Posted on 12/25/2004 4:48:07 PM PST by PatrickHenry
This is a Christmas crevo thread. No "humbug!" jokes. Everyone be nice.
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Thanks for bringing this article to my attention.
I thought "being nice" was guaranteed by point 5 on your "agreement of the willing" on your About Page. ;-)
As it is, I wonder what classifications about species we'd make about the many variants of good old Rover & his friends, if we didn't know about dog shows.
It might make for a good sci-fi short story of the type Isaac Asimov used to write...
You never sleep..do you....Merry Christmas.
Christmas greetings from PatrickHenry: Christmas 1776.
Do we really need another study in anthropology? Heck, there's still ape-like humanoid creatures and knuckle-grazing cave-dwellers wandering the streets today.
I'm pretty sure that if you graphed, say, the body masses of a few thousand critters chosen at random you'd get a bell curve, too. Not too good an argument for their all being the same species.
MORE - see link above.The proper study of mankind
Jun 29th 2000
From The Economist print editionPractical applications are all well and good. But genomics can shed light on the nature of humanity, too
UNTIL the late 1980s, the most useful tools that could be deployed by people who were interested in human origins were the trowel and the cleaning brush. Fossil-hunters had done wonders uncovering specimens of early humanity that told a story of an African genesis, followed by the spread to Eurasia of a species called Homo erectus. But the emergence of modern man, Homo sapiens, was a mystery. Some researchers argued that modern people evolved in one place and then, like Homoerectus, spread out, though they did not agree about where and when this happened. Others believed that the whole erectus population gradually and simultaneously evolved into sapiens.
That argument was settled by genetics. The late Allan Wilson, a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, managed to show the truth about human evolution without picking up a single trowel. He studied the pattern of DNA in people now alive, and produced a human family tree showing that the species emerged in Africa about 200,000 years ago and first left the continent to begin its worldwide spread 100,000 years ago.
ping
Plotted out as a graph, [fossil dimensions] form the classic bell-shaped curve found using data from modern humans.
I'm pretty sure that if you graphed, say, the body masses of a few thousand critters chosen at random you'd get a bell curve, too. Not too good an argument for their all being the same species.
YEC SPOTREP
The problem is that such a "weights and heights" measure is an extremely simplistic measure. Just because there are modern humans who are midgets, that doesn't mean that an Australopithecus would be taken for a "normal" modern human if one were to be brought to the present using a time machine. You'd still freak out if you saw one walk into the 7-11.
I don't know *any* modern humans who look even remotely like *this*:
Massive brow ridge, *NO* forehead, a braincase you could wrap your hand around like a football, a prominent protruding muzzle, small close-set eyes, jawbone larger than the braincase, etc. etc. Compare to the proportions and angles of a modern human skull:
I'd have to see that. My feeling is that a sufficiently large sample of all critters would approach a normal distribution. Samples from particular species would be buffered by samples from other species with similar, but not identical, attributes and the modes would be smoothed away.
But I could easily be wrong; statistics is not my best subject (!).
Trying to say something about John Kerry, Jesse Jackson, and Ted Kennedy, are you?
I doubt very much that human ancestors consumed knuckles to the exclusion of other body parts. It unlikely that they were even the preferred food.
read later
Sorry, man - was it that obvious? Okay, to right my wrongs, throw in Cantwell, Pelosi, Maxine, and our new governor Chris "I-used-to-be-called-Christine-until-I-ran-for-governor" Gregoire.
Does that make up for my wrongs? :)
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