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"Ida is intriguing because she has some characteristics of both branches, which suggests that she could be a transitional animal that gave rise to the anthropoids and, ultimately, to us. "How transitional it is," says Novacek, "is a matter of debate and further study. I expected that from the beginning. The ratio of vertebrate paleontologists to actual specimens is high, which makes for a lot of theorizing." A specimen like this will reduce the theorizing, but in the end it may not settle anything at all."
"But there's a big gap in the fossil record from this time period, Richmond noted. Researchers are unsure when and where the primate group that includes monkeys, apes, and humans split from the other group of primates that includes lemurs."
"Darwinius masillae is not a direct ancestor of both lemurs/lorises and apes/monkeys. It seems to lie on the ape/monkey branch, after the last common ancestor of both groups, and it may well be a direct ancestor of nothing at all that exists today."
1. Over 5,700 manuscripts of the Greek NT existing are referred to as Byzantine. Given the quantity, they are also referred to as the "majority".
2. Sometime in the 19th century two Egyptian manuscripts were found:
2.1 Sinaiticus - also called Aleph, named after the monastery location of the discovery
2.2 Vaticanus, also called B, and both these documents are commonly assumed to be dated around the 4th century.
2.3 These manuscripts are also referred to as the Alexandrian manuscripts. Hence, in these sort of discussions we often find there are two basic camps, Byzantine and Alexandrian.
3. Erasmus, in 1516, published a version of the NT using six of the Byzantine texts available to him at the time. From this comes the "Majority Text" translation label. (my note - actually, I believe this is considered as the Textus Receptus or Received Text of which 6 of the Majority texts were the source)
4. The Geneva Bible, Luther's translation into German, and the KJV translation trace back to the Erasmus translation.
5. Scholars from the Alexandrian position hold that the two Alexandrian manuscripts (Aleph and B) are the oldest and most reliable versions of the NT.
6. These scholars have published a Critical Text (CT) that drew heavily upon the Alexandrian manuscripts (Aleph and B). (my note - but is also substantiated by the discovery of and inclusion of even older manuscripts, as well as Byzantine or Majority texts.)
"The experts concluded Ida was not simply a lemur but a 'lemur monkey', displaying a mixture of both groups, and therefore putting her at the very branch of the human line."
At the height of what many called a revival, WORLD asked Bentley to talk about the healings, like Fogle's, and asked for a list of people who had been healed at the services. His associates told me Bentley was out of the country and a list could not be produced. But six weeks and more than a dozen requests later, the ministry eventually sent a list of 13 names. Fogle was No. 12 on the list, along with this note: "Healed through the Outpouring and is back to fishing."
That was on Aug. 8, 2008. There was just one problem. Two weeks earlier, on July 22, Christopher A. Fogle—according to his obituary in the Keokuk (Iowa) Daily Gate City, "left this life . . . after a courageous battle with cancer."
The opinions I have advanced . . . are the effect of the most clear and long-established conviction that the Bible and the Testament are impositions upon the world, that the fall of man, the account of Jesus Christ being the Son of God, and of his dying to appease the wrath of God, and of salvation, by that strange means, are all fabulous inventions, dishonorable to the wisdom and power of the Almighty; that the only true religion is Deism, by which I then meant, and mean now, the belief of one God, and an imitation of his moral character, or the practice of what are called moral virtues – and that it was upon this only (so far as religion is concerned) that I rested all my hopes of happiness hereafter. So say I now – and so help me God.
Dr. Sutherland said he had not yet found natural ways to generate the other two types of nucleotides found in RNA molecules, but synthesis of the first two was thought to be harder to achieve.
“My assumption is that we are here on this planet as a fundamental consequence of organic chemistry,” Dr. Sutherland said. “So it must be chemistry that wants to work.”
Dr. Joyce said he was so impressed by the role of phosphate that “this makes me think of myself not as a carbon-based life form but as a phosphate-based life form.”
Dr. Sutherland’s proposal has not convinced everyone. Dr. Robert Shapiro, a chemist at New York University, said the recipe “definitely does not meet my criteria for a plausible pathway to the RNA world.” He said that cyano-acetylene, one of Dr. Sutherland’s assumed starting materials, is quickly destroyed by other chemicals and its appearance in pure form on the early earth “could be considered a fantasy.”
Dr. Sutherland replied that the chemical is consumed fastest in the reaction he proposes, and that since it has been detected on Titan there is no reason it should not have been present on the early earth.
"Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven." (Matthew 16:17)