Monkey Shines

For a very long time, science has thought that humans first evolved in sub-Saharan Africa and then spread throughout the world. The main reason for this is that the oldest human-like fossils have been found in Africa. Everywhere else, the oldest fossils are Neanderthal or modern humans. There are exceptions, like homo floresiensis, found in Indonesia. This is the one they called the “hobbit” because it was so small. This is believed to be an archaic human that migrated out of Africa 2 million years ago.

That’s the dominant narrative for how humans came to populate just about every nook and cranny of the earth. Recent genetic studies go a long way toward confirming the flow of humans around the world. It’s not “settled science”, if such a thing could exist, but it is the foundation from which scientists works when examining the fossil record. When a new find turns up, the first instinct is to figure out how it fits into the current model, but that’s not always an easy task.

The history of human evolution has been rewritten after scientists discovered that Europe was the birthplace of mankind, not Africa.

Currently, most experts believe that our human lineage split from apes around seven million years ago in central Africa, where hominids remained for the next five million years before venturing further afield.

But two fossils of an ape-like creature which had human-like teeth have been found in Bulgaria and Greece, dating to 7.2 million years ago.

The discovery of the creature, named Graecopithecus freybergi, and nicknameded ‘El Graeco’ by scientists, proves our ancestors were already starting to evolve in Europe 200,000 years before the earliest African hominid.

An international team of researchers say the findings entirely change the beginning of human history and place the last common ancestor of both chimpanzees and humans – the so-called Missing Link – in the Mediterranean region.

In science, this is what is called a  “big deal.” At the very minimum, it could force a re-evaluation of the timeline for human migration out of Africa. It could also mean that humans moved out of Africa, evolved into what we think of as modern humans and then migrated back to Africa. Later, these early humans then made the trip back out to the rest of the world. At the very minimum, it could lead to a rethinking of the basic narrative, which will set off huge fights within the scientific community for many reasons.

The main reason is the oldest – ego. Many careers have been built around the assumption that modern humans first evolved in Africa and then migrated out to the rest of the world fairly recently. Naturally, when the work of a lifetime is challenged by new evidence, the instinct is to dispute it. Scientists have all the same vices as the rest of us. In fact, smart people tend to be even more petty and envious than most. The most likely result will be an attempt to dismiss these new finds or discredit them in some way.

While all of that is very preliminary, this find does introduce, or re-introduce, an idea that modern science would like to exclude. That is, human evolution not only continued after humans left Africa, but that it accelerated. As humans migrated into new areas, they quickly adapted to those areas, both physically and cognitively. This process continued on just as it does with all species. Put another way, human evolution was copious, local and recent and the result is measurable differences between groups of humans.

That, of course, brings us back to the bogeyman that haunts the dreams of modern intellectuals, which is the bogeyman of race. Just as anthropologists will seek to dismiss data that contradicts the standard model of human migration, modern intellectuals are always on the lookout for anything that contradicts the egalitarian narrative. Most of Western public policy is built on the premise that all people are the same and that any measurable differences are the result of white racism. Nature plays no role.

It is mistakenly assumed that the viciousness with which the Progs attack anyone questioning multiculturalism is purely about power. There’s some of that, but the real driver is belief. How they define the world, and how they define themselves, is based on the bedrock assumptions of the blank slate. If those assumptions are invalidated, not only is their worldview invalid, but they are invalid. Human bio-diversity is the same as telling a devout Muslim that Mohamed was a Jewish comedian and Islam is an elaborate gag.

This discovery will most likely be memory-holed or recast in some way as to not threaten the narrative. The most likely result is everyone just ignores it. But, genetics is making a long march through the human sciences and that’s not something that can be ignored for too much longer. Soon, we reach a Galileo moment when the orthodoxy either shuts down the human sciences or the orthodoxy begins to crumble. That’s ultimately what happened in Christendom. The Church gave way to science in public affairs.

Before anyone gets too excited by the prospect of scientific racism smashing the prevailing orthodoxy, it is important to remember that the Church gave ground to science slowly and violently. The Thirty Years War, for example, left much of central Europe devastated. Towns were depopulated, villages were wiped off the map and people were reduced to cannibalism. The so-called Age of Reason was a bloody mess featuring one more violent war after another. Things tend to end poorly and this will not end well.

100 thoughts on “Monkey Shines

  1. Progressives insure a disproportionate number of abortion clinics in minority neighborhoods. How is that multiculturalism.

  2. First they came after conservatives and I did not speak out—
    Because I was not much into politics.

    Then they came after to employers, and I did not speak out—
    Because I was not a employer and felt I had enough room for duck and cover.

    Then they came after the Christians and I did not speak out—
    Because I was not a practicing Christian.

    Then thought police came after for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

    I have no one to blame.

  3. Good heavens. Apparently some people in the alt-right-ish sphere feel so insecure that they are compelled to grasp at any straw to attack the out-of-Africa hypothesis, which is (a) most likely true and (b) completely irrelevant to any judgment of the group identity and accomplishments of Europeans. I understand the sentiment — some of my compatriots used to feel so bad about themselves that they had to insist on such preposterous nonsense as, e.g, that elephants originated in Ukraine, and some blacks insist on even more preposterous nonsense such as e.g. that Ancient Greeks, Chinese and Koreans were black — but it does not reflect well on those who entertain it.

    • Nobody is grasping except the SJW and his government funded academic and scientist, who embaces that pose in a permanent state. If a factoid or two causes the SJW to gasp, that’s intended as sport first and science second.

    • Considering all the recent, not yet fossilized mammoths in Siberia, plus a little continental drift, elephant progenitors in Ukraine might not be unreasonable.

  4. Human bio-diversity is the same as telling a devout Muslim that Mohamed was a Jewish comedian and Islam is an elaborate gag.

    Wait. You saying he wasn’t?

    • He was! Salmeen Quraysh, the muhammid.
      A Jewish-Arab gangster who told tall tales with half remembered names (Adam, Noah, Cain and Abel) to attract customers to Khadima’s booth during the Ramadan fair at the trading crossroads by the old Roman copper mines (Mecca).

      The stories were wildly popular, so much so that they were collected a hundred years later by ibn Ishak, then with additions a hundred years after that by Bhukari and Tabiri.

  5. Science evolves one funeral at a time. Hopefully, our society doesn’t go all Khmer Rouge and speed up that process.

    Start prepping in your community with like minded folk to get out of the way of the worst of the next civil war.

  6. It took until the 1960s before earth scientists admitted that Alfred Wegener was not a quack but had in fact been on to something really big.

  7. David Berliinski is a trip. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ1eiK1xx_E
    He is an extraordinarily accomplished man, and scientist. This is a four minute vid debunking Darwinian Theory. He opened my eyes when nothing else had. There are many more lengthy videos, all well worth seeing. Bye the bye or not, he is an agnostic. He doesn’t have the answers, which in our age of enforced agreement, is an answer.

  8. “An examination of the detailed morphology of molar teeth from two fossils of G. freybergi published in 2017 suggests that it may be a hominin, that is sharing ancestry with Homo but not with the Chimpanzees (Pan). This calls into question the prevailing belief that humans originated in Africa.”

    If i had a few millions to spare, I’d sponsor excavations in Bulgaria and Greece until they dig up a whole complete proto homo, no homo (or graecopithecus freybergi to be exact)!

    Out of Africa was based on a mixture of statistics and best guesses anyway, it is a “story”, it was never a fact, from the very beginning it was always a “probably” at best.

    I’m so racist i don’t even believe the out of Africa theory!

    That’s pretty, pretty racist…

  9. “Things tend to end poorly.”

    One of the most profound things I’ve read in awhile. It’s so true. I appreciated the rest of the post, but I especially appreciate that.

  10. Christians know this earth age is a test. Evolution of the species is Satanic theology. That is part of the test. I’ll go with GOD the Creator. We were created by the Supreme Being. We will be saved by him as well.

    • say, what are you and your Christian buddies doing to help your brethren in the ME, who are being slaughtered? why are you guys not burning down Planned Parenthood facilities? my friend Jack Shit knows the answers to these questions, I bet.

  11. Natural selection for increased cognitive function (e.g. the intelligence adaptation) was largely driven by the high variability of environmental change (seasonality) in the higher latitudes of northern Europe and in central Europe following the last Ice Age. The challenges associated with surviving a long winter of food deprivation enhanced traits for resourcefulness and long-term prediction/planning. Robustness in a severely changing environment necessitates both mental and physical prowess.

    In our modern world, environmental extremes are now nearly extinct.

  12. This whole human evolution story contains a lot of total bullshit; just made up crap to stroke the egos of researchers.

    Not that evolution is a myth; it is not. After all, humans and chimps/apes (whatever) share about 95% – 98% of DNA. So, somewhere, way way back there had to be a common ancestor(s).
    What is bullshit is the notion that scientists “know” where humans originated. No they do not and they never have; and they really never will.

    If you took all the bones ever found of pre-humans, they would fit on a large conference room table. So, what these scientists have done is say, ‘well, since the oldest bones so far discovered have been in Africa (or, more recently, Greece or Siberia -e,g., Denisovans – or wherever), therefore this region is where humans originated.

    Of course, that hypothesis is fine until they find even older bones of more RECENT humans , say in Uzbekistan or under a hundred feet of ice in Greenland, or maybe deep in some canyon in N.America, or Australia or Laos.
    Then what?

    The fact is finding pre-human bones is pure, dumb luck; and finding just one set of bones that does not fit existing dogma tosses out ( or should toss out) the entire concocted “expert” explanation of where human life originated.

    Think about this; during the Ice Ages, sea levels were 300 feet to 400 feet LOWER than today and surely, many groups of pre-humans or near-humans lived in areas now under 300 feet of water. Any bones there will never be found. Bones there could be significantly older and more human like than any so far discovered.

    It is just human tendency to seek an explanation for something; nothing wrong with that. But developing a thesis based upon an incredible paucity of evidence (e.g., a few bones found at Olduvai Gorge ) is just plain wrong and misleading.

  13. http://vault-co.blogspot.com/

    the above link is a site run by a most peculiar fellow. he is convinced he is a modern day neanderthal, and that N’s were enslaved by “melon heads” in order to harness the N’s greater technological abilities. he’s batshit crazy, but entertaining.

    • I’ve read his posts. He can be very smart, saying something totally rational and interesting, and the next moment you find yourself in an insane maze.

  14. There is still very little evidence in the fossil record to support evolution, i.e., the transformation of one species into another, as opposed to adaptation, i.e., biological variation within a species. Ultimately, those who believe in the Science! of evolution are engaged in an act of faith similar to that of a religious person.

    • this my main beef with Darwin, he didn’t really discover or explain anything. how life started? nope. how a new species arises? nope. any farmer can tell you how to push breeding pairs in any direction you want them to go.

      they used to think different species couldn’t interbreed, but then we get a few Ligers and poof! I have read that even mules are occasionally able to reproduce.

      maybe some curious chinese scientist can do some experiments on mixing human and chimp zygotes (think IVF) to produce a viable embryo.

      • You are right – Darwin did a good job describing how we got fast race horses, juicy apples, etc… Little “e” evolution.

        But we’ve yet to learn how big “E” evolution really works – where you end up with a whole new species. Often with a different # of chromosomes and completely unable to breed with the old species. What the hell happened to create it?

    • The fossil series from Eohippus to Equus is pretty complete, as are many others. Adaptation eventually results in speciation, no faith involved.

      • Sure – African humans adapted to their climate with dark skin and generally longer, leaner bodies. Humans in northern Europe and Asia developed lighter skin because of the lower exposure sunlight, and thicker more compact bodies to deal with the cold. But they can still breed with each other.

        We supposedly share a common ancestor with all primates. Humans have 46 chromosomes, gorillas have 48, Rhesus monkeys have 42, Capuchin monkey have 54. How did this happen? The “drift” answer is pretty weak and has no proof at all.

      • The issue I have with your position is that the line between adaptation within a species and evolution from one species to another (i.e., speciation) is drawn arbitrarily.

        Here’s a link to the sequence of Eohippus to Equus including pictures of skeletons. I could just as arbitrarily characterize this as adaptation within a single species, rather then evolution.

        http://chem.tufts.edu/science/evolution/horseevolution.htm

        • I think one of the definitions of species is inability to produce fertile offspring – up until that point you’re talking race or breed.
          Biology has fuzzy borders no doubt, but Teosinte and Maize
          are different species. Mutation is a real phenomena.

          • The original argument wasn’t “Who created”, but whether forms changed at all.

            Bah.
            All this guff about “Easter Bunny created us… Easter Bunny loves us… Easter Bunny has reasons…”– when any fool with an ounce of sense can see-
            It was March Hare who created everything!

        • Check out ring species like the Arctic Tern or the California Newt. Their geographical range is annular, ring-shaped.

          Each local gene pool can breed with its neighbors, but not with the distant gene pool “across” on the other side of the ring.

          One species? If not, how many? Reality escapes our categorical net one more time.

  15. I question the knowability of how life moved off of the Periodic Table of Elements and into the biochemical soup. A repeatable experiment would help, and it’s well worth the continued effort to pursue such.

    These modern “prophets” are amusing in how they rush forth with a new round of fables at each new discovery, without ever quite moving off of the arrogant faith that their theories are “what’s True”.

    If it keeps scientists off the streets, that’s swell; but I can’t fathom how it affects the sidereal motion that tomorrow we’ll dub “sunrise”.

    • that is the holy grail, isn’t it, too gain the power to conjure new life from inanimate material. funny how life can beget life quite easily, but we make no progress at all in creating it from whole cloth.

      • I daresay (Biochemistry course 15 years ago; pretty much got destroyed) that we’re much farther off from grasping the subtleties of the genome database than we flatter ourselves (at least in the media).

        Even having understood the static information in the chromosomes, there’s the whole protein folding bit.

        • i think a better approach to figuring things out, is to look at dna as a software program. the nucleotides are the primitives that make up the “language” the program is coded in. figure out how that language works, and you unlock the secret to life.

        • The information in engineered objects is very compressible and therefore understandable – for what is “understanding” but a brief description of a long story?

          The history of evolved things like “life” is very different. Added information of incomprehensible subtlety has been accruing for billions of years.. A change in the peptide sequence of an enzyme, far from the “active site”, may after the protein folds modify the geometry of the active site by a few picometres, for weal or woe.

          We’re looking at the accumulation of what worked better, and we will never understand it in the Maxwell / Feynmann way. It’s not regular enough to be boiled down like that.

          I don’t think this supports a claim that biology is dumb.

  16. I know this isn’t your point, sorry to be pedantic, but from the Wiki “Homo Erectus” (earlier than Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Archaic Homo Sapiens): “It is generally thought that H. erectus originated in Africa and spread from there, migrating throughout Eurasia as far as Georgia, India, Sri Lanka, China and Indonesia”

    • Yeah, I was not clear there. The point was that human migration is always from Africa. Northern Europe, Northern Asia and the Americas had no role in the making of modern man.

      • And now they downplay the Cro-Magnon Man – those large-brained early modern humans whose remains have been found all over Europe but nowhere else.

  17. I believe the viciousness with which Progs is at least partially driven by their own insecurities. There has to be a small corner of their minds that recognized that there is no foundation to their crazy beliefs. That kernel of doubt doesn’t make them honestly question and evaluate their faith – rather it makes them all the more desperate to defend it.

    Recognizing they can’t use logic as a weapon, they instead reach for personal slander and Orwellian language and rules to attack their foes.

    • When you just make it all up as you go, it is hard to defend in any ordinary forum of ideas. So ordinary forums are shunned and banned.

  18. As CogDis isn’t a thing in their world, I expect the transition from “there’s no such thing as race” to “of course some races are better than others” to be seamless… and that’s when the *real* fun begins. Won’t it be fun when Literally Hitler turns out to be some disgruntled feminist professor? As someone once said, SJWs always project.

    • that transition would bring the progressives right back to where they were 100 years ago. of course their pose that all races are similar/equal is just a ruse for the rubes, in order to gain political power. i.e. they never stopped being racists.

      • Yep. They’re as ignorant of their own history as they are of all other history. They still worship Saint Margaret Sanger, for instance, though she was as vile a racist as can be. They “fucking loved science” back then, too, which is going to be what gets them over the hump — Christians, those anti-science bigots, believe that all are equal in God’s eyes, so of course those science-loving Lefties will maintain that no no, races are obviously unequal, only a god-bothering bigot could possibly believe that….

        • Hope you’re sarking us with the ‘vile’ tag.
          Met a guy with 45 aunts and uncles.
          Grandad had 20 with the first wife, 25 with the second.

          He wasn’t Swedish.
          Twenty-some new Nordic goddesses would’ve been definitely welcome!

  19. One of the areas of biological evolution open to serious debate is the pace of change. The standard model is a slow (very slow) continuous process with very subtle differences between individual “links” in the evolutionary chain. The idea that evolution could, or did, happen in relatively quick spurts, without a lot of intermediary steps, is probably best captured by Gould’s punctuated equilibrium. In response to rapid environmental change, species will have a corresponding rapid phylogenetic change. It’s a tough thing to tease out of the fossil and geologic record.

    If true, or at least a significant part of the picture, it would seem to make sense that subpopulations of critters could rapidly evolve in response to self-inflicted environmental stresses, like moving from a cold climate to a warm one or visa-versa. Given enough subgroup change, and fast enough, distinct but closely related species could evolve in multiple places on the planet at the same time in time spans measured in centuries instead of millennia. Might make for some interesting social dynamics between the groups once they come back together.

    • I’m very solidly in the fits and starts camp. I think reason and the data back the idea that evolution slumbers along and then races along in response to triggering events like climate change.

    • does evolution “just happen” or is it part of some observable process? if the former, then…I don’t now what to say; if the latter, then let’s figure out what that process is. we know bits and pieces, like how viruses can transport bits of dna from one species to another. but as far as i can tell, not a lot of work has been done to figure the underlying mechanism for speciation.

      problem is, biology is a soft science and the people working in it aren’t that smart. need top physicists and chemists (a specialized branch or physics) working on it, instead of concocting nonsense theories about the start of the universe.

      • Biology is not any “softer” than physics or chemistry and requires deep knowledge of both. Shades of Sheldon vs. Amy. Maybe you left your sark tag off.

        • are you really saying biology isn’t derived from physics? are you really saying biology as a discipline is more academically challenging than physics or chemistry?

          please tell me who the equivalent biologist to Einstein is.

          for fukk’s sake, biologists can’t even find a cure for a single virus. penicillin was only “discovered” by accident, or so the story goes.

          i am guessing you have some vested interest in maintaining the illusion that biology is a “hard” science.

          • Karl,
            I am a lurker but, I have had a very long day, soooo….
            I am a biologist, a fisheries biologist to be exact. My calling utilizes not only chemistry but, also physics, and calculus. Plus a whole lot of mental formations of the issues that confront me.
            I work in a multi dimensional environment as it pertains to the subjects of my inquiry. I enjoy your banter with others on this Excellent blog.
            We do our best with the tools we have at hand (and can afford). As do most biologists.
            Most of the men and women I work with all agree about the adsurdity of “settled science “. We do have the “chicken little ” biologists of global warming. I and others argue with them at the drop of a hat.
            Biology is far from soft. Nothing is unquestionable. The best biology is working to disprove your own hypothesis.

          • If a fraction of the money spent on, say, the Large Hadron Collider was spent on a large scale study of human biodiversity a whole host of delusions underpinning western society would unravel.
            Which is, of course, why it won’t be.

          • why not directly study the PHYSICal nature of the CHEMICAL processes involved?

            hire a few top notch biologists to help instrument tests, and prepare cultures. you can get all you need at $25/hr

          • sounds like a fun and rewarding profession. but not particularly germane to the argument at hand. no one disputes the utility of biology, just like no one disputes the utility of dentistry.

          • Wow. I wanted to defend my profession in a clear and cognitive way. You definitely slapped that down as not “germane ” to the arguement. You must be an miserable son of a bitch to be around. I am also a former United States Marine and former Law Enforcement. I still have more discipline and class. That was unnecessary.

          • You would be the guy to ask. My impression is types of science are thought of as hard or soft due to the type of individual drawn to them more than the actual subject. That would make you a hard guy among soft people. Terrible over generalization I know, and always happy to be corrected. Loved your posts, I’m sure nearly everyone else did also. Stick around.

          • i didn’t slap anything down. my opinion was that biology is a soft science. your reply was a summary of your resume, which i complimented you on. if i missed the part where you show biology is comparable to physics, please quote it in a reply.

            thank you for your service in the Marines; semper fi. and I am more fun than a car full of monkeys!

          • i wonder if there is a confusion in terminology here. a 4 year degree (or higher) in biology certainly takes plenty of smarts and work. but the 160 IQs (and up) are not in the biology building, on campus. they are over in the physical, or “hard” sciences part of campus.

          • I’d say Watson and Crick probably were on the genius side of the campus. Take a stroll through the Krebs Cycle and get back to us about physics and chemistry or lack thereof in biology.

    • The fascinating observation that conjoined twins have a workable shared circulatory system indicates that our genetically determined anatomy is a specific realization of a rough sketch, with lots of interpolation allowed. So a single mutation that somehow modifies the rough sketch can have large effects – for example, 6 fingers rather than 5. This tends to support punctuated equilibrium. If interested, see also “homeobox”.

  20. The idea that science crawled out was against the “darkness” of Catholic Church in particular is a romantic daydream of the last 20th century and into the 21st. Science takes educated men, time, and financial support. The Catholic Church consistently offered all of these through it’s Priests, Monks, and the university system. I can link to a list of the early scientists and almost all of them are Monks/Priests for all the reasons I just mentioned.

    It is borderline insane to imagine that in the late middle ages European society was actively against science, particularly the Church. Islam, in the 12th century, actively turned against science and it’s stayed that way ever since. What are their achievements since then? Science requires the active support of greater society and it’s learned classes.

    Within the Catholic Church it is heresy to say reason is against faith. Indeed, the Church gave the time, money, and support precisely because it believed that to study Creation was to study God. Galileo was no “simple” science hero of science. He put his foot square into a political mess and wouldn’t back down, pushing another man’s work in science (Copernicus), who understood the issues of the day and was willing to let the information come out slowly.

    And frankly neither the church nor science crumbled in it’s Galileo moment. The Church crumbling would happen hundreds of years after that moment and science certainly marched on.

    Unfortunately, science is also crumbling right now. Quality has plummeted except in the very hardest of sciences and even then it’s questionable. The wish to ignore racial data is part of lowering of quality.

    I believe that the decline of sciences in one of the results of abandoning Christianity and replacing it with science worship, as you have done here. Scientism is part of why much of the alt-white is indistinguishable from it’s liberal counterparts. You can’t fight one particular line of science worship with another particular line of science worship. It’s just two groups with the same point of view picking out what they like best from it.

    If people are serious about wanting Western Civilization back, they’re going to have to stop telling themselves lies about science, Christianity, and their relative compatibility. Science is in fact, the daughter of Christianity and to abandon the later is to abandon the former.

    • Excellent comment. It’s not so much the case that the Church “gave ground to science” as that it lost the battle against a corrosive and reductionist rationalism that offered man the false promise of “do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”. Catholic Christianity has never opposed honest inquiry into the workings of creation, and it’s long past time to do away with the scientistic myth of the Holy Martyr Galileo.

    • the issue with the catholic church and science, is the same as we see today. science is subservient to political power. and like any master, the church wanted some things investigated, and some things not. the one case that everyone knows about is with galileo, because of course his work on astronomy threatened the church’s ideological basis for ruling; “that’s not heaven up there, just some other stars”

      • Nope, Galileo threatened nothing of the sort. His problems were manifold:

        – He was wrong about a whole bunch of things, such as the tides and his insistence on a pure Copernican circular-orbit model for the solar system, and other scientists (including Jesuit astronomers) pointed out that Galileo’s theories were often inconsistent with agreed-upon observations.

        – He compounded this wrongness by launching vituperative crusades against anyone who disagreed with him or questioned his findings, no matter how measured or empirically sound their arguments were.

        – He claimed the right to pronounce authoritatively on matters Scriptural.

        – He put the icing on the cake of bad judgement by writing a dialogue on astronomy and making one character (whom he named Simplicio, geddit?) a stand-in for the pope, who had up to this point been his friend and patron.

        At the time, the Church was embroiled in the political and religious disorder sparked by the Reformation, so she wasn’t inclined to indulge the tantrums and deliberate provocations of a brilliant but somewhat unhinged scientist.

        Given all this, Galileo was treated remarkably gently, suffering only the penalty of living under house arrest in (horrors!) his Tuscany estate during his final years.

        If you’re looking for an entertaining but scientifically accurate account of the Galileo Affair, the author Mike Flynn wrote a fantastic series called The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown, which goes over the whole thing in great depth:

        http://tofspot.blogspot.ca/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown.html

        • Excellent summation. Socrates described himself as a gadfly, — the horsefly that stings the intellectually and morally sluggish with his questioning. Galileo too was a gadfly, but it didn’t get him killed, did it? He enjoyed tweaking the sluggish as a sport, and he knew exactly what he was doing. Galileo’s confession was a masterpiece of tweak.

    • Agree. This accepted myth that the church was anti science has to end.
      Try reading Tom Woods , how the Catholic church built western civilization.
      A good start.

    • See Joseph Needham’s monumental seven volume opus “Science and Civilization in China” for parallel parentage for science.

    • PiffleRMe, I think that there are at least three ways to begin handling your interesting claim that Science is the daughter of Christianity.

      First of all, to which sect of Christianity did Eratosthenes belong? As you know, he died about 190 yrs before the alleged birth of Jesus, so it stands to reason that Christianity was flourishing in secret in Athens, say, 300 yrs before the birth of Jesus. This would have given Christianity sufficient time to influence Eratosthenes’ own teachers, or other Christian influences during their formative years, so that they could nudge Eratosthenes toward science when he arrived in Athens. And maybe Christianity was influential also in Cyrene, where he was born.

      Second, we could date the birth of science to about 1453, after which year some Byzantine scholars sought refuge in the west and brought their learning and some texts with them. So, why did the gestation of Science last more than 1400 yrs?? That’s an extremely long pregnancy for a mother whose genes predispose her offspring to a rigorous investigation of nature.

      https://www.britannica.com/biography/Eratosthenes

      Third, if we were to suspect that Christianity would have children and grandchildren, there is good reason to suspect that they would turn out much more like Muhammadism than Science.

      http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/160197/sec_id/160197

      • *sigh* The existence of science work outside or before the Christianity does not make my statement incorrect. A systematic study of science requires, well, a system that supports it. The only places science has ever received that widespread, millenia long support, outside of war development, are in Christian societies. It’s fun and easy to diss Christianity because you found some people throughout history doing similar work. It’s also extremely ignorant of how much knowledge Christianity has gathered in the last 1000 years on this world.

        And as for the last remark, you are vaguely correct in so much that Muhammadism is Christian heresy, but then again so is Mormonism. I’m happy to talk about all of history honestly, but I refuse to play these games where Christianity never did anything right or well, especially as we communicate on an the end product of it.

  21. i don’t have a dog in this fight, so what follows isn’t a big deal to me if you disagree 🙂

    primates are found in tropical areas, not cold assed places like europe. yes southern europe is temperate but there are no primates there, either. so unless europe was real warm 7m years ago, humans didn’t evolve there. if someone knows, or wants to look up, when the last ice age in europe began, post it here and we see if there was a warm era.

      • do you think those monkeys evolved on that island, or were they brought there? they just show how primates can *adapt* to a cold clime — which we already know.

        i never believed in yeti’s until i saw michelle obama in a bathing suit…shudder.

      • Then there are the Canadians, who are referred to as “snow monkeys” but maybe that’s not what you had in mind.

        • The fact they are finding fossils of mammoths and saber tooth tigers on the floor of the English channel and the North Sea indicates our climate in Europe was very different. Animals, and probably humans, didn’t have to contend with natural barriers we have today and since the North Sea was a land bridge, anyone heading west, north-west could cross quite easily.

          But I agree, getting wrapped up in one’s theory is non-sense. They disprove “the proven” all the time. Ego is a dangerous thing, and not just in science, but politics and religion.

          http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-watery-grave-of-europes-monsters-1744973.html

          • “… indicates our climate in Europe was very different. ….”
            Of course it was!
            Everbody knows that woolly mammoths and saber tooth tigers drove giant SUVs and generated electricity by burning lignite coal and farting too much (imagine all that methane for mammoth farts!!).
            By GOD!! No wonder the ice sheets melted.

          • The fact is that the ice-ages suddenly appeared only very recently–2.5 million years ago–affecting Africa no less than Europe, if for different reasons. That number seems very significant in human development, a human bingo cage. Peak cold meant peak drought for Africa when over 90% of it would be parched into desert. Unknown numbers of humanoids rose and fell with those tides of great change until Erectus and his 800 cc brain stuck everywhere there were humans, from Africa to the Pacific. The tides kept coming in and Neanderthal, Dravidians, Cro-Magnon, and unknown others were carved out of Erectus into their peculiar shapes by those tides. Some Mastodon hunters were even left with absurd talents such as calculus, but nobody knows why.

            My lineage may well be Erectus, who was not homo-Sapien, but it is not Bantu, which is homo-Sapien. This seems simple enough. We think of evolution as a happy event because it represents a happy result, but it is everywhere and at all times a process of tragedy.

          • Thanks James. A good sweep of human history for me to remember. I am kind of shocked to think of a modern Erectus form. I peviously had no question about the ‘ settled science’ of African evolution. Now I wonder about who are the modern forms of Erectus .

        • too, the monkey of continental Europe… finds it’s home north and west of the Alps … in France. Trado Amplus creba Simius. The Surrender Monkey. ( badda boom! )

    • Well, Gibraltar has the barbary apes, likely migrants from Morocco, where they are also still found. The skull of one was also found in northern Ireland, dating from 300 B.C., in theory. Morocco (particularly up in the Middle Atlas, has a temperate climate in the north. I’m inclined to consider the case still open. Like you, I have no dog in the fight, but the recent find does pique one’s interest.

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