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.
Try these two sites for a more expert opinion.
I never had that problem. My parents weren't very political at all. They went for the general propaganda that FDR was a good guy; but they voted for Eisenhower because they thought that he too was a good guy. That's probably how the "undecideds" handle every election. It was quite an adventure when I learned to think things through in terms of general principles. I got hooked on freedom and the history of the American Revolution, so I never went through the leftie phase.
My father's favorite story is being at the democrat convention and seeing live the speech that nominated FDR for the first time. I went to a Quaker college and roomed next door (without knowing it at the time) to one of the Rosenberg kids.
The inability precisely to predict the future is at the core of what we perceive as free will. Regardless of the ultimate cause of this inability -- chaos, complexity, indeterminacy, whatever -- we cannot do more than make educated guesses as to what's coming. It is the attempt to ride the future that comprises our gut feeling of freedom.
If there were no unanswered questions about the future -- the classical billiard ball interpretation -- we would have no freedom. On the other hand, if there were no sense at all of cause and effect, no correlations at all between past, present and future, we would likewise have no sense of freedom. The fuzziness of causation, the cloud of probability allows us our sense of freedom.
Just my opinion.
Write down the wavefunction for the universe, and the Hamiltonian, and the wavefunction for the universe is determined at any point in the future by the Schrödinger equation. All the little uncertainty problems in QM arise when you try to splice an external entity onto a quantum system. Just make the whole universe the system, and QM becomes entirely deterministic!
I think js1138 hit it spot on when he talked about freedom existing in a window between complete predictability and unpredictability. However, complete predictability is IMO an unlikely hypothetical. Why should it bother people that their choices might in principle be calculable by a entirely hypothetical computer of such power that it is unlikely the universe could provide the materials to build it?
js1138’s superb description shows the see-saw of determinism much better than Pinker’s (IMHO). On the one end is cause/effect and on the other, the future. If cause/effect is lost then the future is utterly unknowable and free will is flattened to meaninglessness. If cause/effect is hardened, the future is exceedingly knowable, but the illusion of free will is thrown to the wind.
And so it appears the metaphysical naturalists strive for a balance to preserve a sense of free will.
As Right Wing Professor said in post 798:
Of course, my worldview is completely different because I do not agree with Pinker that ”the mind is what the brain does.” It is however quite instructive to understand how the other worldviews rationalize free will.
Sometimes I wonder ... here's Thomas Sowell from a recent column:
A careful definition of words would destroy half the agenda of the political left and scrutinizing evidence would destroy the other half.
Let's parse Pinker.
"The experience of choosing is not a fiction, regardless of how the brain works." Full Stop. Read: "Choosing is real and brain function has nothing to do with it."
Then BAM! Radical Cognitive Dissonance! "It is a real neural process ..." Read: "It's all brain function." Well, this is wordplay and nothing more but with an "A" for audacity. It is the academic's and the sophist's conceit that seeming irreconcilable opposites are understandable with illumination from the deep and intricate workings of the mind (brain?) of the academic. But it never happens. I'm contemptuous and I've just read all of Pinker that could I ever wish to. Students should substitute Eric Hoffer or Solzhenitsyn IMHO. Or Carlos Castaneda. Or Martha Beck. Or Evan Harris Walker. Or Norm Liebmann.
He then proceeds to select from a shelf, placed off to one side, one of a range of human emotions, "anxiety" for example, to justify his points. Well, there can be no anxiety since that is brain function, too. Endless reduction through a series of seeming cause-and-effect leads us deep into the mind (sorry "brain") of the individual squarely into the illusory subconscious where, once again, it is only the academic's superior mind (sorry "brain") that can explain. Spare me. Please. I'm just too old to take this stuff seriously. Pinker is certainly free to write it in the cloistered halls of academe but he is also free to be showered with scorn when his inconsistencies are brought to light.
I could parse on and on but it is such a waste of my time. The guy should be ignored and those who promoted him should be sent to their rooms without dinner. It IS bothersome, though, if young minds are being subjected to this pap without effective rebuttal.
Oh, heck, let's parse a little more:
Let me concentrate, then, on more substantive points [Look out, more intangibility coming!]. Number One: Our own ability to defeat the metaphorical designs of our genes [What? Gene's have designs? Only Levis in my world. Metaphorical? A copout. You can't have it both ways, Steven.], such as choosing to remain childless [no no no no, there is no choice], has nothing to do with Cartesian dualism [which says there are 2 types of reality, material and mind or tangible and intangible], and I explain [???] in How the Mind Works where they do come from. The mind is composed of many parts. [???? There is no mind. And sez who? Well, Pinker of course. He cannot, and will not, by me at least, be allowed to redefine the Universe as he attempts to do.]
This is sheer gobbledebook, not intelligible, flights of fancy. How is it possible to take it seriously? If one is an adult?
We conclude that unintelligibility is the friend of the sophist.
What about emotion? It is a universal human trait, as is consciousness. Do machines evidence emotion. Universally not. We have a chasm here that the Materialists have tried valiently to bridge for decades. Without success. Quantity and complexity won't get you there. Maybe there's a reason for this that goes quite beyond the material. I clearly think so. The day Materialist Science is credibly able to attribute emotion to a gene or set of genes will, I feel safe to say, never come.
We humans always seem to swing with the pendulum too far. When folks like Pinker emerge into prominence in academe, it indicates to me that Materialism has been taken too far in that it has clearly become self-contridictory. When it begins to explain too much, it risks being charged with explaining nothing. Rightly.
My 2 cents ...
You feel safe because you are whistling in the dark. I do not expect to win any arguments by assertions about the future (didn't I just say we can't do that?) but I can still register my bet. Attempts at "artificial flight" were first documented by the Greeks. It took thousands of years to perfect. You will need at the very least, a new law of physics, to demonstrate that machine intelligence and machine emotion are impossible.
Indeed, in a metaphysical naturalist worldview the "sense" of "free will" has been rationalized. Evidently, the purpose is to salvage a meaning for being alive. But despite all the worldcraft, in such a worldview, free will can only be an illusion.
I do enjoy js1138's description at 804. It is quite a balancing act even amongst themselves... no wonder the dispute between Rose and Pinker!
First of all, you cannot equate the statement 'the experience of choosing is real' with 'choosing is real'. We have many real and valid experiences that don't correspond with real phenomena. Think of any optical illusion. When you see a cube drawn in two dimensions, and perceive it as a 3 dimensional object, is the three-dimensionality real? What happens to the reality when the brain switches from perceiving it as convex to concave? We perceive choice as real. That does not mean it is real. The identity between perceived reality and reality is a false one.
Second, computer chess programs clearly make choices, and the result of those choices are just as clearly deterministic. The dichotomy between choice and determinism is therefore a false one.
He then proceeds to select from a shelf, placed off to one side, one of a range of human emotions, "anxiety" for example, to justify his points. Well, there can be no anxiety since that is brain function, too.
Animals clearly show anxiety; even some comparatively simple animals. When you swat a housefly and miss, for a while afterwards the housefly is reluctant to land, and when it does, stays still for a much briefer interval. Does a house-fly have free will? Would you object to a deterministic description of its anxiety? Or if you object to describing some animals as showing anxiety, how do you explain the similarity in stimulus and affect between a dog's anxiety or even a fly's anxiety, and our own? Are you claiming these are different in kind, and not just in degree? What about other emotions? Can't a dog be happy? suspicious? angry?
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