126 votes

Did hominids and non-avian dinosaurs ever coexist?

No. Non-avian dinosaurs were extinct about 65 million years ago, as the most recent dinosaur bone was directly dated as being 64.8 ± 0.9 Ma old. The second dinosaur bone sample from Paleocene ...
  • 78.3k
66 votes
Accepted

Is the discovery of tuff amongst dinosaur fossils in Utah incompatible with scientific consensus about dating of the fossils?

Has tuff found amongst the deposits at the Dinosaur National Monument? Yes. The most famous section of the rocks in Morrison Formation in Dinosaur National Monument, the Brushy Basin Member, is chock ...
  • 14.3k
59 votes
Accepted

Would life not exist on Earth if it was one kilometer closer to, or farther from, the sun?

Their claim is incorrect. On an astronomical scale, one kilometer is a very small value. In fact, Earth's orbit regularly varies by far more than 1km. According to the NASA's Solar System Exploration ...
  • 702
47 votes

Would life not exist on Earth if it was one kilometer closer to, or farther from, the sun?

The Goldilocks zone ("Circumstellar habitable zone") is a real thing: In astronomy and astrobiology, the circumstellar habitable zone (CHZ), or simply the habitable zone, colloquially known ...
  • 7,309
27 votes
Accepted

Have coelacanth fossils younger than 65 million years been found?

According to a Nature article from 1998 this is true (or at least, was in 1998). Coelacanths were known for decades, but only as fossils. They appeared in the fossil record around 370 million years ...
  • 3,025
26 votes
Accepted

Did Patrick Matthew came up with the theory of natural selection before Charles Darwin?

Yes, Patrick Matthew recognized and published the basics of evolution by natural selection prior to Darwin. It is also well-known that Alfred Russell Wallace independently developed the same theory ...
  • 7,759
24 votes
Accepted

Are humans descended from chimp-pig hybrids?

The hypothesis that humans descended from chimp-pig hybrids can be denied on the following points. Hybrids between different orders of mammals are very rare due to the genetic differences and ...
  • 22.6k
21 votes

Did hominids and non-avian dinosaurs ever coexist?

There is a simple factual response based on the fossil record, "No. Dinosaurs and people did not coexist" but this does not really answer the question "did humans draw dinosaurs?" -- with the implicit ...
  • 1,513
17 votes

Are the outcomes of evolution too improbable to have occurred in the Earth's lifetime?

This is a fairly common objection to evolution, that appears in various forms. There is a good answer here. It can be generalised to this: Given a biological structure made up of a specific ...
  • 294
14 votes

Did Chinese philosopher "Tson Tse" anticipate key ideas of evolution 2500 years ago?

In A Source Book on Chinese Philosophy, Wing-Tsit Chan remarks of Chuang Tzu (page 177), All this is a direct product of his concept of Nature. To him, Nature is not only spontaneity but nature in ...
  • 11.1k
14 votes
Accepted

Are Caesarian births having an impact on human evolution?

The BBC article is based on this recent paper: Cliff-edge model of obstetric selection in humans that was published in October 26, 2016. It is a bit too soon to see what post-publication peer-review ...
  • 138k
13 votes

Were humans placed on Earth by aliens?

Ellis Silver takes a number of features of human physiology, claims they are inexplicable by evolution, and comes to the extreme conclusion that aliens placed humans on Earth. However, each of the ...
  • 138k
11 votes

Are the outcomes of evolution too improbable to have occurred in the Earth's lifetime?

Given the proposed mechanism of evolution (rather than the creationist parody of it) there has been plenty of time. When Darwin was proposing his theory of evolution and long before the molecular ...
  • 55.6k
10 votes

Are most christians evolutionists and most evolutionists christian?

Yes, on both counts. This is based on a newer version of the same Pew survey DavePhD used (his was from 2007, mine from 2014). The new version directly provides numbers for the first question rather ...
  • 1,171
9 votes
Accepted

Are most christians evolutionists and most evolutionists christian?

This varies by country. For international information see European Christians are at the forefront in accepting evolution: results from an internet-based survey Evolution & Development, 12 (6), ...
  • 102k
8 votes
Accepted

Is the level of support for evolution decreasing in Europe?

There was a very detailed evolution/creation survey done in September 2010 across numerous counties. This is only one time point, but by comparing the views of younger people to older people in ...
  • 102k
8 votes

Are humans descended from chimp-pig hybrids?

There is evidence of the opposite. Here are some comprehensive references that based on genetic evidence show how actual human evolution probably happened. Some basics: Pääbo, 2003. Stringer, 2012 ...
6 votes

Does the Catholic church accept evolution?

More recently than the other answers Pope Francis gave an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on 27 October 2014 ... When we read the account of Creation in Genesis we risk imagining that ...
  • 671
5 votes
Accepted

Are new genes created through duplication?

Gene duplication is a very important way of creating new genes and hence it helps organisms to evolve. Once a gene is duplicated, the "spare" copy of the gene is effectively not needed by the cell, ...
  • 5,858
5 votes
Accepted

Is any money being spent on hunt for intelligent aliens or is it only for a habitable planet?

Yes, there's some alien hunting going on. Detection Well, yes, money is being spent to search for intelligent aliens. The obvious case is SETI, the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence. Quoting ...
  • 11.1k
5 votes

Are there no identical human bones found in any pre human fossil records?

No. The percentage of hominid bones from the human fossil record for 1.0 to 3.8 million years ago is very sparse, since upto 2001 only 243 specimens are known. From about 75 known individuals, some ...
  • 22.6k
5 votes

Are most people right handed, because they had to protect their heart?

No. Right-handedness appears to be caused by asymmetries in the brain, that arose before humans did. Because of their shared neuroanatomy with humans, most chimps are also right handed. In a second ...
4 votes
Accepted

Did every signer of the Declaration of independence (US) said they believed that men and women were created?

Yes. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights The Declaration of Independence
  • 102k
3 votes

Did hominids and non-avian dinosaurs ever coexist?

Hominidae Temporal range: Miocene–present, 17 – 0 Mya Dinosaur Temporal range: Late Triassic–Present, 233.23 – 0 Mya all non-avian dinosaurs, estimated to have been 628-1078 species, as well as many ...
  • 394
3 votes

Did modern birds exist during the Cretaceous period?

Yes. Wikipedia's article Modern birds says, It is generally agreed that the Neornithes evolved in the Cretaceous Period and that the split between the Palaeognathae and Neognathae, and then the ...
  • 26.4k
1 vote

Are Caesarian births having an impact on human evolution?

I got hung up on your phrase "This is only a couple of generations, which I do not think is enough for evolutionary effects to present themselves." You seem to think that an evolutionary effect ...
  • 127
1 vote

Are red-heads going extinct?

Some phenotypes caused by recessive genes occur in sub-populations that tend to reproduce with other members of the sub-population. For example, Tay-Sachs disease is a recessive genetic disease ...
  • 38.7k

Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible