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Politics : Idea Of The Day -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: IQBAL LATIF who wrote (49542)	12/30/2005 10:37:13 AM
From: IQBAL LATIF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50167

The proverbial Martian!! A discussion with Geoffrey Carr, Science Editor of The Economist “Our aberrant feature is our mind. Lots of the things that we do, like painting and sculpting and singing and dancing, are actually about showing off to the opposite sex, in exactly the same way that a peacock shows off to peahens. The important point of these so-called sexually-specific characteristics is that they are very easy to observe, they are expensive to produce and they are very difficult to fake.” Economist has come out with a very similar article to this.. We live in a complex environment that we can control; what we cannot is our destiny. The planet we live on is prone to disasters big and small, and extinction is an integral part of our planet’s behavior. Recent analysis of South African rocks revealed that rivers suddenly became clogged with sediments 251 million years ago, indicating Earth's worst mass extinction, wiped out many trees and other plants that held soil in place. It is believed a huge comet or asteroid walloped Earth to cause the mass die-off at the end of the Permian Period and dawn of the Triassic. God between 200 million to 65 million years ago looked as if He was busy with extinction; these were the years of massive change as life forms evolved one after the other and gave way to better life forms as a part of natural selection of genes. God was not unhappy with the reptiles living then nor was He punishing a Tyrannosaurus Rex for ripping the neck of a Diplodocus Carnegiei. cybermusings.blogspot.com SEVEN hundred and forty centuries ago, give or take a few, the skies darkened and the Earth caught a cold. Toba, a volcano in Sumatra, had exploded with the sort of eruptive force that convulses the planet only once every few million years. The skies stayed dark for six years, so much dust did the eruption throw into the atmosphere. It was a dismal time to be alive and, if Stanley Ambrose of the University of Illinois is right, the chances were you would be dead soon. In particular, the population of one species, known to modern science as Homo sapiens, plummeted to perhaps 2,000 individuals. The proverbial Martian, looking at that darkened Earth, would probably have given long odds against these peculiar apes making much impact on the future. True, they had mastered the art of tool-making, but so had several of their contemporaries. True, too, their curious grunts allowed them to collaborate in surprisingly sophisticated ways. But those advantages came at a huge price, for their brains were voracious consumers of energy—a mere 2% of the body's tissue absorbing 20% of its food intake. An interesting evolutionary experiment, then, but surely a blind alley. This survey will attempt to explain why that mythical Martian would have been wrong. It will ask how these apes not only survived but prospered, until the time came when one of them could weave together strands of evidence from fields as disparate as geology and genetics, and conclude that his ancestors had gone through a genetic bottleneck caused by a geological catastrophe. www.economist.com