African Americans are the Descendants of Alien Abductees

Dery identified the parallels in "Black to the Future" as 'African Americans are, in a very real sense, the descendanmt of alien abductees," Dery writes. He compares the atrocities of racism experienced by blacks in the United States to "a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields intolerance frustrate their movement; official histories undo what has been done; and technology is too often brought to bear on black bodies (branding, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee ...

 Evolution Predicts the Flowering of Mustard Plants

Here’s another prediction: under prolonged drought, natural selection will lead to the evolution of plants that flower earlier than their ancestors. This is because, during a drought, soils dry out quickly after the rains. If you’re a plant that doesn’t flower and produce seeds quickly in a drought, you leave no descendants. Under normal weather conditions, on the other hand, it pays to delay flowering so that you can grow larger and produce even more seeds. This prediction was tested ...

 Birds to Reptiles

Because reptiles appear in the fossil record before birds, we can guess that the common ancestor of birds and reptiles was an ancient reptile, and would have looked like one. We now know that this common ancestor was a dinosaur. Its overall appearance would give few clues that it was indeed a “missing link”—that one lineage of descendants would later give rise to all modern birds, and the other to more dinosaurs. Truly birdlike traits, such as wings and a large breastbone for anchoring ...

 Darwin Considers Intermediaries Between Species

I have found it difficult, when looking at any two species, to avoid picturing to myself, forms directly intermediate between them. But this is a wholly false view; we should always look for forms intermediate between each species and a common but unknown progenitor; and the progenitor will generally have differed in some respects from all of its modified descendants.