes are (or were, depending on your preferred naming conventions) monkeys. We are not and have never been chimps or gorillas, but we were definitely monkeys for millions of years, a fact which has many important implications for our anatomy, genetics, and social instincts.
 
Not only did we absolutely come from monkeys, we are monkeys

The only thing I dislike about that particular styling is that, though instructive, it has a way of completely confusing students at the outset. I usually explain the whole tree with discrete Linnaean-style categories and time periods first, then explore the whole cladistic method of nomenclature once they've got the basics clearly down.
 
Not only did we absolutely come from monkeys, we are monkeys

The only thing I dislike about that particular styling is that, though instructive, it has a way of completely confusing students at the outset. I usually explain the whole tree with discrete Linnaean-style categories and time periods first, then explore the whole cladistic method of nomenclature once they've got the basics clearly down.

It is definitely confusing.

Because modern monkeys are as close to those monkeys as we are.

Modern monkeys did not go through an inferior evolutionary process and not change that much.

They are all modern species.

More evolved, more refined, than those ancient monkeys.
 
Not only did we absolutely come from monkeys, we are monkeys

The only thing I dislike about that particular styling is that, though instructive, it has a way of completely confusing students at the outset. I usually explain the whole tree with discrete Linnaean-style categories and time periods first, then explore the whole cladistic method of nomenclature once they've got the basics clearly down.

It is definitely confusing.

Because modern monkeys are as close to those monkeys as we are.

Modern monkeys did not go through an inferior evolutionary process and not change that much.

They are all modern species.

More evolved, more refined, than those ancient monkeys.

This is an interesting mixture of true and false statements. It is certainly the case that modern and ancient monkeys are not identical with one another.
 
It is definitely confusing.

Because modern monkeys are as close to those monkeys as we are.

Modern monkeys did not go through an inferior evolutionary process and not change that much.

They are all modern species.

More evolved, more refined, than those ancient monkeys.

This is an interesting mixture of true and false statements. It is certainly the case that modern and ancient monkeys are not identical with one another.

Of course I disagree.

They are careful statements.

Conservative.
 
It is definitely confusing.

Because modern monkeys are as close to those monkeys as we are.

Modern monkeys did not go through an inferior evolutionary process and not change that much.

They are all modern species.

More evolved, more refined, than those ancient monkeys.

This is an interesting mixture of true and false statements. It is certainly the case that modern and ancient monkeys are not identical with one another.

Of course I disagree.

They are careful statements.

Conservative.

'Careful' and 'correct' are not synonyms.
 
It is definitely confusing.

Because modern monkeys are as close to those monkeys as we are.

Modern monkeys did not go through an inferior evolutionary process and not change that much.

They are all modern species.

More evolved, more refined, than those ancient monkeys.

This is an interesting mixture of true and false statements. It is certainly the case that modern and ancient monkeys are not identical with one another.

Of course I disagree.

They are careful statements.

Conservative.
I don't see any statements from untermensche in this thread that are actually false. That modern monkeys changed as much as humans from Oligocene monkeys is no doubt false by some ways of measuring "changed as much" and true by other ways of measuring it, but I doubt there's an objective way of choosing between criteria.
 
I don't see any statements from untermensche in this thread that are actually false. That modern monkeys changed as much as humans from Oligocene monkeys is no doubt false by some ways of measuring "changed as much" and true by other ways of measuring it, but I doubt there's an objective way of choosing between criteria.

You don't have equivalent change with any two species.

But if you have equivalent time you have equivalent opportunity to change. You have equivalent time for environments to change.

Is a Mandrill less evolved than a human?

mandrill.jpg
 
Is a Mandrill less evolved than a human?

View attachment 33862

Which human?

It remains controversial among biologists whether selection can operate at and above the level of species.[13] Proponents of species selection include R. A. Fisher (1929);[13] Sewall Wright (1956);[13] Richard Lewontin (1970);[13] Niles Eldredge & Stephen Jay Gould (1972); Steven M. Stanley (1975).[14][13] Gould proposed that there exist macroevolutionary processes which shape evolution, not driven by the microevolutionary mechanisms of the Modern Synthesis.[15] If one views species as entities that replicate (speciate) and die (go extinct), then species could be subject to selection and thus could change their occurrence over geological time, much as heritable selected-for traits change theirs over generations. For evolution to be driven by species selection, differential success must be the result of selection upon species-intrinsic properties, rather than for properties of genes, cells, individuals, or populations within species. Such properties include, for example, population structure, their propensity to speciate, extinction rates, and geological persistence. While the fossil record shows differential persistence of species, examples of species-intrinsic properties subject to natural selection have been much harder to document.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_of_selection

If species is the unit of selection, and it might be, then you talk about a human as a species.

Is a Mandrill a more evolved species?

Says who?

And why? Does such a claim even make sense?
 
The human as separate and superior from all other life, that is the image that Darwin threatened.

The Christian creationist view that god created Earth for humans, all oter critters are an also-ran runner up.

I could provably find it. There is a great picture of a Capuchin monkey holding a rock over its head cocentrating on cracking a nut.
 
649e361f9aa88d7c5f67af203c95d1bc.jpg


Just sayin'
 
649e361f9aa88d7c5f67af203c95d1bc.jpg


Just sayin'

I understood the question but tried to make a valid point from it.

To me a Trump worshiper is a lower form of life, not fully conscious.

Trump's genius is understanding these kinds of people exist in great numbers in the US and how to communicate with them.

It is not by telling them the truth about their lives.

Truth is something else entirely to fundamentalist Christians.
 
What about the technologies we've developed that have had negative consequences? Could those also be called key discoveries? Key in understanding the actual story of our history, maybe.
 
What about the technologies we've developed that have had negative consequences? Could those also be called key discoveries? Key in understanding the actual story of our history, maybe.

Certainly. Indeed it would be more on-topic than discussion of whether G.W. Bush is a great ape, or some sort of lesser ape. :)
 
I'll get into this thread with cosmology.

If one was to look around with no idea of what we have discovered, one would likely construct a naive cosmology that states that the Earth is a flat disk with a radius about 20 - 30 kilometers and that the sky is an inverted bowl overhead.

Looking at all the earlier cosmological beliefs, we indeed finds versions of this naive cosmology. The Bible has it, though it's mostly in the form of allusions and offhand references, since none of its writers were interested in cosmology. But a bit of Hellenistic Jewish religious literature, the Astronomical Book of Enoch, goes into detail. The sky is indeed a bowl overhead, and the celestial bodies move across its surface. When they set, they go through a gate in the bowl's rim, go along the rim, go through another gate, and then rise. The Flat-Earth Bible.


We don't know for sure who concluded that the Earth is approximately spherical, but expert on everything Aristoteles of Stagira (Aristotle) clearly stated it around 350 BCE in his book "On the Heavens". He gave three arguments:
  • Physical: the Earth's constituents like to go to the center of the Universe, and a spherical shape is the closest that they can get.
  • Visibility of stars: some southern-sky stars are only visible from lands to the south.
  • Shape of the Earth's shadow: the Earth always has a round shadow, no matter where the Moon is in the sky.
That has the further consequence that the Earth must be much larger than the horizon distance for it to look flat over that distance.


Looking outward, the Moon was the first celestial body with a reliably-measured distance, and Aristarchus of Samos was the first one known to have measured that distance. He used lunar eclipses to get the size of the Earth relative to that of the Moon; the Moon is a little more than 1/4 the size of the Earth. From its angular size, the Moon is about 60 Earth radii away. AoS's book has numbers that are rather off, but Hipparchus and Ptolemy got much better numbers.

AoS tried to measure the distance to the Sun, looking at the S-E-M angle when the Moon was exactly half-full (S-M-E = 90d). It was the right method, but it was impossible to measure that angle with the necessary precision. The most that one could conclude is that the Sun is about 10 - 20 times farther from the Earth than the Moon is.

That was improved on with telescopic observations, and by the 18th cy., it was evident that the Sun was nearly 400 times farther away from the Earth than the Moon is.

Of the planets, the distance champion was Saturn at 10 times the Earth-Sun distance, though in 1781, Uranus was discovered, with a distance of 20 times that distance. Some comets go even farther, like Halley's Comet at 35 times that distance.
 
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We don't know for sure who concluded that the Earth is approximately spherical, but expert on everything Aristoteles of Stagira (Aristotle) clearly stated it around 350 BCE in his book "On the Heavens". He gave three arguments:

Pythagoras proposed that the Earth was a sphere ~500 BC, over a century before Aristotle. Eratosthenes measured the Earth's circumference to be ~250,000 stadia (24,000 to 29,000 miles depending on the length of a stadia) in ~250 BC. about a century after Aristotle.
 
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