Tuesday, June 08, 2010

Our Family Tree

In the last couple of years, Vicki and I have become big fans of the television program, Nova, on PBS. In fact, with Lost now complete, this eclectic Science show may just be my current fave on the boob tube. I've found that, the more I learn about Science, the more everything in the universe makes sense to me. A decade ago, I probably would have said that we would never know the answers to any of the big questions in life, so why bother even worrying or wondering about them? Now I feel like most of what we really need to know is already within our grasp or else infer-able from what we've learned so far.

Anyway, the latest dollop of goodness from Nova is this interactive Who's Who in Human Evolution toy. If you're always having trouble remembering exactly how many thousands of years ago Neanderthals are thought to have died off, this is just the site for you! (Answer: approx 30,000 years ago.) I hope that we're on the cusp of having the first generation who just accept evolution as fact, like previous generations learned to replace the Earth with the Sun at the centre of our solar system after thousands of years of misinformation.

1 comment:

Vicki said...

Or replace the Roman Gods like Jupiter and Mars with the one god of today? I wonder what people of the future will think of our quaint belief in one god? Perhaps it will just be something to learn in school like the Greek and Roman gods.