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.
I'm sorry your picture didn't come thru...
yep...a little zyklon B and green Kool Aid on the Rocks...MMMMMM r3efreshing!
What exactly what is it that you disagree with? Are you saying religious organizations should be allowed to curtail individual rights? Are we to allow Islam to take over?
I have to assume, at least in the United States that Catholic women can leave the church without fear of honor killing, but the subjugation of women under Islam is here and now and widespread. are you saying that Muslims can be allowed to continue this, or are religious organizations going to be subject to secular law? Which is it?
I think the lack of ornamentation in the Noah account is its greatest strength....I think it was the original straight account....the other flood accounts such as the highly ornamented epic of Gilgamesh were drawn from it, not the other way around!
Now if you want to argue it a myth...well that's a whole other thread!
Gilgamesh is dated before the Bible.
Your thesis is unsound. The whole Noah sequence is severely flawed. It had been debunked thoroughly. Go to talkorigins and look it up.
No...you miss my point....It was the misuse of scientific theory to support Nazism or even Liberalism by men not really well versed in the science that has become the issue. They've incorporated Evolutionary theory as supportive of a murderous utilitarian world view!
The "written" version of Gilgamesh was certainly "older" than the "written" version found in Genesis. But Genesis was written from the oral tribal traditions of the Hebrews escaping from the Egyptians. Abraham came out of the "Land of Ur" carrying I would assume to be the knowledge of the Mesopotamians with him and as head founder of the Hebrew tribes, communicated those traditions to his son, ect. Who really knows what the older "oral" history was...Gilgamesh or Noah. My bet is is on the Noah story, which was glamorized "docudrama" style in the more colorful Gilgamesh myth!
By the way, though it may seem irrelevant to you...the chinese character for boat...is a boat like symbol with 8 men in it. 8 being the number of men and women in the ark!(the chinese language goes back some 6 to 8 thousand years)
I assume you mean that humans are a particular species of ape, as in, a human is an ape, but not all apes are human. Otherwise, you and I have extremely different definitions of what a human is to say the least. You cannot train a gorilla to perform arthroscopic surgery, nor can a chimpanzee expound on philosophy and moral dilemmas. They're very different from us.
Evolution is not a straight line, it is a tree or bush.
True, but if you look at the tip of the highest branch of any tree, you can still trace a single line all the way down to the root.
But we came from a common ancestor, all the great apes and diverged along different branches, some of them ending in extinction.
So what was this common ancestor?
Here is a list of relatively close ancestors of apes and humans: Starting some 80 million years ago: Tree shrews, Lemurs Lorises Tarsiers Cebids Old World Monkeys Gibbons Oranutan Gorilla Human Chimps. Chimps branched off after Humans started evolving from the common ancestor of humans and chimps about 7.7 million years ago. Chimps branched about 3.4 million years ago.
Anthropoids branced from ancestral primates about 70 million years ago and apes as a whole about 23 million years ago.
Let's cut to the chase. It is the period from the point this common ancestor appeared +/-7.7 million years ago to the present that my questions are concerned with. Repeating the analogy given above, we should be able to start at the tip of the highest branch of the tree -- us -- and trace backward in a single line, if not to the root (microbes) then to a thicker main branch (this ancestor). What was this ancestor, and roughly how many basic successful mutations were there between it and us? There are only three possible answers to this question:
1) a specific number;
2) an approximate number;
3) we really don't know.
I don't know how I can make this question any clearer.
What you have to understand about genetics is that mutations and other content changes in genetic material build up whether expressed in the phenotype or not.
Fair enough, but I knew that already. This is stuff taught in basic biology in grade school and high school. Genetic traits skip generations due to various combinations of dominant and recessive genes, etc. But for the purposes of this conversation, I am only concerned with those expressed phenotypes.
Thus, there are many areas of genetic material that can be activated by various type of switch type genes. So if life has been evolving for a billion years, we have a billion years of genetic variations throught the whole system.
That would seem obvious. But I am only interested in this common ancestor of 7.7 million years ago to the present, as in, this ancestor eventually gave rise to this phenotype, which then gave rise to this one, then that one, etc.
And while we're at it here, let's take a poll. There seem to be 3 basic positions represented in here:
1) Atheist/agnostic.
2) Pure creationist, believes Earth is no more than about 10,000 years old.
3) Believers in God who believe the Earth is much older than that and who at least allow the possibility that evolution was God's way of creating the variety of life we have now.
Which are you? I would consider myself more or less a 3.
However, some 3's in here appear to be clinging so tightly to evolution that they are speaking as if the physical world of matter is all there is, which is to say they are much more a 1 than a 3, which is to say they don't REALLY believe there's a God but think it's a "lovely idea".
If you are a 3, then just as with a 2, by definition you have to allow for the possibility of supernatural intervention by an omnipotent metaphysical Supreme Being whenever He bloody well feels like it. This means you have to allow for things that cannot and will not ever be explained by science, which deals only with the physical and by definition cannot address the metaphysical.
Using physical science to explain the metaphysical is much like a man standing under a streetlight looking for his car keys. Another man approaches and asks "What are you doing?"
"I'm looking for my car keys."
"Where were you when you dropped them?"
"Over there," he points to the gutter over in the dark away from the streetlight.
"So why aren't you looking there?"
"Because the light is better over here."
***
So everybody, are you a 1, 2, or 3?
sorry, it's a frosty 6 pak of koolaid bursts, enough for you and five other of your closest jonestown friends and candidates,lol
he hasn't got a clue, but he's a christian, or as Nancy grace would say, "uh-huh, uh-huh"
Yeah, I guess animals just live in the lap of luxury. What about those long periods where it's below freezing for months on end and there's no food to be found? Craploads of giggles just lazing in the trees then, huh? When there's too many deer and not enough berries? Or birds flying south to escape the winter who end up plowing into thunderstorms that developed to quickly for them to fly around them and get bludgeoned to death by hail, cremated by lightning or blown by updrafts to altitudes where they can't breathe or freeze to death?
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, other than that humans have it tough too, which is obvious. Religious folk like me refer to this world as this Veil of Tears, that is no paradise for either man or beast.
My only point is that nature is even more cruel and violent than man ever was or will be. All the nuclear warheads and C4 in the world couldn't stop an asteroid making a beeline for us. What makes our cruelty and violence so terrible is that we're supposed to know better. It's worse than nature by its moral context, not by degree.
I am a Christian by the way but I find myself not as invested in the whole creationism/Darwin controversey. Its the problem of no one really "being there". None of us was really "there" at the beginning, so we can only posit what happened from fossils and erosive wear factors as well as argon/ radon (?) testing.(I know carbon testing is good at most for about 10k years but I forgot the name of the other testing they do). Yet, I believe God created it all, at whatever time he did it!
Both Creationists and Evolutionists have good points and arguements for their own positions and against those of the other. And no one on either side wants to listen to the other.
Meanwhile, the anti-religious who are not all well versed in Evolutionary science, have tried to couple the science with political and social movements designed to undermine classical western culture by casting aspersions against its Judeo Christian underpinnings.
Most evolutionary scientists just want to study life and the processess that created it. The politically lawless of character want to bring back the notion of Lex Talionis(law of the jungle...rule of tooth and claw) using Evolution as the driving wedge between man and the notion of the Divine.
I think a truce could be drawn between religious folk and science folk if both groups would stop to examine just who the folks are that really driving the conflicts between science and faith. It ain't necessarily true scientists that are raising the havoc against religion! It might just be that smug anti religious editor at your local newspaper or the muck raking ACLU types!
Do you remember growing up? I'm sure, like me, you lived next door to all kinds of people and played with their kids. We may have noted which church they went to, or if they never went, but it was live and let live.
However, now, and in no small part, due to God's sworn enemies, which include atheists and Communists, that harmony is no longer possible.
The idea as to change the nation by indoctrinating the children, but that hasn't worked. So it starts, first a little here, then a little there. Then some "scientist" starts calling for more drastic measures. If you think Dennett is scary, check out Peter Singer.
Now is the time: the two witnesses are standing up
That is my point. How does Darwin take blame for misuse?
The political solution is being stopped by the leftists. There campaign to eliminate God in the schools is making the fundamentalists shoot the wrong target.
We need to eliminate the nonsense the left has saddled us with as far as "separation clause" nonsense is concerned. There is no separation clause.
If we allowed people to pray in school led by whatever teacher wanted to, it would harm no one. It would not be against the Constitution the way it was intended, either.
"Then the fundamentalists would see that it is not biology that keeps God out of schools, but leftists. This would reduce the problem, but not eliminate it. The creation scam artists have radicalized the right wing to such an extent that their apostasy is widely accepted as THE interpretation of Scripture, now. The combination of bad teaching by the NEA in public schools and ignorance on the right, plus antagonism to God on the left has resulted in a dangerous mix of ignorance that may be hard to defeat."
posted earlier on another thread by shubi
"Repeating the analogy given above, we should be able to start at the tip of the highest branch of the tree -- us -- and trace backward in a single line, if not to the root (microbes) then to a thicker main branch (this ancestor)."
A straight line going back 2.2 million years from Homo sapiens to Homo erectus to Homo habilis with the common ancestor Australopithecus afarensis at about 2.7 million years (common to Australopithicenes and Homo.
I don't know if they know precisely what differences in DNA sequence and alleles there might have been, because there is no DNA available, to my knowledge.
I don't know why you think the number of mutations between one and the other is that important. It is obvious there are major differences in skeletal structure, especially cranial development.
There is a gap in fossils from 8 mya to 4.4 mya. So we don't have common ancestor information for the gorilla, chimp, human split. But using the molecular clock and DNA-DNA hybridization some conclusions can be drawn.
The difference in amino acid sequences in albumin of chimps, gorillas and humans is only about 1.2%. With this and a simple formula that indicates the relationship between time and distance, a divergence date of about 5MYA can be estimated. Much of the difference between apes and humans are attributable to just a few regulator genes. We are not as genetically different as we look.
But I wasn't blaming Darwin....I was blaming the Lawless ones for misusing Darwin for political purpose when all he was was a scientists!
Yeah, it is just like misusing the Bible to attack science.
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