Spoke Lee Hotz, Wall Street Journal, re the fresh announcement that a father-and-son team, Matthew and Lee Berger, reveal a wholly new version of the australopithecines. The story of the discovery is Hollywood. Lee Berger, a prominent paleontologist, located a series of unexplored caves in South Africa near Johannesburg by using Google Earth. Working in the bush, with his nine-year-old son Matthew nearby playing with Matthew's dog, Tau, Lee Berger heard his son call out, "Daddy, I found a fossil." (I suspect Tau found the bone.) Father thought it was an antelope bone and took it up to dazzle the child with the analysis. It turned out to be what may be the clavicle of a never-seen-before and yet-unnamed hominid. About 4 feet tall, with long arms, gangly legs, and having a delicate human face and small teeth, the hominids (they found an adult female and a male child) had a small brain. Dated to 1.78mya to 1.95mya, this new find was coterminous with more robust and bigger-brained hominids elsewhere in Africa. Did we develop in parallel genuses, not serially but independently. Are we today, homo sapiens sapiens, a survivor of the vagaries of the last two million years? Not the survival of the fittest, but rather the survival of what worked in the neighborhood that worked, at the time that it worked? We are not inevitable? We are accidental?
“Inevitable”; “accidental”? What difference does it make? Just because we’ve learned to write and add and think in linear fashion, we think we’re better than all creation. It speaks to our almost pathetic parochialism. It makes us susceptible to the call of the snake oil salesman who promises utopia, immortality, global warming and who knows what. True, we’ve managed to survive long enough to evolve. To what end? To become entrenched victims of ourselves? To deny the greater power that so obviously sustains us? To debase the significance of our external organs? To think we can manage alone?
Man’s arrogance – based on ignorance – continues to astound me. I don’t quell when a tree is cut down to build a house or a guitar. I don’t swoon at the thought of eating meat. I trust in the laws that govern the universe, the natural cycles of history, the rise and fall of empires; the boom and bust of economies. And I am awed by all of it. Even if I should find myself caught in the destructive end of a cycle, I can hardly complain, knowing that I have been privileged to witness the birth of new shadows. I now know why Hindus worship the cow.
http://peterkoelliker.blogspot.com/
I was going to say it looked a little like Harry Reid, but Ion second thought, think the cranial cavity is too large.
we are.
cool enough for me.
i envy matthew and his dad.
all carbon (and iron and oxygen etc) was made in the hearts of stars.
your fingertip is stardust.
"life evolves" suggests progress. depends on who is measuring.
"stuff changes" might be closer to the truth. heraclitus strikes back.
an amusing paradox of evolution is
the more "fit" a population becomes to a particular condition of the world
the more vulnerable it becomes to change in the world.
change rulz
improvise adapt and overcome