> Only fossils younger than 35,000 years show the same globular shape as present-day humans
and
> They used state-of-art statistics to analyze endocasts of various fossils and present-day humans.
There's nothing uncomfortable about this. They analyzed modern day humans and compared it to humans 35k years ago and found a statistical difference. "Uncomfortable" thoughts fall into the category of pseudoscience which has been long discredited - phrenology, essentially.
What you pointed out is a very astute answer, but comes from a creationist perspective rather than an evolutionary perspective. His main answer is:
> Firstly, fully reduced (oxidation state 0) metal has a high energetic cost to create in reduced form.
Basically, it takes a ton of energy to make steel. We are literally burning gigagallons of over a billions years worth of pressurized organic matter to have made all of the steel we have made in the past century and a half or so. We could make a super inaccurate but somewhat plausible estimation that we have used something like 150 million years worth of the entire earth's lifeforms at the time's dead bodies and converted that into 150 years worth of steel. So if my orders of magnitude are correct...it would be something like a million times more difficult energy-wise for an organisms to create steel from scratch than calcium-based hardened material.
That's assuming we have burned through 15% of a billion years worth of oil from bacteria, that 100% of the bacteria converted into oil and then converted directly into steel, and that there was only a billion years of bacteria to oil creation. I am sure these numbers are off, but maybe that means it's only 100,000 times or 10 million times more difficult for organisms to make steel rather than bones.
You are vastly overestimating the efficiency of turning life into oil, and vastly overestimating how much has gone into steel. The article even addresses the energy needed to reduce iron, and it's not that much. The high number of 60kJ/mole/reduction comes out at about 500 food calories per kg to reduce twice. Industrial molten iron production is only around 5000 food calories per kg. So it's really no big deal to produce a few kilograms per lifetime. (Mixing in other elements to get steel is a minor cost per kg.)
Well that's interesting, it seems we've got the next few centuries to start colonizing the solar system, or we're going to go extinct at this rate of usage... Who was it that made the theory, a next civilization may never happen because we used up all the easily available resources...
Creationism is not "just a metaphor for evolution." It is a word which covers a wide range of beliefs, include those who argue that each species was the result of a specific act of divine creation.
("In Creationism, special creation is a theological doctrine which states that the universe and all life in it originated in its present form by unconditional fiat or divine decree." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_creation )
> The absence of evidence for evolution does not, by itself, prove creation, of course; nevertheless, special creation is clearly the only alternative to evolution.
How can special creation - one type of creationism - be both a "metaphor for evolution" and "the only alternative to evolution"?
Obviously it can't, which is why it's incorrect to summarize creationism as you did.
Progressive creationism is more accepting of evolution, in that it says "microevolution" occurs but "macroevolution" does not. Even this cannot be seen as a metaphor for evolution, because it rejects part of evolution.
Catholics and Orthodox Christians who practice the faith both have prayers for the dead and to the Saints. Much of the liturgical calendar is also focused on commemorating the Saints.
Catholics + Orthodox also make up the vast majority of Christians worldwide.
I don't know what college or University you went to, but at the large public University I went (University of Minnesota) one literally receives no governmental authority and extremely little guidance dictating what path you should take whatsoever. Students are literally tiny specks of nothing helping to finance an ivory tower and they can do whatever they want, whenever they want, it's an extremely lax environment behaviorally speaking. There are no authority figures, no hierarchy, and professors do not know your name or care if you come to office hours, because you are one of 500 students in a class. There were classes that I never showed up to except for the first day and tests. People who manage to come across the financial means to get a degree are able to finish while others drop out over time - so I think it's seen as more of a financial stability indicator, which could perhaps be a surrogate metric for submissiveness but not necessarily as you purport. I slunked my way through an Electrical Engineering degree while running a landscaping business I had started in high school, because I wanted to build stuff rather than be a landscape dude for the rest of my life. I see nothing in the University world resembling the corporate politics world what so ever. Perhaps you attended Hogwarts?
You are trying to communicate a wonderful message with an extreme amount of vision to people who sling code and do devops all day. What many of them may hear is you are asking them to do a bunch of work. But if you think 10-20 years in the future, your server was running something like a Phoenix type environment, then scaling wouldn't be as much of an issue. There are ways that updates and other problems can be abstracted away in a non-cloud environment. There are ways of running lean technologies on commodity hardware for servers.
The bottleneck I see is bandwidth and government regulation of the electromagnetic spectrum. If Amit Pai gets his way then what you are talking about will be much more difficult.
He didn't directly say, "You have no idea what you're doing," he said, "Google [as a company] has no idea [in which new verticals] how to invest its money, other than advertising, [and therefore] Google is no longer a tech company, [in the new technology sense of the word]."
He goes on to say that an investment in Google is a bet against new search engine technologies. Eric Schmidt rebuts by saying that there have been many business process technological innovations within the company, such as Chrome, which represent Google being a tech company.
Something happened to me recently when I was attempting to browse a Gopher site via Firefox...I opened the site, and that site opened another tab to the same site, and so on recursively every ~200mS or so until my computer's RAM was saturated. I had to force terminate Firefox. It was funny because it reminded me of the type of malicious WaReZ that you would see in the 90s.
> Only fossils younger than 35,000 years show the same globular shape as present-day humans
and
> They used state-of-art statistics to analyze endocasts of various fossils and present-day humans.
There's nothing uncomfortable about this. They analyzed modern day humans and compared it to humans 35k years ago and found a statistical difference. "Uncomfortable" thoughts fall into the category of pseudoscience which has been long discredited - phrenology, essentially.