Theweakeredge

And yet, even in the current literature about human origins that we do have, the end point of evolution is often depicted as a white man carrying a spear. This image not only eliminates our African heritage but also erases women and children from the picture. Because evolution is foundational knowledge, we need the story to be told in many different ways, by many different voices.

As we move forward to undo systemic racism in every aspect of business, society, academia and life, let’s be sure to do so in science education as well. Embracing humanity’s dark-skinned ancestors with love and respect is key to changing our relationship to the past, and to creating racial equity in the present. These ancient people made the rest of us possible. Opening our hearts to them and embracing them as heroic, fully human and worthy of our respect is part of the process of healing from our racist history.

"The global scientific community overwhelmingly accepts that all living humans are of African descent. Most scientific articles about our African origins focus on genetics. The part of the story that is not widely shared is about the creation of human culture. We are all descended genetically, and also culturally, from dark-skinned ancestors. Early humans from the African continent are the ones who first invented tools; the use of fire; language; and religion. These dark skinned early people laid down the foundation for human culture.  Considering the short life span of our early ancestors, these original innovators were probably also very young. No one who follows artistic trends will be surprised to learn that, from the beginning, human culture was essentially invented by teenagers. And by culture I don’t just mean the arts, I mean the whole shebang."

"I want to unmask the lie that evolution denial is about religion and recognize that at its core, it is a form of white supremacy that perpetuates segregation and violence against Black bodies. Under the guise of “religious freedom,” the legalistic wing of creationists loudly insists that their point of view deserves equal time in the classroom. Science education in the U.S. is constantly on the defensive against antievolution activists who want biblical stories to be taught as fact. In fact, the first wave of legal fights against evolution was supported by the Klan in the 1920s. Ever since then, entrenched racism and the ban on teaching evolution in the schools have gone hand in hand. In his piece, What We Get Wrong About the Evolution Debate, Adam Shapiro argues that “the history of American controversies over evolution has long been entangled with the history of American educational racism.”"

"At the heart of white evangelical creationism is the mythology of an unbroken white lineage that stretches back to a light-skinned Adam and Eve. In literal interpretations of the Christian Bible, white skin was created in God's image. Dark skin has a different, more problematic origin. As the biblical story goes, the curse or mark of Cain for killing his brother was a darkening of his descendants' skin. Historically, many congregations in the U.S. pointed to this story of Cain as evidence that Black skin was created as a punishment."

"Many interpreters have questioned the “mark” placed on Cain after he kills his brother Abel. The notion of the “mark of Cain” as dark skin is a familiar interpretive tradition. Less well known are interpretations that treat the mark as white skin. This article traces how Black interpreters connect the “mark of Cain,” white skin, and White violence."

"American Protestant racial beliefs on the mark of Cain
At some point after the start of the slave trade in the United States, many[citation needed] Protestant denominations began teaching the belief that the mark of Cain was a dark skin tone in an attempt to justify their actions, although early descriptions of Romani as "descendants of Cain" written by Franciscan friar Symon Semeonis suggest that this belief had existed for some time. Protestant preachers wrote exegetical analyses of the curse, with the assumption that it was dark skin.[19]"

The Black-white wealth gap today is a continuation of decades-long trends in wealth inequality, as shown in figure 1. Over the past 30 years, the median wealth of white households has consistently dwarfed that of Black households—ranging from a gap of $106,900 in 1992 to $185,400 in 2007 (both adjusted for inflation to 2019 dollars). Furthermore:

• In the second quarter of 2020, white households—who account for 60 percent of the U.S. population—held 84 percent ($94 trillion) of total household wealth in the U.S.
  
• Comparatively, Black households—who account for 13.4 percent of the U.S. population—held just 4 percent ($4.6 trillion) of total household wealth.
  

By some estimates bequests and transfers account for at least half of aggregate wealth (Gale and Scholz 1994), have recently averaged 3 percent of total household disposable personal income (Feiveson and Sabelhaus 2018), and account for more of the racial wealth gap than any other demographic or socioeconomic indicator (Hamilton and Darrity 2010).8 

They are also more likely to have a parent with a college degree. Since higher levels of education are associated with higher levels of wealth (see, for example, the Bulletin article), this association suggests White and other families are likely to have wealthier parents than Black or Hispanic families.

As a scientific theory, however, which facts does evolutionary theory explain? One pivotal example is the succession in the fossil record. This evolution, namely, macroevolution, explains the larger evolutionary picture that is the appearance of the greater groups, such as the evolution of mammals, insects, and plants. Fossilized mammals are easily recognized, as they have distinct types of teeth, such as molars, canines, and incisors. These vertebrates are also very likely to fossilize on account of their rigid teeth and hard cranium. If mammals are so easily fossilized, how can we explain a rich fossil record full of vertebrates and invertebrates with no mammalian fossil before 300 million years ago?

Similarly, if we dig deeper still, disclosing 500 million years old layers, we find no hard skeleton vertebrates but plenty of fossilized invertebrates in a boost of diversity that we call the Cambrian Explosion. There are no vertebrates in this explosion because vertebrates appear in a much later explosion. Digging even deeper, to 600 million years old records, we find strata with soft-bodied Ediacaran animals but no hard-shelled invertebrates and no vertebrates. In one billion years old strata, we find only single-celled organisms.

How can we find, in old strata, many single celled organisms but not a single mammalian tooth? The only reasonable explanation for these facts is that 400 million years ago, mammals had not yet evolved; 500 million years ago, vertebrates had not yet evolved; 600 million years ago, hard-shelled invertebrates had not yet evolved; and one billion years ago,

multicellular life had not yet evolved. Smaller local successions are also observable in the fossil record; such as the beautiful strings of intermediate fossils that include amphibians (Kustchera and Elliot, 2013), birds, whales (Thewissen, 2009), horses, and humans. These successions in the fossil record are the most obvious evidence to macroevolution (Figure 2). In fact, the entire fossil record is a set of millions of intermediate fossils that provide solid evidence of how macroevolution worked in the past billion years.

Scientists also have gained an understanding of the processes by which new species originate. A new species is one in which the individuals cannot mate and produce viable descendants with individuals of a preexisting species. The split of one species into two often starts because a group of individuals becomes geographically separated from the rest. This is particularly apparent in distant remote islands, such as the Galápagos and the Hawaiian archipelago, whose great distance from the Americas and Asia means that arriving colonizers will have little or no opportunity to mate with individuals remaining on those continents. Mountains, rivers, lakes, and other natural barriers also account for geographic separation between populations that once belonged to the same species.

Once isolated, geographically separated groups of individuals become genetically differentiated as a consequence of mutation and other processes, including natural selection. The origin of a species is often a gradual process, so that at first the reproductive isolation between separated groups of organisms is only partial, but it eventually becomes complete. Scientists pay special attention to these intermediate situations, because they help to reconstruct the details of the process and to identify particular genes or sets of genes that account for the reproductive isolation between species.

A particularly compelling example of speciation involves the 13 species of finches studied by Darwin on the Galápagos Islands, now known as Darwin's finches. The ancestors of these finches appear to have immigrated from the South American mainland to the Galápagos. Today the different species of finches on the island have distinct habitats, diets, and behaviors, but the mechanisms involved in speciation continue to operate. A research group led by Peter and Rosemary Grant of Princeton University has shown that a single year of drought on the islands can drive evolutionary changes in the finches. Drought diminishes supplies of easily cracked nuts but permits the survival of plants that produce larger, tougher nuts. Droughts thus favor birds with strong, wide beaks that can break these tougher seeds, producing populations of birds with these traits. The Grants have estimated that if droughts occur about once every 10 years on the islands, a new species of finch might arise in only about 200 years.

The historical nature of macroevolutionary study involves inference from fossils and DNA rather than direct observation. Yet in the historical sciences (which include astronomy, geology and archaeology, as well as evolutionary biology), hypotheses can still be tested by checking whether they accord with physical evidence and whether they lead to verifiable predictions about future discoveries. For instance, evolution implies that between the earliest known ancestors of humans (roughly five million years old) and the appearance of anatomically modern humans (about 200,000 years ago), one should find a succession of hominin creatures with features progressively less apelike and more modern, which is indeed what the fossil record shows. But one should not—and does not—find modern human fossils embedded in strata from the Jurassic period (65 million years ago). Evolutionary biology routinely makes predictions far more refined and precise than this, and researchers test them constantly.

Evolution could be disproved in other ways, too. If we could document the spontaneous generation of just one complex life-form from inanimate matter, then at least a few creatures seen in the fossil record might have originated this way. If superintelligent aliens appeared and claimed credit for creating life on Earth (or even particular species), the purely evolutionary explanation would be cast in doubt. But no one has yet produced such evidence.

The evolutionary, structural, and biochemical information implicates segment 85-119 as of special functional significance. The physicochemical properties and finer structural details of its conserved residues now point to a more specific function for this segment. Fourteen of its 15 conserved positions are fixed for charged and strongly hydrophobic residues (Figure 3). This mix of charged and hydrophobic residues, with their outwardly projecting side chains, predicts a second binding site for Leptin-protein interactions, which is separate from that for its receptor (Figure 2; Benner and Gerloff 1991). At least some of the six positions with NS substitutions in the stem hominoid, which are directly or indirectly related to segment 85-119, may then contribute new hydrophobic, charged, and smaller residues that may alter the secondary structure and specific binding properties of this second interaction site. For example, the conserved G118 of hominoids permits a more pronounced turn at the N terminus of this segment relative to that predicted for L118 of the other mammals. In these ways, segment 85-119 may underlie the functional differences between human and other nonhominoid Leptins (e.g., why this hormone is central to energy expenditure in mice, but apparently not in us; Mantzoros 1999; Hofbauer and Huppertz 2002).

Wealth is primarily built through home value and inheritance - typically called generational wealth

Wealth is obtained through the stock market primarily, at least for me.  Very little wealth is built through inheritance out of the millions one earns in their lifetime and I don't get to collect my inheritance until both of my parents die, which by the time that happens, I would be in my 50s and my career would be pretty established.

So then, today, those people do less well in school because of generational poverty, then able to get less well-paying jobs - so you know - for the people who actually need those jobs need to be paid the minimum wage.

Your assuming a significant portion of minorities work minimum wage jobs.  Only 1.6 million workers work minimum wage jobs and the majority are either in highschool or in college (Characteristics of minimum wage workers, 2019 : BLS Reports: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics) so they don't need the money as much as someone who is done with school.  There are about 100 million minorities in the US.  If every single adult working a minimum wage job was a minority (this isn't the case), then around 1% of minorities work minimum wage jobs.  Since that's not the case, the proportion of minorities that work minimum wage jobs is even less.

Regardless, the principle that the lowest we can pay is so low beneath the living wage is disgusting and a country that supposedly cares for it's people should be ashamed for ever considering having a 7.50 minimum wage. 

You didn't address my alternative to the minimum wage, which was any person perminately out of college that works a minimum wage job gets hooked up to a better paying job that isn't tied to a government mandated salary, which both gets the government out of the situation and allows the worker to earn a higher salary by doing more valuable work.

How many of you have come from a religious background? And what was this background? And what convinced you to become an atheist? 

Was it a journey or an epiphany? Did it cause problems with your family or partner at the time? 

And are you still connected somehow with the people from your old religious affiliation? 

First of all i would like to say something the estimate that historians agree on is 5.4 to 6 million deaths. do not try and say that my debate title said 6mil and didnt specify. anyways, when the nazis were about to lose the war they tried covering up as much evidence as they could-----https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/combating-holocaust-denial-evidence-of-the-holocaust-presented-at-nuremberg,  https://www.history.com/news/how-the-nazis-tried-to-cover-up-their-crimes-at-auschwitz

here is a good article on how historians and researchers estimate how many people died in the holocaust. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution