Posted on 01/27/2004 8:08:04 AM PST by blam
'Your forefathers were not Neanderthals'
January 26 2004 at 02:30PM
By Maggie Fox
Washington - You may think your grandparents act like Neanderthals, but United States researchers said on Monday they had strong evidence that modern humans are not descended from them.
A computer analysis of the skulls of modern humans, Neanderthals, monkeys and apes shows that we are substantially different, physically, from those early humans.
New York University paleoanthropologist Katerina Harvati said Neanderthals should be considered a separate species from Homo sapiens, and not just a sub-species.
"We interpret the evidence presented here as supporting the view that Neanderthals represent an extinct human species and therefore refute the regional continuity model for Europe," she and colleagues wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Some anthropologists believe that Neanderthals, who went extinct 30 000 years ago, may have at least contributed to the ancestry of modern Europeans.
There is strong evidence that Homo sapiens neanderthalis, as they are known scientifically, interacted with the more modern Cro-Magnons, who eventually displaced them. Cro-Magnons are the ancestors of modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens.
Some research has suggested they may have interbred to a limited degree, although this is hotly disputed in anthropological circles.
At least one study that looked at fragments of Neanderthal DNA suggested any Neanderthal-Cro-Magnon offspring did not add to the modern gene pool.
Harvati and colleagues combined modern computer technology and the tried-and-true method of determining species that uses physical comparisons.
They examined the skulls of modern humans and Neanderthals and 11 existing species of non-human primates including chimpanzees, gorillas and baboons.
They measured 15 standard skull and face landmarks and used 3-D analysis to superimpose each one on the other.
"From these data, we were able to determine how much variation living primate species generally accommodate, as well as measure how different two primate species that are closely related can be," Harvati said in a statement.
Their computer analyses showed that the differences measured between modern humans and Neanderthals were significantly greater than those found between subspecies of living monkeys and apes.
Oh reeeeeally?
New UNC study: Teens with regular religious practices get into less trouble
Material Girls (and Boys) in a Material World Are Not Happy Campers
Sing to the tune of “God Bless America”:
"Godless philosophy, pointless and dumb, None to cause us, but Cosmos– All that is, was, and ever shall come."
"From the big bang, to the slime soup, To the heat death, dark and old: Godless philosophy, it leaves me cold; Godless philosophy, it leaves me cold."
"In an article in the November 2001 Directions in Psychiatry, Drs Koenig and Larson and Susan Larson cited a Gallup Poll that found 95 percent of those in the US believe in God or a Universal Spirit. In addition, 85 percent of Americans consider religion "very important" or "fairly important" in their lives. A 1997 survey found 80 percent of psychiatric inpatients consider themselves spiritual or religious persons, with 68 percent relying on religion as a source of strength "a great deal."
Of course. Religion is, and has always been, a form of social control and shaping. They picked a subset of teens with a strict form of control over their lives and compared them to a random set of teens with varying levels of control. Any positive religious influences can be replaced with non-religious influences, although they would be missing the easy threat of hell as a billy club and therefore require a bit more thought and work.
Material Girls (and Boys) in a Material World Are Not Happy Campers
That was a "duh" study. It's kind of obvious that people who concentrate only on gaining material wealth would find something missing in their lives, but the missing thing need not necessarily be religion.
New UNC study: Teens with regular religious practices get into less trouble
If what you said is true than please explain why
1) Atheist/Agnostic are ~15% of the population yet make up just 0.2% of the prison population
2) From 1991 to 2001, The Number of the non-religious doubled in number while at the same time the number calling themselves Christians declined by 10% this is was seen especially in young people, yet the violent crime rate has declined through this period, as well as The pregnancy rate for unmarried women has continuously declined through the 1990s and the abortion rate dropped by about 25 percent for both married and unmarried women through the 1990s and The teen Pregnancy Rate Reached a Record Low.
If being religious leads to great goodness and morals then why as the country is becoming more Atheist and less religious is the opposite happening?
3) Modern day Japan is for all practical purposes an Atheist country yet their society doesn't have anything near the moral problems we have in this country, Meanwhile in Latin America you have very Christian countries yet there societies are in constant chaos and turmoil.
Sorry no but there is no correlation between morals and religion.
Material Girls (and Boys) in a Material World Are Not Happy Campers
Oh please - A religious site saying being religious makes them more happy, Yeah no bias there. But as they say Ignorance is Bliss
"Godless philosophy, pointless and dumb, None to cause us, but Cosmos– All that is, was, and ever shall come."
"From the big bang, to the slime soup, To the heat death, dark and old: Godless philosophy, it leaves me cold; Godless philosophy, it leaves me cold."
Yep, Another example of Liberals and Fundamentalist being different sides of the same coin in not caring about facts and results but instead choosing what to believe by what makes you feel better.
The opposite is happening?
Link?
This page is a bit more of a total run down of the horse story.
No honest scholars are claiming that horses prove evolution anymore.
And all of it's been debunked already. For the gazillionith time, Horse evolution is NOT linear!!!! Picking and choosing members of different branches to compare without the whole picture is disingenuous at best.
No honest scholars are claiming that horses prove evolution anymore.
Yep again YEC creationist showing themselves to be just like the Liberals in using soundbites over substance.
1) Who exactly are these scholars? Show me some names of REAL scientist who say this and YEC aren't real scientist. Your little sound bite there is the Liberal equivalent to moveon.org saying "No honest Republicans are claiming that tax cuts prove trickle down economics anymore".
2) And no, No "Honest Scholar" would claim horses BY THEMSELVES prove evolution
BTW Again where are the fossils of all these the unicorns that are mentioned in the Bible???
Do you have any mechanism whereby the accumulation of small changes doesn't add up to large changes? Have you actually thought through your position?
For anything to be evolution, it HAS to be linear. If something isn't linear, it isn't evolution.
Ahem, "evolution" means change. Period. A species may split into two or more species. Each of those species may give rise to additional species. The species we see today are the surviving branches of vast genetic trees. Take a look at the horse evolution charts again and explain why that cannot be considered evolution.
No it doesn't. Evolution means something evolved from something else and, in particular, it means that complex animals evolved from simple ones, which themselves evolved from still simpler, which ultimately evolved from inorganic materials via natural processes. To demonstrate that, you need linearity. You need to demonstrate that b evolved from a, and c from b, and d from c etc. so as to show a line of descent leading from a to d.
First It's hard to take serious a site whose ultimate goal is to sell you their CDs.
Secondly, By no means am I saying today's society is perfect morally and yes there are still many problems and there is a long way to go. However by any definition we are over all making big improvements and it's happening without religion. For example today's teenagers even though as a whole they are probably the least religious generation we have had yet they are also one of the most pro-life generations.
As for pop culture, Yes it's mindless drivel but it's always been that way. Yes we can complain about all Britney's exploits but she is rather tame compared to the female stars of the past like Madonna and Janis Joplin and that story on that website about how society is going to hell because kids are sneaking looks at the playboy channel is no different from the past when kids used to sneak looks at their father's playboy. Pop culture has less of an influence today than it has in the past, Today stars like The Ditsy Chicks come out and speak against America and they get shunned in the past Stars like John Lenin spoke againt America and they were made Icons.
The problems in today's society with kids has nothing to do with lack of religion, It is due to the me,me,me Baby Boomers being horrendous parents who could care less about their kids (and the baby boomers BTW grew up being heavily exposed to religion yet that didn't stop them from becoming the most selfish and decadent generation in the history of the USA) and the reason things are improving has nothing to do with religion but the fact that Gen-X & Y are starting to replace the Baby Boomers as the parents of today's kids.
No it's not. There are branches all over the place.
The whole premise of the link you gave is
Eohippus evolved into Orohippus which then evolved into Pliohippus which then evolved into Modern Horse.
Which is a lie and totally wrong and no biologist claims it happened that way.
What happened was some of Eohippus had decendants that became Propalaeotherium, while some others eventually became Pachynolophus while some others eventually became Orohippus and then the rest of the Eohippus individuals went extinct. Then after many more branches and transitional forms one of many of those branches from Orohippus led to the Merychippus and from the some of the Merychippus decendents branched into Calippus which then branched into Pliohippus while other Merychippus branched into Dinohippus which branched into Hippidion and Equus in which the Equus branched into old world and today's new world horses.
That site you linked disingenously compares the Pliohippus with modern day horses as some how proof that evolution is false when they aren't even directly or as you incorrectly put it "linear" related to each other. They may have a common distant ancestor but they are not related on the same branch.
And as for you assertion that evolution going from simple to complex, Well that's not entirely correct either. Evolution is driven by what survives to have the most offspring that will survive which is why the most abundent lifeforms are simple one cell bacteria.
So again where are all these scholars you claim doubt horse evolution?
Oh and of course where are the Unicorns?
Darwin described species as "well-marked varieties".
If we populate an an island, teeming with game, with 100 male great Danes and 100 female chihuahuas, and come back in 100 years, there won't be any dogs. Ditto if we use 100 f. Danes and 100 m. chihuahuas. If we use 50 m. Danes, 50 f. Danes, 50 m. and 50 f. chihuahuas, then 100 years later we will find two populations that breed true. (We get exactly the same results using horses instead of Danes and donkeys instead of chihuahuas.)
Therefore, the two breeds of dog must be considered different species in some sense.
Since there is a continuum of breeds that can mate with Danes, with smaller breeds, still smaller ones, etc, all the way to chihuahuas, dogs are an example of a ring species.
I never said whether H. sapiens and H. Neanderthalis were capable of interbreeding or not; no one is really sure, or we wouldn't have articles like this.
BTW, the criterion is producing fertile, not merely viable offspring; think of mules.
That's the problem. All there seems to be is branches, no roots or trunk anywhere to be seen at all. If you want to claim that horses evolved, you need to show roots and a trunk as well as branches.
The evidence which actually exists could as easily if not more easily be explained by claiming that Jehovah, Wotan, or Allah or somebody simply didn't know what sort of horse would thrive on this planet and therefore created fifty or sixty different kinds of them and let natural selection sort the thing out and weed out all the losers.
So it's just coincidence that our earbones start out in a reptilian arrangement and migrate during gestation to a mammalian atrangement, recapitulating the fossile record of the transition between reptiles and mammals?
It's just another coincidence that any retrposon found in both cows and whales will also be found in hippos, and furthermore, if the same mutation is not found in camels, it will not be found in pigs either?
The list goes on and on. How many "coincidences" will it take to make you think "hmm, there might be something true there?"
The evolutionists inability to admit that the theory of evolution ... is no more of an empirical science than creation does leave me somewhat confused, though.
Allow me to help dispel your confusion: Using evolution, we can *predict* where various mutations will and will not be found, like the example of artiodactyls above, or the relations between apes, monkeys and people. Every time these predictions have been tested, they were found to be true. This is typical of science.
Creationism, or ID for that matter (as long as we postulate a sufficiently powereful creator or designer), does not even allow us to make any predictions, much less ones that juust happen to be right.
Still confused?
Can you come up with a specific prediction of creationism that can be tested?
An evolutionist requires as much faith as a creationist does.
Faith in the invariance of physical laws and in the scientific method, is all that's required. This "faith" is also required for all of science. It's more like knowledge than religious faith, though, because everywhere it's possible to test it, it's passed.
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