Posted on 03/07/2005 3:19:42 PM PST by Truth666
A joint Ethiopian-US team of palaeontologists announced on Saturday they had discovered the world's oldest biped skeleton to be unearthed so far, dating it to between 3.8 and four million years old.
"This is the world's oldest biped," Bruce Latimer, director of the natural history museum in Cleveland, Ohio, told a news conference in the Ethiopian capital, adding that "it will revolutionise the way we see human evolution".
The bones were found three weeks ago in Ethiopia's Afar region, at a site some 60 kilometres from Hadar where Lucy, one of the first hominids, was discovered in 1974. Researchers at the site in northeast Ethiopia have in all unearthed 12 hominid fossils, of which parts of one skeleton were discovered.
Keep following the evidence. Don't stop and assume you have THE answer..like the darwinites do.
Right and wrong are rules enforced by society.
Right and wrong are instilled in the hearts of humans.
First of all, we know from fossil evidence that at least some different species of hominids coexisted for a period of time (in some cases, with very close proximity to one another). The fossil evidence indicates as much at several junctures since the divergence from the great apes (i.e., during the emergence of bipedalism).
Second, we know from multiple examples that it's not too uncommon for just one species to be extant out of a given genus. And, why stop at asking for a 'man-ape'? Why not ask for a "chimp/gorilla" or a "baboon/orangutan" or whatever? The request would be just as ignorant, but more self-evidently silly. Where are the rhino-elephants, and if you had one, would you be asking for a rhinohippophant? Why aren't you just as satisfied with a 'man-monkey' by your reasoning -- i.e., a chimp?
Third, our most recent hominid relatives had the 'misfortune' of occupying precisely the same ecological niche that we did. Our species has a tendency to kill things even if they're not especially bothersome, much less if they're competing with us for the exact same territory and resources. There's an excellent chance we have no hominid companion species because we killed most of the survivors off. Since our species had spread throughout the region possibly inhabited by previous hominids by no later that 80,000 years ago or so, we had plenty of time to finish them off (and we occupied most of the region by tens of thousands of years before that).
Fourth, unless there is geographic separation or some other kind of division, the bulk of a species will evolve in toto via genetic drift. Whatever advantageous traits that emerge will permeate the entire population over the decades or centuries when they haven't drifted far enough apart to inhibit mating. We have a fairly good sense of the degree to which our forebears were (or were not) isolated from one another. As an unsurprising aside, we also find that the most 'extreme' divergences are found where groups of hominids were evidently most distant from the 'core' of the evolutionary line.
Finally, we are obviously better adapted to our environment than would've been our progenitors. As we likely crowded them toward far less hospitable lands, they would've found it much more problematic to survive challenges. There is in fact paleontological evidence of this but I don't have citations on hand so I won't go into that. Combine this with the previous two points and it's not hard at all to accept that the only other surviving primates are those that were in the refuge of largely inaccessible wilderness.
Even if a group of, say, Homo erectus had managed to survive into recorded history, we likely would be reading accounts of how they were driven extinct not long after their discovery...
?
I guess I have no idea what we're talking about now, so I'm sure we both have something better to do. Regards.
People only become "fools" if there is a superior source of morality and wisdom to compare them too! Since material science cannot countenance morality and wisdom drawn from morality and subjective experience, the charge of "fool" has no business coming from the mouth of an "objective" person such as your-self!
As a matter of fact, a truly objective person could make no moral decisions about anything at all!
What answer?
Do you have the evidence of the age of the earth? If so, please share it.
It amounts to groups of 'less advanced' hominids living in very marginal terrain for no apparent reason other than that 'more advanced' hominids evidently occupied more hospitable nearby territory. I don't have any sources handy as I mentioned before, so take my recollection about that fwiw.
I have a few clues; bacteria dug up from a 250 million year old salt deposit that begin to reproduce.
65 million year old red blood corpuscles
Trunks of trees upright in coal mines
Saturns finely ordered rings..and
the chances any system could survive for a billion years just by chance. Does this help?
Appendix
Your appendix...It's there for a reason
Appendix
Appendix is it necessary?
Human vestigial organs
Do any vestigial organs exist in humans? (original evolutionist claim was 180!!!)
So what do you do with God? How does God fit into evolution...in your view? As far as your challenge, I have no time today to research it....I may post to you at some later point (I do have other activities). If you read my entire post, you would know that those words are not mind but I do agree with them.
So what do you do with God? How does God fit into evolution...in your view? As far as your challenge, I have no time today to research it....I may post to you at some later point (I do have other activities). If you read my entire post, you would know that those words are not mind but I do agree with them.
So what do you do with God? How does God fit into evolution...in your view? As far as your challenge, I have no time today to research it....I may post to you at some later point (I do have other activities). If you read my entire post, you would know that those words are not mind but I do agree with them.
WHAT????
We disagree. I think it was actually quite literal. Animals might be blissfully ignorant, but their lives are anything but bliss. They spend almost every waking minute hungry, cold, hot, afraid, trying to survive. Only rarely do they ever get to relax or even "play".
Keep in mind also that death is introduced by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If it's just a parable, then death could not have been introduced because it was already there.
Of course, I acknowledge that this is theological stuff and not something that science can prove or disprove.
I may be a layman but I'm keenly aware of all of that. But if we can evolve from apes in a span of 7 million years at the outside (not very long on the earth's calendar), into very physically different Asian, Caucasoid and Negroids, and this wide variety of chimps and apes, it stands to reason that there is a good chance that there would be either such a species currently existing, or fossils thereof that appeared after the previous hominid group was wiped out by the current homo sapiens.
My point is that if you can have apes currently existing, and homo sapiens currently in existence, it follows logically that you could have a currently existing hominid somewhere in between, which from what I gather reading in here and elsewhere is what the biology community says was once the case.
That 99.9% of mutations are fatal is irrelevant. The overwhelming volume of mutations in any species over such a long period of time makes the 0.1% a pretty huge number nonetheless. The fact is that the before (ape) and after (us) have been very successful species for hundreds of thousands of years. It therefore stands to reason that unless you are willing to posit that apes directly gave birth to humans, at least one and most likely several, maybe even dozens, of in-between species (mutations) were all successful long enough to at least hand the baton off to the next successful mutation. From what I understand, the current "model" appeared about 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. According to this website:
http://www.riverapes.com/AHAH/Timescale/RiverApeModel1.htm
...the ancestors of the modern ape appeared at most 7 million years ago. Ancestors, though. Not the current variety. Maybe they're wrong, I don't know.
But if we stipulate for the sake of argument that there were only ten basic models in the evolution from apes to humans, and then assume the 7 million year figure, that's an average of one successful mutation every 700,000 years. But chances are there were a lot more than 10 successful mutations, so humor me for a moment and stipulate that there were 100 successful mutations. That's one every 70,000 years. At this rate, at least one successful mutation would likely have appeared in the ape family -- or in the homo sapiens family! -- in the last 70,000 years or so. Consider also the main homo sapiens subspecies mentioned above (Caucasian, Asian/Oriental, etc.) that must have at some point been evolving on separate tracks for some time in order to turn out so different in skin and facial features. So you have still more potential variations. It's no sure thing but isn't it probable that something radically different would have appeared from either apes or from us in the last 70,000 years, or is due to appear at any moment?
The main argument I've read in here against this is that homo sapiens wiped out all the other hominids. If so, why didn't the hominids wipe out the other apes? They would have been no less in competition with each other for food, caves, better climates, etc., than homo sapiens would be with the other hominids. You may say, well they probably did wipe out some ape species. Yes, some, but clearly nowhere nearly all or we wouldn't have the huge variety we have now. So it seems equally unlikely that homo sapiens would have wiped out 100% of the other hominid species.
I don't claim to be any sort of subject matter expert by any stretch. Again, I don't preclude the possibility that evolution was God's means of creation. I'm just a layman asking questions that I never heard answered in a satisfactory way by the scientific community. Or maybe they have answered them and I missed it, but if so, that's the job of folks like you to fill me in. But so far, I'm just not satisfied. Something other than pure apes and pure humans should have evolved in the last 7 million years (or whenever the first modern apes appeared) that would still exist today.
Science cannot directly say anything at all about God, pro or con. And I believe it is extremely unlikely that science will ever have anything to say about God. I think it is a mistake to base faith on worldly knowledge.
Excellent!
Well gosh, how could anyone fail to be persuaded by your reasoned argument full of supporting evidence...
And hey, are you ever going to retract your false slanders against Daniel Dennett? You know, the way that you accused him of being a Nazi-like fanatic who wanted to put Christians into concentration camps, when in actual fact he was saying that dangerous beliefs like radical Islam may need to be contained, disarmed, and/or re-educated...
Then when we confronted you with the full text of what Dennett had actually written (as opposed to the badly butchered "not really quotes" you used to slander him), you failed to exhibit any shame whatsoever, and instead simply posted *brand new* butchered "quotes" which dishonestly put more statements into his mouth that he never actually said in the way you wanted to imply.
You falsified this new "quote":
"If you insist on teaching your children that Man is not the product of evolution...Zoos are now seen as havens for endangered species [like you church people]" Daniel Dennett, page 519, 1995Let's look at the passage IN FULL, to see what you DISHONESTLY snipped out in order to change the meaning, shall we? Here it is with the parts you CUT OUT in black, your TINY SNIPPETS which you sewed together to dishonestly create a false impression will be highlighted in red:
"If you insist on teaching your children falsehoods--that the Earth is flat, that Man is not a product of evolution by natural selection--then you must expect, at the very least, that those of us who have freedom of speech will feel free to describe your teachings as the spreading of falsehoods, and will attempt to demonstrate this to your children at our earliest opportunity. Our future well-being--the well-being of all of us on the planet--depends on the education of our descendants.Anyone with working reading comprehension can see that with his "zoo" analogy, Dennett was talking about using *discussion* in response to incorrect teachings, and about PRESERVING FADING CULTURAL TRADITIONS, so that they will not be lost. He's not talking about putting "church people" in cages, as metacognative DISHONESTLY tries to slander Dennett as saying by posting a BUTCHERED "quote". Dennett's actual meaning is made even more clear in a following paragraph:What then of all the glories of our religious traditions? They should certainly be preserved, as should the languages, the art, the costumes, the rituals, the monuments. Zoos are now more and more being seen as second-class havens for endangered species, but at least they are havens, and what they preserve is irreplaceable. The same is true of complex memes and their phenotypic expressions."
"A human life worth living is not something that can be uncontroversially measured, and that is its glory. And there's the rub. What will happen, one may well wonder, if religion is preserved in cultural zoos, in libraries, in concerts and demonstrations? It is happening; the tourists flock to watch the Native American tribal dances, and for the onlookers, it is folklore, a religious ceremony to be sure, to be treated with respect, but also an example of a meme-complex on the verge of extinction, at least in its strong, ambulatory phase; it has become an invalid, barely kept alive by its custodians."Now compare what Dennett *actually* wrote to metacognative's WILDLY DISHONEST attempted "(mis)quote":
"If you insist on teaching your children that Man is not the product of evolution...Zoos are now seen as havens for endangered species [like you church people]"Nowhere -- NOWHERE -- does Dennett ever advocate putting "church people" in "zoos" of any sort. The phrase "church people" doesn't even appear anywhere in the whole book -- metacognative just made that up. So why are you lying, metacognative? Is it okay to lie about him because he's an evolutionary biologist, and you're a creationist?
Here's the second "not-really-a-quote" metacognative posted in order to divert attention from his original massive lie used as slander after it was exposed:
"If you want to teach your children...God. We will stand firmly opposed to you."Again, it's easy to spot just how incredibly, disgustingly dishonest this is by just comparing it to the original passage it butchers:
"We preach freedom of religion, but only so far. If your religion advocates slavery, or mutilation of women, or infanticide, or puts a price on Salman Rushdie's head because he has insulted it, then your religion has a feature that cannot be respected. It endangers us all.In context, it's clear that Dennett was talking about opposing DANGEROUS RELIGIOUS BELIEFS LIKE RADICAL ISLAM. He even specifically mentions Islam in a footnote referenced in this passage. Now compare the above passage, which accords well with sentiments expressed countless times on FreeRepublic threads, with metacognative's DISHONESTLY BUTCHERED and slanderous (mis)quote:It is nice to have grizzly bears and wolves living in the wild. They are no longer a menace; we can peacefully coexist, with a little wisdom. The same policy can be discerned in our political tolerance, in religious freedom. You are free to preserve or create any religious creed you wish, so long as it does not become a public menace. We're all on the Earth together, and we have to learn some accommodation. [...] Child abuse is beyond the pale. Discrimination is beyond the pale. The pronouncing of death sentences on those who blaspheme against a religion (complete with bounties or rewards for those who carry them out) is beyond the pale. It is not civilized, and it is owed no more respect in the name of religious freedom than any other incitement to cold-blooded murder. [...] If you want to teach your children that they are the tools of God, you had better not teach them that they are God's rifles, or we will have to stand firmly opposed to you: your doctrine has no glory, no special rights, no intrinsic and inalienable merit.
"If you want to teach your children...God. We will stand firmly opposed to you."
Metacognative, your vicious dishonesty disgusts me.
Is this sort of "lying for the cause" of creationism considered okay, especially when it falsely slanders an evolutionary biologist? Because it sure is common behavior from folks on your side of the fence.
|
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.