Why does who hate us?

Via Slate - Why Do They Hate Us? Strange answers lie in al-Qaida's writings.

Why do they hate us?

Americans have been asking this question for nearly six years now, and for six years President Bush and his accomplices have been offering the same tired response: "They hate us for our freedoms." With every passing year, that answer becomes less convincing.

Part of the problem has to do with the question itself. Who exactly are they? Are we referring to al-Qaida and its cohorts? Are we talking about Iran, Syria, and the other nation-states whose interests in the Middle East do not properly align with America's? Or perhaps we mean Hamas, Hezbollah, or the myriad religious nationalist organizations across the Muslim world that share neither the ideology nor the aspirations of global, transnational groups like al-Qaida, but that have nevertheless been dumped into the same category: them.

The whole article is an interesting read and takes an interesting perspective on the issue.

Near the end, the author alludes to a question:

Because, if we are truly locked in an ideological war, as the president keeps reminding us, then our greatest weapons are our words. And thus far, instead of fighting this war on our terms, we have been fighting it on al-Qaida's.

Why are we fighting on their terms? It is a very interesting question indeed.

"unlike fossils -- anthropological theory is seldom fixed in stone"

Via MSN - 2 Human Ancestors Probably Co-Existed

A fragment of upper jaw and a skull found in Africa are helping rewrite the textbook on how mankind came to be millions of years ago.

Gone is the step-wise theory of one ancient species, Homo habilis, dying off as another, Homo erectus, takes over -- to give rise later to modern-day Homo sapiens.

In its place are two fossils uncovered in Kenya that appear to show habilis and erectus lived together in close proximity for more than half a million years, about 1.5 million years ago.

The findings, from a paleontology team led by Meave Leakey, wife of renowned paleontologist Richard Leakey, were published Wednesday in the Aug. 9 issue of the journal Nature.

"If they are correct, that simple kind of tree -- where you went from habilis and erectus takes over -- clearly is no longer the case," said Jeffrey Laitman, director of the Center for Anatomy and Functional Morphology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, in New York City.

It's not surprising to me that such a find would come along and paleontologist would have to change their ideas. I studied anthropology and human evolution as my major area of study (within a social science degree program) as an undergraduate. Certainly this doesn't make me an expert, but did reveal to me all the guesswork that goes into creating theories about creatures that lived and things that happened millions of years ago. There is such limited information out there, or at least a very limited amount that has been unearthed and studied in a scientifically non-biased way. Human beings have a need to know, and researchers have a need to act like they know or have found indisputable proof of something.

As the article goes on to point out:

Still, Laitman cautioned that -- unlike fossils -- anthropological theory is seldom fixed in stone.

"These fossils don't come with name tags on them, and this is tough stuff to try and pinpoint," he said.

But the truth is, we will probably never know. For all we know, we are really the descendants of Golgafrinchan hairdressers.