Fossils Bridge Gap in African Mammal Evolution

Reuters to My Yahoo! ^ | Wed Dec 3, 2003 | Patricia Reaney

[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.

[Phaedrus]

Pinker is at least philosophically coherent

OK, at the level being discussed.

[Doctor Stochastic]

"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."

Your re-writing of the original sentence changes the meaning entirely. You are arguing against your changed meaning not the author's.

[Right Wing Professor]

But astronomers have physicists backing them up with experiments, such as on the neutrinos. And the physicists are in turn backed up by the mathematicians

And likewise palaeontologists have experimental biologists and bioinformatics types. A lot of astronomical phenomena are at energies that are simply not repeatable in the lab. We can't create a black hole; and the physics underlying it is extrapolated far from any experimental observation. We have a few observations of gravitational lensing as the sole direct evidence. The CNO cycle that is thought to drive fusion in the center of the sun has never been duplicated on earth; it's a result of modelling of the behavior of a material well outside the range of conditions we can study ourselves.

The distinction you're making really isn't as clean as you're arguing.

[general_re]

Othello is similar, but on a smaller board. Othello is a 6x6 or 8x8 board, IIRC, but Go is played on a 19x19 board.

[Elsie]

And which SHOULD not be so, if I (and everything else on this planet) 'evolved', for it would be ingrained in our jeans (neat pun, huh?) to do so.

So, you're saying God created man to lust after animals? Better be careful, there.

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What part of IF is hard for you to understand?

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Exodus 22:19
   "Anyone who has sexual relations with an animal must be put to death.

Leviticus 18:23
   "`Do not have sexual relations with an animal and defile yourself with it. A woman must not present herself to an animal to have sexual relations with it; that is a perversion.

Leviticus 20:15-16
 15.  "`If a man has sexual relations with an animal, he must be put to death, and you must kill the animal.
 16.  "`If a woman approaches an animal to have sexual relations with it, kill both the woman and the animal. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.

Deuteronomy 27:21
   "Cursed is the man who has sexual relations with any animal."    Then all the people shall say, "Amen!"

[Doctor Stochastic]

Not all chess programs are deterministic. In particular, the one that I helped write made random choices.

[Elsie]

In my defense, my family was lefty, and I was brought up thinking conservatives were either stupid or evil.

Now we gotta work on that idea you still have that just us Crevo's are!!!

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;^)

[Elsie]

http://www.4literature.net/Frederic_Bastiat/The_Law/

 

Socialism is defined as 'Legalised Plunder'.

 

When a something of value is forceably taken from one group and given to another:

I.E. today's American landscape.

[general_re]

I had to go look up Othello, since I've never actually played it. What can I say? I was a deprived child ;)

I don't see that it's been fully solved, but the depth of the game is apparently such that computer programs can typically look ahead about 25 moves, and therefore play a perfect game from about 1/3'rd of the way in onward. Apparently, computer programs have been regularly beating human world champions every year since about 1980. Anyway, from a superficial glance at it, the gameplay appears to be much different than Go, besides being on a smaller board.

IIRC, the depth of Deep Blue's searches varied, but it tended to hover around 7- or 8-ply, or about 14-16 moves ahead at any given point.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Othello is much different from Go. It's equivalent to Reversi. The difficulty of many of these games is the branching factor. In chess that factor is about 30 in Go, about 300. Using the alpha-beta search algorithm can reduce these to their square roots (5.5 and 17.5 roughly.) Still, Go needs about 3**k more positions examined for a depth k search than does chess. A good Go playing program needs more rules of thumb (expert systems as they are fopishly called) than brute force.

On the other hand, a simple program of a few hundred successive IF statements has more execution paths than there are particles in the universe.

[Elsie]

that even Brownian motion is the effect of a cause.

And it's this RANDOMNESS of supposed 'evolution' that should, in any logical thought process, doom it's acceptance as a 'theory'.

[general_re]

Nevermind the last bit. You know, I really should verify that my memory is operant before posting ;)

Anyway, Deep Blue was apparently capable of at least 30-ply, should the occasion warrant it - IOW, it could look 60 moves ahead. Obviously, the search space at such a depth is enormous, so once again, the real cleverness is in pruning that tree down to manageable proportions.

[Elsie]

between Bush, Dean and a wasted vote.

OR.........

between Bush, and 2 wasted votes.

[Right Wing Professor]

But even in principle, one cannot predict Brownian motion. Measuring instruments small enough to measure the motion are subject to Brownian motion themselves.

To some extent the scientists and the non-scientists are arguing somewhat at cross purposes. You seem to be arguing, as I am, that a system can be said to be deterministic if we can model it - that is, if we can set up a computation that predicts its behavior. By this standard, sure, Brownian motion is not deterministic; and if it will ever feasible to model a human brain, we're a long way from even being able to demonstrate the possibility.

Alamo-Girl is taking a Platonist view; that if the system works according to a set of physical laws, it is deterministic, because it's theoretically possible (even if utterly infeasible) to predict its behavior at any point in time. As I noted earlier, QM says that if the wavefunction of the universe is psi, then d psi/dt is just -i*hbar*H*psi, and it's just a very big Runge Kutta problem. :-)

Maybe we should make a distinction between empirical determinism and essentialist determinism.

[Doctor Stochastic]

It's a big Runga-Kutta problem unless a "measurement" takes place.

[Right Wing Professor]

between Bush, and 2 wasted votes.

Well the only way I'd vote for Dean is if I were wasted, so I guess you're right: it would be a wasted vote.

[Junior]

You're saying bestiality would not exist if humans evolved. Therefore bestiality could only exist if man were created. Since your default position is that God created man, and man lusts after animals (which he wouldn't do if he'd evolved), therefore God is responsible for men lusting after animals.

I understood perfectly. You did not present yourself well.

[Right Wing Professor]

It's a big Runga-Kutta problem unless a "measurement" takes place.

Ah, but the 'measuring apparatus' is part of the Universe, and therefore it's part of psi, not external to the system.

[Elsie]

You're saying bestiality would not exist if humans evolved.

I did not.

You cannot understand English.

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You have scrabbled up the words of my post and made yourself a Calvinosaurus statement: misrepresenting what I said.

[Doctor Stochastic]

I'll have to work on that. Is there no possibility of a crystal dislocation acting as a "measurement"? It should still be impossible to tell "when" a kaon decays in this case. The universe may only be deterministic with respect to objects that commute with the hamiltonian. (For the whole universe, this would be the Universe Conjugation Operator, the most grandiose term I have seen yet.)

Likewise is there an absolute size of an object that can avoid de-coherence? (Assuming that de-coherence happens.)