mermaids

Discussion in 'Pseudoscience Archive' started by sifreak21, May 29, 2012.

  1. sifreak21 Valued Senior Member

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    Just watched the show.. the videos are sketchy at best but some of the evidence is can be varified. My question is do you think its possible part of pur ancestors took to the sea.. you can find the audio they show. There have been fish with odd spears found in them. So is it possible

    Plz if your going to post if it was here we would find it! That is complete bullshit in the last decade we have discovered hundredes of new species even 2 new species of whale. Yhe ocean covers 95% of the earth and we have descovered maybe 5% of it so if your going to post that dont bother to respond
     
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  3. Epictetus here & now Registered Senior Member

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    If the ocean really covered 95% of the earth,yes, someone would have noticed that, and yes, they might well have missed your mermaids. And what of the mermen!?

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    Mermaid Man​
     
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  5. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    As if we didn’t have enough probably fictitious but possibly real beings to worry about. All over basic cable, people are searching for Bigfoot, hunting down ghosts, looking for extraterrestrials. Now, it turns out, we need to add mermaids to the list.

    At least we do if you take “Mermaids: The Body Found” seriously. Which you shouldn’t. The film, Sunday night on Animal Planet and part of its Monster Week, is a fictional account built on a few strands of fact and made to look like an actual documentary. If you know those ground rules, it’s a rather enjoyable and intriguing piece of work, in the same vein as “The Blair Witch Project.”


    http://tv.nytimes.com/2012/05/26/arts/television/mermaids-the-body-found-on-animal-planet.html
     
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  7. MacGyver1968 Fixin' Shit that Ain't Broke Valued Senior Member

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    Please tell me you didn't think that was a real documentary...eh scifreak?
     
  8. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    It took approximately five million years for Pakicetus, the artiodactyl ancestor of the cetaceans, to evolve into Protocetus, the first mammal that could be called a primitive whale. And the cetaceans have had forty million years since then to evolve into the much better adapted species we have today. (The ancestors of the cetaceans were basically primitive hippopotamuses who swam all the way down the river to the sea, and rather liked it there.)

    It takes a lot of major changes to turn a land mammal into a fully marine mammal. (Not partially marine like seals, who sleep and give birth on land.)

    Going back five million years from today takes us to our own ancestral species that weren't even human yet. These were creatures that were still largely arboreal, barely adapted to living on the ground. There's no way that, in addition to completing their evolution into ground-dwelling primates, they could have made the additional, much more complex evolution into marine mammals. Just not enough time!

    The most recent primates that we can call proto-human lived two or three million years ago. It's even more impossible that one of those creatures evolved into a marine mammal in such a short timespan.

    The "Aquatic Ape Hypothesis" suggests that at some time in the last four or five million years our ancestors took a detour and became partially aquatic. Supposedly, they took up residence on the shore of a lake. This is said to have caused them to adapt into better swimmers: humans are more buoyant than other apes, we have those little vestigial webs between our fingers, and we still have a remnant of the Mammalian Diving Reflex that occasionally allows a baby who's been underwater for ten minutes to be pulled out no worse for the wear. Furthermore, warm-blooded air-breathing animals (mammals and birds) have a much higher-energy metabolism than cold-blooded and/or gill breathing animals (fish, amphibians, reptiles, crustaceans, cephalopods, etc.) and this typically allows them to utterly rule aquatic environments as the apex predator.

    Almost no one takes this hypothesis seriously (except here on SciForums

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    ) but even if it were true, these aquatic apes have a long way to go before they could become completely marine mammals who never have to return to shore, even to sleep and give birth.

    Thus the mermaid hypothesis qualifies as an extraordinary assertion. It violates everything we know about mammals returning to the sea. Therefore it invokes the Rule of Laplace:
    Extraordinary assertions must be supported by extraordinary evidence before anyone is obliged to treat them with respect.​
     
  9. Epictetus here & now Registered Senior Member

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    Okay, if not the in the past, perhaps in the future...

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