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Much like all of the new season, it was a fantastic episode. Can’t disagree that I’m a little biased though. =D
“Things don’t exist simply because you believe in them.”
Sums it up well.
Bender is my role model.
One of the best episodes ever!!! I love the FSM appearance!
I feel like people who haven’t had conversations with Creationists can’t fully appreciate how accurate this is.
You said it! Agreed!
I was a little disappointed at the ending and the overall message though. I expected it though, the writers obviously aren’t all atheists.
Their universe explicitly has a God (Bender meets him in an episode from a previous season). Though it doesn’t seem to be all knowing and it’s policy on divine intervention is “If you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.”
“According to a recent Gallup poll, only 12 percent of Americans believe that life on Earth has evolved through a natural process, without the interference of a deity. 31 percent believe evolution has been ‘guided by God.’ [...] The same Gallup poll revealed that 53 percent of Americans are actually ‘creationists.’ This means that despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of life of life and the greater antiquity of the earth, more than half our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue.”
Like :-)
xD
That’s awesome. Is there a timeline somewhere that shows things like that? 1,000 years after the invention of glue, 4,000 years after the building of the first temple in Turkey. 9,000 years after switching to agriculture. 24,000 years after the ritual sculpting of fertility idols, and cave painting began.
I’ve read that somewhere before. Where is it from?
The Onion has a great article about the 4000 BC Sumarians being very puzzled about God arriving, claiming to create the world and making the “first” people.
It’s from “Letter to a Christian Nation” (Sam Harris)
The video makes a good point – at what point do we fail to find a link from A to B because they are so similar, a link would be redundant? Then again, is it right for us to say we are descended from apes without a clear-cut evolutionary path?
It’s sort of like that math case, where the person walks halfway through the room, then halfway through the remaining distance, and so on, making the distance to the wall 0.5^infinity.. For all intents and purposes, 0.5^infinity is 0 (therefore distance is zero) but you can’t actually say you’ve walked from one side of the room to the other since, mathematically, the number can only reach a quantity closest TO zero.
Basically, we’re talking practical, common sense versus solid proof.. I’m still not sure which is better.
The evolutionary past of humans from the common ancestors we share with apes (human have not evolved from apes) is well documented. The concept of missing link is a load of crap. between the extremely low chance of fossilization and the difficulty of finding fossils finding every single humanoid that ever lived (which is the only way you will have a complete record of human evolution) is not going to happen. The creationist jump on the gaps in the fossil record fallacy is one more demonstration for the lack of actual evidence supporting the anti-evolution political movement.
Err.. Right, I forgot we branched out from a common ancestor.. cough
Idk, I still think they have a strong argument *if* it’s an argument of picking over small details. Which is inevitably what it would become, as you said.
They have a strong argument, if by strong you mean, “utterly lacking in logic and evidence.”
“God of The Gaps” again? This is what Creatards and IDiots do: They spot the tiny gaps in knowledge (i.e. what we can’t prove *yet*) and they say “You can’t prove this, therefore God did it”.
It’s nonsense, because:
A) Disproving one theory (which they haven’t) does not mean that the only proposed alternative must be true – each theory must stand individually on its own merits. Creatardism / IDiocy cannot do that.
B) It is well proven that evolution *does happen*. We have an evolutionary chain that proves conclusively that humans did not start out as humans – what our common ancesters are with other species (which we have to accept there are since evolution is proven) is an academic point. Sooner or later we all go back to an amoeba anyway.
That’s crap. Humans are apes. The ancestors of humans were apes. The common ancestor of humans and chimps was an ape. The common ancestor or humans and orangs was an ape. Humans absolutely have evolved from (and remain) apes.
What we haven’t evolved from is modern, existing apes.
But I was replying to someone who used the human evolved from apes line which usually mean they take the abominable drawing with the chimp at one and and then a series of cavemen of decreasing cartoonishness leading to a modern human seriously. If you’re writing an academic paper then the distinction between terms like anthropoid, hominid, human, ape etc are important in a reply to a comment on a blog I think it reasonable to assume ape and human to mean modern apes and human and thus there is nothing wrong with saying that humans did not evolved from apes.
Eh, I disagree. It implies that humans are not apes, which is, itself, evolution denial. In the same way that we know that our ancestors were fish (just not any living fish), we know that our ancestors were apes, and claiming they weren’t just muddies the waters.
I agree that it’s worth pointing out that we’re not descended from modern apes, but not at the expense of thinking we’re not descended from apes at all.
This bothers me too. I remembered seeing an article a while back saying paleontologists had discovered that “our ancestors were more human-like than ape-like.” I to this day have no idea what they were trying to say. Presumably they meant that particular ancestors (though they didn’t say which ones) were more similar to modern humans than to some other ape, but they didn’t specify which other ape. It left me baffled.
I also get annoyed when people call recent human ancestors “ape-men.” Generally this refers to apes that are not, in fact, men. It’s a bit like calling a mountain lion a “cat-tiger.”
The main problem with the clip is that, by the time you get to Darwinius masillae you’re no longer looking for a link to apes. D. masillae was either not especially relevant to human evolution, or a link between simians (monkeys and apes) and prosimians (lemurs and bushbabies). If it is ancestral to humans, you’d be looking for a missing link between that and shrews.
Video is down, Fox claimed copyright. Strangely, I thought Viacom / Comedy Central had the copyright now. Oh well.