PLEASE – do yourself a favour and turn the sound OFF – NOW. I’m almost willing to throw the towel in admit that creationists are right when I hear it. However the video is just brilliant (if you ignore the silly text as well). I’ve posted this in response to the last comments around the Dawkins video where he’s “pointing at some blue lines” and related comments – well there’s a reason why there are the lines. Here’s 500 generations every SECOND backed up by actual fossil evidence – shoved in to a computer and animated together. It’s fantastic to watch.
From Australopithecus to Homo sapiens in 5 minutes.
We’re nicking all this from the Atheist Media blog of recent so thanks to them for this as it’s a great example of the solid proof we have of evolution as a solid theory. Having lived with a palaeontologist for the last 3 months it’s refreshing to not hear him scream “do you want me to show you all 9000 bits of evidence in a row to show you there are no gaps at all?” every time I try and wind him up with a bit of creationist “theory”. Apparently this is quite recent that we’ve filled in all the holes but was always assumed (it’s actually more than 9000 if you count every frame it’s more like 112000 generations).
I want a paleontologist of my own. Can I have yours?
hey, nothing wrong with john legends song
The animation is very very nice…
I’ve seen this posted a couple places now and everyone is bitching about the song.
What the hell is wrong with you people? It’s John Legend!!
Phillis, can you explain what the problem is? This was a political call to arms for the most recent presidential election in America. Personally, I found it to be a very powerful moment when he played it live at an Obama event.
Can it be a knee-jerk atheist reaction to the word ‘believe’? If so, maybe the bad guys are right. We’re getting too militant.
Maybe because i’m in the US (or perhaps because my network connection sucks), the embedded version did not work well.
That, and the “Video response” to the version on YouTube was a slightly better one. (Sorry, I kept the sound off, so I couldn’t say if that improved), so, should others find the need for it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrhYLvNeQd4
…Hopefully the filters don’t hate me for posting a link, though. [wince]
OK, now I don’t want to wade in here and pick sides, as it got pretty heated on the other thread. You all know where I stand on this, but in terms of preaching to the choir we’re no further ahead than we were with the blue lines.
I don’t know much about paleontology beyond basic comparative anatomy taught in art class, but speaking as someone who has animated stuff if you wanted to win over a creationist you have to pull out the big guns (not literally… tempting as it may be!)
Merely morphing one photo into another without showing actual intermediate fossils is merely going to result in some hardcore creationist saying “you just animated all the intermediates how you imagine them to be, they don’t actually exist outside your pretty animation”.
Yes I know it’s frustrating, but someone really needs to do this with every available fossil you can lay your mits on in order to win over the doubters, cause there’s some pretty hardcore doubters out there. Just saying…the first 300 examples looked like the same skull pulled around on photoshop.
Don’t shoot the messenger!
omg – now i know why you said to turn the sound off!!!!!!!
p.s – i know i’m a bit late in saying this but i love the navigation at the end of each entry to go to the next or previous post. it saves having to keep reloading the homepage, especially when viewing on mobile. Also loving the anti spam – aboe the submit. Loving everything!
above*
I think that I may be making some psychological connection between the song and the Obama campaign that colors my view here. It’s certainly a cheesier song than I’d go for under any other circumstance, that must be it. It must take me back to my good feelings from the election.
Wow, I’m getting (more) lame as I age.
I feel like I’m getting snarked at because the answers too all of this are obvious to anyone that has studied, but the point really is that people who think that the answer to everything is simply that ‘God did it’ won’t have studied, so these vids don’t do anything at all to challenge the notions of people that struggle with the theory of evolution.
So yeah, I get a kick out of seeing the skull evolve, but…well everything Flapjack already said.
But just so’s nobody misunderstands me, I’m playing for the team here! I come to this blog because I’m on board, I’m not trying to rock anyone’s boat.
[...] fossil evidence – shoved in to a computer and animated together. It’s fantastic to watch. Video: from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens in 5 minutes (Via Daily [...]
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was very well acquainted with this sequence … and he was a Jesuit. So there goes THAT theory. The song is clearly cheesy, whatever its purpose, and it is compressed and enhanced with studio-voodoo audio-enhancers beyond all recognition of anything ‘musical’, and its on that grounds, and the injected “Marco Polo” cryptoquip that really makes me see the zealots of Scientism as no better than the PTL-Club and their 1-800 prayer lines. Sorry.
If science was what we want to present, then we should present the science, and the core video buried under the lame rhetoric is absolutely brilliant, but I would never show it to anyone, not unless I could find the original un-slanted (and I suspect the authors of that were not the politicos who posted this junky pitch) As Joe Friday would say, “Just the facts, ma’am.”
The facts will speak for themselves. Let’s leave the snake-oil pitch to the carney barkers.
The thing that I like best is to play it fast … The music .. never heard of it nor the singer I guess … am not sure whether it is a professional .. it sort of does have potential but needs still some work ..
Am I a homo sapiens? Cool!
[...] Video: from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens in 5 minutes (Via Daily Grail) [...]
So then why are there still apes (almost identical to the original stills)? Wait, I know. Because there has always been a difference between apes and man. Who ever posted that every still was based on a complete fossil record is ignorant. There currently is no complete fossil record from Australopithecus to Homo Sapiens. Filling in the gaps with B.S. is bad science. Give me five minutes with photoshop and I will illustrate how we clearly evolved from a ford escort.
Chris Bertschy… if you made a video showing a ford escort morphing into a human, that wouldn’t invalidate the premise of the video, it would solidify it.
You should really read the sidebar to it. It’s very informative.
The video isn’t presented to be an accurate representation of our own lineage. It’s meant to illustrate (what many creationists can’t seem to understand) that micro changes, can culminate in “macro” results. That there is no distinction between the two in Science. Macro, is just what you call micro after a lot of it has occurred. It’s what you call seconds, once they turn into minutes.
That’s what the video was illustrating. How a little bit of change over a long period of time, can culminate in very long chances, at no point in which can you ever object to the transition in the next frame. That’s the point.
Morphing a man into a dog or any of the likes wouldn’t invalidate the video… it’s precisely the point of it.
@flapjack unfortunately doing it with every fossil we have still won’t convince creationists, who will merely ask for the intermediate stages between each sample you have. Creationists will not be convinced until we can provide fossils from every generation to them, which for obvious reasons is impossible. Palaeontologists ruefully acknowledge this when they discover something that the press hails as “the missing link” – the message sent is usually “congratulations, you’ve just identified two new gaps in the fossil record.”
@Chris Bertschy – you’re almost right, but not for the reasons you think. The creationist argument that “if we evolved from apes, why are they still around” arises from the fundamental misconception that we evolved from the same species of apes we have now. We didn’t. Man did not evolve from chimps, gorillas, orangutans or any other of the extant ape species. We like they, evolved from common ancestors. There was no direct change from chimpanzee to man, rather there was a change from some common ancestor, and over time the chimpanzees and the homo sapiens became very distinct, but neither led into the other.
I got no problem with evolution but this video is bogus. You expect me to believe there are over 120000 generations in this video or is it simply a CARTOON?
does anyone know anywhere one actually can view the mentioned 9000 fossils which would go some way to backing up this video? i have looked on the internet but not found anything of that order.
- they’re not all in one place.But the Natural History has a fair few – Phillis