Believe it or not, they're all the same species [Human Evolution]

telegraph.co.uk ^ | 26 December 2004 | Robert Matthews

[mtbopfuyn]

Easier to just throw in all the RATS.

[PatrickHenry]

I don't know *any* modern humans who look even remotely like *this*:

You haven't looked around enough:

[BJungNan]

The words of Patrick Henry

"Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is impossible that a nation of infidels or idolaters should be a nation of free men. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, are incompatible with freedom."

Patrick Henry ·1736-1799·
Virginia House of Burgesses
Born: May 29, 1736 in: Hanover County, Virginia.
Education: (Lawyer, Politician)
Work: Elected to Virginia House of Burgesses, 1765;
Admitted to the Bar of the General Court in Virginia, 1769;
Elected to the Continental Congress, 1774; Virginia Militia Leader, 1775; Governor of Virginia, 1776-1778, 1784.
Died: June 6, 1799.

And how now has this nation evolved?

[Victoria Delsoul]

Believe it or not, they're all the same species [Human Evolution]

I don't, but Happy belated Christmas, dear Patrick.

[PatrickHenry]

Thanks, Victoria. You too.

[shuckmaster]

here to help!

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[Physicist]

The question is not whether the distributions, when put together, give a nice Gaussian. The central limit theorem more or less guarantees that. The question is whether the various sub-populations have Gaussians which overlap, and whether or not they interbred.

[PatrickHenry]

The question is not whether the distributions, when put together, give a nice Gaussian. The central limit theorem more or less guarantees that. The question is whether the various sub-populations have Gaussians which overlap, and whether or not they interbred.

That would help, but even then the issue is unresolved. For example, if several thousand years from now the same kind of investigation were made of a few skeletons from, say, Kennebunkport in Maine and the South Side of Chicago, I imagine the same debate would rage. What's needed to resolve the matter is DNA, to show common descent relationships, but even that wouldn't resolve whether the groups actually interbred.

[Doctor Stochastic]

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.

It's more likely that you'd get a superposition of bell curves. This would be either multi-modal or maybe just hyperkurtotic.

[Doctor Stochastic]

It's true that a sufficiently large sample from a set with finite variances (if one doesn't violate the Lindeberg-Feller conditions), will give a normal distribution. However, sufficiently large can be very big. The Barry-Essen theorems show convergence to be quite slow.

The Lindeberg-Feller conditions mostly ensure that one of the kinds of objects being sampled doesn't dominate the sample. That is, you cannot sample 10 elephants for each other critter.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Does that neanderthal look like Albert?

It's the 100th anniversary of the Special Theory of Relativity!

E=mc squared everbody!!