Of course, said American might have wanted to say something a bit more intelligent and current about large-scale migratory gerrymandering operations by the ANC resulting in entire townships of people being moved to parts of the country where there’s no jobs or infrastructure to support them… But that’s another story.

Andrew.

i tried rational argument but to no avail….

The Zulus were certainly the original people in the north-east (Zulu-Natal) and the Khoi and San at the cape. The Xhosa are part of the Bantu group of people who were the first (that we know about) who ‘invaded’ the area.

Of course, the first ‘people’ would have been homo erectus, and before them homo neanderthalis, and before them…

Martin — does this mean you don’t count the Khoi, San, Xhosa, or Zulu as indigenous because they didn’t build towns??

Andrew.

The original populations were the Khoi and San who were displaced by the Xhosa. When the first white men arrived (Dutch) they found both the Xhosa and Khoi/San peoples, but they wouldn’t work for them, so they started importing slaves from Madagascar and India. Descendents from these are confusingly known as Cape Malays (despite there not being any Malaysian link). Some Dutch farmers (Boers) married the Cape Malays and they are known as ‘Coloured’

The British annexed Cape Town around 1800 and pushed into the interior, encountering the Zulus who lived in the north-east of what is now South Africa. Britain subsequently fought both the Zulus and Boers.

The make-up of South Africa is about 80% ‘Black’ (almost anyone with any Zulu or Xhosa ancestry), 10% ‘White’ (Afrikaners or other europeans), and 10% ‘Coloured’. The Khoi, San or Xhosa could claim to be the original population (although they were nomadic), but there’s hardly anyone left who can claim Khoi or San ancestry.

The first people to really settle were the Dutch, so your American friend wasn’t quite as daft as he sounds.

you have to remember that a lot of american’s don’t “get” sarcasm so i thought i’d double check

and you’d be dumbstruck by what some of them believe….

One once tried to convince me that racial segregation in south africa was ok because the blacks were trying to displace the original white population…. i was so gobsmacked i had trouble speaking!

“Re #98 “it’s original American English” please tell me your being sarcastic?”

I might read quite a lot into the fact that you even have to ask, along with a particular misspelling. I would have thought the answer to your question was transparently evident in the text – the actual words and phrases, and their order. Evidently not!
I’m very English. Is that a clue?

Don’t forget that one eyed kitten….the occasional mutation or birth defect can be pretty much discarded.

to challange the theory what you would really need would be a better theory along with something to put holes in the current one.

As i’ve said before i think that natural selection / evolution is the right explanation given the observed facts.

However, the new data would be reviewed, and it’s likely that the four-legged duckling/ dragon could be easily accommodated within the theory of evolution – a branch which has died out due to a number of factors.

In order to really stress the theory, you would need to challenge the basis of the theory – natural selection – although how you would do that I have no idea.

Alien breeding programmes, maybe?

jnex26

I never said that evolution does not work. Evolution can be observed and yes it can even be simulated. Simulations however are set up to allow it to happen.

But it is still a theory. All scientific propositions are theories untill they are disproved. They can still be accepted as correct whilst still being theories but a scientist should always be willing to question is additinal data comes in.

If we find a new fossil we can look at it, identify it if it’s a known species, classify it if it’s not and see where it fit’s in on the evolutionary chain. What happens one day if somebody turns up say a fossil of a dragon (plucking example out of the air) or to put it another way… a long necked, four legged creature with wings… no prior examples in the fossil record, no prior examples of 6 limbed creatures (talking vertebrate here)… time to re-examine the theory guys.

However i don;t think i’ve ever heard a theory saying creatures moved from true aquatic creatures to true land creatures in just a few generations.

The final part of the move might have happened relativly quickly but before that there would have been a lot of changes happening over a lot period of time to set that up.

Look at creatures that are aquatic today but have the capability to cross dry land as well. This can be seen several species… those that were better at it would have the chance to move to new pockets of habitation that were further away than the individuals that were not as good, this would give them an unexploited area to grow into…hence strenghtening that trait.

Indeed if a pool dry’s out and the closest water is further away than, say 90% of the individuals of a species can manage all of a sudden you have a breeding population that now contains only that top 10% of the species… do that a couple of times and your talking about a huge evolutionary pressure which creates these sudden leaps.

As for trying to disprove a deity on here… my comment was more that you can’t prove something does not exist… at least not until you can catagorically say you have located everything, on every dimension in the universe (in all universes according to some theories) plus have the knowledge of how every single thing within that interacts. Who know’s… one day science might come up with a device that can communicate with a deity?

I Uderstand your comments on religion, trying to disproove a deity on a weblog comment page would be pointless as there are many people with differing opinions.

However your evolution comment, It is more than just a theory microevolution is proven mathematically, in labs and in the real world and even in simulations.

The controvisty that is used to disrupt evolutionis macroevolution from my understanding (although not being biologist i could be wrong) is that macro evolution is huge leaps in biological makeup (EG. moving from water to land in just a few generations) This is what is being used as the flaw in evolution,

Just wanted to clear that up….

“I think that science and religion should not be mixed.”

Probably in the same way that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and “The X Files” should not be mixed.

“Also, the Bible is a 2000 year old record…”

Record? Collected writings, mostly in the epic heroic style of Homer, in ancient languages, from ancient superstitious tribes with a largely oral tradition of story telling, of uncertain provenance and veracity, interpreted, translated, edited, abridged, re-edited, re-interpreted, re-translated, re-edited, etcetera, etcetera, by a cast of hundreds if not thousands, into its original American English language. Must be reliable then.

#87:
As far as I’m aware, priests don’t “work” on the Sabbath; saying mass is a calling.

So what do the creationists propose as the mechanism to explain evolutionary changes that we have seen occurrring in the natural world? Presumably it’s god who is tinkering around with the population gene frequencies of all the bacteria, amoebas and beetles, though you have to ask why an omnipotent deity needs to bother – if you want a new species, why not just create it? Perhaps it just gives him something to do.

My apologies to all who felt I judged them too harshly, or came across to strongly, or tried too hard.

One has to learn things somewhere. While one person thinks of gravity as a law of physics, I think of gravity as one ove God’s laws called physics,gravity. As someone here said, “God’s hand in motion.” A person can understand evolution and still have faith in that unseen God. I see the kind of stuff shown in the video as an attempt to keep the masses in line. Lucky I was encouraged in science as well as in faith, art, history, gardening, cooking…well, you get the idea. I still feel..better to have some faith that includes “badscience” then no faith at all.