best commentary on the 2023 furby design

when I was very young my mother told me “they’re going to try and teach you that we came from monkeys but that’s not true and you shouldn’t listen to them because we were made from god” and she was my mom and I was like 7, so I pretty much just went “okay, noted, anyway”

anyway like 2 years later evolution comes up in class and one of my classmates goes “is this the we evolved from monkeys thing?”

and I’m on Red Alert. this is what my mom told me about!

the teacher replies, “well, we share a common ancestor, but we didn’t evolve directly from apes. if you go back way before apes or people existed, you’ll find a different third thing we both came from. we know this because of things like fossils”

and I was like whoo! dodged a bullet there, good thing my 4th grade science class isn’t trying to teach us we came from monkeys and instead figured stuff out using fossils and taught us that instead :)

Instructions Unclear, Ended Up Believing In Evolution Anyway

US Elevation.

by @cstats1

man the Appalachian mountains really aren’t shit huh

The Rockies are new, young and virile and fresh from the Laramide orogeny, tall and lanky teenagers on the geological scale. the Appalachian mountains are old, formed hundreds of millions of years ago before dinosaurs walked the Earth. They are ancients, elders, witnesses to half a billion years of life coming and going. To be tall is not a virtue. To be small is not a sin. The Appalachians are eroding under the weight of time, slowly shrinking and returning to the Earth from which they sprang. Appreciate them while they are still here.

I do want to say real quick again about the age of the Appalachians…

They said “before dinosaurs,” but we have a cave here that began forming between 450 million to 550 million years ago.

There are no bones in that cave. No fossils. No nothing.

That’s because this cave began forming before bones existed on land, and had only just started to exist in the ocean. Shellfish hadn’t evolved yet. Limestone, which forms many caves, was just starting to become a more prevalent rock.

The mountains aren’t older than dinosaurs. They are older than bones.

see that little lump up at the top of minnesota? the sawtooth mountains? so small most places would just call them hills?

those are over a billion years old.

that’s why they’re so small. they’re the last ancient remnants of a lava flow 5 miles thick. the lava didn’t kill any dinosaurs. or any fish. or any animals at all. because there were no animals. you know what there was?

algae.

those mountains were 5 miles tall when the most advanced life on earth was algae.

so i’m just gonna go ahead and keep calling them mountains, even though all you need to climb them is hiking shoes and a nice afternoon. because a place where you can crouch down and touch basalt that was lava before leaves were invented deserves some respect.

The earth is unfathomably ancient, and you garner no love from her when you insult her eldest children.

not only that, the Appalachians predate the Atlantic Ocean and were fragmented. they stretch across three continents, as Atlas in Africa and Caledonians in Europe as you can see here:

the Appalachians are way way old. the fossils that ARE found in these ranges are ancient marine beings, whose fossil remains predate the anatomical structures of beings migrating to land for the first time. THAT’S how old the Appalachians are.

show the elders some respect, they have witnessed eons and are returning to the land from which they grew, it’s the kind of the passage of time on a scale that our human lives could not even begin to comprehend.

*deep breath in*

So are you telling me that… life is old there?

Younger than the m–

Whenever someone tries to claim that evolution is a lie, I send them a picture of platybelodon.

1. It’s an excellent example of transitional evolution.

2. It’s a mess who would intentionally do this and why

3. It makes them piss themselves a little.

“Evolution is just a theory-”

Oh good god

I couldn’t help but wonder what this absolute bastard of a skull would look like, and

I was not disappointed. But I was terrified.

OK but what is fucking killing me is that this whole argument, while brilliant, is this:

@cooolgnome

Modern birds are descended from dinosaurs.

Therefore modern rubber duckies are descendants of those hollow mouth-agape cheap toy dinosaurs.

Toy researchers are left only with theories as to how ‘missing link’ may have appeared, but new data is uncovered every day.

This is genious

doodled my own take on the rubbery matter.

Wonderfully done and well researched. An illustration worthy of a museum exhibit!

I want you all to know that an Arab Muslim from Tunis proposed the Theory of Evolution near 600 years before Charles Darwin even took his first breath. Don’t let them erase you.

his name is Ibn Khaldun

Also, it was not the apple falling from a tree that made Issac Newton “discover” gravity. He was reading the books of Ibn Al Haytham, an Arab Muslim from Iraq, who pioneered the scientific method, discovered gravity and wrote about the laws governing the movement of bodies (now known as Newtons three laws of motion) some 600 years before Newton existed. Without him, modern science as we know it wouldn’t exist. Read on him. His achievements are far greater than what I’ve just mentioned here.

#no offense but arabs literally invented chemistry and algebra and we came up with the concept of the camera #the cataract operation that’s still practiced today was invented by an Arab #we created alchemy and the wright brothers used abbas ibn firnas’ findings and writings to build on to create a plane #I could go on and on and on #pls don’t erase our scientific history

I reblog this post every time I see it

We fucking replaced a Muslim scientist with an apple?

In the middle ages, THE place to go for an education was the middle East, or, failing that, Spain. The Muslim world didn’t have the same limits placed on scientific inquiry that the Christian world did, and since they were willing to look at more than just Aristotole and actually compare texts to the observable world, they had some incredible scientific and mathematical advancements. And street lights and toilets. I mean theories and algebra are great and all, but street lights and toilets. In the 12th century. Also medical advancements, and fewer rules against women studying. Hell, women *should* be the ones studying the female body, would you rather a woman see your female relatives, or some old man? Would you rather have someone who lives in the same kind of body, or one who has no first hand idea what the parts can do?

Also, the above, the reason Spain was another good option for education in case you don’t know is because for a good chunk of time it was either Muslim ruled (al-Andalus) or still heavily populated with Muslim people.

And ftr one of the only reasons Europeans have any of that classical Greek knowledge like Plato, Aristotle, etc, Greek myth, astrology/astoronomy, etc etc (you know, the root of the White European renaissance and aristocratic classist based education) is because of the Arabic world. While white Christian Europeans quickly lost track of the writings and advancements from this time, Muslim-Arabic cultures did not. They kept writing and translating them into Arabic and learning/expanding from them. It wasn’t until a massive flood of Latin translations poured from predominantly Spain and other Muslim-heavy areas in like… the 12th c? That Christians and White Europeans as a mass started working with the material again.

And note I said Christians. Because it’s also worth note that one of the groups in Europe embracing and reading these texts from Muslim sources earlier on were Jewish groups. A lot of Jews read Arabic as well as Hebrew and so would make their own translations and work on the texts before Christian Europeans did (at least in a mass sense). In fact, Jews who also knew Latin often times played a large role in helping translate the sources into Latin or European venacular.

Wisdom teeth are so weird cause my body is like, “hey I know you are done growing but would you like some…MORE TEETH???? And I’m like, “hell no, theres no room,” but then my body is still like *slamming fists on table* “more teeth! MORE TEETH! MORE TEETH! MORE TEETH! M O R E T E E T H”

[former dental student voice]

like many things, wisdom teeth are a byproduct of evolution! biology’s natural solution to a problem we have since solved with the advancement of medical technology!!

historically, people lost their second molars quite early due to dental decay! Before the invention of the toothbrush, we were unable to reach far enough back to clean those teeth - and even if we could reach them, the lack of any other oral hygiene was too much to fight off.

so we lost those teeth! They decayed and fell out in early adulthood. And of all the teeth at your disposal, molars are the most important! Without molars we are unable to grind and swallow most of the diet we evolved to ingest.

So the body decided the best thing to do was to give us a third set of molars - ones that came later in life, after we had surely already worn out the second set. This is why they don’t erupt with the rest of our adult dentition.

So now that we have the toothbrush and toothpaste and floss - and now that a significant portion of drinking water (at least in the United States) is fluoridated - dental decay is much, much less frequent, especially in young adults. 

So when those wisdom teeth are ready to come in, the average adult no longer has room for them.

( also, we’re starting to evolve past them! my dad only got his lower wisom teeth and my sister had only one!)

and that’s the story of the Seemingly Redundant and Unnecessary Wisdom Tooth, Who Was Really Only Trying to Help

Octopus and squid evolution is officially weirder than we could have ever imagined

Just when we thought octopuses couldn’t be any weirder, it turns out that they and their cephalopod brethren evolve differently from nearly every other organism on the planet.

In a surprising twist, scientists have discovered that octopuses, along with some squid and cuttlefish species, routinely edit their RNA (ribonucleic acid) sequences to adapt to their environment.

This is weird because that’s really not how adaptations usually happen in multicellular animals. When an organism changes in some fundamental way, it typically starts with a genetic mutation - a change to the DNA.

The findings have been published in Cell.

Olga Visavi/Shutterstock

The Eevee Brothers from the original anime were named Rainer, Pyro, Sparky and they owned a Vaporeon, Flareon and Jolteon respectively. If you nickname your Eevee either Rainer, Pyro or Sparky, your Eevee will evolve into that desired Eeveelution!

Sparky = Jolteon

Rainer = Vaporeon 

Pyro = Flareon 

@raisin-brahms

Continue Reading.

I want you all to know that an Arab Muslim from Tunis proposed the Theory of Evolution near 600 years before Charles Darwin even took his first breath. Don’t let them erase you.

his name is Ibn Khaldun

Also, it was not the apple falling from a tree that made Issac Newton “discover” gravity. He was reading the books of Ibn Al Haytham, an Arab Muslim from Iraq, who pioneered the scientific method, discovered gravity and wrote about the laws governing the movement of bodies (now known as Newtons three laws of motion) some 600 years before Newton existed. Without him, modern science as we know it wouldn’t exist. Read on him. His achievements are far greater than what I’ve just mentioned here.

#no offense but arabs literally invented chemistry and algebra and we came up with the concept of the camera #the cataract operation that’s still practiced today was invented by an Arab #we created alchemy and the wright brothers used abbas ibn firnas’ findings and writings to build on to create a plane #I could go on and on and on #pls don’t erase our scientific history

Whenever someone tries to claim that evolution is a lie, I send them a picture of platybelodon.

1. It’s an excellent example of transitional evolution.

2. It’s a mess who would intentionally do this and why

3. It makes them piss themselves a little.

“Evolution is just a theory-”

I busted out laughing in the middle of Christmas dinner. This is the best post of 2015 that I’ve seen. 

Not to be rude, but evolution is just a theory, albeit a probable one.

You can’t prove it, the only thing you can do is disprove it, which is what good scientists are supposed to do, try to disprove their theory.

Ah, but that’s the thing; A scientific theory IS a proven fact, and evolution is a very good example of an undeniably true one!

I’ve been meaning to write a post about what the meaning of a scientific theory is, and this seems like a good opportunity.

In science we have theories, and we have laws. It’s a very common misconception that a scientific theory is a an unproven hypothesis. This is understandable, but leads to a fundamental misunderstanding of how science works. A scientific theory isn’t the same as what we commonly refer to as a ‘theory’. Here’s a definition:

A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that is acquired through the scientific method and repeatedly tested and confirmed through observation and experimentation. x 

Compare this to the definition of a scientific law:

A scientific law is a statement based on repeated experimental observations that describes some aspects of the universe. A scientific law always applies under the same conditions, and implies that there is a causal relationship involving its elements. x

This means, basically, that a law summarizes observations about some sort of natural phenomena (usually mathematically). A good example is Newton’s law of gravity! 

Newton’s Law of Gravity explains through mathematics how different bodies react to each other because of this force we call gravity, both on earth and in space, but it doesn’t explain why it happens or even what gravity actually is. No explanation, therefor a law!

Then we have theories, which not only document phenomena, but give explainations as to why these phenomena happen and what they are. A scientific theory requires more testable evidence than a law, and usually encompasses multiple laws and explains them more thoroughly. For example, Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Newton’s law of gravity was testable, but it was only after Einstein proposed the theory of relativity that we started to understand what gravity actually is and how it functions. Einstein was able to give us explainations mathematically for why the laws of physics work as they do. Explanations for how it worked, therefor a theory!

(It’s also important to remember that a scientific theory and a scientific law are two very different things, and one can never become the other. A theory will always be a theory, and a law will always be a law.)

One of my favorite examples of this is the laws of Mendelian inheritance. 

Long before we knew what genetics were, farmers were breeding for favorable traits. They didn’t know where they came from or how they were passed from one organism to the next, but they knew that if they bred a large dog with another large dog, they’d get large puppies, and they knew that if they bred only their best produce that their plants would produce better produce in the future.

Gregor Johann Mendel started conducting experiments by hybridizing pea plants, and was able to prove that this consistently happened. By doing this he created three separate laws that all fall under the Laws of Inheritance; The Law of Segregation, the Law of Independent Assortment, and the Law of Dominance. It gets a little complicated here and I’m not an expert on DNA, but I’ll try to summarize.

The Law of Segregation states that all organisms contain two alleles for each trait, and that those separate during meiosis so each gamete only contains one of them. That means that offspring receives a pair of alleles from its parents for each trait, resulting in one allele for each trait from each parent. For example, a calico cat and a tabby may breed and produce 4 tabby kittens, but all of those kittens will also carry the genetic information of a calico.

The Law of Independent Assortment states that alleles for these traits are passed independently of one another during gamete formation. For example, if the calico is a manx and the tabby is a scottish fold, the kittens can inherit a short tail without inheriting their calico parents coloring. They can also look entirely like one parent despite carrying the genetic information of both. Each trait is passed independently of all other traits.

The Law of Dominance states that recessive alleles will be masked by dominant alleles. For example, blue eyes in cats is a recessive trait. Therefor even if the scottish fold has blue eyes (is a carrier and affected), the dominant trait eyes of the manx will determine the color of the kittens eyes, and we’ll only have a slim chance of producing affected, blue eyed kittens if the manx also carries the recessive blue eyed gene, and those genes line up. (If I’ve made any mistakes here, I’d appreciate someone with more knowledge on genetics letting me know)

But you’ll notice he didn’t show how or why this happened, he was just able to observe it and prove that it did. It wasn’t until the Chromosome Theory of Inheritance was discovered that we could explain why. This was the theory that explained that chromosomes are what carry genetic material and pass these traits from one generation to the next. 

It’s a fundamental, unifying theory of genetics that shapes how we conduct our science today. This theory is the basis of genetic engineering, which has had a huge impact on modern science. Just for example, the manufacturing of drugs (insulin and vaccines!), gene therapy, the genetic engineering of lab animals, and, most famously, agriculture. AKA, GMOs.

This leads into another requirement of a theory; Being supported by numerous other fields of science. Genetics is one of the sciences that hugely supports the Theory of Evolution. This is how we’ve been able to sequence DNA and discover how closely all life on earth is related, and how the DNA of humans and chimps is nearly identical.

x And this isn’t the only field of science that supports the validity of the Theory of Evolution. 

We have radioisotope dating! Isotopes make up all matter on earth, and by measuring the decay of radioactive isotopes, we can date rock layers. We can do this because we know the rate of radioactive decay. This is how we know that the Earth is around 4.5 billion years old. We’ve used this to date fossils and prove that transitional forms came between connected species, and that humans and modern animals didn’t live alongside dinosaurs.

We have paleontology! The fossil record shows extremely detailed evidence of evolution occurring. Evolution is so accurate in its predictions that there’s never been a single fossil found in a place that it shouldn’t be. For example, the transitional fossils between dinosaurs and modern birds is found right in the middle, exactly where we’d expect it to be. So is the ancestor of platybelodon, and its relatives as they became our modern elephants! We’re able to predict so accurately where fossils should be located that we’ve been able to pick sites to excavate based entirely on that, then find the fossils we expected! Predictive power is a huge part of a proven scientific theory.

We have molecular biology! Which proves that gene sequences among extremely different organisms are still related. The basic structure of all DNA on the planet is in the form of the double helix, and while we predictably have nearly all the same DNA as our primate cousins, over half of our DNA is also identical to banana plants!

Then we have embryology! When we compare embryos, not only are most animals nearly indistinguishable from each other, but we see holdover traits from our previous ancestors. The most compelling examples are the fact that human fetuses, and all other mammals, have gill slits as embryos. In mammals these develop into the eustachian tubes and the ear canal, while they continue to develop into gills in fish. Humans also have tails and yolk sacs as embryos! (Also look up lanugo in fetuses, very interesting and shared among other mammals)

Then there’s biochemistry! The basic chemistry that occurs in the cells of all life on earth is extremely similar, and shows that all modern organisms had a common ancestor. For example, all animals have enzymes and hormones. Trypsin is just one that’s found in everything from humans to sea sponges.

Then biogeography! The fact that groups of organisms that are related are all found near one another is more evidence for the validity of evolution. If life didn’t evolve, there’d be no reason for certain life to only exist on certain continents, or for species to be distributed in a pattern that reflects their genetic relationships with one another.

Modern observations are extremely helpful as well! This is why we now see antibiotic resistant strains of viruses, elephants becoming less likely to have tusks because of poaching, and the peppered moth becoming darker to better camouflage itself during the industrial revolution.

There are others, but I’ll end with comparative anatomy, which is one of the coolest, imo. (I’m probably biased because I collect bones lol)

x

When you compare the skeletal structures of vertebrates, we have extremely similar structures regardless of how wildly different our environments and behaviors are. The skeletal structure of a fin is hardly the best way for a fin to be designed, but because whales evolved from terrestrial mammals, they adapted using what they had. (we can also show the full evolution of cetaceans through the fossil record, which is very cool if you want to look it up.) This is true in non-mammals as well. An excellent example is the laryngeal nerve! In fish, the nerve makes a direct line from the brain down to the larynx, which is practical and to be expected. In animals that developed longer necks, however, we see that the nerve is trapped under the aortic arch!

x

The nerve had to evolve with us as we evolved from our aquatic ancestors, so our laryngeal nerve is forced to not go from our brain to our larynx, but rather to take a detour into our chest and around the aortic arch before doubling back! 

This is amazing in giraffes, where the nerve is nearly 15 feet long because it was forced to grow as the giraffe’s neck did, and now takes a detour down the entirety of the giraffe’s neck and around the heart before returning the the larynx, which was its destination.

x There are mountains more evidence, but it’d take a lifetime to cover it all.

  So you’ve got the way a theory works a little backwards; A theory only remains a theory when it can’t be disproven, and therefor is proven accurate. For a theory to be a theory, it has to be proven true. This is why we teach other theories, for example:

Plate tectonics theory: Plate tectonics is the theory that the outer rigid layer of the earth (the lithosphere) is divided into a couple of dozen “plates” that move around across the earth’s surface relative to each other, like slabs of ice on a lake.

Cell theory: In biology, cell theory is a scientific theory which describes the properties of cells. These cells are the basic unit of structure in all organisms and also the basic unit of reproduction. and

Atomic theory: In chemistry and physics, atomic theory is a scientific theory of the nature of matter, which states that matter is composed of discrete units called atoms.

In your tags you state that evolution is a theory, and therefor can’t be taught as fact. I’m sure you don’t believe that we shouldn’t teach about the existence of atoms and the function of cells because they’re ‘only theory’, so I hope this makes clearer why that notion is flawed. We accept all of these as true because we know factually that they are. 

The reason that evolution is given such intense scrutiny is because it disproves the notion that humans are a separate, superior entity to all other life on earth. This is a blow to some egos and contradicts some people’s religious beliefs. The discovery that Earth wasn’t the center of our solar system, much less the universe, was met with the same sort of scrutiny for the same reasons. The ever building proof that we’re only a tiny flicker of what has been and will be in the universe inspires strong reactions in people, for good or bad. Personally, I find it endlessly interesting!

Also, to clarify, attempting continually to disprove a theory wouldn’t necessarily be good science. When you have a theory like plate tectonics, trying to disprove it at this point really isn’t a good use of your time. We know how it works, we’ve seen it working, we can predict how it’ll work, we can prove this is how mountains formed and earthquakes happen and continents drift. Being critical and making sure things line up properly is good science, but trying to continuously disprove something we know to be fact is a waste of energy and resources.

Evolutionary theory is the basis of everything from vaccines and Glofish to agriculture, modern medicine and decoding DNA. It’s so ingrained in everything that we do, that it’s vital for people to understand how it works. 

If it were proven false tomorrow, it’d take a lot of other fields of science down with it. But most of us are understandably doubtful that it’ll happen, because it’s been undergoing this same intense scrutiny since Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859. That’s an awfully long time and a lot of scientific advances for there to have never been a single, solitary piece of evidence that disproved it.

To stay on theme, let’s end with a platybelodon family reunion.

Source

THANK YOU! It’s important to be aware that the scientific definition of a theory differs drastically from its colloquial usage.

This entire thread was a train ride of wonder. Props to @madsciences!

S-s-science :D

(Unfortunately, people who don’t want this to be true will just read it as Blah Blah Blah =/)

believe in your dreams

tweet of the century