It's the little things that people don't usually notice...
It's the little things that people don't usually notice that continue to allow ideas to thrive despite their inaccuracy.
For example: I saw this on CNN.com today - "Scientists hailed Tuesday a 47-million-year-old fossil of an ancient "small cat"-sized primate as a possible common ancestor of monkeys, primates and humans."
This is great. The time period is right and it is an interesting find. Hopefully it is well supported by genetic and morphological data. The problem? Read the last bit again. "monkeys, primates and humans." HUMANS ARE PRIMATES. For centuries we've viewed ourselves apart from the rest of the natural world and this has resulted in countless crimes against nature and has largely kept us from being able to see how impressive our place in the world really is. It's extremely disappointing to see phrases like this dropped into articles by reputable news sources (whatever you may think of CNN).
Also, Birds are Dinosaurs. What we commonly think of as Dinosaurs are commonly referred to as "non-Avian Dinosaurs".
***Someone else must have seen this because the line has been changed to "Scientists hailed Tuesday a 47-million-year-old fossil of an ancient "small cat"-sized primate as a possible common ancestor of monkeys, humans and other primates."
For example: I saw this on CNN.com today - "Scientists hailed Tuesday a 47-million-year-old fossil of an ancient "small cat"-sized primate as a possible common ancestor of monkeys, primates and humans."
This is great. The time period is right and it is an interesting find. Hopefully it is well supported by genetic and morphological data. The problem? Read the last bit again. "monkeys, primates and humans." HUMANS ARE PRIMATES. For centuries we've viewed ourselves apart from the rest of the natural world and this has resulted in countless crimes against nature and has largely kept us from being able to see how impressive our place in the world really is. It's extremely disappointing to see phrases like this dropped into articles by reputable news sources (whatever you may think of CNN).
Also, Birds are Dinosaurs. What we commonly think of as Dinosaurs are commonly referred to as "non-Avian Dinosaurs".
***Someone else must have seen this because the line has been changed to "Scientists hailed Tuesday a 47-million-year-old fossil of an ancient "small cat"-sized primate as a possible common ancestor of monkeys, humans and other primates."