salyavin, thanks for giving me another reason to love Pangaea, well, even its demise as well as its existence. That footage looking down into Victoria Falls is awesome IMHO and elicits a pretty visceral response in me.
On the Dawkins topic: for me the core of the debate seems to lie in understanding the nature of cognitive dissonance or what you call weird disconnect or wooly thinking. I say let's hook up the ABofC to an fMRI and see what actually happens inside his skull when he expresses such a potentially explosive combo of belief and scientific knowledge. Yep, I'm making a joke and I admit that whenever you make such a point, inside my head I'm screaming gap, gap, gap! Maybe Dawkins doesn't have one. Let's hook him up to fMRI too (-: On the acupuncture topic: I've never done it. But I have done EFT tapping which is done on meridian points and I like it though can't say it "cured " me. OTOH, I am currently doing an energy modality, thank you Cardemaister, which involves no touch at all and with which I've had really good results. BTW, stay tuned for news concerning my jyotish chart rectification and if it turns out to be accurate. ________________________________ From: salyavin808 <fintlewoodle...@mail.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Saturday, June 22, 2013 9:59 AM Subject: [FairfieldLife] Did the Earth move for you? How the splitting up of a supercontinent 250million years ago led to the invention of sex Today we are familiar with our continents being scattered across the globe, but 250 million years ago they were part of one 'supercontinent'. Here TV geologist Professor Iain Stewart tells how the history of the 'supercontinent' is responsible for koalas being native only to Australia and llamas to only South America, but also, most importantly, how the 'supercontinent' brought about the invention of sex... We geologists are an odd bunch. We travel through lands that don't exist. The gateway to these imagined lands are the rocks underfoot. They are portals to the past. No need for a Tardis or fancy time machine - just a hand lens and a hammer can teleport us back to ancient geological times. The ancestral Earths we geologists inspect are very different from the familiar geography of the present. Today, our great land masses are scattered across the globe, but repeatedly in our planet's history they have clumped together as vast agglomerations - supercontinents. Supercontinents come together every 500 million years or so, as armadas of land assemble, weld, founder and disperse. The most recent great continental union occurred 250 million years ago. Geologists give it the name Pangaea, meaning 'all Earth', but it lasted only 100 million years. Its break-up would give us the scattered continents of today. But more than that, the rise and fall of Pangaea would shape our modern world in the most surprising ways. For a start, the continental couplings that first gave birth to Pangaea played a critical role in one of the most important evolutionary developments in the story of life - the invention of sexual intercourse. The evidence is preserved in the walls of one of the planet's geological wonders, the Grand Canyon. The strata in this gorge span more than a billion years of time, but it is the uppermost rock layers that track the slow death of an ancient ocean as continents coalesced. The grey muds of shallow seas, then coastal deltas pass up into the distinctive red sands of continental Pangaea. Among the windblown ripples are footprints which showed that some critters thrived in this new arid wasteland. Not amphibians, which up until this point had been the dominant animals on the planet. But reptiles. A clue to why the ancestors of alligators and crocodiles quickly adapted to the vast Pangaean desert lies in the way they have sex. Now, gator sex is pretty much like human sex; a tad more brutish and noisy perhaps, but with the same style of copulation - internal fertilisation. For amphibians, fertilisation is a messy and haphazard business involving eggs being released in rivers and ponds. In reptiles, the sperm is delivered inside the female direct to the ova. The embryos grow within protective shells filled with life-sustaining amniotic juices. Young reptiles didn't need external water to develop. The hard, impermeable egg was the revolution. It was the great Pangaean desert that kick-started an evolutionary chain reaction that would lead, eventually, to us. There's more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2343325/How-splitting-supercontinent-250million-years-ago-led-invention-sex.html
