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To: VadeRetro
Does throwing in gratuitous "ontologically"s and "epistemologically"s ease the pain when admitting you can't seem to tell an ape from a human in the fossil record? "Epistemologically easy?" Give it up, man!

Tell me about it.

The Homo habilis Debate

Another debate centered around [sic] Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis is whether or not these two species belong in the genus Homo or would be better suited in one of the other hominid genera. Some researchers feel that all species within the genus Homo should have characteristics, such as locomotor patterns, diet and body proportions, that make them more like modern humans than like the australopiths. These researchers feel that the characteristics of H. habilis and H. rudolfensis are more ape-like than modern, a conclusion that would remove them from our genus. This would make Homo a monophyly (all species evolved from a common ancestor), rather than a polyphyly (the species evolved from more than one ancestor) as it is now thought to be. Other reseearchers think, however, that moving the two species out of the genus Homo does not solve the problem since the specimens do not easily fit into the genus Australopithecus as currently defined.

Examples of this sort of thing are legion. Nothing gratuitous about it.

Cordially

565 posted on 03/16/2006 12:50:31 PM PST by Diamond
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To: Diamond
That is precisely your problem. Homo habilis, probably the most human-like hominid of its day, straddles the "gap" creationists would claim separates ape to man.

Some scientists have argued for putting some early habiline specimens into genus Australopithecus. There's intergrading up and down the hominid series.

Kind of hard to make separate created kinds out of that.

The skulls I posted are all modern species. They don't intergrade because they're the tips of the branches. As you go back in time, the branches grow closer and closer together, divergence run backwards. That's the signature of evolution. That's why things get hard to lump neatly into modern bins as you go back.

568 posted on 03/16/2006 1:15:10 PM PST by VadeRetro (I have the updated "Your brain on creationism" on my homepage.)
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