Darwin Day

[Reverend Blair]

And for anybody near a radio on Saturday...

This week on Quirks & Quarks our feature item is:

"From Cave Cravings to Canapes:" The Evolution of Human Diet.

Advice for healthy eating is everywhere these days, usually wrapped up
with a scientific rationale. One long-standing suggestion is to get back
to our roots, and eat the kinds of foods our ancestors did. After all,
if we evolved to eat certain foods, wouldn't that be what's best for us
today? The problem is that it's difficult to determine what those
ancient cave-people were consuming. But new research, presented at the
American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting last week,
might give us some clues, and also explain why a prehistoric diet may
not be the best choice for modern Homo sapiens.

Plus - why bird-brain may be a misnomer.

All this and more on Quirks & Quarks, Saturday right after the noon
news on Radio One.

Bob McDonald
Host

For those of you who aren't lucky enough to get CBC Radio One you can listen on the internet by going to http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/

 

[Reverend Blair]

This is kind of interesting too:

Two Ethiopian fossils have been crowned as the oldest known members of our species. An estimated 195,000 years old, the pair were witness to the earliest days of Homo sapiens.

The discovery adds yet more weight to the argument that Africa, and Ethiopia in particular, was the birthplace of humans. The dating sits well with genetic analyses of modern populations, which suggest that H. sapiens first appeared in Africa around 200,000 years ago.

You can find the whole story at Nature.

It shows how modern techniques for dating fossils is confirming and expanding evolutionary theory.

 

[sezo]

Well, purely as someone who is from Darwin's home town, well where he went to school at least (in Shrewsbury, England) a Darwin day would be pretty cool! He doesn't get as much press as he ought to. It would be great to have a day that celebrates rationality, the beginnings of our modern day thought, philosophy and science.
And then of course we would have the debates surrounding how his work is all in theory - opening peoples minds to how Creation myths could still be right.
I love a good debate

Sezo
x

 

[Reverend Blair]

Nah. Creation myths are cool. They give insight into cultures so the anthropologists love them. They'll never honestly win out over science though.

Darwin's theory may "just" be a theory, but it is scientifically sound and has withstood more challenges than any other theory. It also has a plethora of evidence backing it up.

 

[peapod]

This might be a good site to end this thread

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/mayr/mayr_index.html