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Simon
SFN Regular
USA
1992 Posts |
 Posted - 02/03/2009 : 08:45:20
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Seriously, that is a great story!
Fixed link.
Kil
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Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Carl Sagan - 1996 |
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Kil
Evil Skeptic
USA
13477 Posts |
 Posted - 02/03/2009 : 09:37:28 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Simon
Seriously, that is a great story!
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While not as crazy, the story reminds me of the more modern day, and fairly public battle between Donald Johanson and Mary and Richard Leaky over the naming of Lucy and Johanson's work in Olduvai Gorge, a place that the Leaky's considered a kind of ownership.
THE EVOLUTIONISTS AT WORK ... AND AT WAR
…The nub of the controversy is Mr. Johanson's insistence that Lucy was the common ancestor of both Australopithecus, a branch of ''ape-men'' that would become extinct, and Homo - the evolutionary line of habilis, erectus and sapiens, leading eventually to Homo sapiens, modern humans. Lucy and her kin were assigned a new species name, Australopithecus afarensis. Mr. Johanson, working with his principal collaborator, Tim White, established that Lucy had stood about 3 feet 6 inches tall and walked upright, like prehuman hominids. The proportions of her arms and legs suggested an intermediate stage between apes and humans. And her brain was scarcely larger than a chimpanzee's. The species seemed to have all the marks of a key transitional figure in human evolution.
The Leakeys did not take kindly to this brash young American, a relative newcomer to the field, poaching on their intellectual territory. They had found the first habilis fossils, the earliest member of the Homo family, and they should be the ones to find its ancestors. This interpretation of subsequent events in the dispute is not Mr. Johanson's alone. Mary and Richard Leakey, committed and capable followers in the steps of Louis Leakey, complained of Mr. Johanson's haste in proclaiming a new species. They and their allies argued that afarensis fossils could be a misleading mix of several different species. They refused to accept the evidence that contradicted Louis Leakey by indicating the true ancestors of the Homo line could not be any older than three million years…. |
Snip:
| …Mr. Johanson is nothing if not bold. Responding to an invitation from the Tanzanian Government, he decided to dig right where the Leakeys had made their reputation. This is Olduvai Gorge, the 25-mile canyon cutting through the Serengeti Plain. Even though the Leakeys had not worked there for years, Mary Leakey, we are told by Mr. Johanson, sought to stop this incursion with disparaging remarks to Government officials about this interloper. She also is reported to have stripped the field station there of all its furnishings and equipment… |
Ain't science grand!!!
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Uncertainty may make you uncomfortable. Certainty makes you ridiculous.
Why not question something for a change?
Genetic Literacy Project |
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Bone wars! (Please, leave your dirty jokes behind)
