Posted on 03/18/2012 5:24:33 PM PDT by varmintman
Danny Venderamini's main site.
All Neanderthal images here courtesy of www.themandus.org
This thing starts off with Danny Vendramini figuring out something which should have been figured out 100 years ago i.e.. that (other than for the larger brain area) a Neanderthal skull is a near perfect match for ape profiles and a very bad match for one of ours:
That is consistent with what we know about Neanderthal DNA i.e. that it's no closer to ours than to an ape's. The funny thing is that Vendramini did not tell his artist to produce the world's scariest monster, the basic order was to start with Neanderthal skulls and skeletal bones and try to flesh them out using the assumption that what you had was a bipedal, carniverous ape with an 8" fur coat (like every other ice-age animal) and the big eyes which Neanderthal eye sockets suggest for nocturnal hunting, and possibly a slightly mean look on the thing's face. The fact that what turns up looks as bad as it does to us is probably, as Vendramini suggests, due to past bad experiences with it, sort of like the instinctive human reaction to spiders and snakes:
The 8" fur coat also explains why no Neanderthal needles have ever been found...
Without the fur coat:
Given the recent human population bottleneck, there is no way to believe that any modern human is related to this creature in any way other than for the possible re-use of low-level genetic components by an original designer or designers (the bottleneck says that if any human had any of this guy's genes we all would, not just Caucasians and East Asians), and likewise there is zero way to believe that any modern humans ever interbred with something like that. The image of the Neanderthal in popular culture and science turns out to be rubbish.
This thing was wiped out in some sort of a stone age world war and whoever wiped it out did the world a giant favor. Other than that, Danny Vendramini subscribes to a variant of the Gould/Eldredge flavor of evolutionism, nonetheless the scholarship involved in reconstructing what Neanderthals actually amounted to does not suffer from that.
“A reconstruction of what Neanderthals might have looked like would be a little more believable if the person doing the reconstruction demonstrated some knowledge of anatomy.”
Here are the reconstructionist’s qualifications, from his website:
“As an atheist and Darwinian scholar, Vendramini’s work is anchored in evidence based research and deduction, but ultimately it is his artistic imagination and scientific creativity that distinguishes his evolutionary theories.”
Look for an upcoming horror film.
This is a case of evoloserism not sufficing to totally ruin good logical thinking. Vendramini’s thesis as to how SQ hominids punk-eeked their way into Cro Magnonhood due to 50K years of suffering predation from Neanderthals is not believable. His reconstruction of the Neanderthal itself is totally logical and totally believable. This whole thing is another nail in the coffin of evolution/evoloserism.
That would be my advice to Vendramini, i.e. get together with Quentin Tarantino and start owning the next 20 years worth of horror flicks. I mean, I hope he (Vendramini) isn't sitting around waiting for evolosers to declare him some sort of a hero of the people or anything like that; gratitude isn't part of their psychological makeup and he's basically just reduced the value of over a hundred years worth of palaeontological scholarship to zero, in industry they call that "disruptive technology".
I saw him in Philly!
Careful, no wrestling moves, you’d lose, just punching and the main targets are that big nose and those big eyes.
I’m skilled in BJJ.
good luck...
“God said let us make man in our own image and in our own likeness”
Wellllll... what he really said is “let us make man in our own imagination and to each his own likeness.”
God has quite an imagination, let me tell you.
Somebody like Bill Kazmaier or Haloti Ngata might be ballpark for as strong as a halfway big male neanderthal, I don’t see how any of the guys your pics show would be. You’re dealing with something closer to a gorilla than a chimp in size and you’re dealing with something whose idea of a good time was killing a mammoth or woolly rhino or cave bear with just thrusting spears with stone tips.
I am watching this year's clutch of Decorah Eagles hatch. (Two down, one to go.) In particular, watching the mama eagle do her thing with the eggs, and knowing a bit about what is to come, I thought about the chicken and egg thing.
And what I thought is that the mama eagle (or chicken) doesn't just have to produce an egg and that's the end of it. It would seem she has to know about keeping the eggs warm and moving them around before they hatch and then she has to know how to feed the eaglets until they become mature enough to feed themselves; and she has to have a willing partner to bring her the food to prepare for the eaglets.
We're suppose to think that all of this just evolved to the way it is now, slowly over eons as starving eaglets waited for the right cosmic ray to come along.
ML/NJ
Yep. We think that because there is plenty of evidence from both the fossil record and from living examples of creatures who are somewhere in between complete caring for their young and complete disinterest beyond laying the eggs. Frogs happen to exist all along that spectrum, as do sharks and many other species.
If you want to continue this exchange, please humor me by telling me whether you believe "evolution" occurs slowly over many years or if instead you believe it occurs in a single generation.
ML/NJ
Yeah. I'll accept the "artistic imagination" and "creativity" parts, but the "scientific" doesn't belong. Honestly, vertical pupils on a primate???
Look for an upcoming horror film.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Vendramini's background is in theater, TV, and film. That would explain why his "Neanderthal" looks less like the person who might have lived in that skull and more like a model for Gollum from Lord of the Rings.
Evolution is a gradual process, and that is true of behaviors as well as physical features. Modern animals, with their modern behaviors evolved from other animals with similar behaviors. Eagles have exhibited maternal behavior for as long as they have existed. But ancestors of eagles many millions of years ago did not have that behavior. Many species of birds that exist now do not have that behavior.
If you want to continue this exchange, please humor me by telling me whether you believe "evolution" occurs slowly over many years or if instead you believe it occurs in a single generation.
That question is so ridiculous that I don't even know how to answer. Only if you believe in literal creation à la book of Genesis could you believe that animals suddenly appear, fully formed and with complex behaviors already programmed in their heads. Scientifically, we know that the form and function of organisms develop gradually over millions of years.
You see exDemMom, if only one of us has science degrees, it is I. So you may think my question is "ridiculous" possibly out of ignorance.
All animals have some characteristic number of chromosome pairs. We humans have 23 pairs. To be sure some people are born with 24 pairs, but so far as I am aware none ever has any grandchildren. So since I expect that you believe animals started out with just one chromosome pair you have to explain how we gradually got from 24 or 22 pairs or whatever to 23 pairs.
And I didn't say anything about Genesis. I don't pretend to know how we got here. I can only be certain that some explanations are not true, and one of those is the one attributed to Darwin.
ML/NJ
Tell me this and I might at least listen:
You're claiming that creatures which had down feathers for insulation evolved into flying birds (including eagles). Flight feathers however resemble down feathers in no way, shape, or manner. A flight feather has interlocking barblets and hooks for structural strength (to hold the bird up in the air) which a down feather doesn't begin to have. If flight feathers evolved via any sort of mutation, then ALL of the creatures feathers would change into flight feathers since the creature had down feathers all over his body. Nonetheless the flight feathers only exist in the precise areas in which the eagle needs them, i.e. his wings.
How did flight feathers evolve only where the flying bird needs them? Why doesn't the eagle have flight feathers all over his whole body??
ML/NJ
All animals have some characteristic number of chromosome pairs. We humans have 23 pairs. To be sure some people are born with 24 pairs, but so far as I am aware none ever has any grandchildren. So since I expect that you believe animals started out with just one chromosome pair you have to explain how we gradually got from 24 or 22 pairs or whatever to 23 pairs.
And I didn't say anything about Genesis. I don't pretend to know how we got here. I can only be certain that some explanations are not true, and one of those is the one attributed to Darwin.
Let's see--if you truly do not literally believe the creation story as presented in Genesis, then do you believe that life was seeded here by extraterrestrials? And if you don't believe that improbable story, either, then why not just accept the scientific evidence? There's a ton of it out there, from paleontology to astronomy to geology to biology of many disciplines. You don't have to look for supernatural explanations to explain the evidence that's all around.
And, pray tell, what exactly is your "science degree" in?
Your question *was* ridiculous, stunningly so. Asking a scientist if she believes that complex organisms can just pop into existence--please, tell me you understand that there is nothing scientific about such a scenario?
As for the chromosome number, that isn't as important as having the proper number of genes, and that those genes exist in pairs. Chromosome numbers can change by chromosome fusion or breakage--as long as the number of paired genes isn't altered, there is no reason a human with a broken chromosome can't survive--as long as both parts of the broken chromosome have a centromere, so the DNA replicates. The characteristic of having two small instead of one large chromosome would probably be lost fairly quickly--unless that person is a member of a small isolated population, in which case the trait could spread over the whole population. The same would also be true of a chromosome fusion event. What you're thinking of, the people with an extra chromosome, or "trisomy", is deleterious because some genes exist in triplicate instead of in pairs. When there are 3 of the gene, too much of the gene product is made, and that has a ripple effect over the entire metabolism of the cell (and thus, the organism). If a piece of a chromosome is deleted, then there is only one copy of some genes, and not enough of the gene product is made--also bad.
Had time to think about that thing about the flight feathers evolving from down feathers only on wings yet?
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