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.
Why?
Next November, like most of us, I'll have a three-way choice to make, between Bush, Dean and a wasted vote. Anyone who knows me well - my wife for example - will be able to predict with essentially 100% certainty what that choice will be. Does that mean I didn't have a choice?
So why then does the possibility that we might (very hypothetically) be able to predict human choices from our knowledge of physics and chemistry, mean that free will doesn't exist?
RWP: 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?
In the metaphysical naturalist scenario, your voting choice is the sum effect of the causes accrued over your life (timeline) to date. Thus, the parents you've had, your experiences in life (which were also effects of prior cause) - working in consort with your genetic code determine your vote.
IOW, you could be a robot or strong AI program running. How would you know you weren't?
This is an empty statement, because for the naturalist, "the physical realm" is anything that can be studied, and the list of things that can be studied grows almost exponentially with advancing knowledge. There is no final list of the contents of the "physical reality" set.
Science revises its way of thinking about "things" quite frequently. In facts that pretty well defines what theoretical physicists do for a living. As for the too set, that grows at an exponential rate.
I would love to hear of any other human enterprise that accepts revisison more gracefully, or whose revised ideas produce more observable results.
..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.
You completely lose me here. Choice is a constant minute-to-minute reality among humans. Choice in a computer chess program has been removed from the program by a human programmer who has pre-made all the possible choices. The determinism has been infused by the programmer and bears not on our ability to choose.
I think we have limited free will. We have the freedom to decide our actions, but only within a rather narrow range of possibilities. As far as human lives go, that's still a large field of action, and it can give us lives as impressive as those of Alexander the Great and George Washington. Or we can get lives as narrow and circumscribed as those of a dull government clerk. Between those very real boundries we have free will.
We are not free to do things that would be beyond the capabilities of our bodies, technology, and minds. And society imposes great restraints (which is why Alexanders and Washingtons are very rare). I assume (but cannot know) that the range of "forbidden" activities is infinite, and therefore the range of our free will is very small. From a god's viewpoint, it may be that we have no free will at all. Still, to us it's free will.
Similarly, my dogs have free will -- within the limits of their abilities, and also within the limits that I allow. They can't leave the house or yard, for example, unless it's under my control. Do they know that? Do they ever think that it would be really nice to leave home without me and visit the park? I doubt it. I'm aware of the limitations on my dogs, but they aren't. Just as we are not really aware of all the limitations on us. But we don't know what we can't know; so we're happy, right?
So yeah, we have free will. And it's not an illusion. I think the extent of our free will is probably illusory. But I try not to let it trouble me.
So if the Jewish Kabbalists are right and the speed of light is the boundary (firmament) between the physical and the spiritual then it would stand to reason that any scientific research into superluminal phenomenon would be expanding the meaning of “physicality” to include part of the spiritual realm.
Likewise, if the boundary (firmament) is dimensionality per se then inter-dimensional laboratory tests that might be performed on gravity (or perhaps virtual particles) would broach the spiritual realm and expand the meaning of “physicality.”
Even more interesting, from your observation, all the research that we perform on physical realm manifestations of spiritual events (which to us believers is everything) – is research into the spiritual and again “physicality” includes some of the spiritual.
All very fascinating, js1138. Thank you!
Perhaps now I ought to change my definition of the metaphysical naturalists’ worldview to be that his anchor is his own apparant self-awareness, he sees “all that there is” as that which can be observed or inferred by what he believes to be physical sensory perception, reasoning or experimentation?
This is simply not true. There have been programs that attempted to work out every possible move and counter-move to the end of the game, but these aren't successful against the best human players. Modern programs have rules of thumb to guide them.
But chess is a bad example because all the legal moves in any situation are stipulated. Much more interesting would be a poker playing program, or a car driving program. Such things exist, although admittedly not ready for prime time.
Tortoise can, and has many time, explained why the construction of a thinking machine is difficult. The difficulty involves the state of technology rather than theoretical possibility.
I disagree. A computer has a set of possible moves, calculates a score for each based on some criteria, and chooses the highest score. All based on rational rules.
Let's say you make a rational choice next November between Bush, Dean, and wasted vote. If the choice is rational, you are going to take a set of criteria, score each of the candidates on the criteria, and pick the best. Excepting the fact that you're probably more fallible than the computer, if you make the choice purely on rational grounds, it's no less deterministic than that of the computer.
An emotional choice, of course, might be less deterministic; there are laws of logic, but no laws of anger or envy or resentment. But then, if you regard determinism as a bad thing, you're almost required to abjure rational choices; and that's a very hard position to defend.
Most of what we observe is actually inferred. This is true of science, religion and everyday experience. And inference is extremely susceptable to error, which is why science demands multiple avenues of evidence, and wherever possible, repeatablity.
LOLOL! Thank you for sharing your views on free will.
You are evidently not a strong determinist and put a bit more weight on the "future" side of js1138's see-saw. Nevertheless I would still call it a balancing act, as you observe:
The physicists have been good about ensuring their theories comport to experimental reality but they have their blind spots, too. They have yet to explain the probability wave phase collapse to, I think, anyone's satisfaction.
I don't see how.
The possibilities are these:
Now RWP, I didn't say determinism is a bad thing, just that it's not the only thing.
Most areas of science have some element of unrepeatability. Astronomers, for example, study supernova remnants. You can't repeat a supernova explosion.
"Explaining" is probably not going to happen. You are asking for a metaphor or image that comports with ordinary experience. Ain't gonna happen. Still there is some evidence that more and more people are "getting used" to quantum theory and are able to make non-ridiculous statements about it. The ramifications of quantum events will gradually work their way into ordinary speech, and in a hundred ears or so, ordinary educated people will wonder what the fuss was about.
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