By the Gods, I think you are right!
Abandon thread!! All hands, abandon thread!
Posted on 03/24/2006 11:47:46 AM PST by The_Victor
ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - A hominid skull discovered in Ethiopia could fill the gap in the search for the origins of the human race, a scientist said on Friday.
The cranium, found near the city of Gawis, 500 km (300 miles) southeast of the capital Addis Ababa, is estimated to be 200,000 to 500,000 years old.
The skull appeared "to be intermediate between the earlier Homo erectus and the later Homo sapiens," Sileshi Semaw, an Ethiopian research scientist at the Stone Age Institute at Indiana University, told a news conference in Addis Ababa.
It was discovered two months ago in a small gully at the Gawis river drainage basin in Ethiopia's Afar region, southeast of the capital.
Sileshi said significant archaeological collections of stone tools and numerous fossil animals were also found at Gawis.
"(It) opens a window into an intriguing and important period in the development of modern humans," Sileshi said.
Over the last 50 years, Ethiopia has been a hot bed for archaeological discoveries.
Hadar, located near Gawis, is where in 1974 U.S. scientist Donald Johnson found the 3.2 million year old remains of "Lucy," described by scientists as one of the greatest archaeological discoveries in the world.
Lucy is Ethiopia's world-acclaimed archaeological find. The discovery of the almost complete hominid skeleton was a landmark in the search for the origins of humanity.
On the shores of what was formerly a lake in 1967, two Homo sapien skulls dating back 195,000 years were unearthed. The discovery pushed back the known date of mankind, suggesting that modern man and his older precursor existed side by side.
Sileshi said while different from a modern human, the braincase, upper face and jaw of the cranium have unmistakeable anatomical evidence that belong to human ancestry.
"The Gawis cranium provides us with the opportunity to look at the face of one of our ancestors," he added.
A rock with teeth? I mean I've heard of tumors having teeth...(gag)
Evolution in an ongoing and never ending process. So, the answer to your questions is, yes!
“Grant’s consumption (of cigars) zoomed to 20 stogies a day, a habit he continued until doctors ordered him to quit in 1884. He died of throat cancer in 1885, after losing 70 of his 200 pounds and becoming addicted to cocaine to ease the pain.”
- “A Stogie Warning, chic-and dangerous,” Newsweek, December 2, 1996, p. 75.Link
By the Gods, I think you are right!
Abandon thread!! All hands, abandon thread!
You're the one playing games with terms. Humans are apes and aren't likely to magically turn into anything else anytime soon no matter how creative you get with your terms.
Vegetables know what season it is.
"Natural childbirth" seems on a par with "natural root canal."
OK, you can stop posting now, we understand fully exactly where you are coming from... lol!!!
All indications are that the variation within the genome, that range of alleles (possible genes at the same place on the DNA sequence) within a population, is produced without any intelligent tinkering. New alleles are produced mainly by errors during meiosis (when the gametes (germ cells (sperm and the ovum)) are produced) commonly called mutations. Mutations take quite a number of forms, some are deleterious, some advantageous but the vast majority are neutral. Many of those neutral mutations can become deleterious or beneficial if the environment changes. In this context, the environment is not just the weather, or the type of food available but includes the number and type of competing animals outside the population but in the physical area, and those competitors in the population as well as any intra-species sexual/kin preferences. In the factors listed above (normally part of selection), there is no indication of any outside intelligence even though selection can be said to direct evolutionary change.
"Do not the physical laws say that every thing is breaking down on evolving?
Simple answer - No.
Complex answer - There has been a number of people who claim that the 2LoT (2nd Law of Thermodynamics) allows only degradation and loss of information causing organisms to 'wind down' rather than improve. This argument is generally based on a misapplication of 'entropy'- the diffusion of energy from a high energy system to a lower energy environment - to biological organisms. This diffusion is sometimes considered a decrease in order, although it is probabilistic in that statistically it is possible for order to increase.
Within a system where entropy is increasing, there can exist pockets of decreased entropy.
Another way of viewing entropy (and I know I will be corrected by the learned physicists here) is as energy that is no longer available for a system to use to produce work.
In our solar system, during the manufacture of helium (fusion) where a more complex atom is formed by combining two simpler atoms, the sun releases energy previously stored in the atomic bonds of hydrogen. This energy once radiated out into space is obviously no longer available to be used by the sun to produce work, thus the entropy of the system is increased. The sun will eventually, through the production of more and more complex atoms, run out of energy. It is, in your parlance, breaking down.
However all that energy that is no longer available for the sun to use can be used by lower energy level systems in the environment. In this case it is the Earth which is free to use or store that waste energy (at least from the sun's point of view) it receives from the sun.
Some of that energy is captured by the bacteria (called chloroplasts )living inside the cells of plants, which store a part of the received energy in the chemical bonds of complex molecules such as carbohydrates. That energy used in the work performed to store energy is released by the plants as waste O2. It's obvious that more energy must be received by the plant than it stores since the storage of energy takes energy. Some of this stored energy is used by the plant to survive and reproduce. If no other organism makes use of the energy stored by the plant in chemical bonds, that energy is released, and/or deposited on the earth as C (carbon) when the plant dies, thereby contributing to the increase of over all entropy.
Animals, who need energy to survive and reproduce, eat the plants and use that energy stored in the plants to manufacture their own complex molecules such as proteins and lipids, thus storing some of the energy, while radiating the rest of the energy as heat, dead cells and fecal matter. Remember from the post by ahayes that some DNA codes for proteins. Those particular proteins are used ultimately to produce more animals. Again, the user of energy must take in more energy than it stores. It uses up energy to store energy. It takes a fair bit of plant matter to sustain an animal so some animals have found a source of high density energy called protein. They eat other animals.
Because energy directly, or indirectly, derived from plants that can be used to perform work such as creating gametes, animals can easily add length and content to their genes. As long as energy is available to the parent organism, the child organism is not going to be 'less 'than the parent. (Assuming no deleterious mutation). When an organism dies, much of its stored energy is released, thus increasing entropy, and the rest is stored in complex molecules for use by other organisms, including plants. Eventually all stored energy is released as heat radiated into space after a few possible detours.
Increased information (which is really a red herring, but we can go into that at another time) is more than possible without breaking, bending, or otherwise mutilating the 2LoT through a long line of energy storage and use, starting with the sun and ending with its eventual radiation out into space. Through the use of stored energy, evolution can not only preserve current species but produce new, novel species.
Entropy is increased as it should, and work is performed to keep biological organisms from 'breaking down'.
Yes. The record is in the fossils we dig up. The dates are from numerous well verified methods.
Why use an obvious fake to support the idea that the evidence cannot be made to fit the assumptions? It would not be easy to work a combination of ape and human bones into anything, although the fraud may have enjoyed wide support for a time.
What specific bone shapes would lead one to conclude that skull is not that of a human, but of something quasi-human? What is the range of bone shapes in our current population? How does its diversity compare to all the bone shapes found throughout history? Can the shape of a bone found buried in Ethiopia match the shape of a bone residing in the body of the bum crouching at the corner of 5th and Bergen a Newark at 2:37 this afternoon?
When I say it is "easy," what I mean is the inclination to interpret morphological similarities as historic continuities, or to arrange the findings in a manner that shows a progression. We are born into progressions, so it would be natural to assume progressions govern all things.
Some people don't believe in mathematics. Others just don't count.
Note that a submarine may or may not be a fish under these terms. If an airplane can fly, can a submarine swim?
A better way to put it: When you don't have the intellectual fortitude to debate, throw out the call to "abandon thread." Fortunately there are some on the side of evolutionism who have the intellectual fortitude to stick around. Please don't chastise them for lack of knee pads.
The molecules in your head are about to stumble upon a quaint reality. You're behind.
No, actually that isn't true. Until the mid-twenties/early thirties a human produces more new cells than he loses in dead cells. Biological organisms are not rocks which continually break down; they self repair, increase in size and reproduce.
On a population basis, which is what evolution is all about, each new generation brings a renewal.
What are the differences?
Fester,
I have neither the time nor the inclination to manually transcribe pages 37 through 93 of the book i metioned earlier.
I will simply ask you to admit the fact that there are indeed sufficient landmark features and measurements and indices and ratios on the human skull to identify age, gender, and race with over 99% certainty... and then ask you to use your head for a moment and consider that these same landmarks and measurements and indices and ratios allow for accurate typing of hominid skulls by morpholgical deviation from the human benchmarks.
Well, there's a huge difference.;->
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