Today's mega dose of irony

[tgif007]

In order to understand what had me laughing out of control for the first time in a long time, let me give you the background that preceded the trigger...

In the October 2nd issue of Science, a major revolution in paleontology was announced in 11 papers.

You can read a summary newspaper article here, or see the full set of downloaded articles here

Comments

[jordan179]

... but in essence, a new pre-human, more than a million years older than "Lucy" has been found, and they now believe that apes are descended from humans (or human-like creatures) rather than the other way around.

You've misunderstood the nature of the discovery.

It's not that "apes are descended from humans." It's that the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees was probably bipedal. This common ancestor wasn't, by any means, "human." Try looking at the reconstruction above the neck.

In addition, the ardipithecenes so far discovered aren't chimpanzee ancestors. Humans and chimpanzees split off from each other 5-6 MYA, which is fully 0.5 to 1.5 MY earlier than the ardipithecene skeletons we've found. We still don't know what the LCA (Last Common Ancestor) of humans and chimps was like, though it was probably fairly close, morphologically, to an ardipithecene. We don't even know if the LCA was a biped or a quadruped.

Oh yes - timing is everything in humor.Why do you believe that the concept of the LCA of chimps and humans

[tgif007]

I didn't trying to say that apes were descended from humans, just that our common ancestor was more human-like than ape like.

Nor was I saying that this article in any way raises any doubt about evolution (although I personally don't believe in it, that is another matter entirely).

My only point was that Dr. Weissmann was so smug in his statement about evolution, treating it as an absolute and incontrovertible fact with no possible room for discussion rather than a well accepted theory, had great timing in having his comments published the day before a major belief in evolution got turned upside down, establishing a "new" incontrovertible set of facts that people are not allowed to debate or argue! :-)

Maybe it's just me, but I found the combination of the smugness of his statement along with its timing (and having found out about them in the order that I did) to be absolutely hilarious.