by Richard William Nelson | Jun 6, 2010
This is the story of the Ida Fossil Fiasco. “This little creature is going to show us our connection with the rest of all the mammals, with cows and sheep, and elephants and anteaters,” said Sir David Attenborough, who narrated the BBC documentary in May 2009.
“The more you look at Ida, the more you can see, as it were, the primate in embryo.”
Really? According to Jørn Hurum, the paleontologist from Oslo University’s Natural History Museum who assembled the scientific team
“It tells a part of our evolution that’s been hidden so far. It’s been hidden because the only [other] specimens are so incomplete and so broken there’s nothing almost to study”,
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by Richard William Nelson | May 30, 2010
In a letter to Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, his closest friend in 1857, Charles Darwin confided, “I cannot swallow Man [being that] distinct from a Chimpanzee.” Chimp genetics, by extension of Darwin’s theory, were expected to be similar to humans. Charles Darwin writes in his Autobiography –
“My Descent of Man was published in Feb. 1871. As soon as I had become, in the year 1837 or 1838, convinced that species were mutable products, I could not avoid the belief that man must come under the same law.”
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by Richard William Nelson | May 9, 2010
In 1856, just three years before the publication of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, the first Neanderthal in the fossil record was discovered in the Neander Valley limestone quarry located in Germany.
In The Descent of Man, Darwin argued against the concept that the Neanderthals were humans’ ancestors based on the Neanderthal skull’s larger size. “Nevertheless,” Darwin noted,
“it must be admitted that some skulls of very high antiquity, such as the famous one of Neanderthal, are well developed and capacious.”
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by Richard William Nelson | Apr 25, 2010
Each fossil record discovery has a unique story, and the Archaeoraptor matter is undoubtedly no exception. In November 1999, a feature article in National Geographic titled “Feathers for T. Rex? New Birdlike Fossils Are Missing Links In Dinosaur Evolution” played out to be one of the most spectacular debacles in the history of paleontology rivaling the Piltdown Man saga. The article alleged –
“A true missing link in the complex chain that connects dinosaurs to birds.”
Discovered in the northeastern Liaoning Province of China in 1997 by farmers (pictured left), the fossil appeared to have a bird’s body with a small, terrestrial dinosaur’s teeth and tail. The name given to the fossil, Archaeoraptor liaoningensis, is in recognition of its discovery site.
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by Richard William Nelson | Apr 18, 2010
Darwin had a significant influence on Karl Marx (pictured left). Struggle and survival are central to Darwin’s theory of evolution. The full 1859 title of The Origin is – On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection and the Survival of the Fittest in the Preservation of Favoured Races.
Darwin’s premise on survival and struggle in nature paralleled Karl Marx’s premise on social class struggle. Marx summarized the importance of “struggle” in the first line of chapter one of The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848 –
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
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This is the story of the Ida Fossil Fiasco. “This little creature is going to show us our connection with the rest of all the mammals, with cows and sheep, and elephants and anteaters,” said Sir David Attenborough, who narrated the BBC documentary in May 2009.
In 1856, just three years before the publication of 
Each 
Darwin had a significant influence on 