quotes

An apeman is supposed to be dumb. One that smart, I can live without!

My little girl, Sadie, couldn't sleep last night and we sat up watching a show about the "Skunk Ape" of the South. She loved it! Well, today I happened across an article about skunk apes as an eastern Tennessee cultural phenomenon. Here's a quote:

The legend of Bigfoot, even as a symbol for a kind of unkempt redneck naturalism, can remind us of a simpler time, back when fantasy and reality had more of a symbiotic relationship. Back when tall tales had a tinge of morality woven into the yarn.

(via Instapundit)

From p. 48 of P. V. Tobias, Dart, Taung, and the Missing Link, Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg:

All fossil hominid discoveries up to 1925 had bearings on the evolution of established and unequivocal hominids; they had illustrated teh changes that had occurred along the way from incontrovertible earlier hominids (like Homo erectus of Java) to later hominids (like Neandertal and Cro-Magnon men). Australopithecus imported an entirely new dimension into the picture: it opened a window, not on to the evolution of established hominids, but on to human emergence -- the very roots of the family of hominids from non-hominid predecessors. It posed such questions as these: What are the features that distinguish hominids from other primate families? Which of the hallmarks of mankind were the first to appear and when did they arise? How were the different traits that characterize the human family related to one another? -- such traits as uprightness and bipedal locomotion, reduced canines, brain enlargement and structural re-arrangement, the human grasping and manipulating hand, human communication, human material culture including tool-making activities?

These were the kinds of questions which Dart's discovery and what he made of it compelled upon the world of science. Countless new areas of investigation were opened up -- even if the motivation was the felt need to repudiate Dart's claims! Dart's plunge into ancestral waters took the twentieth century to the very fountainhead where one could plumb the depths of human genesis.

From p. xviii-xix of the preface of Selection, by Graham Bell (Chapman and Hall, New York, 1997):

One might expect, for example, that in Britain, the cradle of evolutionary biology, natural selection might be accorded an honored and conspicuous position. But in the published curricula of the programs that students follow preparatory to the university, it is no more prominent than aquaculture....

The treatment of selection in textbooks usually follows more or less the same course. There is an introductory section on genetics, sometimes even outlining the chemical structure of DNA, followed by an account of Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, a page or two of population genetics, and of course the history of the peppered moth. The whole is illustrated by a picture of Darwin, looking stern, as well he might. This is a caricature, of course, but by no means an unrecognizable one. Thousands of students have left courses on evolution with the vague impression that selection is something to do with the Hardy-Weinberg law, and study for the examination by trying to remember which it is that adenine pairs with.