Humans Didn't Evolve from Monkeys

---

This very simple summary of human evolution outlines that humans did not evolve from monkeys, but in fact evolved with them from a common ancestor.

Mimic Octopus

Mimic Octopus (Thaumoctopus mimicus)

This strange creature might look a bit like a Lion Fish in this image, but it’s actually the Mimic Octopus (Thaumoctopus mimicus). As the name implies it confuses its enemies by mimicking other (poisonous or dangerous) sea creatures. It was discovered only some decades ago in 1998 off the coast of Indonesia. The mimic octopus is about 55 cm long and is brown with white in its normal form, although it is hard to determine what it really looks like because of its constant shape-shifting. The mimic octopus lives in a burrow on the bottom of the ocean but has also been found in muddy rivers in some tropical regions. Some of the creatures it’s been seen mimicing are sea snakes, brittle stars, jelly fish, sole fish, sting rays, sea anemones, lion fish, Japanese spider crabs, and sea shells.

The mimic octopus chooses the mimic forms it takes on carefully. When in danger the mimic octopus will most often choose a form which is a natural predator of the attacking creature. And the mimic form chosen by the octopus almost always is a common predator or creature for the habitat it’s in. This is important because if the attacking creature does not know the form the octopus mimics it will attack. How the octopus has evolved and adapted the way it has by mimicking other creatures, and knowing which creature to mimic, is really remarkable!

The Carina Nebula

Carina Nebula

Lying 7,500 light years from Earth, the Carina Nebula buzzes with activity. Countless stars are being born among the glowing clouds of dust and gas and, over several million years, this nebula – which was named after the keel of the mythical ship Argo – has created some of the most massive stars known to astronomers.

The nebula is one of the largest diffuse nebulae in our skies. Although it is some four times as large and even brighter than the famous Orion Nebula, the Carina Nebula is much less well known, due to its location far in the Southern Hemisphere. It was discovered by Nicolas Louis de Lacaille in 1751–52 from the Cape of Good Hope.

Leaf Insects

Leaf Insect

Leaf insects are members of the family Phylliidae, and are some of the most remarkable leaf mimics in the entire animal kingdom. They can be found from South Asia through Southeast Asia to Australia. They evolved a tremendously long time ago to camouflage themselves by taking on the appearance of a leaf. They do this so accurately that predators often aren't able to distinguish them from real leaves. In some species the edge of the leaf insect's body even has the appearance of bite marks. To further confuse predators, when the leaf insect walks, it rocks back and forth, to mimic a real leaf being blown by the wind. A 47 million year old fossil of Eophyllium messelensis, a prehistoric ancestor of Phylliidae, displays many of the same characteristics of modern leaf insects, indicating that this family has changed little over time, testimony to how effective their method of camouflage really is.

M16: Pillars of Creation

M16: Pillars of Creation
Image Credit: J. Hester, P. Scowen (ASU), HST, NASA

"It was one of the most famous images of the 1990s. This image, taken with the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995, shows evaporating gaseous globules (EGGs) emerging from pillars of molecular hydrogen gas and dust. The giant pillars are light years in length and are so dense that interior gas contracts gravitationally to form stars. At each pillars' end, the intense radiation of bright young stars causes low density material to boil away, leaving stellar nurseries of dense EGGs exposed. The Eagle Nebula, associated with the open star cluster M16, lies about 7000 light years away. The pillars of creation were imaged again in 2007 by the orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope in infrared light, leading to the conjecture that the pillars may already have been destroyed by a local supernova, but light from that event has yet to reach the Earth."

The Glasswing Butterfly

The Glasswing Butterfly

This breath-taking beauty is The Glasswing Butterfly. It thrives only in Central America. Its distribution ranges from the country of Panama up into parts of Mexico. They are common butterflies but difficult to see because of their transparent wings.

The wings have clear patches because they have, through the course of evolution, shed the microscopic scales that give butterflies their color. While many butterflies have evolved colors and patterns designed to ward of predators, this one has opted to make itself nearly invisible to it's hunters.

Flying Fish

It's a bird! It's a plane!

Nope. It's a fish! And it can fly. The record for a sustained glide by a flying fish is 1300 feet, at a speed of 42 miles per hour! They achieve flight by beating their tail 70 times a second and launching themselves out of the water, then ride the updrafts waves produce. They can fly up to 20 feet vertically into the air, and sometimes accidentally strand themselves on ships.

Those are impressive numbers for an animal that is generally designed to swim for a living, and can’t even breathe air.

Exocoetidae is a family of marine fish in the order Beloniformes of class Actinopterygii. Fish of this family are known as flying fish. There are about sixty-four species grouped in seven to nine genera. Flying fish use this fascinating arial display as a natural defense mechanism to evade predators.

Atheism a Non-Prophet Organization

There is no polite way to suggest to someone that they have devoted their life to a folly.

---

---

Dark Clouds in Aquila: Part of a dark expanse that splits the crowded plane of our Milky Way galaxy, the Aquila Rift arcs through the northern hemisphere's summer skies near bright star Altair and the Summer Triangle. In silhouette against the Milky Way's faint starlight, its dusty molecular clouds likely contain raw material to form hundreds of thousands of stars and astronomers eagerly search the clouds for telltale signs of star birth. This telescopic close-up looks toward the region at a fragmented Aquila dark cloud complex identified as LDN 673, stretching across a field of view slightly wider than the full moon. In the scene, visible indications of energetic outflows associated with young stars include the small red tinted nebulosity RNO 109 at top left and Herbig-Haro object HH32 above and right of center. The dark clouds in Aquila are estimated to be some 600 light-years away. At that distance, this field of view spans about 7 light-years.

Image Credit & Copyright: Adam Block, Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter, University of Arizona

---

Religion	vs.	Reality
	Embrace
Faith  Myths  Slavery		Evidence  Facts  Freedom

---

"When you live on a round planet, there's no choosing sides."

Dr Wayne Dyer

---

We'll let you teach creationism in our schools. When you let us teach evolution in your churches.

---

Atheism Isn't Scary -- Well, it may ne scary at first (it really is), but when you think about it, that means that all of this; our planet, our moon, our stars and the trillions of lifeforms crawling everywhere, are all brilliantly interconnected. Our home is the heroic survivor of a collision from the black, as evidenced by the Moon. Our star is a nuclear furnace, powering our weather, our plants, and ultimately our very bodies. We're brothers and sister to the other apes, cousins of the cats and dogs, distant relatives of the spiders and crocodiles, and all children of exploding stars, showering us with the ingredients for life.

We aren't just beings placed here in a tailor-made Universe. We are the Universe, brought alive through chance and power, of conflict and an endless string of love: our only purpose to huddle together on a sea-soaked rock hurtling through time and space as we live our lives and learn about ourselves and our origins.

That to me, is so much more beatiful than any god could ever make it. There's nothing that could compare. A godless Universe isn't scary. It's amazing.

---

Incidentally, disturbance from cosmic background radiation is something we have all experienced. Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive, and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe.

---

What can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.

---

"It's my view that the simplest explanation is, there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization. There is probably no heaven and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe and for that, I am extremely grateful."

- Stephen Hawking

---

"Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars are been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms - up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested - probably once belonged to Shakespeare.

A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name.

So we are all reincarnations - though short-lived ones. When we die our atoms will disassemble and move off to find new uses elsewhere - as part of a leaf or other human being or drop of dew.

- Bill Bryson - A Short History of Nearly Everything

---

Life is More Beautiful Without a God

We are all part of this beautiful & amazing Universe - made up of ancient stars and cosmic dust.

- Kat Blackheart

---

What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

---

Milky Way

We live on a hunk of rock and metal than circles a humdrum star that is one of 400 billions other stars that make up the Milky Way Galaxy which is one of billions of other galaxies which make up a universe which may be one of a very large number, perhaps an infinite number, of other universes. That is a perspective on human life and out culture that is well worth pondering.

---

Species of Fish with Hands

Pink Handfish

Using its fins to walk, rather than swim, along the ocean floor in an undated picture, the pink handfish is one of nine newly named species described in a recent scientific review of the handfish family.

Only four specimens of the elusive four-inch (ten-centimeter) pink handfish have ever been found, and all of those were collected from areas around the city of Hobart, on the Australian island of Tasmania.

Though no one has spotted a living pink handfish since 1999, it's taken till now for scientists to formally identify it as a unique species.

The new-species determinations were made based on a number of factors, including number of vertebrae and fin rays, coloration, the presence of scales and spines, and proportional body measurements, according to review author Daniel Gledhill of Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, or CSIRO.

All of the world's 14 known species of handfish are found only in shallow, coastal waters off southeastern Australia, the review notes.

Even among the previously known species, the fish are poorly studied, the review authors add, and little is known about their biology or behavior.

Spotted Handfish

The previously known spotted handfish, seen above in a file photo, is found on sandy sediments at the bottom of Tasmania's Derwent Estuary and adjoining bays. The fish use their fins to walk along the seabed, where they eat small invertebrates such as worms and crustaceans.

Perhaps the best studied species of the handfish family, the spotted handfish is listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature—meaning it's "facing an extremely high risk of extinction in the wild in the immediate future."

Handfish's slow movements and tendencies to stay within tightly confined habitats would seem to make the fish easy targets for predators. But researchers think handfish have a secret weapon: a toxic skin that kills most attackers.

Red Handfish

The red handfish, a previously known species, is listed as vulnerable in Australia, where it's found only around the southern island state of Tasmania.

Not much is known about handfish, because their populations are low and they are not often seen in the wild. But researchers suggest handfish lay fewer eggs than most other fish species, which means their long-term survival is a concern.

Handfish also tend to stay very close to home, so they don't adapt well to new places, said fish taxonomist Gledhill.

Ziebell's Handfish

Newly described as its own species, the Ziebell's handfish typically has yellow fins, as seen to the right in a file photo, but the species can also appear with a mottled purplish coloration. Ziebell's handfish is found only in small, isolated populations off Tasmania and is listed as vulnerable in Australia.

Today all handfish are found only around southeastern Australia. But about 50 million years ago the animals likely inhabited regions around the world, the CSIRO scientists note. Fossils of the curious creatures have been discovered in the Mediterranean, for example.



Source from National Geographics
Pictures: Nine Fish With "Hands" Found to Be New Species