[Trinidad]

Maybe this puts the views of some Middle East leaders in perspective.

Simply put: Not only the Taliban have weird believes that are influencing politics.

Rik

[Phil]

I have to admit when I first read this headline, I thought of this story:

Meshweaver

[Cyberyeti]

Codo, on 2012-October-11, 03:24, said:

Did you see the pictues of Prince Harry ina Nazi-uniform?

Prince Harry has never been elected to anything. He's just done a load of things many none too bright kids of his age would do if they had the cash (the Vegas photos for example).

[billw55]

Well, he is a politician after all, and they almost universally tailor their comments to be well received by their audience at the moment. He was speaking to a church congregation, possibly a fundamentalist one, so of course his remarks come out like this. If he was addressing a gathering of scientists, I'm sure he would sound very different. What he actually thinks is hard to tell; and what he actually does on that committee probably has more to do with gains and losses for himself and his district than his personal beliefs.

[PassedOut]

Of course it's disheartening when politicians willing to place superstition and science on equal footing get elected. But, in time, the wonderful advances in science will push all that nonsense aside: The Neanderthal in My Family Tree

Quote

Major breakthroughs in the past five years in the way scientists extract and analyze ancient DNA have given researchers a whole new way to look back in time. They are using DNA to trace the evolution of modern humans and archaic species. One thing has become perfectly clear: Our ancestors were seldom, if ever, alone on Earth. New fossils and genetic studies show that our direct ancestors shared the planet with at least one other type of hominin from shortly after the time our taxa split from the chimpanzee and bonobo lineage roughly 6 million years ago until a Hobbit-size human called Homo floresiensis went extinct on the island of Flores in Indonesia just 17,000 years ago or so. And it’s clear that they knew about each other, because we carry traces of some of those other kinds of humans in our DNA today.

The most stunning revelation has been in how we view our relationship with our close cousins, the Neanderthals. Ever since the discovery of the skull of an archaic human in 1856 in a cave in Germany’s Neander Valley, researchers have wondered how Neanderthals were related to us. For most of the 20th century, most scientists thought Neanderthals were our direct ancestors, one step ahead of us on what was often seen as a single, ladder-like line leading from primates to modern humans. But when researchers re-dated key fossil sites in the Qafzeh and Skhul caves in Israel in the 1980s and 1990s, they found that fossils of early Homo sapiens were 80,000 to 120,000 years old—older than the 40,000-to-60,000-year-old Neanderthal fossils in the same caves or nearby. This made it pretty clear that Neanderthals didn’t give rise to modern humans and showed they probably were contemporaries of our ancestors. We also know from fossils that modern humans arose in Africa 200,000 years ago or so and that Neanderthals lived in Europe starting at least 300,000 to 600,000 years ago and went extinct about 30,000 years ago.

We all come from a long, long line of ancestors to share the adventure of life today. How that progressed is one of the most interesting searches today.

[dwar0123]

PassedOut, on 2012-October-11, 11:19, said:

We all come from a long, long line of ancestors to share the adventure of life today. How that progressed is one of the most interesting searches today.

I worthy topic in its own right, reminds me of when I read up on the actual Adam and Eve(spoiler, they never met)

http://en.wikipedia....tochondrial_Eve
http://en.wikipedia....hromosomal_Adam

[jdeegan]

Trinidad, on 2012-October-11, 07:32, said:

Maybe this puts the views of some Middle East leaders in perspective.

Simply put: Not only the Taliban have weird believes that are influencing politics.

Rik

Right, one group are killers, the others are rustic oddballs.

[barmar]

phil_20686, on 2012-October-11, 03:48, said:

Most MP's are expected to be available to help their locals with their problems several days a week. Ministers will generally staff them with a senior aide. People will ask them to intervene in everything from problems with government departments to consumer complaints to school board elections.

In the US this tends to be done by members of the state legislatures, not federal.

[phil_20686]

dwar0123, on 2012-October-11, 11:43, said:

I worthy topic in its own right, reminds me of when I read up on the actual Adam and Eve(spoiler, they never met)

http://en.wikipedia....tochondrial_Eve
http://en.wikipedia....hromosomal_Adam

I think you need to think more about this. Matrilinear descent is pretty restrictive. For example, any woman who has sons drops out of the tree. The most recent common female ancestor=/=mitochondrial Eve. The only certain statement you can make is that the most common recent ancestor is certainly more recent than either of these limiting cases.

In fact probability simulations suggest that non-isolated populations (i.e. everyone except isolated amazon tribes) shares a common ancestor at around 200 BC.

It seems virtually certain that Humans share both a male and female common ancestor much more recently than mitochondrial eve or y-chromosomal adam.

[billw55]

Phil, on 2012-October-11, 08:42, said:

I have to admit when I first read this headline, I thought of this story:

Meshweaver

haha, a funny story. I suspect what is really going on is not that anyone with authority cares much about the spider, but rather that the right contractors (ie connected to politicians) don't have the work. So the politicians find a ruse to hold up the job, giving the general some time to rethink which subs he hires for the earthwork, paving, etc. If it goes on long enough, perhaps the whole job will get rebid. Nutty conspiracy theory? Maybe. But is the spider thing any more rational?

[Cyberyeti]

billw55, on 2012-October-12, 06:10, said:

haha, a funny story. I suspect what is really going on is not that anyone with authority cares much about the spider, but rather that the right contractors (ie connected to politicians) don't have the work. So the politicians find a ruse to hold up the job, giving the general some time to rethink which subs he hires for the earthwork, paving, etc. If it goes on long enough, perhaps the whole job will get rebid. Nutty conspiracy theory? Maybe. But is the spider thing any more rational?

It may not be more rational, but happens all the time in the UK, either for wildlife habitats or archaeological remains.

[Fluffy]

It is laughable that people think $ whatever-millions or highway are worth more than preserving nature, people are too atached to their own beliefs (money & own-pleasure normally on top) to see the picure from any kind of non human POV.

[dwar0123]

phil_20686, on 2012-October-12, 04:05, said:

I think you need to think more about this. Matrilinear descent is pretty restrictive. For example, any woman who has sons drops out of the tree. The most recent common female ancestor=/=mitochondrial Eve. The only certain statement you can make is that the most common recent ancestor is certainly more recent than either of these limiting cases.

In fact probability simulations suggest that non-isolated populations (i.e. everyone except isolated amazon tribes) shares a common ancestor at around 200 BC.

It seems virtually certain that Humans share both a male and female common ancestor much more recently than mitochondrial eve or y-chromosomal adam.

It's Wikipedia, if you want to fix it, go ahead. But I think you will find if you read it that it clearly mentions all your points.

[Trinidad]

jdeegan, on 2012-October-11, 15:29, said:

Trinidad, on 2012-October-11, 07:32, said:

Maybe this puts the views of some Middle East leaders in perspective.

Simply put: Not only the Taliban have weird believes that are influencing politics.

Rik

Right, one group are killers, the others are rustic oddballs.

?!? Both groups contain killers and oddballs. Some of them may be rustic.

Rik

[kenberg]

I have been away at the beach. Maybe I'll go back!

From the cited article:

Quote

Broun, a medical doctor by training, serves on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.
[

This must make for interesting meetings. At least he is no longer dong medical diagnoses, I guess every cloud has a silver lining. Oh wait, Bill Frist did a long distance diagnosis of a Florida woman from the comfort of the Senate.

Of course Mike is correct. If a congressional district is filled with idiots, they are entitled to be represented by an idiot. Fair is fair.

[cherdano]

Gerben42, on 2012-October-11, 04:41, said:

@Fluffy: I have an insane government to donate also! (I live in Germany)

Translation: Gerben has a major disagreement on the government on the policy issue that matters the most to him.

[Fluffy]

Or he just has the knowledge on that matter that it makes it plain obvious that the policy is totally wrong.

[jdeegan]

Trinidad, on 2012-October-12, 12:56, said:

?!? Both groups contain killers and oddballs. Some of them may be rustic.

Rik

True, but one group is out killing the other by 10,000 to one.

[barmar]

Bbradley62, on 2012-October-10, 23:00, said:

Broun isn't a senator, he's a congressman. The difference is that he isn't answerable to the broad range of citizens who might live in a state; he's only answerable to the mostly-monolithic constituents in his district. The House of Representatives includes (proportionately) many more nutjobs on both extremes of the political spectrum than the Senate does.

True, but there are some clueless characters in the Senate, too. Ted Stevens calling the Internet "a series of tubes", for instance.

[mike777]

I thought the backbone of the internet was basically a series of tubes....UTube, fiberglass tubes for the most part.