Posted on 12/03/2003 4:53:26 PM PST by Pharmboy
LONDON (Reuters) - Fossils discovered in Ethiopia's highlands are a missing piece in the puzzle of how African mammals evolved, a team of international scientists said on Wednesday.
Little is known about what happened to mammals between 24 million to 32 million years ago, when Africa and Arabia were still joined together in a single continent.
But the remains of ancestors of modern-day elephants and other animals, unearthed by the team of U.S. and Ethiopian scientists 27 million years on, provide some answers.
"We show that some of these very primitive forms continue to live through the missing years, and then during that period as well, some new forms evolved -- these would be the ancestors of modern elephants," said Dr John Kappelman, who headed the team.
The find included several types of proboscideans, distant relatives of elephants, and fossils from the arsinoithere, a rhinoceros-like creature that had two huge bony horns on its snout and was about 7 feet high at the shoulder.
"It continues to amaze me that we don't have more from this interval of time. We are talking about an enormous continent," said Kappelman, who is based at the University of Texas at Austin.
Scientists had thought arsinoithere had disappeared much earlier but the discovery showed it managed to survive through the missing years. The fossils from the new species found in Ethiopia are the largest, and at 27 million years old, the youngest discovered so far.
"If this animal was still alive today it would be the central attraction at the zoo," Tab Rasmussen, a paleontologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri who worked on the project, said in a statement.
Many of the major fossil finds in Ethiopia are from the Rift Valley. But Kappelman and colleagues in the United States and at Ethiopia's National Science Foundation (news - web sites) and Addis Ababa University concentrated on a different area in the northwestern part of the country.
Using high-resolution satellite images to scour a remote area where others had not looked before, his team found the remains in sedimentary rocks about 6,600 feet above sea level.
Yep. Count me as one of them. Although an explanation would take a significant effort, suffice to say our creator and spiritual connection has fascinating methods, which we probably have only the tiniest fractional understanding.
The difference being, the "naturalist dogma" is far better supported by the evidence than the theist dogma.
One will dogmatically in advance refuse to consider the possiblity of divine intervention as an answer,
Poppycock. This is a gross misrepresentation of the scientific view. Science frequently "considers the possibility of divine intervention", and if the evidence indicated such an occurrence, then the provisional conclusion would be that a miracle had occurred. Unfortunately for your position, no such evidence has turned up.
What science *does* hold as a central premise -- and it seems a reasonable one -- is that simple lack of evidence either way (or lack of knowledge) is not a valid reason for presupposing supernatural occurrences in any particular observation. All conclusions must be drawn based on which direction the evidence points, and that *includes* conclusions of divine acts/intervention/existence. In other words, it's unscientific to *presume* the divine at the start (or to presume any particular naturalistic explanation) and then reach conclusions based on that pre-existing presumption.
This is often misunderstood by laymen (and almost always misunderstood by fundamentalist creationists) as some sort of "denial of God" or "refusal to accept God as a possible explanation", but it is neither.
Instead, it is like the tale about Napoleon and Laplace. Laplace explained his theory of celestial mechanics (i.e. orbits) to Napoleon, and Napoleon asked Laplace where God was in his theory. Laplace replied, "I had no need for that particular hypothesis". In other words, his theory worked just fine without shoehorning God (or any other additional factor) into it in order to be "RC" (Religiously Correct).
the other will refuse to consider that time and chance, space and energy are all that is at work in the universe.
Then rest easy, since science makes no such statement of "that's all there is" either. To imply that it does is another straw man argument.
More accurately though, "the other" will refuse to consider that God may not be involved in every single process, even those for which the evidence indicates occur fine on their own even without divine intervention.
No side is any more open minded than the other.
Thanks, I always appreciate a good joke.
You are attempting to take the intellectual and, somehow, moral highground on pretenses.
How do you figure?
for the theory to be coherent, all forms had to evolve from a single one celled animal. That makes for one hell of a lot of transitional forms. If you take just one hundredth of one percent of those transitional forms that just happened to be in the right time and place to be fossilized, you would have a fossil record composed of almost entirely of them.
That's just one tiny flaw in the theory that all creatures physically came from one physical source.
I thought the rino had matted hair, not horns ...
Actually there is a reason to reject the supernatural. A supernatural explanation can be invoked to explain anything and thus has no content. Water freezes because Poseidon wants it to; ice melts because Poseidon wants it to. These putative explanations are rejected (in scientific inquiry) because they allow no predictions at all. The assumption of supernatural intervention implys the inability to predict anything.
Yes the missing link fossil frauds are numerous...and the fact is you and the rest of us came from God, to whom we will have to answer one day very soon.
I feel sorry for those who deny creation or attempt to corrupt it by mixing godless evolution with creation.
By the way I was once a devout evolutionist.
Actually there is a [fundamental] reason to reject the supernatural. A supernatural explanation can be invoked to explain anything and thus has no content. Water freezes because Poseidon wants it to; ice melts because Poseidon wants it to. These putative explanations are rejected (in scientific inquiry) because they allow no predictions at all. The assumption of supernatural intervention implies the inability to predict anything.
I don't care how important a scientist he was (and he did do some important work) Lewontin is wrong here. Also, never forget Lewontin was a communist first and a scientist second. Anything he says about philosophy must be viewed in that light.
Look, I agree that what you say is the way it SHOULD be, but the guys you look to are doing it the OPPOSITE of the way you think it should be done.
What they say or believe is not relevant. What scientists do (in terms of the ideas they actually utilize or implicate in their research) is what matters. That is what determines the content of science, and nature of this content determines the nature of science, and the dicta of what compromises "good" or "proper" theories.
Those theories that scientists find useful in organizing their research, framing and solving scientific problems, and so on, are the ones that they will use. You can't get around that. Sure there will be various prejudices tied to the ruling assumptions (and the dominant theories) at any one time, but these won't keep scientists from using an idea that's useful. Since you can't say that a theory used by scientists to do science isn't "scientific," a deviant theory (that has been widely adopted) will inevitably change the assumptions about what does or doesn't qualify as "science". There isn't any getting around that either.
You're just trying to avoid the obvious: That the prejudice against creationistic science doesn't (in the end) derive from philosophical bias, but from the fact that creationism doesn't work (as science -- I'm a cautious creationist myself philosophically). I suspect you are like most creationists (at lest the more sophisticated ones). Deep down you realize that modern creationism has utterly failed to produce a coherent and useful scientific theory of any kind, and you fear that it will never be able to. Therefore you're desperate to exempt creationists from the standard that applies to any normal scientist: "Put up or shut up."
PS- Your example is anchronistic. Materialism was not even named before Newton and gravity. His theory was already part of the "natural world" long before the "classical dictum of amterialism" was ever codified.
Huh? By "classical materialism" I had in mind Greek atomism. This certainly did come before Newton, by a millennia or so! If my example is bad, how do you explain the contemporary objections to Newton's gravitation as "occult"? How do you explain that no one before Newton (I believe I'm correct in saying) ever proposed a natural force that acted without physical contact between bodies?
In any case there are plenty of other examples. Both Galilean and Newtonian science, for instance, were based on the assumption that space was euclidian. This metaphysical assumption was abandoned when useful and fruitful theories emerged that required it to be abandoned. For hundreds of years the notion of a "vacuum" was rejected as "unphilosophical," but this objection too was brushed aside when the kinetic theory of gases, and other considerations, rendered vacuums useful notions.
There are innumerable theories accepted today that would have once, and in some cases not so very long ago, been considered as inherently "unscientific," or as standing in violation of some dicta defining good, proper or acceptable scientific theories.
So, back to the main point, it's pointless to whine about what's "allowed" in science. Anything is allowed if you can show it works. If you think "supernatural" considerations should be allowed in scientific thinking and problem solving, then fine. Show us how that's gonna work.
Dear, dear friend. Dear, sweet friend.
You will learn not to tangle with those whose god is a collection of bones. You will learn.
That's a lie. Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. And here's the kicker: It's not subject to reason.
Alas, we believers are stupid and believe in nonsense and are emotional, and <insert your adjective here>.
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