Evidence that the evolution of mammals began in the Southern Hemisphere
australiangeographic.com.au
australiangeographic.com.au
I thought it well grounded that mammals had evolved on Gondwana (the southern part of Pangea) during the process of it splitting away from Laurasia, and had settled Laurasia from Gondwana
Gondwana was composed of now South America, Africa, India, and Australia.
"Many paleontologists angrily reject the DNA findings, arguing there must be something wrong with the molecular clocks the geneticists use to date their findings. The geneticists counter that paleontologists just haven't found the right fossils yet."
And that should make clear it is not that clear cut as I (with ZERO background knowledge in either area) thought it was.
Just this quote immediately put me off the article. Weasel word "many" to start with (how many? Four or five? Half of them?) and followed up with emotive language (how angry were they? Perhaps they were just bored with shoddy justifications?)
That Ancient Apocalypse show in Netflix is really interesting along those lines.
https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/ancient-apocalypse-pseud...
For me, it’s fodder for modern TTRPG campaigns and a Sailor Moon prequel fanfic, as well as letting me know of the existence of ancient sites I never knew about.
Never heard this type of pushback about Ancient Aliens, which is even more ridiculous. I feel like the replies are going to be "but nobody took that seriously anyway." Firstly, I dunno about that. Secondly, not sure anyone's taking Ancient Apocalypse more seriously.
The show presents a theory, it's not claiming a fact. It's so bizarre that out of all the media out there that walks the line between history, science, and outlandish ideas, this one very specific show, for some reason, gets all this hateful focus. Very weird.
That's odd, because "this type of pushback" is the only context in which I've heard of "ancient aliens".
'Establishment archeologists' say it's a bunch of BS.
Mr. Hancock studied sociology for a while before switching gears to journalism.
It's fun to think about, but as far as him being the modern day Galileo, I'm not personally buying it.
Big archeology? Could we get some names? Maybe an interview with some of them? No, just imagine them like the illuminati but dirtier and poorer, and extremely tribal for some reason.
People just aren't as good at organising as the theories demand they are. They would 100% break ranks if there was a chance to make a major discovery and be famous for it, group loyalty be damned.
Most recently, the very first reaction was to label him racist. Then he was "dangerous" to The Children.
The fact is, he is wrong in his interpretations, but they are based on evidence. Instead of calling him "dangerous", why not engage with the evidence? Among few places I have seen that done is the "Scientists Against Myths" YT channel, https://youtube.com/@ScientistsAgainstMyths/videos. It is rather off-putting: they forget they are addressing the audience, not the promoters of bad interpretations. You have to endure that to get to the end, each time.
On the other side, we have Ancient Architecture, with a relentlessly empirical bent: https://youtube.com/@AncientArchitecture/videos
Shows like Graham Hancock's evoke wonder that seems beyond scientists to match. That feeling of wonder is where the next generation of scientists comes from.
It is critically important that scientists say when they don't know something. They should seek out opportunities to mention them, instead of trying to cover them up. Hancock has been right, and historical consensus dead wrong, too many times. He was an early promoter of humans in the Americas before 15kya, and of the comet strike in North America, near (maybe after) the start of the Younger Dryas cold spell, that wiped out mammoths, mastodons, horses, camels, dire wolves, cheetahs, giant beavers, giant sloths, and the Clovis culture; and about megalithic construction dating that far back. There are lessons here on science's ability, and often failure, to self-correct. All of these had evidence "scientists" rejected outright, not because of anything about the evidence, but just because.
There is plenty of evidence that stone bowls were "turned" to grind them into shape, but the first depictions of it we know of show up thousands of years later. What is the history of "turning"? Somebody might make progress on the question someday, but only if they know there is much unknown.
And then he leaves.
What?! This is your whole life's work and reputation on the line and you aren't digging 10m to check? It might take a few days but that's nothing. If it's illegal, will he risk nothing for his conviction? He makes the speculation, seeds doubt and then follows through with nothing again and again.
It's the same as those tv psychics. The whole episode we watch as they get closer to a burial site and then right when they are staring out the car window at some woods with dramatic music, the credits roll. Nothing found again!
The first 80% of the episode is fascinating as he shows us these amazing sites. Then inevitably comes the wild speculation disconnected from anything actually shown. Such a frustrating end to every episode. Wake me up when you find something.
I wish someone would take him aside and explain that Earth's rotational precession has nothing to do with solar system orbital dynamics.
Because it's not factual? If you aren't constrained by evidence you can evoke whatever wonder you feel like.
He may try to stay consistent with the evidence as he understands it in which case it becomes clear he doesn't understand it.
So no, I don't find it inspirational or evocative, any more than I have found talks by psychics, ufologists or homeopaths evocative. They all imagine their beliefs are evidenced...
Our expectations for Netflix shows is low. Our expectations for behavior of historians should be higher. Making this be about Hancock would be a mistake.
I think it goes back to the OP’s original point… there are some things we cannot ever know for sure but they are fun to learn and talk about.
What else but a population bottleneck could explain the lack of any genetic diversity to speak of in humans? No human alive today is more distantly related to you than 37th cousin. Any two random individuals are 99.9% identical. That's weird. For this to have occurred, something must have happened everywhere all at once.[1]
[1] https://https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theor...
Before that, all bets are off, and I personally do consider the Toba catastrophe a possible explanation for the ridiculously low level of genetic diversity in modern humans outside sub-Saharan Africa.
> It also shows that pockets of architectural knowledge rapidly advanced and then receded all across the known world.
as "individual pockets, all around the world, advanced and receded."
That just means that this level of architectural capability is easily discovered from scratch when circumstances happen to be somewhat right, but then not enough of a gamechanger to endure when when they are not.
I started to watch it, then figured out that I didn't really want to.
The megastructures, while large, showed no evidence of sophisticated engineering.
How do we know Gondwana was in the Southern Hemisphere? How do we know that we didn't get the Hemispheres mixed up in the first place?[1]
[1] https://images.theconversation.com/files/162021/original/ima...
Why is it a matter of regional pride whether mammals (or humans) originated in your region?
Usually there was no nation or culture there at the time, and in this case, not even any humans.
People are always looking for a reason to be special, they'll take whatever they can get.
not quite. In the former, there were homo sapiens while in the latter, not.
Animal Planet, I bet.
I'll show myself out now.
Because dinosaurs are cool.
Marsupial Saber Tooth Tigers.
I hate to get all ad hominem here, but the fact that it comes from an Australian journal is just a tad bit self-interested. It reminds me of the Chinese scientists who keep insisting that humans evolved in China, not Africa:
https://www.news.com.au/technology/science/evolution/chinese...
The far better argument IMO would be "it's a lot easier for new discoveries to be made by and reported in the the country they occur in so it isn't necessarily surprising the initial challenge would come from and be reported in that country". The China human origin one had more problems than just initial suspicion but this one will probably sort itself out into overall consensus in time and I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up being true. However it's probably still getting more self-attention than it would if the discovery were somewhere else in the southern hemisphere than Australia and there is nothing wrong with keeping that in mind regardless where you are or what you currently think.
The assessing motivations game has no role to play here, and no destination for that matter. You could spend the next millennium trying to determine whether this particular piece of research was published in an Australian journal for nationalistic reasons (and whose reasons?) vs whether it just so happened that a piece of Australian research got published in Australian journals (gosh!) vs whether the putative 'research must be reviewed by peers from outside the region' rule (created in an HN thread) was equally applied to default US and EU based researchers. None of it would illuminate the truth or otherwise of the proposed idea.
> Together this weighty band of experts has just published a paper in the scientific literature that’s likely to be seen as landmark in our understanding of life on Earth.
I noticed over time that my visual system would get into this weird state where it was like I wasn't actively focusing on anything, but I could pick up any tiny motion or snake-like shape anywhere in my visual field. It's a really strange but gratifying feeling.
Its always made me wonder how members of indigenous tribes, that hunt and gather, perceive the world.
Same! It's always weird when I know there's a snake there even before I have consciously recognized that I've seen it.
Neither marsupials nor placentals are "earlier", they both have a common ancestor. This paper is about that common ancestor, more precisely about the continent where it lived, which now appears to have been Gondwana, in contradiction with earlier suppositions.
Gondwana is the former union of Africa, South America, Antarctica, Australia, Madagascar and India. The evolution of mammals has been influenced much more by the breaking and fusion of the continents than the evolution of other animals, because for mammals travel across seas was much less likely to be successful.
> Ferns, wasps and slugs don’t like ocean voyages much, either. Coconuts are adapted to them
Are you suggesting that coconuts are migratory?That certainly occurs but it seems likely it isn't all that common, coconuts really only needed to disperse as far as the next coral atoll or island, which tends to be as far as a planktonic coral larvae can disperse. Really remote islands probably had coconuts introduced relatively recently by early settlers.
Will you tell your lord and master that Arthur from the Court of Camelot is here?
But it does not tell you anything about where they came from.
http://penguinology.blogspot.com/2011/01/fossil-hunt-in-anta...
"but if they existed, they would solve one of the largest mysteries of cosmology"
Is that not enough?
This kind of thing is important with relation to some of their video topics, but what's the connection here?
* This is a joke; I know how it works.
He fronted a parliamentary hearing on climate change some time around 2010, where a heroic Liberal minister stated something along the lines of ‘you’re a palaeontologist, not a climate scientist, so you’re argument is invalid’. It was pretty sad to see.
Even being a climate scientist back then was cause for your credentials to be brought into question, let alone one from a cognate field.
Not being familiar with Australian politics, is it liberal in the US meaning or the european meaning ?
> "Coal is mined in every state of Australia. The largest black coal resources occur in Queensland and New South Wales. About 70% of coal mined in Australia is exported, mostly to eastern Asia, and of the balance most is used in electricity generation. In 2019-20 Australia exported 390 Mt of coal (177 Mt metallurgical coal and 213 Mt thermal coal) and was the world's largest exporter of metallurgical coal and second largest exporter of thermal coal."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_Australia
The fact that Australia has been experiencing severe climate-change-related whipsaws from extreme flooding to extreme drought and fire hasn't changed this dynamic, as the Australian government cheerfully reports:
> "Coal export volumes have grown at an average annual rate of 2.5 per cent from 285 Mt in 2010–11 to 363 Mt in 2020–21... In 2020, Australia held 14 per cent of the world’s coal reserves (black and brown), ranking third behind the United States (23 per cent) and Russia (15 per cent)."
It's the same in the USA, although here we have two fossil-fuel-owned parties, Dems and Reps, but the former lie about their climate agenda while the latter are honest about it. In reality, both are owned by Wall Street interests who invest heavily in fossil fuels.
At least they could be honest about the science, instead of trying to hide the reality.
(This isn't to say the two parties are the same, especially post ~2018. Just that the main dynamic is very similar)
“left” isn’t a thing academically because there isn’t some line that actually captures the wide variety of political positions.
This meme of “there is no left in America” is just a childish way of saying, “I don’t like the current majority opinion of the Democratic Party”.
Additionally, political science has many subfields and the ones that are closely related to political beliefs are subject to the same replication crisis as the other fields of social psychology (i.e. lots of junk science). So any of that stuff that generalizes 1 dimensional outcomes to entire lifestyles and views is likely complete trash.
In quantitative political science, candidates and parties tend to be placed in "n-dimensional political spaces" where each issue occupies a different dimension. For example, if an election contains candidates who have publicly stated their positions on LGBT rights, free trade, and public healthcare, then you can call this a 3-dimensional political space where candidates place their attitudes on these issues on these axes.
In qualitative political science, there's many distinctions. There's "liberal rights vs substantive rights" political systems (e.g. whether the government guarantees individuals rights against their government or whether the government guarantees individuals substantive (standard of living e.g. basic healthcare) claims. There's "authoritarian vs democratic systems" (e.g. both fascist systems and Democratic Centralist ("politburo-style") socialist systems are authoritarin systems; liberal democratic, social democratic, and participatory economic systems are all democratic systems).
Even then, Europe has social democratic and communist parties that are anti-immigration. Japan has pro-labor pro-immigration parties. Politics cannot be boiled down to a "left" and a "right". When discussing "the Left" in the context of political philosophy, I've largely seen it as a reference to Hegelian Marxist thought at its strongest and a general orientation around the disenfranchisement of labor at its weakest.
Also, the majority of American citizens don't like the opinions of the democratic party. They works for the corps, not the people.
There is no “global center-right”.
What is considered a “right wing extremist” in France could still be extremely nationalistic, anti-immigration, pro state entitlements, anti free speech, and anti gun rights. That has zero overlap with any of the political parties in the US no matter where you plop the dumb pin on the 1d line.
Well, for Europeans (and I'd guess Canadians, Latin Americans, etc.) there is a line, and the Dems never cut it. A fuzzy line (a spectrum if you will on the left) doesn't mean there isn't one, and one can be of either side. Dems are not, and have never been, even close to the fuzzy "border" part of that line, always to the right of it.
Centrist is the more accurate term for Dems (and even that's charitable).
It's basically center-right (Dems), and right-to-far-right (GOP).
Sure, for some Americans, Democrats might be called "left", but then again other Americans also considered Swedish style social democracy as "communism".
>This meme of “there is no left in America” is just a childish way of saying, “I don’t like the current majority opinion of the Democratic Party”.
No, it's more like saying "America never has had a left party, just a party more to the left than the other".
Not in any historical sense of the term as developed and still currently used in Europe, at any rate.
Poverty rate in Sweden is, like in most of Western Europe, low. [1] whilst the cost of living is lower than in the USA as an example. [2] At the same time schools, university, healthcare, social services, is accessible to everyone. There is a shortage of housing, only 0.8% of rental properties are availbe for rent[3] but it isn’t necessarily only a failure of government as the housing market is largely commercial, only 19% of housing is owned by the government [4].
[1] https://data.oecd.org/inequality/poverty-rate.htm
[2] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings_by_country.js...
[3] https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subje...
[4] https://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/11...
Japan is very capitalist but builds lots of housing because landowners can build up with little zoning restrictions.
The USSR was very communist and they also built a lot of housing because the government just went in and did it.
But the USA and Europe seem to easily get stuck in NIMBY traps where nothing gets built, and then when prices go up due to lack of supply people will reach for solutions like rent control, which almost 100% of economists will tell you is bad for longterm housing supply because it discourages new construction.
I've heard Stockholm's rent control is especially stupid because while the landlord is forced to rent to the primary tenant at a low, below market rate, that primary tenant can turn around and sublet their entire unit at a much higher, market rate to a secondary tenant. So the primary lease is basically a capital asset with perpetual returns. The unit ends up renting for market rate anyway to the secondary tenant, while the primary tenant collects free money.
This is overly simplistic. For instance, the US (left?) has been ahead of Europe on issues like accessibility for the disabled or same-sex marriage.
In any case, it's not like the right is against "accessibility for the disabled".
Similarly, same-sex marriage is not about left vs right but about progressive/liberal (in the in favor of invididual rights sense) vs concervative.
An anarcho-capitalist can be all about same-sex marriage without being left (the opposite), where even communists were known to be socially conservative in several cases, or pioneering such rights in others.
It’s so incredibly stupid to think that there is just one dimension driving all political views and it’s stemming from the lens of the US two-party system sucking the oxygen out of the room.
Pick all of the policies you think defines a “left” party and we can go through one-by-one and find parties in some country that are considered right-wing that will share some of the same views.
Gore Vidal
That doesn't sound right.
> or banning guns.
In which other western country or part of Europe are guns banned?
Increasing partisanship and gerrymandering are making this less true, but it is still a significant force, particularly for Senate seats.
Strong parties, that run on a policy platform and where they have much more control over their members, just isn't a thing in the US, and couldn't be, without a lot of constitutional changes.
Minor parties and coalition governments in other countries function in somewhat the same way. It's not uncommon for a party to win but not gain absolute power in the legislative branch of government, and have to compromise with others to pass laws and spending bills.
Democrats are the ones pushing for universal healthcare: https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/achievin...
> or banning guns.
Yep, they're the ones pushing for gun control too: https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/healing-...
It's almost like not all issues fit neatly on a single left/right dimension.
Also the Democrats created Obamacare which is similar to the Swiss system of mandated insurance, so they obviously do care about healthcare.
And in many states, Democrats have passed gun control at the state level.
>The question of Free Trade or Protection moves entirely within the bounds of the present system of capitalist production, and has, therefore, no direct interest for us socialists who want to do away with that system.
>Indirectly, however, it interests us inasmuch as we must desire as the present system of production to develop and expand as freely and as quickly as possible: because along with it will develop also those economic phenomena which are its necessary consequences, and which must destroy the whole system: misery of the great mass of the people, in consequence of overproduction. This overproduction engendering either periodical gluts and revulsions, accompanied by panic, or else a chronic stagnation of trade; division of society into a small class of large capitalist, and a large one of practically hereditary wage-slaves, proletarians, who, while their numbers increase constantly, are at the same time constantly being superseded by new labor-saving machinery; in short, society brought to a deadlock, out of which there is no escaping but by a complete remodeling of the economic structure which forms it basis.
From this point of view, 40 years ago Marx pronounced, in principle, in favor of Free Trade as the more progressive plan, and therefore the plan which would soonest bring capitalist society to that deadlock. But if Marx declared in favor of Free Trade on that ground, is that not a reason for every supporter of the present order of society to declare against Free Trade? If Free Trade is stated to be revolutionary, must not all good citizens vote for Protection as a conservative plan?
>If a country nowadays accepts Free Trade, it will certainly not do so to please the socialists. It will do so because Free trade has become a necessity for the industrial capitalists. But if it should reject Free Trade and stick to Protection, in order to cheat the socialists out of the expected social catastrophe, that will not hurt the prospects of socialism in the least. Protection is a plan for artificially manufacturing manufacturers, and therefore also a plan for artificially manufacturing wage laborers. You cannot breed the one without breeding the other.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1888/free-trade/
In the US, different people use “liberal” to mean:
(1) Everything to the left of center of institutional power of the Republican Party, or
(2) Everything to the right of their preferred viewpoint (common among the US’s small number of actual leftists.)
(3) People who agree with their particular take on pro-capitalist econonic policy (often prefixed with “classical”.)
Among other uses.
I also struggle to categorize its recent former leader Tony Abbott and his close mate Joe Hockey who was the Treasurer as "centre-right". We are talking about a priest who was famously & accurately labelled by the only female Australian Prime Minister as a misogyny - that speech was voted for the No.1 moment in Australian TV history! These two are the people who want everyone to believe that it is a life style choice when people don't buy & drive ferrari.
Oh, let's also don't forget what happened to Liberal's actual centre-right leader Malcolm Turnbull. He was replaced by a bulldozer PM who is responsible for the use of automated machines to force the most vulnerable people to fork out billions of $ to cover their non-exist debts so his federal budget can look better to his supporters. Is this centre-right?