Ok I've added summary versions of the <Winter> material on your fine Pronunciation video of <Aljechin>:

The Harry Potter books and films seem to borrow from this theme. Harry Potter both has a good and an evil side. (Actually even the Hogswarth school of wizardry looks like a clone of the Earthsea Roke school of wizards. I believe that Rowlings has borrowed heavily from Le Guin's Earthsea ideas, and she should really acknowledge this.)

<Thanh> thanks for all the great links. :)

<visayanbraindoctor> fascinating.

Ancient beds designed to ward off insects add to evidence modern man evolved in Africa ~ The earliest mats are about 77,000 years old,http://www.washingtonpost.com/world...

Fundamental Glossary For The Higgs Broadcast ~ As everybody knows, next Tuesday we will be treated with a CERN webcast of the analysis results on the Higgs boson searches by ATLAS and CMS. http://www.science20.com/quantum_di...

Nowadays, it's now bracketed as an arthropod.

The Cambrian explosion was notable because nearly all modern animal phyla first appeared there, in a very short geological time period.

(BTW creationists look at this as evidence of Creationism.)

In addition, there were many animals that defy classification in any modern phylum, and may in a sense be representing entire phyla that never made it past the Cambrian.

After the Cambrian and until today, we can see diversity evolving rapidly mostly only in the species and subspecies level. For instance a hybrid of two species may exhibit traits that prevent them from back breeding into their mother species, and thus in nature they essentially are pushed toward the pathway for a new species.

Even races within a species may exhibit this phenomenon. The domestic dog has been bred into several races or breeds, each one very close genetically to one another; yet some of them physically unable to interbreed- for instance a chihuahua with a german shepherd. If a chihuahua and a german shepherd mixed population of dogs were let loose in a large island, chances are that the chihuahuas will only interbreed with one another and the same for german shepherds. Eventually after hundreds of thousands of years genetic drift will cause their genomes to sufficiently differ so that they would be regarded as different species.

If this sounds incomprehensible, the following example might clarify matters:

After the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, the seas were suddenly bereft of large air-breathing predator species, a niche previously filled by ichthyosaurs, pliosaurs, and mosasaurs (the latter being essentially giant monitor lizards whose feet had evolved into fins). This represented an opportunity for the diversifying land-bound mammals. In a geological short period of time, a lineage of mammals did take to the seas. We now know them as the Cetacea- dolphins and whales. They quickly became so disparate that 20th century anatomists regarded them as a separate order of mammals.

(BTW creationists look at this as evidence of Creationism.)>

I don't know about evidence, but it would be a possible explanation that doesn't dull Occam's Razor.

<To the shock of everyone>

Ordovician–Silurian extinction event 440–450 Ma

Devonian-Carboniferous or Late Devonian extinction 360–375 Ma

Permian–Triassic extinction event (End Permian or the Great Dying) 251 Ma which was Earth's largest extinction event which killed more than 95% of all marine species and about 70% of land species, and the only extinction event that affected insects.

Triassic–Jurassic extinction event 205 Ma

Cretaceous–Tertiary (or Cretaceous–Paleogene) extinction event 65.5 million years ago.

After every mass extinction, God suddenly created a whole suite of new species in an instant.

However, most creationists believe in a young earth theory, and usually cite the inconsistent abundance of carbon 14 in fossil fuels; and so do not believe in the above dates (millions of years ago). This inconsistency is explained by evolutionists as due to microbial contamination of certain fossil fuel underground collections, or the migration of these hydrocarbons underground.

When is the next one?

For some the question is:

Are we already in one?

For a few:

Regarding the breeds of dogs, we never see a wolf evolve into a chihuahua in our lifetime either. Yet it is clear from historical, archaeological, and biological data that all the breeds of dogs originated from the wolf, perhaps more than ten thousand years ago. Nowadays, the wolf and the dog are disparate enough to be classified as different species; and some breeds of dog are so different in sizes that they cannot physically interbreed.

<twinlark: It takes millions of years for such changes, for which there is abundant evidence. No faith required.>

Right.

IMO the evidence as a whole points more to evolution than to creationism.

I understand that literal belief in the Bible has something to do with many creationist beliefs. As I have pointed out above, there are thousands of sincere and practicing Christians, including many paleontologists, that believe in evolution theory, but they are not fundamentalists. Or put it in another way, if a fundamentalist Christian changes his belief system in only one matter- he or she starts believing in evolution- then he ceases to be a fundamentalist Christian but remains a Christian. I also understand that this statement becomes a problem for some fundamentalist Christians that believe that any 'Christian' who is not fundamentalist like them is not really a Christian.

I would rather stick to a purely scientific discussion; theological disputes are best discussed elsewhere.

I appreciate the measured affirmation, which is not that common.

<Regarding the Cambrian explosion, the causes must have been multifactorial. IMO the most plausible eminent cause was the rise in atmospheric O2 levels to nearly modern values >

If I granted that drastic change in atmospheric composition, it's not like that is all that hard to reconcile with the Creationist viewpoint.

I agree with these two posts but I would pose this comment differently:

<Both creationist and evolutionary theory are still theories>

In everyday life, someone might say something is just a theory, meaning it's a supposition or a conjecture that may or may not be true.

But in science, a theory is supported by a significant body of evidence that provides the basis for the construction of one or more hypotheses that have been accepted after being tested without being falsified by the results. The body of evidence and successfully tested predictions in most theories is formidable, the extent of which can be judged by the fact that Dr Andrew Prentice's neo-Laplacian hypothesis of planetary formation that has produced a string of accurate predictions over twenty years that have been corroborated by interplanetary probes has nonetheless not yet advanced past the stage of being a hypothesis within the mainstream community.

A hypothesis is an educated guess, based on observation that can subsequently be supported or refuted through experimentation or more observation. Clearly a significant amount of support is required to advance a hypothesis to the giddy heights of a full blown scientific theory.

Creationism doesn't even get to the stage of being a hypothesis. It consists of a series of faith-based non-empirical conjectures and assertions. The proof of the pudding is whether creationism has any observation or evidence of its own that can support a hypothesis <that can be tested>. As far as I know, there have been none whatsoever.

The testability of the predictions of a theory underpin its credibility, even if the theory is incompatible with another equally respected theory, the classic examples of course being quantum mechanics and relativity. Both are theories that have been extant for nearly a century, both having good track records for successfully tested predictions, but which are nonetheless at odds with each other, hence the ongoing search for a unifying theory.

Regarding the inconsistency of the abundance of carbon-14 in fossil fuels, I found this interesting paper that might explain it. (Link below.)

http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ex/0308025v2

1. Some of them have brains as large as ours, and display self-awareness, human-like emotional behavior, and high intelligence.

2. Depict the romantic story of mammals going back top the sea.

Seals obviously belong to order Carnivora by morphology, but whoever would have thought that whales are genetically almost identical to even-hoofed herbivorous ruminants? Their limbs are now modified into fins, the hemoglobin content of their blood and myoglobin content of their muscles are so high that they act as scuba divers' oxygen tanks enabling them to dive without breathing for nearly an hour, other anatomical and physiological adaptations enable them to withstand crushing pressure in deep dives, many can use sonar as a form of second sight, they are as a group the most predatory of all mammals eating nothing but other animals (a diet that ranges from 1mm long copepods to large sharks, and even other seals and other whales).

Virtually the only clue to their ruminant nature is that many whales apparently have multi-compartmental stomachs, a trait of ruminants- our common cow, goat, deer, sheep, antelope. The other major marine mammal group, seals, has the usual single stomach. Digesting animal flesh is much easier than trying to digest plant cellulose, and all other meat eaters have just single compartment stomachs. The ruminants deal with hard-to-digest foods with the aid of their multiple stomachs.

No one has tried to explain the Cetacean multi-compartmental stomach before, even if they look unnecessary to a predator; but they now make sense if they are seen as a ruminant's stomach. Their stomachs are now virtually the only morphological link that whales have to their past; so modified have they become.

Recently however, many fossils have turned up that link modern whales to the ruminants.

Fossil whales are identified by their inner ear bones. According to anatomists, this creature, which for practical intents and purposes looks and lives like a deer, was anatomically (in terms of its ear) a whale. It was an even-toed hoofed plant-eater that lived near streams.

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencen...

The following ancient whale is more whalish in that it is a predator, but still it was totally terrestrial and had even toed hoofs.

http://dinosaurs.about.com/od/mesoz...

The following ancient whale was more adapted to water, and resembled a crocodile more than a deer.

http://en.goldenmap.com/Ambulocetus

This whale lived mostly in freshwater, even more aquatic than the above.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:K...

The whale below had now made the transition to the sea.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ging...

Now this is clearly already a whale, even by morphology.