Thursday, November 30, 2017
I found something interesting. Somebody's list of anti-religion blogs which includes this blog.
I found a very long list of atheist blogs at a blog that hasn't been used in 5 years. One of the blogs on this list is my blog. The other blogs on the list are much better than my blog.
So don't waste your time here. There are much better places to waste your time.
The list is at http://foreverinhell.blogspot.com
To find the list scroll down until you see "My Blog List" in the right column.
By the way my blog has a list of my favorite blogs at My favorite blogs which has 46 posts.
So don't waste your time here. There are much better places to waste your time.
The list is at http://foreverinhell.blogspot.com
To find the list scroll down until you see "My Blog List" in the right column.
By the way my blog has a list of my favorite blogs at My favorite blogs which has 46 posts.
In his "The Greatest Show on Earth" Richard Dawkins wrote about the Christian crybabies who "burst into tears when told they would be studying evolution."
The plight of many science teachers today is not less dire. When they attempt to expound the central and guiding principle of biology; when they honestly place the living world in its historical context -- which means evolution; when they explore and explain the very nature of life itself, they are harried and stymied, hassled and bullied, even threatened with loss of their jobs. At the very least their time is wasted at every turn. They are likely to receive menacing letters from parents, and have to endure the sarcastic smirks and close-folded arms of brainwashed children. They are supplied with state-approved textbooks that have had the word 'evolution' systematically expunged, or bowdlerized into 'change over time'.
In October 2008 a group of about sixty American high-school teachers met at the Center for Science Education of Emory University, in Atlanta. Some of the horror stories they had to tell deserve wide attention. One teacher reported that students 'burst into tears' when told they would be studying evolution. Another teacher described how students repeatedly screamed 'No!' when he began talking about evolution in class. Another reported that pupils demanded to know why they had to learn about evolution, given that it was 'only a theory'. Yet another teacher described how 'churches train students to come to school with specific questions to ask to sabotage my lessons'.
In October 2008 a group of about sixty American high-school teachers met at the Center for Science Education of Emory University, in Atlanta. Some of the horror stories they had to tell deserve wide attention. One teacher reported that students 'burst into tears' when told they would be studying evolution. Another teacher described how students repeatedly screamed 'No!' when he began talking about evolution in class. Another reported that pupils demanded to know why they had to learn about evolution, given that it was 'only a theory'. Yet another teacher described how 'churches train students to come to school with specific questions to ask to sabotage my lessons'.
What a fantastic creature
Pterosaurs (/ˈtɛrəˌsɔːr, ˈtɛroʊ-/;[4][5] from the Greek "πτερόσαυρος", "pterosauros", meaning "winged lizard") were flying reptiles of the extinct clade or order Pterosauria. They existed from the late Triassic to the end of the Cretaceous (228 to 66 million years ago[6]). Pterosaurs are the earliest vertebrates known to have evolved powered flight. Their wings were formed by a membrane of skin, muscle, and other tissues stretching from the ankles to a dramatically lengthened fourth finger.[7]
Early species had long, fully toothed jaws and long tails, while later forms had a highly reduced tail, and some lacked teeth. Many sported furry coats made up of hair-like filaments known as pycnofibers, which covered their bodies and parts of their wings. Pterosaurs spanned a wide range of adult sizes, from the very small anurognathids to the largest known flying creatures of all time, including Quetzalcoatlus and Hatzegopteryx.[8][9][10]
“Extraordinary.” “Stellar.” “Truly awesome.” “A world-class find.”
That's how paleontologists are reacting to the discovery of several hundred ridiculously well-preserved pterosaur eggs in China, some of them still containing the remains of embryos.
Way to go Poland.
In Poland the Muslim population is less than 0.1%. Why? Because Poland won't let them get in and that's a good thing. They don't have to deal with all the crime problems Germany has, not to mention the terrorism in the UK and France.
Why are Muslims trying to get into normal countries? It's because the Muslim theocracies are hellholes.
If Muslims throw out Islam then let them get in. If they can't exist without their moronic Allah fantasy they should not be allowed to get in.
Politically correct fucktards don't understand because they're just plain fucking stupid.
I agree with this "Urban Dictionary" definition of politically correctness:
Politically Correct: A method of controlling and dictating public speech and thought.
Somebody asked "Why is god such an insecure demanding fool?" This is what I wrote:
Exodus 34:14-16King James Version (KJV)
14 For thou shalt worship no other god: for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.
I recommend the book "GOD, The Most Unpleasant Character In All Fiction" by Dan Barker.
Creationists are not too bright.
A Canadian scientist with a blog called Sandwalk explains why it's pointless to be nice to creationist idiots. This is what I found at his website:
I frequently use insulting words to describe stupid people. The most obvious example is my use of 'IDiot' as a shorthand for Intelligent Design Creationist.
When I use the word 'IDiot' I fully intend to bash the IDiots for their stupid ideas. Why? Because their ideas are stupid and they really are idiots.
I don't expect to convince the IDiots of the error of their ways any more than they intend to convince scientists by using insulting terms like 'Darwinist,' 'materialist,' and 'stupid.' There's no such thing as 'constructive discourse' with creationists.
I frequently use insulting words to describe stupid people. The most obvious example is my use of 'IDiot' as a shorthand for Intelligent Design Creationist.
When I use the word 'IDiot' I fully intend to bash the IDiots for their stupid ideas. Why? Because their ideas are stupid and they really are idiots.
I don't expect to convince the IDiots of the error of their ways any more than they intend to convince scientists by using insulting terms like 'Darwinist,' 'materialist,' and 'stupid.' There's no such thing as 'constructive discourse' with creationists.
The Christian death cult in 15th to the 18th centuries. 200,000 women murdered because a witch makes Christians cry.
This is from Wikipedia. I also recommend "The Dark Side of Christian History" by Helen Ellerbe.
A witch-hunt is a search for persons labelled "witches" or evidence of witchcraft, often involving moral panic or mass hysteria. The classical period of witch-hunts in Early Modern Europe and Colonial North America took place in the Early Modern period or about 1450 to 1750, spanning the upheavals of the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War, resulting in an estimated 35,000 to 100,000 executions. Including illegal and summary executions it is estimated 200,000 or more "witches" were tortured, burnt or hanged in the Western world from 1500 until around 1800. The last executions of people convicted as witches in Europe took place in the 18th century.
A witch-hunt is a search for persons labelled "witches" or evidence of witchcraft, often involving moral panic or mass hysteria. The classical period of witch-hunts in Early Modern Europe and Colonial North America took place in the Early Modern period or about 1450 to 1750, spanning the upheavals of the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War, resulting in an estimated 35,000 to 100,000 executions. Including illegal and summary executions it is estimated 200,000 or more "witches" were tortured, burnt or hanged in the Western world from 1500 until around 1800. The last executions of people convicted as witches in Europe took place in the 18th century.
An interesting fact: In 2012 Jerry Coyne provided a link to my blog.
Evolution deniers can't explain why human babies have lanugo (a coat of hair) before they are born.
In 2012 at whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com - Evidence for evolution: development of our kidneys Jerry Coyne provided a link to my blog at darwinkilledgod.blogspot.com - Lanugo makes Jeebus cry. which was a copy & paste job from his book "Why Evolution Is True" in 2010.
What Jerry Coyne wrote at his website:
This ordering of developmental events that mimic those of our ancestors is not unique to the kidney: it also occurs, for example, in the way our blood vessels form, and Darwin gives other examples. One of my favorite examples, which I’ll also teach about today, is the lanugo, the coat of hair that all human embryos develop and then shed about a month before birth (see my explanation here). The lanugo forms because we carry the genes for a full coat of hair, inherited from our primate ancestors. We briefly express those genes in utero, and at about the same relative time of development as do embryonic chimps (who don’t lose the hair). Here’s the lanugo on a premature infant. It’s shed soon after birth.
In 2012 at whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com - Evidence for evolution: development of our kidneys Jerry Coyne provided a link to my blog at darwinkilledgod.blogspot.com - Lanugo makes Jeebus cry. which was a copy & paste job from his book "Why Evolution Is True" in 2010.
What Jerry Coyne wrote at his website:
This ordering of developmental events that mimic those of our ancestors is not unique to the kidney: it also occurs, for example, in the way our blood vessels form, and Darwin gives other examples. One of my favorite examples, which I’ll also teach about today, is the lanugo, the coat of hair that all human embryos develop and then shed about a month before birth (see my explanation here). The lanugo forms because we carry the genes for a full coat of hair, inherited from our primate ancestors. We briefly express those genes in utero, and at about the same relative time of development as do embryonic chimps (who don’t lose the hair). Here’s the lanugo on a premature infant. It’s shed soon after birth.
I asked a question.
Which of these should be a taught in a biology classroom? Evolution, creationism, theistic evolution, all of the above, none of the above?
I was expecting some extreme stupid and here it is:
--------------------------------
Macroevolution - No
Microevolution - Yes
My reason for Macroevolution not being taught is that it is heavily based on faulty science and connections of connections to other bad sciences. What I mean by bad science is that instead of following the evidence, they make assumptions and force the evidence to match. Real science takes evidence and draws a picture from it. This brings me to microevolution. I believe this should be taught as it is witnessed every day. It is clearly a real thing that I can mix one species of horse with another and get a mix. This has been witnessed for thousands of years by man. Macroevolution even to many in the science community is a foolish pathway, regardless of the religion, culture, or creed of the person.
--------------------------------
I was nice to the brain-dead uneducated moron and I wrote this: I suggest read "Why Evolution Is True" by Jerry Coyne, University of Chicago biologist.
--------------------------------
The fucktard wrote "That book focuses on natural selection as being factual, which I just agreed above. A type of dog and another type of dog can mate and make a different type of dog, but a dog will not become a whale over time. No evidence of macroevolution exists. I'll read it though if I can get my hands on it."
--------------------------------
These idiots for Jeebus love to invoke dogs for some reason. They think evolution means every species evolved from a dog.
I wrote this:
--------------------------------
Amazon is your friend. A nice thing about Amazon is the customer reviews which I recommend. By the way whales evolved from a land animal that is now extinct. The fossil evidence for this transition is overwhelming and DNA sequencing confirms the whole thing.
I can't imagine why anyone would think after four billion years of natural selection, zero new species would develop. I also don't understand why people throw out 150 years of scientific progress and replace it with a magical fantasy.
This is just plain dishonest: "Macroevolution even to many in the science community is a foolish pathway."
"What I mean by bad science is that instead of following the evidence, they make assumptions and force the evidence to match." You insulted all the world's scientists and you obviously don't know how science works.
--------------------------------
Science deniers apparently think there are real scientists who want throw out science. And like this asshole the creationists like to insult scientists.
Somehow I managed to write all that stuff without saying "Why are you so fucking dense? Grow up you fucking moron."
--------------------------------
There were some answers written by normal people:
Well since its a biology class, only biology should be taught.
I shouldn't have to break it down any further than that - but creationism and intelligent design nonsense have zero to do with biology.
Private Detective Eddie Valiant who also wrote this comment for a creationist fucktard: "Stupidity should be painful. Your body should be alerting you to your debilitating condition right now."
--------------------------------
Evolution because it is true, is supported by a wealth of evidence and underpins all biology.
Creationism - well first which one do you think should be taught? There are many creation myths. That is what they are - myths. Creationism is not science and has no evidence. It has no relevance to biology.
Theistic evolution is creationism in disguise and so my comments on it are the same as those for creationism above. Creationism should not be taught, period.
MARK
I was expecting some extreme stupid and here it is:
--------------------------------
Macroevolution - No
Microevolution - Yes
My reason for Macroevolution not being taught is that it is heavily based on faulty science and connections of connections to other bad sciences. What I mean by bad science is that instead of following the evidence, they make assumptions and force the evidence to match. Real science takes evidence and draws a picture from it. This brings me to microevolution. I believe this should be taught as it is witnessed every day. It is clearly a real thing that I can mix one species of horse with another and get a mix. This has been witnessed for thousands of years by man. Macroevolution even to many in the science community is a foolish pathway, regardless of the religion, culture, or creed of the person.
--------------------------------
I was nice to the brain-dead uneducated moron and I wrote this: I suggest read "Why Evolution Is True" by Jerry Coyne, University of Chicago biologist.
--------------------------------
The fucktard wrote "That book focuses on natural selection as being factual, which I just agreed above. A type of dog and another type of dog can mate and make a different type of dog, but a dog will not become a whale over time. No evidence of macroevolution exists. I'll read it though if I can get my hands on it."
--------------------------------
These idiots for Jeebus love to invoke dogs for some reason. They think evolution means every species evolved from a dog.
I wrote this:
--------------------------------
Amazon is your friend. A nice thing about Amazon is the customer reviews which I recommend. By the way whales evolved from a land animal that is now extinct. The fossil evidence for this transition is overwhelming and DNA sequencing confirms the whole thing.
I can't imagine why anyone would think after four billion years of natural selection, zero new species would develop. I also don't understand why people throw out 150 years of scientific progress and replace it with a magical fantasy.
This is just plain dishonest: "Macroevolution even to many in the science community is a foolish pathway."
"What I mean by bad science is that instead of following the evidence, they make assumptions and force the evidence to match." You insulted all the world's scientists and you obviously don't know how science works.
--------------------------------
Science deniers apparently think there are real scientists who want throw out science. And like this asshole the creationists like to insult scientists.
Somehow I managed to write all that stuff without saying "Why are you so fucking dense? Grow up you fucking moron."
--------------------------------
There were some answers written by normal people:
Well since its a biology class, only biology should be taught.
I shouldn't have to break it down any further than that - but creationism and intelligent design nonsense have zero to do with biology.
Private Detective Eddie Valiant who also wrote this comment for a creationist fucktard: "Stupidity should be painful. Your body should be alerting you to your debilitating condition right now."
--------------------------------
Evolution because it is true, is supported by a wealth of evidence and underpins all biology.
Creationism - well first which one do you think should be taught? There are many creation myths. That is what they are - myths. Creationism is not science and has no evidence. It has no relevance to biology.
Theistic evolution is creationism in disguise and so my comments on it are the same as those for creationism above. Creationism should not be taught, period.
MARK
I was wondering why there are two Koreas. I looked it up. It looks like Japan's annexation of Korea in 1910 was a bad idea. This should be one country. That might eventually happen but not for a very long time.
In 1910, Korea was annexed by the Empire of Japan. After the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II in 1945, Korea was divided into two zones, with the north occupied by the Soviets and the south occupied by the Americans. Negotiations on reunification failed, and in 1948, separate governments were formed: the socialist Democratic People's Republic of Korea in the north, and the capitalist Republic of Korea in the south. An invasion initiated by North Korea led to the Korean War (1950–1953). The Korean Armistice Agreement brought about a ceasefire, but no peace treaty was signed.[15]K
I like what someone wrote about a creationist fucktard.
"Stupidity should be painful. Your body should be alerting you to your debilitating condition right now."
Wednesday, November 29, 2017
Islam is a violent disgusting anti-science bullshit cult infested with countless thousands of terrorist assholes and "moderate" Muslims who treat women like farm animals. Evolution makes Muslim morons cry.
The birthday of Prophet Muhammad is Friday, December 1, 2017.
Who is Muhammad? I looked it up. Apparently Muhammad was a stupid fucking asshole.
https://thereligionofpeace.com/pages/muhammad/life-of-muhammad.aspx
Timeline of Muhammad's Life (A.D)
570 - Born in Mecca
576 - Orphaned upon death of mother
595 - Marries Kadijah - older, wealthy widow
610 - Reports first revelations at age of 40
619 - Protector uncle dies
622 - Emigrates from Mecca to Medina (the Hijra)
623 - Orders raids on Meccan caravans
624 - Battle of Badr (victory)
624 - Evicts Qaynuqa Jews from Medina
624 - Orders assassination of Abu Afak
624 - Orders assassination of Asma bint Marwan
624 - Orders the assassination of Ka'b al-Ashraf
625 - Battle of Uhud (defeat)
625 - Evicts Nadir Jews
627 - Battle of the Trench (victory)
627 - Massacre of the Qurayza Jews
628 - Signing of the Treaty of Hudaibiya with Mecca
628 - Destruction and subjugation of the Khaybar Jews
629 - Orders first raid into Christian lands at Muta (defeat)
630 - Conquers Mecca by surprise (along with other tribes)
631 - Leads second raid into Christian territory at Tabuk (no battle)
632 - Dies
Who is Muhammad? I looked it up. Apparently Muhammad was a stupid fucking asshole.
https://thereligionofpeace.com/pages/muhammad/life-of-muhammad.aspx
Timeline of Muhammad's Life (A.D)
570 - Born in Mecca
576 - Orphaned upon death of mother
595 - Marries Kadijah - older, wealthy widow
610 - Reports first revelations at age of 40
619 - Protector uncle dies
622 - Emigrates from Mecca to Medina (the Hijra)
623 - Orders raids on Meccan caravans
624 - Battle of Badr (victory)
624 - Evicts Qaynuqa Jews from Medina
624 - Orders assassination of Abu Afak
624 - Orders assassination of Asma bint Marwan
624 - Orders the assassination of Ka'b al-Ashraf
625 - Battle of Uhud (defeat)
625 - Evicts Nadir Jews
627 - Battle of the Trench (victory)
627 - Massacre of the Qurayza Jews
628 - Signing of the Treaty of Hudaibiya with Mecca
628 - Destruction and subjugation of the Khaybar Jews
629 - Orders first raid into Christian lands at Muta (defeat)
630 - Conquers Mecca by surprise (along with other tribes)
631 - Leads second raid into Christian territory at Tabuk (no battle)
632 - Dies
States where taxpayers pay for schools that teach magical creationism instead of evolution. This is totally wrong. Some of it or all of it violates our Establishment Clause. The students learn how to be anti-science morons.
Tax-funded creationism
Green: (Louisiana and Tennessee) - Bible thumping morons teach magical creationism in public schools which requires throwing out our constitution but they are getting away with it.
Orange: (Florida where I live, Indiana, Ohio, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Oklahoma, Wisconsin) - Private schools that teach magical creationism and accept tax-funded vouchers or scholarships.
Red: (Texas) - Charter schools using magical creationism curricula.
What we have here is thousands of students learn how to hate science because they think it's boring.
Even worse is this fact: 72% of American biology teachers are incompetent uneducated morons.
Idiot America will always be an idiot country.
"Evolution is clearly a tinkerer, not an engineer; it has to work with yesterday's model." A copy & paste job that explains everything about the human ape species.
All those aching backs may be trying to tell us something: It's part of the price we pay for walking on two legs.
By Jennifer Ackerman
We humans are odd creatures: tailless bipeds with sinuous spines, long limbs, arched feet, agile hands, and enormous brains. Our bodies are a mosaic of features shaped by natural selection over vast periods of time—both exquisitely capable and deeply flawed. We can stand, walk, and run with grace and endurance, but we suffer aching feet and knee injuries; we can twist and torque our spines, and yet most of us are plagued by back trouble at some point in our lives; we can give birth to babies with big brains, but only through great pain and risk. Scientists have long sought to answer the question of how our bodies came to be the way they are. Now, using new methods from a variety of disciplines, they are discovering that many of the flaws in our "design" have a common theme: They arise primarily from evolutionary compromises that came about when our ancestors stood upright—the first step in the long path to becoming human.
A tight squeeze
In Karen Rosenberg's laboratory at the University of Delaware, a room packed with the casts of skulls and bones of chimpanzees, gibbons, and other primates, one model stands out: It's a life-size replica of a human female pelvic skeleton mounted on a platform. There is also a fetal skull with a flexible gooseneck wire. The idea is to simulate the human birth process by manually moving the fetal head through the pelvis.
It looks easy enough.
"Go ahead, try it," Rosenberg says.
Turn the little oval skull face-forward, and it drops neatly into the pelvic brim, the beginning of the birth canal. But then it jams against the protrusions of the ischial bones (those that bear the burden during a long car ride). More shoving and rotating, and it's quickly apparent that the skull must traverse a passage that seems smaller than itself, cramped not only by the ischial bones but also by the coccyx, the bottom of the tailbone, which pokes into the lower pelvic cavity. Only by maneuvering the skull to face sideways in the middle of the canal and then giving it a firm push, does it move a centimeter or two—before it gets hung up again. Twist it, jostle it: The thing won't budge. Rosenberg guides my hand to turn the skull around to face backward, and then, with a hard shove, the stubborn cranium finally exits the birth canal.
"Navigating the birth canal is probably the most gymnastic maneuver most of us will ever make in life," says Rosenberg, chair of the university's department of anthropology. It's a trick all right, especially if there's no guiding hand to twirl and ram the skull. And the neat two-piece model doesn't even include the broad, rigid shoulders of the human infant, a legacy from our apelike ancestors who, some 20 million years ago, evolved wide clavicles that allowed them to hang suspended from branches and feed on fruit. To follow the head, a baby's shoulders must also rotate two times to work through the birth canal; they sometimes get stuck, causing injury to part of the spinal nerves that control the arms.
Suddenly I understand as never before why it took 36 hours, two doctors, and three shifts of nurses to safely deliver my firstborn.
Birth is an ordeal for women everywhere, according to a review of birthing patterns in nearly 300 cultures around the world by Rosenberg and colleague Wenda Trevathan, an anthropologist at New Mexico State University. "Not only is labor difficult," Rosenberg says, "but because of the design of the female pelvis, infants exit the birth canal with the back of their heads against the pubic bones, facing in the opposite direction from the mother. This makes it tough for her to reach down and guide the baby as it emerges without damaging its spine—and also inhibits her ability to clear the baby's breathing passage or to remove the umbilical cord from around its neck. That's why women everywhere seek assistance during labor and delivery."
Compared with humans, most primates have an easier time, Rosenberg says. A baby chimpanzee, for instance, is born quickly: entering, passing through, and leaving its mother's pelvis in a straight shot and emerging faceup so that its mother can pull it forward and lift it toward her breast. In chimps and other primates, the oval birth canal is oriented the same way from beginning to end. In humans, it’s a flattened oval one way and then it shifts orientation 90 degrees so that it’s flattened the other way. To get through, the infant’s head and shoulders have to align with that shifting oval. It’s this changing cross-sectional shape of the passageway that makes human birth difficult and risky, Rosenberg says, not just for babies but also for mothers. A hundred years ago, childbirth was a leading cause of death for women of childbearing age.
Why do we possess a birth canal of such Byzantine design? "The human female pelvis is a classic example of evolutionary compromise," Rosenberg answers. Its design reflects a trade-off between the demand for a skeletal structure that allows for habitual walking on two feet and one that permits the passage of a baby with a big brain and wide shoulders. Its unique features didn't come about all at once, but at different times in our evolutionary history, in response to different selective pressures. "The result of these different pressures is a jerry-rigged, unsatisfactory structure," Rosenberg says. "It works, but only marginally. It's definitely not the type of system you would invent if you were designing it. But evolution is clearly a tinkerer, not an engineer; it has to work with yesterday's model."
Yesterday’s model
Humans come from a long line of ancestors, from reptile to mammal to ape, whose skeletons were built to carry their weight on all fours. Our ape ancestors probably evolved around 20 million years ago from small primates that carried themselves horizontally. Over the next several million years, some apes grew larger and began to use their arms to hold overhead branches and, perhaps, to reach for fruit. Then, six or seven million years ago, our ancestors stood up and began to move about on their hind legs. By the time the famous Lucy (Australo-pithecus afarensis) appeared in East Africa 3.2 million years ago, they had adopted walking as their chief mode of getting around.
It was a radical shift. "Bipedalism is a unique and bizarre form of locomotion," says Craig Stanford, an anthropologist at the University of Southern California. "Of more than 250 species of primates, only one goes around on two legs." Stanford and many other scientists consider bipedalism the key defining feature of being human. "Some may think it's our big brain," Stanford says, "but the rapid expansion of the human brain didn't begin until less than two million years ago, millions of years after we got upright and began using tools. Bipedalism was the initial adaptation that paved the way for others."
Evolutionary biologists agree that shifts in behavior often drive changes in anatomy. Standing upright launched a cascade of anatomical alterations. The biomechanics of upright walking is so drastically different from quadrupedal locomotion that bones from the neck down had to change. The skull and spine were realigned, bringing the head and torso into a vertical line over the hips and feet. To support the body's weight and absorb the forces of upright locomotion, joints in limbs and the spine enlarged and the foot evolved an arch. As for the pelvis: It morphed from the ape's long, thin paddle into a wide, flat saddle shape, which thrust the weight of the trunk down through the legs and accommodated the attachment of large muscles. This improved the stability of the body and the efficiency of walking upright but severely constricted the birth canal.
All of these architectural changes, seen clearly in the fossil record, did not happen overnight. They came gradually, over many generations and over long periods of time, in small steps favored by natural selection.
Upright citizens
Consider the simple human act of walking or running. At his laboratory in the anthropology department at Harvard University, Dan Lieberman does just that, using biomechanical studies to see how we use our body parts in various aspects of movement. As a volunteer subject in one of his experiments last fall, I was wired up and put through paces on a treadmill. On my feet were pressure sensors to show my heel and toe strikes. Electromyographic sensors revealed the firing of my muscles, and accelerometers and rate gyros on my head detected its pitching, rolling, and yawing movements. Small silver foam balls attached to my joints—ankle, knee, hip, elbow, shoulder—acted as reflectors for three infrared cameras mapping in three-dimensional space the location of my limb segments.
These biomechanical windows on walking and running illuminate just how astonishing a feat of balance, coordination, and efficiency is upright locomotion. The legs on a walking human body act not unlike inverted pendulums. Using a stiff leg as a point of support, the body swings up and over it in an arc, so that the potential energy gained in the rise roughly equals the kinetic energy generated in the descent. By this trick the body stores and recovers so much of the energy used with each stride that it reduces its own workload by as much as 65 percent.
The key lies in our human features: the ability to fully extend our knees; the way our lower back curves forward and our thighbone slopes inward from hip to knee so that our feet straddle our center of gravity; and the action of the gluteal abductors, the muscles attached to the pelvis that contract to prevent us from toppling over sideways mid-stride when our weight is on a single foot.
In running, we shift from this swinging pendulum mode to a bouncy pogo-stick mode, using the tendons in our legs as elastic springs. Lieberman's recent studies with Dennis Bramble of the University of Utah suggest that running—which our ancestors mastered some two million years ago—was instrumental in the evolution of several features, including our extra leg tendons, our relatively hairless skin and copious sweat glands (which facilitate cooling), and our enlarged gluteus maximus, the biggest muscle in the body, which wraps the rear end and acts to stabilize the trunk, preventing us from pitching forward. Now Lieberman is studying the role in upright locomotion of a tiny slip of muscle in the neck called the cleidocranial trapezius—all that remains of a massive shoulder muscle in chimps and other apes—which steadies our head during running, preventing it from bobbling.
Watching the graphs from the experiment on a computer screen, one can't help but marvel at the effectiveness of the system, the little cleidocranial portion of the trapezius steadying the head; the regular pumping action of arms and shoulders stabilizing the body; the consistent springlike rhythms of our long-legged stride.
"Compare this with the chimp," Lieberman says. "Chimps pay a hefty price in energy for being built the way they are. They can't extend their knees and lock their legs straight, as humans can. Instead, they have to use muscle power to support their body weight when they're walking upright, and they waste energy rocking back and forth."
Chimps are our closest living evolutionary relatives and, as such, are especially well suited to teach us about ourselves. Almost every bone in a chimp’s body correlates with a bone in a human body. Whatever skeletal distinctions exist are primarily related to the human pattern of walking upright—hence the keen interest in parsing these distinctions among those who study the origins of human bipedalism.
Two-legged walking in a chimp is an occasional, transitory behavior. In humans, it is a way of life, one that carries with it myriad benefits, perhaps chief among them, freed hands. But upright posture and locomotion come with a host of uniquely human maladies.
Achilles' back
An old friend of mine, a former politician from West Virginia, has difficulty remembering names. He saves himself from embarrassment with a simple trick: He delivers a hearty handshake and asks, "So how's your back?" Four times out of five he strikes gold. Names become unnecessary when the acquaintance, flattered by the personal inquiry, launches into a saga of lumbar pain, slipped disk, or mild scoliosis.
Back pain is one of the most common health complaints, accounting for more than 15 million doctor visits each year. That most of us will experience debilitating back pain at some point in our lives raises the question of the spine's design.
"The problem is that the vertebral column was originally designed to act as an arch," explains Carol Ward, an anthropologist and anatomist at the University of Missouri in Columbia. "When we became upright, it had to function as a weight-bearing column." To support our head and balance our weight directly over our hip joints and lower limbs, the spine evolved a series of S curves—a deep forward curve, or lordosis, in the lower back, and a backward curve, or kyphosis, in the upper back.
This change took place at least four million years ago, probably much earlier. Ward and her colleague Bruce Latimer, director of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, recently analyzed the vertebral column of Lucy, along with two Australopithecus africanus skeletons from more than two million years ago. They found that the spines of all three possess the same S curves present in the human spine, confirming that Australopithecus walked on two legs.
"This system of S curves is energetically efficient and effective for maintaining our balance and for bipedal locomotion," Ward says. "But the lower region of the column suffers from the excessive pressure and oblique force exerted on its curved structure by our upright posture."
Lean back, arching your spine. You're the only mammal in the world capable of this sort of backbend. Feel a cringing tightness in your lower back? That's the vertical joints between your vertebrae pressing against one another as their compressive load increases. The curvature in your lower spine requires that its building blocks take the shape of a wedge, with the thick part in the front and the thin part in the back. The wedge-shaped vertebrae are linked by vertical joints that prevent them from slipping out from one another.
"These joints are delicate structures and very complex," Ward says. "They allow our spines to move with great flexibility, to twist and bend and flex, pivoting on the disks between the vertebrae."
But in the lower back region, where the load is heaviest and the wedging most dramatic, strains such as heavy lifting or hyperextension (say, from doing the butterfly stroke or cleaning the gutters) can cause your lowest vertebrae to slip or squish together. When the vertebrae are pressured in this way, the disks between them may herniate, or bulge out, impinging on spinal nerves and causing pain. Or the pressure may pinch the delicate structures at the back of the vertebrae, causing a fracture called spondylolysis, a problem for about one in twenty Americans.
No other primate experiences such back problems—except, Ward and Latimer say, our immediate ancestors. The two scientists have found fossil evidence that back trouble likely plagued our bipedal forebears. The bones of the Nariokotome boy, a young Homo erectus (a species preceding our own Homo sapiens) who lived some 1.5 million years ago, reveal that the youth suffered from scoliosis, a potentially devastating lateral curvature of the spine.
The cause of most scoliosis cases remains a mystery, Latimer says, but like spondylolysis, it appears linked to the spinal features associated with upright posture, particularly lordosis, the deep forward curvature and flexibility of our lower spine. "Because scoliosis occurs only in humans and our immediate bipedal ancestors, it appears likely that upright walking is at least partially to blame," he says.
Considering the pressures of natural selection, why are such seriously debilitating diseases still prevalent? Latimer suspects the answer lies in the importance of lordosis for upright walking: "Selection for bipedality must have been so strong in our early ancestors that a permanent lordosis developed despite the risk it carries for spondylolysis and other back disorders."
Disjointed
Liz Scarpelli's postural orientation is at the moment horizontal. Her leg is elevated in a surgical sling as Scott Dye, an orthopedic surgeon at California Pacific Medical Center, examines her knee with an arthroscope. The ghostly image of the joint—femur, tibia, and patella—appear magnified on a flat screen above the gurney. An athletic woman of 51, a former gymnast and skier, Scarpelli is a physical therapist who works with patients to rehabilitate their joints after surgery. While demonstrating to one patient a technique for leg-strengthening knee squats, Scarpelli blew out her own knee for the third time. Dye's arthroscopic camera shows healthy bone and ligaments, but large chunks of cartilage float about like icebergs in the fluid spaces around the joint. Dye expertly scrapes up the pieces and sucks them out before sewing up the holes and moving on to the next five surgeries scheduled for the day.
To hear Scott Dye speak of it, the knee joint is among the greatest of nature's inventions, "a 360-million-year-old structure beautifully designed to do its job of transferring load between limbs." But it is also among the most easily injured joints in the human body; medical procedures involving knees total a million a year in the United States.
"In standing upright, we have imposed unprecedented forces on the knee, ankle, and foot," Bruce Latimer says. When we walk quickly or run, the forces absorbed by our lower limbs may approach several multiples of our own body weight. Moreover, our pelvic anatomy exerts so-called lateral pressure on our lower joints. Because of the breadth of our pelvis, our thighbone is angled inward toward the knee, rather than straight up and down, as it is in the chimp and other apes. This carrying angle ensures that the knee is brought well under the body to make us more stable.
"But nothing is free in evolution," Latimer says. "This peculiar angle means that there are forces on the knee threatening to destabilize it. In women, the angle is greater because of their wider pelvis, which explains why they are slower runners—the increased angle means that they're wasting maybe ten percent of their energy—and also why they tend to suffer more knee injuries."
Unlikely feat
And where does the buck finally stop? What finally bears the full weight of our upright body? Two ridiculously tiny platforms.
"The human foot has rightfully been called the most characteristic peculiarity in the human body," says Will Harcourt-Smith, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History. "For one thing, it has no thumblike opposable toe. We're the only primate to give up the foot as a grasping organ."
This was a huge sacrifice. The chimp's foot is a brilliantly useful and versatile feature, essential to tree climbing and capable of as much motion and manipulation as its hand. The human foot, by contrast, is a hyper-specialized organ, designed to do just two things, propel the body forward and absorb the shock of doing so. Bipedality may have freed the hands, but it also yoked the feet.
Harcourt-Smith studies foot bones of early hominins with the new technique of geometric morphometrics—measuring objects in three dimensions. The variations in foot structure he has discovered in Australopithecus and Homo habilis (a species that lived 2.5 to 1.6 million years ago) suggest that these early hominins may have walked in different ways.
"We have a desire to see the story of bipedalism as a linear, progressive thing," he says, "one model improving on another, all evolving toward perfection in Homo sapiens. But evolution doesn't evolve toward anything; it's a messy affair, full of diversity and dead ends. There were probably lots of ways of getting around on two feet."
Still, in all the fossil feet Harcourt-Smith studies, some type of basic human pattern is clearly present: a big toe aligned with the long axis of the foot, or a well-developed longitudinal arch, or in some cases a humanlike ankle joint—all ingenious adaptations but fraught with potential problems. "Because the foot is so specialized in its design," Harcourt-Smith says, "it has a very narrow window for working correctly. If it's a bit too flat or too arched, or if it turns in or out too much, you get the host of complications that has spurred the industry of podiatry." In people with a reduced arch, fatigue fractures often develop. In those with a pronounced arch, the ligaments that support the arch sometimes become inflamed, causing plantar fasciitis and heel spurs. When the carrying angle of the leg forces the big toe out of alignment, bunions may form—more of a problem for women than men because of their wider hips.
And that's not all.
"One of the really remarkable aspects of the human foot, compared with the chimp and other apes, is the relatively large size of its bones, particularly the heel bone," Bruce Latimer notes. "A 350-pound male gorilla has a smaller heel bone than does a 100-pound human female—however, the gorilla bone is a lot more dense." While the ape heel is solid with thick cortical bone, the human heel is puffed up and covered with only a paper-thin layer of cortical bone; the rest is thin latticelike cancellous bone. This enlargement of cancellous bone is pronounced not just in the heel, but in all the main joints of our lower limbs—hip, ankle, knee—and has likely marked the skeleton of our ancestors since they first got upright; it has been found in the joints of 3.5-million-year-old hominin fossils from Ethiopia.
"The greater volume of bone is an advantage for dissipating the stresses delivered by normal bipedal gait," Latimer says. However, it's not without cost: "The redistribution in our bones from cortical to cancellous means that humans have much more surface exposure of their skeletal tissue. This results in an accelerated rate of bone mineral loss—or osteopenia—as we age, which may eventually lead to osteoporosis and hip and vertebral fractures."
What do we stand for?
We humans gave up stability and speed. We gave up the foot as a grasping tool. We gained spongy bones and fragile joints and vulnerable spines and difficult, risky births that led to the deaths of countless babies and mothers. Given the trade-offs, the aches and pains and severe drawbacks associated with bipedalism, why get upright in the first place?
A couple of chimps named Jack and Louie may offer some insights. The chimps are part of an experiment by a team of scientists to explore the origin of bipedalism in our hominin ancestors.
Theories about why we got upright have run the gamut from freeing the arms of our ancestors to carry babies and food to reaching hitherto inaccessible fruits. "But," says Mike Sockol of the University of California, Davis, "one factor had to play a part in every scenario: the amount of energy required to move from point to point. If you can save energy while gathering your food supply, that energy can go into growth and reproduction."
Paleogeographical studies suggest that at the time our ancestors first stood upright, perhaps six to eight million years ago, their food supplies were becoming more widely dispersed. "Rainfall in equatorial East Africa was declining," Sockol says, "and the forest was changing from dense and closed to more open, with more distance between food resources. If our ape ancestors had to roam farther to find adequate food, and doing so on two legs saved energy, then those individuals who moved across the ground more economically gained an advantage."
To test the theory that the shift to two feet among our ancestors may have been spurred by energy savings, Sockol and his colleagues are looking at the energy cost of locomotion in the chimp. The chimp is a good model, Sockol says, not just because it's similar to us in body size and skeletal features and can walk both bipedally and quadrupedally, but also because the majority of evidence suggests that the last common ancestor of chimps and humans who first stood upright was chimplike. By understanding how a chimp moves, and whether it expends more or less energy in walking upright or on all fours (knuckle-walking), the scientists hope to gain insight into our ancestors' radical change in posture.
Jack and Louie and several other young adult chimps have been trained by skillful professional handlers to walk and run on a treadmill, both on two legs and on four. One morning, Jack sits patiently in his trainer's lap while Sockol's collaborators, Dave Raichlen and Herman Pontzer of Harvard University, paint small white patches on his joints—the equivalent of those silver balls I wore on Dan Lieberman's treadmill. Only occasionally does Jack steal a surreptitious lick of the sweet white stuff. Once he's marked, he jumps on the treadmill and runs along on two legs for a few minutes, then drops to four. Every so often, his trainer hands him a fruit snack, which Jack balances on his lower lip, thrust out as far as it will go, before rolling the fruit forward and flicking it into his mouth. For a set time, Jack breathes into a small mask connected to equipment that gathers information on how much oxygen he consumes—a measure of energy expenditure—while the movements of his limbs (marked by those white dots) are monitored with cameras to help the scientists understand how the energy is being used.
Once the scientists have refined their model for how things work in the chimp—for what limb movements are used in the two types of locomotion and how each consumes energy—they hope to apply this model to the fossils of our ancestors. "We use the biomechanical data to determine the types of anatomical changes that would have reduced energy expenditure," Raichlen explains. "Then we look at the fossil record and ask, Do we see these changes? If we do, that’s a pretty good clue that we're looking at selection for reduced energy costs in our ancestors who became bipedal. That's the dream."
Scientists are the first to admit that much work needs to be done before we fully understand the origins of bipedalism. But whatever drove human ancestors to get upright in the first place—reaching for fruit or traveling farther in search of it, scanning the horizon for predators or transporting food to family—the habit stuck. They eventually evolved the ability to walk and run long distances. They learned to hunt and scavenge meat. They created and manipulated a diverse array of tools. These were all essential steps in evolving a big brain and a human intelligence, one that could make poetry and music and mathematics, assist in difficult childbirth, develop sophisticated technology, and consider the roots of its own quirky and imperfect upright being.
We humans are odd creatures: tailless bipeds with sinuous spines, long limbs, arched feet, agile hands, and enormous brains. Our bodies are a mosaic of features shaped by natural selection over vast periods of time—both exquisitely capable and deeply flawed. We can stand, walk, and run with grace and endurance, but we suffer aching feet and knee injuries; we can twist and torque our spines, and yet most of us are plagued by back trouble at some point in our lives; we can give birth to babies with big brains, but only through great pain and risk. Scientists have long sought to answer the question of how our bodies came to be the way they are. Now, using new methods from a variety of disciplines, they are discovering that many of the flaws in our "design" have a common theme: They arise primarily from evolutionary compromises that came about when our ancestors stood upright—the first step in the long path to becoming human.
A tight squeeze
In Karen Rosenberg's laboratory at the University of Delaware, a room packed with the casts of skulls and bones of chimpanzees, gibbons, and other primates, one model stands out: It's a life-size replica of a human female pelvic skeleton mounted on a platform. There is also a fetal skull with a flexible gooseneck wire. The idea is to simulate the human birth process by manually moving the fetal head through the pelvis.
It looks easy enough.
"Go ahead, try it," Rosenberg says.
Turn the little oval skull face-forward, and it drops neatly into the pelvic brim, the beginning of the birth canal. But then it jams against the protrusions of the ischial bones (those that bear the burden during a long car ride). More shoving and rotating, and it's quickly apparent that the skull must traverse a passage that seems smaller than itself, cramped not only by the ischial bones but also by the coccyx, the bottom of the tailbone, which pokes into the lower pelvic cavity. Only by maneuvering the skull to face sideways in the middle of the canal and then giving it a firm push, does it move a centimeter or two—before it gets hung up again. Twist it, jostle it: The thing won't budge. Rosenberg guides my hand to turn the skull around to face backward, and then, with a hard shove, the stubborn cranium finally exits the birth canal.
"Navigating the birth canal is probably the most gymnastic maneuver most of us will ever make in life," says Rosenberg, chair of the university's department of anthropology. It's a trick all right, especially if there's no guiding hand to twirl and ram the skull. And the neat two-piece model doesn't even include the broad, rigid shoulders of the human infant, a legacy from our apelike ancestors who, some 20 million years ago, evolved wide clavicles that allowed them to hang suspended from branches and feed on fruit. To follow the head, a baby's shoulders must also rotate two times to work through the birth canal; they sometimes get stuck, causing injury to part of the spinal nerves that control the arms.
Suddenly I understand as never before why it took 36 hours, two doctors, and three shifts of nurses to safely deliver my firstborn.
Birth is an ordeal for women everywhere, according to a review of birthing patterns in nearly 300 cultures around the world by Rosenberg and colleague Wenda Trevathan, an anthropologist at New Mexico State University. "Not only is labor difficult," Rosenberg says, "but because of the design of the female pelvis, infants exit the birth canal with the back of their heads against the pubic bones, facing in the opposite direction from the mother. This makes it tough for her to reach down and guide the baby as it emerges without damaging its spine—and also inhibits her ability to clear the baby's breathing passage or to remove the umbilical cord from around its neck. That's why women everywhere seek assistance during labor and delivery."
Compared with humans, most primates have an easier time, Rosenberg says. A baby chimpanzee, for instance, is born quickly: entering, passing through, and leaving its mother's pelvis in a straight shot and emerging faceup so that its mother can pull it forward and lift it toward her breast. In chimps and other primates, the oval birth canal is oriented the same way from beginning to end. In humans, it’s a flattened oval one way and then it shifts orientation 90 degrees so that it’s flattened the other way. To get through, the infant’s head and shoulders have to align with that shifting oval. It’s this changing cross-sectional shape of the passageway that makes human birth difficult and risky, Rosenberg says, not just for babies but also for mothers. A hundred years ago, childbirth was a leading cause of death for women of childbearing age.
Why do we possess a birth canal of such Byzantine design? "The human female pelvis is a classic example of evolutionary compromise," Rosenberg answers. Its design reflects a trade-off between the demand for a skeletal structure that allows for habitual walking on two feet and one that permits the passage of a baby with a big brain and wide shoulders. Its unique features didn't come about all at once, but at different times in our evolutionary history, in response to different selective pressures. "The result of these different pressures is a jerry-rigged, unsatisfactory structure," Rosenberg says. "It works, but only marginally. It's definitely not the type of system you would invent if you were designing it. But evolution is clearly a tinkerer, not an engineer; it has to work with yesterday's model."
Yesterday’s model
Humans come from a long line of ancestors, from reptile to mammal to ape, whose skeletons were built to carry their weight on all fours. Our ape ancestors probably evolved around 20 million years ago from small primates that carried themselves horizontally. Over the next several million years, some apes grew larger and began to use their arms to hold overhead branches and, perhaps, to reach for fruit. Then, six or seven million years ago, our ancestors stood up and began to move about on their hind legs. By the time the famous Lucy (Australo-pithecus afarensis) appeared in East Africa 3.2 million years ago, they had adopted walking as their chief mode of getting around.
It was a radical shift. "Bipedalism is a unique and bizarre form of locomotion," says Craig Stanford, an anthropologist at the University of Southern California. "Of more than 250 species of primates, only one goes around on two legs." Stanford and many other scientists consider bipedalism the key defining feature of being human. "Some may think it's our big brain," Stanford says, "but the rapid expansion of the human brain didn't begin until less than two million years ago, millions of years after we got upright and began using tools. Bipedalism was the initial adaptation that paved the way for others."
Evolutionary biologists agree that shifts in behavior often drive changes in anatomy. Standing upright launched a cascade of anatomical alterations. The biomechanics of upright walking is so drastically different from quadrupedal locomotion that bones from the neck down had to change. The skull and spine were realigned, bringing the head and torso into a vertical line over the hips and feet. To support the body's weight and absorb the forces of upright locomotion, joints in limbs and the spine enlarged and the foot evolved an arch. As for the pelvis: It morphed from the ape's long, thin paddle into a wide, flat saddle shape, which thrust the weight of the trunk down through the legs and accommodated the attachment of large muscles. This improved the stability of the body and the efficiency of walking upright but severely constricted the birth canal.
All of these architectural changes, seen clearly in the fossil record, did not happen overnight. They came gradually, over many generations and over long periods of time, in small steps favored by natural selection.
Upright citizens
Consider the simple human act of walking or running. At his laboratory in the anthropology department at Harvard University, Dan Lieberman does just that, using biomechanical studies to see how we use our body parts in various aspects of movement. As a volunteer subject in one of his experiments last fall, I was wired up and put through paces on a treadmill. On my feet were pressure sensors to show my heel and toe strikes. Electromyographic sensors revealed the firing of my muscles, and accelerometers and rate gyros on my head detected its pitching, rolling, and yawing movements. Small silver foam balls attached to my joints—ankle, knee, hip, elbow, shoulder—acted as reflectors for three infrared cameras mapping in three-dimensional space the location of my limb segments.
These biomechanical windows on walking and running illuminate just how astonishing a feat of balance, coordination, and efficiency is upright locomotion. The legs on a walking human body act not unlike inverted pendulums. Using a stiff leg as a point of support, the body swings up and over it in an arc, so that the potential energy gained in the rise roughly equals the kinetic energy generated in the descent. By this trick the body stores and recovers so much of the energy used with each stride that it reduces its own workload by as much as 65 percent.
The key lies in our human features: the ability to fully extend our knees; the way our lower back curves forward and our thighbone slopes inward from hip to knee so that our feet straddle our center of gravity; and the action of the gluteal abductors, the muscles attached to the pelvis that contract to prevent us from toppling over sideways mid-stride when our weight is on a single foot.
In running, we shift from this swinging pendulum mode to a bouncy pogo-stick mode, using the tendons in our legs as elastic springs. Lieberman's recent studies with Dennis Bramble of the University of Utah suggest that running—which our ancestors mastered some two million years ago—was instrumental in the evolution of several features, including our extra leg tendons, our relatively hairless skin and copious sweat glands (which facilitate cooling), and our enlarged gluteus maximus, the biggest muscle in the body, which wraps the rear end and acts to stabilize the trunk, preventing us from pitching forward. Now Lieberman is studying the role in upright locomotion of a tiny slip of muscle in the neck called the cleidocranial trapezius—all that remains of a massive shoulder muscle in chimps and other apes—which steadies our head during running, preventing it from bobbling.
Watching the graphs from the experiment on a computer screen, one can't help but marvel at the effectiveness of the system, the little cleidocranial portion of the trapezius steadying the head; the regular pumping action of arms and shoulders stabilizing the body; the consistent springlike rhythms of our long-legged stride.
"Compare this with the chimp," Lieberman says. "Chimps pay a hefty price in energy for being built the way they are. They can't extend their knees and lock their legs straight, as humans can. Instead, they have to use muscle power to support their body weight when they're walking upright, and they waste energy rocking back and forth."
Chimps are our closest living evolutionary relatives and, as such, are especially well suited to teach us about ourselves. Almost every bone in a chimp’s body correlates with a bone in a human body. Whatever skeletal distinctions exist are primarily related to the human pattern of walking upright—hence the keen interest in parsing these distinctions among those who study the origins of human bipedalism.
Two-legged walking in a chimp is an occasional, transitory behavior. In humans, it is a way of life, one that carries with it myriad benefits, perhaps chief among them, freed hands. But upright posture and locomotion come with a host of uniquely human maladies.
Achilles' back
An old friend of mine, a former politician from West Virginia, has difficulty remembering names. He saves himself from embarrassment with a simple trick: He delivers a hearty handshake and asks, "So how's your back?" Four times out of five he strikes gold. Names become unnecessary when the acquaintance, flattered by the personal inquiry, launches into a saga of lumbar pain, slipped disk, or mild scoliosis.
Back pain is one of the most common health complaints, accounting for more than 15 million doctor visits each year. That most of us will experience debilitating back pain at some point in our lives raises the question of the spine's design.
"The problem is that the vertebral column was originally designed to act as an arch," explains Carol Ward, an anthropologist and anatomist at the University of Missouri in Columbia. "When we became upright, it had to function as a weight-bearing column." To support our head and balance our weight directly over our hip joints and lower limbs, the spine evolved a series of S curves—a deep forward curve, or lordosis, in the lower back, and a backward curve, or kyphosis, in the upper back.
This change took place at least four million years ago, probably much earlier. Ward and her colleague Bruce Latimer, director of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, recently analyzed the vertebral column of Lucy, along with two Australopithecus africanus skeletons from more than two million years ago. They found that the spines of all three possess the same S curves present in the human spine, confirming that Australopithecus walked on two legs.
"This system of S curves is energetically efficient and effective for maintaining our balance and for bipedal locomotion," Ward says. "But the lower region of the column suffers from the excessive pressure and oblique force exerted on its curved structure by our upright posture."
Lean back, arching your spine. You're the only mammal in the world capable of this sort of backbend. Feel a cringing tightness in your lower back? That's the vertical joints between your vertebrae pressing against one another as their compressive load increases. The curvature in your lower spine requires that its building blocks take the shape of a wedge, with the thick part in the front and the thin part in the back. The wedge-shaped vertebrae are linked by vertical joints that prevent them from slipping out from one another.
"These joints are delicate structures and very complex," Ward says. "They allow our spines to move with great flexibility, to twist and bend and flex, pivoting on the disks between the vertebrae."
But in the lower back region, where the load is heaviest and the wedging most dramatic, strains such as heavy lifting or hyperextension (say, from doing the butterfly stroke or cleaning the gutters) can cause your lowest vertebrae to slip or squish together. When the vertebrae are pressured in this way, the disks between them may herniate, or bulge out, impinging on spinal nerves and causing pain. Or the pressure may pinch the delicate structures at the back of the vertebrae, causing a fracture called spondylolysis, a problem for about one in twenty Americans.
No other primate experiences such back problems—except, Ward and Latimer say, our immediate ancestors. The two scientists have found fossil evidence that back trouble likely plagued our bipedal forebears. The bones of the Nariokotome boy, a young Homo erectus (a species preceding our own Homo sapiens) who lived some 1.5 million years ago, reveal that the youth suffered from scoliosis, a potentially devastating lateral curvature of the spine.
The cause of most scoliosis cases remains a mystery, Latimer says, but like spondylolysis, it appears linked to the spinal features associated with upright posture, particularly lordosis, the deep forward curvature and flexibility of our lower spine. "Because scoliosis occurs only in humans and our immediate bipedal ancestors, it appears likely that upright walking is at least partially to blame," he says.
Considering the pressures of natural selection, why are such seriously debilitating diseases still prevalent? Latimer suspects the answer lies in the importance of lordosis for upright walking: "Selection for bipedality must have been so strong in our early ancestors that a permanent lordosis developed despite the risk it carries for spondylolysis and other back disorders."
Disjointed
Liz Scarpelli's postural orientation is at the moment horizontal. Her leg is elevated in a surgical sling as Scott Dye, an orthopedic surgeon at California Pacific Medical Center, examines her knee with an arthroscope. The ghostly image of the joint—femur, tibia, and patella—appear magnified on a flat screen above the gurney. An athletic woman of 51, a former gymnast and skier, Scarpelli is a physical therapist who works with patients to rehabilitate their joints after surgery. While demonstrating to one patient a technique for leg-strengthening knee squats, Scarpelli blew out her own knee for the third time. Dye's arthroscopic camera shows healthy bone and ligaments, but large chunks of cartilage float about like icebergs in the fluid spaces around the joint. Dye expertly scrapes up the pieces and sucks them out before sewing up the holes and moving on to the next five surgeries scheduled for the day.
To hear Scott Dye speak of it, the knee joint is among the greatest of nature's inventions, "a 360-million-year-old structure beautifully designed to do its job of transferring load between limbs." But it is also among the most easily injured joints in the human body; medical procedures involving knees total a million a year in the United States.
"In standing upright, we have imposed unprecedented forces on the knee, ankle, and foot," Bruce Latimer says. When we walk quickly or run, the forces absorbed by our lower limbs may approach several multiples of our own body weight. Moreover, our pelvic anatomy exerts so-called lateral pressure on our lower joints. Because of the breadth of our pelvis, our thighbone is angled inward toward the knee, rather than straight up and down, as it is in the chimp and other apes. This carrying angle ensures that the knee is brought well under the body to make us more stable.
"But nothing is free in evolution," Latimer says. "This peculiar angle means that there are forces on the knee threatening to destabilize it. In women, the angle is greater because of their wider pelvis, which explains why they are slower runners—the increased angle means that they're wasting maybe ten percent of their energy—and also why they tend to suffer more knee injuries."
Unlikely feat
And where does the buck finally stop? What finally bears the full weight of our upright body? Two ridiculously tiny platforms.
"The human foot has rightfully been called the most characteristic peculiarity in the human body," says Will Harcourt-Smith, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History. "For one thing, it has no thumblike opposable toe. We're the only primate to give up the foot as a grasping organ."
This was a huge sacrifice. The chimp's foot is a brilliantly useful and versatile feature, essential to tree climbing and capable of as much motion and manipulation as its hand. The human foot, by contrast, is a hyper-specialized organ, designed to do just two things, propel the body forward and absorb the shock of doing so. Bipedality may have freed the hands, but it also yoked the feet.
Harcourt-Smith studies foot bones of early hominins with the new technique of geometric morphometrics—measuring objects in three dimensions. The variations in foot structure he has discovered in Australopithecus and Homo habilis (a species that lived 2.5 to 1.6 million years ago) suggest that these early hominins may have walked in different ways.
"We have a desire to see the story of bipedalism as a linear, progressive thing," he says, "one model improving on another, all evolving toward perfection in Homo sapiens. But evolution doesn't evolve toward anything; it's a messy affair, full of diversity and dead ends. There were probably lots of ways of getting around on two feet."
Still, in all the fossil feet Harcourt-Smith studies, some type of basic human pattern is clearly present: a big toe aligned with the long axis of the foot, or a well-developed longitudinal arch, or in some cases a humanlike ankle joint—all ingenious adaptations but fraught with potential problems. "Because the foot is so specialized in its design," Harcourt-Smith says, "it has a very narrow window for working correctly. If it's a bit too flat or too arched, or if it turns in or out too much, you get the host of complications that has spurred the industry of podiatry." In people with a reduced arch, fatigue fractures often develop. In those with a pronounced arch, the ligaments that support the arch sometimes become inflamed, causing plantar fasciitis and heel spurs. When the carrying angle of the leg forces the big toe out of alignment, bunions may form—more of a problem for women than men because of their wider hips.
And that's not all.
"One of the really remarkable aspects of the human foot, compared with the chimp and other apes, is the relatively large size of its bones, particularly the heel bone," Bruce Latimer notes. "A 350-pound male gorilla has a smaller heel bone than does a 100-pound human female—however, the gorilla bone is a lot more dense." While the ape heel is solid with thick cortical bone, the human heel is puffed up and covered with only a paper-thin layer of cortical bone; the rest is thin latticelike cancellous bone. This enlargement of cancellous bone is pronounced not just in the heel, but in all the main joints of our lower limbs—hip, ankle, knee—and has likely marked the skeleton of our ancestors since they first got upright; it has been found in the joints of 3.5-million-year-old hominin fossils from Ethiopia.
"The greater volume of bone is an advantage for dissipating the stresses delivered by normal bipedal gait," Latimer says. However, it's not without cost: "The redistribution in our bones from cortical to cancellous means that humans have much more surface exposure of their skeletal tissue. This results in an accelerated rate of bone mineral loss—or osteopenia—as we age, which may eventually lead to osteoporosis and hip and vertebral fractures."
What do we stand for?
We humans gave up stability and speed. We gave up the foot as a grasping tool. We gained spongy bones and fragile joints and vulnerable spines and difficult, risky births that led to the deaths of countless babies and mothers. Given the trade-offs, the aches and pains and severe drawbacks associated with bipedalism, why get upright in the first place?
A couple of chimps named Jack and Louie may offer some insights. The chimps are part of an experiment by a team of scientists to explore the origin of bipedalism in our hominin ancestors.
Theories about why we got upright have run the gamut from freeing the arms of our ancestors to carry babies and food to reaching hitherto inaccessible fruits. "But," says Mike Sockol of the University of California, Davis, "one factor had to play a part in every scenario: the amount of energy required to move from point to point. If you can save energy while gathering your food supply, that energy can go into growth and reproduction."
Paleogeographical studies suggest that at the time our ancestors first stood upright, perhaps six to eight million years ago, their food supplies were becoming more widely dispersed. "Rainfall in equatorial East Africa was declining," Sockol says, "and the forest was changing from dense and closed to more open, with more distance between food resources. If our ape ancestors had to roam farther to find adequate food, and doing so on two legs saved energy, then those individuals who moved across the ground more economically gained an advantage."
To test the theory that the shift to two feet among our ancestors may have been spurred by energy savings, Sockol and his colleagues are looking at the energy cost of locomotion in the chimp. The chimp is a good model, Sockol says, not just because it's similar to us in body size and skeletal features and can walk both bipedally and quadrupedally, but also because the majority of evidence suggests that the last common ancestor of chimps and humans who first stood upright was chimplike. By understanding how a chimp moves, and whether it expends more or less energy in walking upright or on all fours (knuckle-walking), the scientists hope to gain insight into our ancestors' radical change in posture.
Jack and Louie and several other young adult chimps have been trained by skillful professional handlers to walk and run on a treadmill, both on two legs and on four. One morning, Jack sits patiently in his trainer's lap while Sockol's collaborators, Dave Raichlen and Herman Pontzer of Harvard University, paint small white patches on his joints—the equivalent of those silver balls I wore on Dan Lieberman's treadmill. Only occasionally does Jack steal a surreptitious lick of the sweet white stuff. Once he's marked, he jumps on the treadmill and runs along on two legs for a few minutes, then drops to four. Every so often, his trainer hands him a fruit snack, which Jack balances on his lower lip, thrust out as far as it will go, before rolling the fruit forward and flicking it into his mouth. For a set time, Jack breathes into a small mask connected to equipment that gathers information on how much oxygen he consumes—a measure of energy expenditure—while the movements of his limbs (marked by those white dots) are monitored with cameras to help the scientists understand how the energy is being used.
Once the scientists have refined their model for how things work in the chimp—for what limb movements are used in the two types of locomotion and how each consumes energy—they hope to apply this model to the fossils of our ancestors. "We use the biomechanical data to determine the types of anatomical changes that would have reduced energy expenditure," Raichlen explains. "Then we look at the fossil record and ask, Do we see these changes? If we do, that’s a pretty good clue that we're looking at selection for reduced energy costs in our ancestors who became bipedal. That's the dream."
Scientists are the first to admit that much work needs to be done before we fully understand the origins of bipedalism. But whatever drove human ancestors to get upright in the first place—reaching for fruit or traveling farther in search of it, scanning the horizon for predators or transporting food to family—the habit stuck. They eventually evolved the ability to walk and run long distances. They learned to hunt and scavenge meat. They created and manipulated a diverse array of tools. These were all essential steps in evolving a big brain and a human intelligence, one that could make poetry and music and mathematics, assist in difficult childbirth, develop sophisticated technology, and consider the roots of its own quirky and imperfect upright being.
I found this at a UK science website.
The theory of evolution is a staggeringly beautiful and rather clever concept that aims to describe how animals, plants, bacteria and all other living things have adapted, and continue to adapt, to their surroundings. The theory allows mankind to perceive life's history down the eons and understand how and why all living things came to be.
Evolution is the grand unifying theory of biology. It is a solid core running through all modern research from molecular biology to genomics to ecology. Where once biology was a disjointed group of subjects whose main role seemed to be just to classify life into neat categories, it is now at the forefront of scientific research. Indeed, the study of heredity - genetics - is said to be leading mankind into a biotechnological golden age with ever-more potent pharmaceuticals, cleaner fuels and improved crops.
Everything you always wanted to know about the evolution of whales from land animals.
Smithsonian.com - How Did Whales Evolve?
"When the fossil data was combined with genetic data by Jonathan Geisler and Jennifer Theodor in 2009, a new whale family tree came to light. Raoellids like Indohyus were the closest relatives to whales, with hippos being the next closest relatives to both groups combined. At last, whales could be firmly rooted in the mammal evolutionary tree."
"When the fossil data was combined with genetic data by Jonathan Geisler and Jennifer Theodor in 2009, a new whale family tree came to light. Raoellids like Indohyus were the closest relatives to whales, with hippos being the next closest relatives to both groups combined. At last, whales could be firmly rooted in the mammal evolutionary tree."
I asked some Christian fucktards this question: Christian evolution-deniers, what are your reasons for throwing out 150 years of scientific progress?
https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20171129165854AA4HFam
One of the fucking morons wrote this:
1. Fish fossils on the tops of the highest mountains
2. Only a couple thousand years worth of top soil
3. Creatures believed to be extinct for millions of years being found alive
4. A species has never been seen evolving into another species
5. Biblical proof
-------------------------
1. The dipshit for Jeebus knows nothing about Plate tectonics and Mountain formation.
-------------------------
Another know-nothing asshole for Jeebus wrote this:
150 years of scientific progress and without any evidence for evolution....... None.
One of the fucking morons wrote this:
1. Fish fossils on the tops of the highest mountains
2. Only a couple thousand years worth of top soil
3. Creatures believed to be extinct for millions of years being found alive
4. A species has never been seen evolving into another species
5. Biblical proof
-------------------------
1. The dipshit for Jeebus knows nothing about Plate tectonics and Mountain formation.
-------------------------
Another know-nothing asshole for Jeebus wrote this:
150 years of scientific progress and without any evidence for evolution....... None.
The Discovery Institute which has never discovered anything is a Christian creationist organization. Their goal is to dumb down the teaching of evolution in America. Some creationist fucktards get all their information about science from these stupid fucking assholes who want to throw science out. Somebody else wrote the comment below and I agree with it.
The Discovery Institute is a fundamentally dishonest organization. It is funded by conservative (often radically so) Christians with the explicit mission to chip away at "materialist science", particularly evolution. A few years ago, an alert copy center clerk exposed the Discovery Institute's plan to use mass publicity, lawyers and lobbyists to promote "design theory" as a pseudoscience to get the public to insist that supernaturalism (specifically, the Christian God) be accepted as a valid scientific explanation. This document is called "The Wedge" - google it for yourselves. While the Discovery Institute goes to great pains to never mention "God" in the materials they create for schools and for general distribution, their internally agreed motive as stated in the Wedge is: "To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and hurnan beings are created by God."
The Discovery Institute wields science in EXACTLY the same way that Big Tobacco wielded science back when they were trying to convince people that smoking isn't dangerous. Big Tobacco, by their own admission in internal memos, built a strategy to market doubt in science. And the Discovery Institute, by their own admission, is doing exactly the same: marketing doubt in science to further the fundamentalist Christian agenda of their financial backers.
So the question is: why is the Washington Post giving commentary space to an organization devoted to lying to the American public? Why is Sally Quinn promoting the agenda of a bunch of lawyers and lobbyists who are working fervently to make our children more ignorant of our natural world and more distrustful of our natural sciences? Yes, it is appropriate to give people of different beliefs an opportunity to speak. But the Discovery Institute's mission is fundamentally one of deception - to use vast advertising dollars and a mantle of pseudoscience to sneak Genesis back into the classroom. Why are the Washington Post and Sally Quinn assisting in this deception?
https://www.onfaith.co/onfaith/2011/02/22/how-evolutionary-theorys-other-discoverer-could-heal-the-darwin-divide/2258
The Discovery Institute wields science in EXACTLY the same way that Big Tobacco wielded science back when they were trying to convince people that smoking isn't dangerous. Big Tobacco, by their own admission in internal memos, built a strategy to market doubt in science. And the Discovery Institute, by their own admission, is doing exactly the same: marketing doubt in science to further the fundamentalist Christian agenda of their financial backers.
So the question is: why is the Washington Post giving commentary space to an organization devoted to lying to the American public? Why is Sally Quinn promoting the agenda of a bunch of lawyers and lobbyists who are working fervently to make our children more ignorant of our natural world and more distrustful of our natural sciences? Yes, it is appropriate to give people of different beliefs an opportunity to speak. But the Discovery Institute's mission is fundamentally one of deception - to use vast advertising dollars and a mantle of pseudoscience to sneak Genesis back into the classroom. Why are the Washington Post and Sally Quinn assisting in this deception?
https://www.onfaith.co/onfaith/2011/02/22/how-evolutionary-theorys-other-discoverer-could-heal-the-darwin-divide/2258
PZ wrote this about 10 years ago.
"My point here is that there is an incredible amount of evidence for evolution, far more than any one person can digest, and that it is a vital field, still growing and still producing new results. All those papers don't get published unless they contain some new observation, a new experiment, a new test of the idea…and evolution has weathered them all."
-- PZ Myers, University of Minnesota biologist
-- PZ Myers, University of Minnesota biologist
Faith is the process of not thinking.
A big part of religious brainwashing goes like this: You must have faith.
In other words you must never think.
Thinking is the greatest possible threat to the world's moronic religious cults.
In other words you must never think.
Thinking is the greatest possible threat to the world's moronic religious cults.
My favorite quote about chess
I found this quote about chess at "Bronstein On The King's Indian" by David Bronstein with Ken Neat.
"Winning or losing is not the main idea of chess at all. A chess game is in fact a friendly exchange of intentions, hidden in individual moves. You always have the choice either of putting into action your planned move, or of first calmly preventing the intended move of the friend with whom you are playing chess in this brief, finite moment of your life."
The best place to learn how to play chess, watch chess games, study chess, play chess, and use computer analysis to find out what mistakes were made is at https://lichess.org which is totally free with no ads.
"Winning or losing is not the main idea of chess at all. A chess game is in fact a friendly exchange of intentions, hidden in individual moves. You always have the choice either of putting into action your planned move, or of first calmly preventing the intended move of the friend with whom you are playing chess in this brief, finite moment of your life."
The best place to learn how to play chess, watch chess games, study chess, play chess, and use computer analysis to find out what mistakes were made is at https://lichess.org which is totally free with no ads.
My comments about the previous post.
About 13 percent of biology teachers "explicitly advocate magical intelligent design creationism by spending at least one hour of class time presenting it in a positive light."
About 60 percent, “fail to explain the nature of scientific inquiry, undermine the authority of established experts, and legitimize creationist arguments.”
This means we have bible thumping morons teaching science in America.
This is one fucked up country.
Job interview for biology teachers in Idiot America:
Employer: What makes you qualified to teach biology?
Candidate: I know nothing about biology and evolution makes me cry.
Employer: You're hired.
About 60 percent, “fail to explain the nature of scientific inquiry, undermine the authority of established experts, and legitimize creationist arguments.”
This means we have bible thumping morons teaching science in America.
This is one fucked up country.
Job interview for biology teachers in Idiot America:
Employer: What makes you qualified to teach biology?
Candidate: I know nothing about biology and evolution makes me cry.
Employer: You're hired.
72% of American biology teachers are incompetent uneducated morons. 72% of students in America learn nothing about evolution. The incompetent teachers need to be fired immediately but that will never happen because the brain-dead students never complain. The stupid, it will burn forever in Idiot America. A copy & paste job from the Washington Post.
Study: Most high school biology teachers don’t endorse evolution
modeducation.blogspot.com - Few High School Biology Teachers Accurately Teach Evolution
In the same week we learned that most American students did not do well in science on a test known as “the nation’s report card,” a study about biology teachers in public high schools was published that said:
* About 28 percent consistently implement National Research Council recommendations calling for introduction of evidence that evolution occurred, and craft lesson plans with evolution as a unifying theme linking disparate topics in biology.
* About 13 percent of biology teachers "explicitly advocate creationism or intelligent design by spending at least one hour of class time presenting it in a positive light." Creationists do not believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution.
* The rest, about 60 percent, “fail to explain the nature of scientific inquiry, undermine the authority of established experts, and legitimize creationist arguments.”
These teachers, the researchers said, try to avoid controversy by using one of several different strategies that include :
* Teaching evolutionary biology as if it applies only to molecular biology and failing to to explain evidence that one species gives rise to other species.
* Telling students they don't have to "believe" in evolution but they have to know it for tests.
* Telling students to make up their own minds -- even though scientists say that they are as certain of the validity of evolution as they are of other scientific principles taken as fact.
The research was conducted by Penn State political science professors Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer and published in the newest issue of Science magazine. They examined data from the National Survey of High School Biology Teachers, a representative sample of 926 public high school biology instructors, to reach their conclusions.
More high school students take biology than any other science course, the researchers said. They also said that for as many as 25 percent of them, biology is the only science course they will ever take,
In related news, the details released this week about student performance on the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress was not stellar: 34 percent of 4th graders and 30 percent of 8th graders were deemed proficient or better in science.
Here’s the position of the National Science Teachers Association on evolution:
"The National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) strongly supports the position that evolution is a major unifying concept in science and should be included in the K–12 science education frameworks and curricula. Furthermore, if evolution is not taught, students will not achieve the level of scientific literacy they need. This position is consistent with that of the National Academies, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and many other scientific and educational organizations.
"NSTA also recognizes that evolution has not been emphasized in science curricula in a manner commensurate to its importance because of official policies, intimidation of science teachers, the general public's misunderstanding of evolutionary theory, and a century of controversy. In addition, teachers are being pressured to introduce creationism, “creation science,” and other nonscientific views, which are intended to weaken or eliminate the teaching of evolution."
modeducation.blogspot.com - Few High School Biology Teachers Accurately Teach Evolution
Study: Most high school biology teachers don’t endorse evolution
By Valerie Strauss
The central theory of biology is evolution, yet a new study shows that most high school biology teachers are reluctant to endorse it in class.In the same week we learned that most American students did not do well in science on a test known as “the nation’s report card,” a study about biology teachers in public high schools was published that said:
* About 28 percent consistently implement National Research Council recommendations calling for introduction of evidence that evolution occurred, and craft lesson plans with evolution as a unifying theme linking disparate topics in biology.
* About 13 percent of biology teachers "explicitly advocate creationism or intelligent design by spending at least one hour of class time presenting it in a positive light." Creationists do not believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution.
* The rest, about 60 percent, “fail to explain the nature of scientific inquiry, undermine the authority of established experts, and legitimize creationist arguments.”
These teachers, the researchers said, try to avoid controversy by using one of several different strategies that include :
* Teaching evolutionary biology as if it applies only to molecular biology and failing to to explain evidence that one species gives rise to other species.
* Telling students they don't have to "believe" in evolution but they have to know it for tests.
* Telling students to make up their own minds -- even though scientists say that they are as certain of the validity of evolution as they are of other scientific principles taken as fact.
The research was conducted by Penn State political science professors Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer and published in the newest issue of Science magazine. They examined data from the National Survey of High School Biology Teachers, a representative sample of 926 public high school biology instructors, to reach their conclusions.
More high school students take biology than any other science course, the researchers said. They also said that for as many as 25 percent of them, biology is the only science course they will ever take,
In related news, the details released this week about student performance on the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress was not stellar: 34 percent of 4th graders and 30 percent of 8th graders were deemed proficient or better in science.
Here’s the position of the National Science Teachers Association on evolution:
"The National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) strongly supports the position that evolution is a major unifying concept in science and should be included in the K–12 science education frameworks and curricula. Furthermore, if evolution is not taught, students will not achieve the level of scientific literacy they need. This position is consistent with that of the National Academies, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and many other scientific and educational organizations.
"NSTA also recognizes that evolution has not been emphasized in science curricula in a manner commensurate to its importance because of official policies, intimidation of science teachers, the general public's misunderstanding of evolutionary theory, and a century of controversy. In addition, teachers are being pressured to introduce creationism, “creation science,” and other nonscientific views, which are intended to weaken or eliminate the teaching of evolution."
The little fat thug, dictator of the most fucked up country on the planet, North Korea, which now has the ability to vaporize Washington DC.
In December 2013, Kim Jong-un's uncle Jang Song-thaek was arrested and executed for treachery.[108] Jang is believed to have been executed by firing squad. Yonhap has stated that, according to multiple unnamed sources, Kim Jong-un has also put to death members of Jang's family, to completely destroy all traces of Jang's existence through "extensive executions" of his family, including the children and grandchildren of all close relatives. Those reportedly killed in Kim's purge include Jang's sister Jang Kye-sun, her husband and ambassador to Cuba, Jon Yong-jin, and Jang's nephew and ambassador to Malaysia, Jang Yong-chol. The nephew's two sons were also said to have been killed.[109] At the time of Jang's removal, it was announced that "the discovery and purge of the Jang group ... made our party and revolutionary ranks purer ..."[110] and after his execution on 12 December 2013 state media warned that the army "will never pardon all those who disobey the order of the Supreme Commander".[111]
In September 2015, the South Korean government commented that Kim appeared to have gained 30 kg in body fat over the previous five years, reaching a total estimated body weight of 130 kg (290 lb).[140]
In September 2015, the South Korean government commented that Kim appeared to have gained 30 kg in body fat over the previous five years, reaching a total estimated body weight of 130 kg (290 lb).[140]
Tuesday, November 28, 2017
Today's religious news is more ridiculous than usual. These accidents happen frequently in Idiot America.
Two accidentally shot in church while discussing church shootings
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (USA Today) — A man accidentally shot himself and his wife at an east Tennessee church while he was showing off his gun during a discussion on recent church shootings, police said.
Elder members of First United Methodist Church in Tellico Plains were cleaning up about 1 p.m. Thursday (Nov. 16) after enjoying a luncheon held to celebrate Thanksgiving. They began talking about guns in churches, according to Tellico Plains Police Chief Russ Parks.
A man in his 80s pulled out a .380-caliber Ruger handgun and said, “I carry my handgun everywhere,” according to Parks.
The man removed the magazine, cleared the chamber and showed the gun to some of the other men in the church. He put the magazine back in, apparently loaded a round in the chamber and returned the gun to its holster, Parks said.
“Somebody else walked up and said, ‘Can I see it?'” Parks said. “He pulled it back out and said, ‘With this loaded indicator, I can tell that it’s not loaded.'”
The man pulled the trigger.
“Evidently he just forgot that he re-chambered the weapon,” Parks said.
The gun was lying on its side on a table. The bullet sliced the palm of the man’s upward-facing hand, then entered the left side of his wife’s abdomen and exited the right side, Parks said.
Both the husband and wife, who is also in her 80s, were flown to the University of Tennessee Medical Center with injuries that police said didn’t appear to be life-threatening. Their names had not been released as of Thursday evening.
Charges will not be filed, Parks said.
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (USA Today) — A man accidentally shot himself and his wife at an east Tennessee church while he was showing off his gun during a discussion on recent church shootings, police said.
Elder members of First United Methodist Church in Tellico Plains were cleaning up about 1 p.m. Thursday (Nov. 16) after enjoying a luncheon held to celebrate Thanksgiving. They began talking about guns in churches, according to Tellico Plains Police Chief Russ Parks.
A man in his 80s pulled out a .380-caliber Ruger handgun and said, “I carry my handgun everywhere,” according to Parks.
The man removed the magazine, cleared the chamber and showed the gun to some of the other men in the church. He put the magazine back in, apparently loaded a round in the chamber and returned the gun to its holster, Parks said.
“Somebody else walked up and said, ‘Can I see it?'” Parks said. “He pulled it back out and said, ‘With this loaded indicator, I can tell that it’s not loaded.'”
The man pulled the trigger.
“Evidently he just forgot that he re-chambered the weapon,” Parks said.
The gun was lying on its side on a table. The bullet sliced the palm of the man’s upward-facing hand, then entered the left side of his wife’s abdomen and exited the right side, Parks said.
Both the husband and wife, who is also in her 80s, were flown to the University of Tennessee Medical Center with injuries that police said didn’t appear to be life-threatening. Their names had not been released as of Thursday evening.
Charges will not be filed, Parks said.
November 28, 2017: U.S. Stocks on Track for Fresh Records
Some people are making tons of money today. I'm making a little bit of money.
I was shocked when I saw the numbers.
Dow Jones Industrial Average
I was shocked when I saw the numbers.
Dow Jones Industrial Average
23,839.26
+258.48 (1.10%)
Nov 28 - Close
INDEXDJX real-time data - Disclaimer
| Range | 23,617.11 - 23,849.61 |
| 52 week | 19,062.22 - 23,849.61 |
| Open | 23,625.19 |
| Vol. | 300.46M |
Heavy stuff. 3 minute Youtube video, the evolution of our moon. A religious fucktard told me the Magic Man magically created the moon to help us human apes see at night. This video explains what really happened. "The religious imagination is paltry and petty compared to the awesome reality." -- PZ Myers
NASA Goddard Published on Mar 14, 2012
From year to year, the moon never seems to change. Craters and other formations appear to be permanent now, but the moon didn't always look like this. Thanks to NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, we now have a better look at some of the moon's history.
Assholes for Jeebus will always be stupid assholes.
An asshole for Jeebus wrote some bullshit about evolution. This is one of the best comments that somebody else wrote.
Monday, November 27, 2017
Fuck you Christian scum.
Evolutionary biologists make Christian scum cry according to an article I read recently.
Christians also don't like atheists very much for some reason.
The same article said that in America the younger generations are throwing out the Jeebus bullshit. This also makes Christians cry which might explain why Christian scum are making a lot of noise these days.
Christianity is dying in America. It's a very slow death but it's definitely dying. Good riddance.
Christians also don't like atheists very much for some reason.
The same article said that in America the younger generations are throwing out the Jeebus bullshit. This also makes Christians cry which might explain why Christian scum are making a lot of noise these days.
Christianity is dying in America. It's a very slow death but it's definitely dying. Good riddance.
I never met a Christian or a Republican who wasn't a stupid fucking asshole.
At There is a Christian war against teaching evolution in Florida where I live I wrote about the Christian assholes in my state who are attacking science education.
A quote from the newspaper article:
The anti-science measure Gov. Rick Scott signed into law in June, for instance, carefully avoided a direct mention of evolution, although a stack of affidavits filed by members of the Naples-based Florida Citizens Alliance, who championed the bill, made it plain what this was about.
“Most Americans believe that the world and the beings living on it were created by God as revealed in the Bible.” said one. Another complained public schools were pushing “the presentation of evolution as fact with no clarifying that this is an unproven theory, and that there are other beliefs as to the origin of life.”
------------------------------------
Obviously these assholes for Jeebus are just plain fucking stupid. Same thing for our Republican governor who is obviously a science denier.
The problem is every student is being cheated. If they get stuck with incompetent biology teachers, those teachers will use the new law to teach magical creationism and/or spread lies about evolution.
The best way to fight this war against education is to have a war against Christian scum. I suggest relentless ridicule. Also the governor needs to be thrown out the window.
A quote from the newspaper article:
The anti-science measure Gov. Rick Scott signed into law in June, for instance, carefully avoided a direct mention of evolution, although a stack of affidavits filed by members of the Naples-based Florida Citizens Alliance, who championed the bill, made it plain what this was about.
“Most Americans believe that the world and the beings living on it were created by God as revealed in the Bible.” said one. Another complained public schools were pushing “the presentation of evolution as fact with no clarifying that this is an unproven theory, and that there are other beliefs as to the origin of life.”
------------------------------------
Obviously these assholes for Jeebus are just plain fucking stupid. Same thing for our Republican governor who is obviously a science denier.
The problem is every student is being cheated. If they get stuck with incompetent biology teachers, those teachers will use the new law to teach magical creationism and/or spread lies about evolution.
The best way to fight this war against education is to have a war against Christian scum. I suggest relentless ridicule. Also the governor needs to be thrown out the window.