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Scientists Look To Europe As Evolutionary Seat
University Of Toront ^ | 19 February 2002 | Staff

Posted on 02/19/2002 7:53:03 AM PST by PatrickHenry

University of Toronto anthropologist David Begun and his European colleagues are re-writing the book on the history of great apes and humans, arguing that most of their evolutionary development took place in Eurasia, not Africa.

In back-to-back issues of the Journal of Human Evolution, Begun and his collaborators describe two fossils, both discovered in Europe. One comes from the oldest relative of all living great apes (orangutans and African apes) and humans; the other is the most complete skull ever found of a close relative of the African apes and humans.

In the November 2001 issue, Begun and colleague Elmar Heizmann of the Natural History Museum of Stuttgart discuss the earliest-known great ape fossil, broadly ancestral to all living great apes and humans. "Found in Germany 20 years ago, this specimen is about 16.5 million years old, some 1.5 million years older than similar species from East Africa," Begun says. "It suggests that the great ape and human lineage first appeared in Eurasia and not Africa."

In the December 2001 paper, Begun and colleague László Kordos of the Geological Museum of Hungary describe the skull of Dryopithecus, discovered in Hungary by their team a couple of years ago. The fossil is identical to living great apes in brain size and very similar to African apes in the shape of the skull and face and in details of the teeth, the researchers say.

The discoveries suggest that the early ancestors of the hominids (the family of great apes and humans) migrated to Eurasia from Africa about 17 million years ago, just before these two continents were cut off from each other by an expansion of the Mediterranean Sea. Begun says that the great apes flourished in Eurasia and that their lineage leading to the African apes and humans - Dryopithecus - migrated south from Europe or Western Asia into Africa, where populations diverged into the lines leading towards great apes, gorillas and chimps (chimpanzees and bonobos). One of those lines eventually evolved into the ancestors of humans about six million years ago.

[Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by University Of Toronto for journalists and other members of the public. If you wish to quote from any part of this story, please credit University Of Toronto as the original source. You may also wish to include the following link in any citation: Source. ]


TOPICS: Culture/Society; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: crevolist; godsgravesglyphs
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To: balrog666
What the hell are you smoking? And do you have any more of it?

I guess my brevity confused you. I meant intellectually -- I'm talking about the development of language, literature, science, logic -- modern consciousness, in short, when no contemporary society was even close.

21 posted on 02/19/2002 11:00:16 AM PST by WL-law
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To: PatrickHenry
No doubt, we in the West were among the first to begin making serious intellectual and technological progress.

Gunpowder came from where? Al Gebr means what?

22 posted on 02/19/2002 11:12:59 AM PST by AndrewC
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To: Jonathon Spectre
There are lots of reasons why the European powers were able to dominate the planet for much of the last 500 years. I would recommend “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond and “The Rise and Fall of Great Powers” by Paul Kennedy. Taken together, these volumes present a clear convincing case for the political, sociological, and environmental factors that resulted in European hegemony.

Recognize that until about 1550, the most technologically advanced, educated, and wealthiest people were the Chinese. Had they heeded the advice of Zheng He and not turned inward, allowing the less advanced Europeans to explore and colonize the world, North America might be populated by their decedents. Europe might very well have become a third world backwater.

The privileged lives that Europeans and their American brethren enjoy today have as much to do with blind luck as with hard work. I for one am glad I was born lucky.

23 posted on 02/19/2002 11:27:08 AM PST by Gerfang
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To: Gerfang
Recognize that until about 1550, the most technologically advanced, educated, and wealthiest people were the Chinese

The had gunpowder, iron, paper, the center pivot rudder and magnetic compass. Their navigators had explored as far as the Cape of Good Hope. Chinese style anchors are still occassionally found in California coastal waters.

They would have taken over the world, except that the Chinese bureaucracy feared loss of control, and taxed and regulated exploration out of existance.

To this day it remains bureaucracy's most stunning acheivement...

24 posted on 02/19/2002 11:40:54 AM PST by null and void
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To: cracker
I suggest you read Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel for an explanation of why you are so VERY VERY VERY wrong. And yes, you are a racist.

Well, I swore I wasn't going to post again in this thread, but this just demands it. Let me summarize Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel, which I read and laughed at all the way through:

"Luck determines everything. Human effort, work, and willpower mean nothing. European civilization flourished into the Western culture of today because Europeans were so lucky. Africans remained mired in backward hunting and gathering because they were unlucky. It had nothing to do with the people in any way, it was all the work of some mystical, unquantifiable, invisible thing called luck. Some people are lucky, and some are just unlucky. That's why we're all equal."

This is an infantile, submissive worldview perpetrated by someone who wants the world to be a nursery and refuses to take reponsibility for their failings. "Oooh, it wasn't my fault I didn't get that job, I was just UNLUCKY!" "Oooh, I can't figure out it's better to plant a field than to eat bark off a tree, how UNLUCKY!" What nonsense. If Jared Diamond is being used as a refutation of what I said, then I know I'm onto something.

"Racist" is the modern-day version of "heretic". People shriek it when they see something they don't want to have to deal with or think about that contradicts their worldview. Like "heretic", it is a peculiar, intractable, unprovable one-word slander that has come to mean essentially nothing. Galileo was a heretic, you know. He was also right.

I'll go back to lurking now. I'm a bit saddened there haven't been more fundamentalists drawn to this thread, their foaming at the mouth is always interesting to watch.

25 posted on 02/19/2002 11:48:49 AM PST by Jonathon Spectre
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To: AndrewC
Me: "No doubt, we in the West were among the first to begin making serious intellectual and technological progress."

You: Gunpowder came from where? Al Gebr means what?

My question to you: Are these statements of equal meaning?
1. We were the first ...
2. We were among the first ...

26 posted on 02/19/2002 12:15:31 PM PST by PatrickHenry
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To: WL-law
I guess my brevity confused you.

No, your phrasing of the question was poor and I pointed that out.

I meant intellectually -- I'm talking about the development of language, literature, science, logic -- modern consciousness, in short, when no contemporary society was even close.

Close? You mean as in the cities and empires of Babylon, Southern India, Burma, Laos, China? All had writing, literature, accounting, science, and, of course, logic.

So back to my question: What the hell are you smoking'?
27 posted on 02/19/2002 12:42:17 PM PST by balrog666
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To: PatrickHenry
My question to you: Are these statements of equal meaning?

No. My intent was to counter the (to me)ever-growing presumption of a superiority in European culture.

CHINESE INVENTIONS

5. Cast Iron: China, Forth Century BC. By having good refractory clays for the construction of blast furnace walls, and the discovery of how to reduce the temperature at which iron melts by using phosphorus, the Chinese were able cast iron into ornamental and functional shapes. Coal, used as a fuel, was placed around elongated crucibles containing iron ore. This expertise allowed the production of pots and pans with thin walls. With the development of annealing in the third century, ploughshares, longer swords, and even buildings were eventually made of iron. In the West, blast furnaces are known to have existed in Scandinavia by the late eighth century AD, but cast iron was not widely available in Europe before 1380.

6. The Helicopter Rotor and the Propeller: China, Forth Century AD. By fourth century AD a common toy in China was the helicopter top, called the 'bamboo dragonfly'. The top was an axis with a cord wound round it, and with blades sticking out from the axis and set at an angle. One pulled the cord, and the top went climbing in the air. Sir George Cayley, the father of modern aeronautics, studied the Chinese helicopter top in 1809. The helicopter top in China led to nothing but amusement and pleasure, but fourteen hundred years later it was to be one of the key elements in the birth of modern aeronautics in the West.

7. The Decimal System: China, Fourteenth Century BC. An example of how the Chinese used the decimal system may be seen in an inscription from the thirteenth century BC, in which '547 days' is written 'Five hundred plus four decades plus seven of days'. The Chinese wrote with characters instead of an alphabet. When writing with a Western alphabet of more than nine letters, there is a temptation to go on with words like eleven. With Chinese characters, ten is ten-blank and eleven is ten-one (zero was left as a blank space: 405 is 'four blank five'), This was much easier than inventing a new character for each number (imagine having to memorize an enormous number of characters just to read the date!). Having a decimal system from the beginning was a big advantage in making mathematical advances. The first evidence of decimals in Europe is in a Spanish manuscript of 976 AD.

8. The Seismograph: China, Second Century AD. China has always been plagued with earthquakes and the government wanted to know where the economy would be interrupted. A seismograph was developed by the brilliant scientist, mathematician, and inventor Chang Heng (whose works also show he envisaged the earth as a sphere with nine continents and introduced the crisscrossing grid of latitude and longitude). His invention was noted in court records of the later Han Dynasty in 132 AD (the fascinating description is too long to reproduce here. It can be found on pgs. 162-166 of Temple's book). Modern seismographs only began development in 1848.

And no, I don't propose we install an Emporer and kow-tow to him or wave little red books around.
28 posted on 02/19/2002 1:35:35 PM PST by AndrewC
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To: AndrewC
Emporer=Emperor

Dyslexia strikes again.

29 posted on 02/19/2002 1:36:33 PM PST by AndrewC
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To: AndrewC
Analog Computer, 1st century BC, Greece ...
30 posted on 02/19/2002 1:41:57 PM PST by Junior
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To: gnarledmaw
bump
31 posted on 02/19/2002 1:42:26 PM PST by gnarledmaw
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To: Junior
Analog Computer, 1st century BC, Greece ...

Very interesting, but are they sure it is not of the character displayed by the New Mexico sparkplug?

32 posted on 02/19/2002 1:49:13 PM PST by AndrewC
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To: AndrewC
Very interesting, but are they sure it is not of the character displayed by the New Mexico sparkplug?

Which turned out to be from the 1920s: Mysteries from the Depths of Time: The Coso Artifact

33 posted on 02/19/2002 1:55:04 PM PST by Junior
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To: Junior
Which turned out to be from the 1920s: Mysteries from the Depths of Time: The Coso Artifact

Yep, that's the one! Anyway it does not appear that the "computer" was anomalous. Here is more information including a reference to something I was seeking, a Greek orrery.

The Antikythera Mechanism: Physical and Intellectual Salvage from the 1st Century B.C.

Price remained undiscouraged and maintained his conclusions. In 1971 the Oak Ridge national laboratory published an article on the use of high-energy gamma radiation to examine the interiors of metallic objects. Price soon secured the assistance of the Greek Atomic Energy Commission in shooting gamma rays into the clumps of corroded bronze. He was able to produce photographic plates that not only allowed him to reconstruct the device but to ascertain its date of construction.[12]

34 posted on 02/19/2002 2:08:06 PM PST by AndrewC
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To: Jonathon Spectre
Let me summarize Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel, which I read and laughed at all the way through:

I think you’ve misunderstood Mr. Diamond’s premise.

"Luck determines everything. Human effort, work, and willpower mean nothing.”

This is absolutely wrong. Mr. Diamond’s premise is that some human groups developed in environments that supplied the materials that encouraged agricultural societies. These materials included flora conducive to agriculture and fauna appropriate for domestication. Agriculture in turn created the necessary conditions for civilization.

Mr. Diamond speaks in the aggregate, so he doesn’t address the your issues of effort, work, and willpower. He does note that wherever the population obtained the proper tools, civilizations soon developed. For example, once the Bantu people acquired cattle from the Arabs they soon coalesced into tribal societies capable of dominating their neighbors. When the Northern Europeans acquired agriculture from Rome and Greece, they too embarked upon the path to civilization.

It had nothing to do with the people in any way, it was all the work of some mystical, unquantifiable, invisible thing called luck.

Did you actually read the book? He doesn’t say anything of the sort and I dare you to find a quote to back up your claim. “Guns, Germs, and Steel” doesn’t focus on your concerns because Mr. Diamond speaks in the aggregate. He doesn’t address the reasons why certain European civilizations like France, England, or Russia came to dominate neighbors who had the same sort of advantages. That’s why I recommend other books, like “The Rise and Fall of Great Powers” by Paul Kennedy or “Diplomacy” by Henry Kissenger.

Some people are lucky, and some are just unlucky. That's why we're all equal."

Individual and cultural traits come mainly into play in contests between equivalent powers. The contests between Rome and Carthage, Athens and Sparta, or England and France are all conflicts where cultural characteristics and the efforts of great individuals become important. In the type of conflicts analyzed in “Guns, Germs, and Steel”, the disparities are so great that individual effort cannot be of great help. A Napoleon leading Athenian armies might have defeated Sparta, but he couldn’t have saved the Aztecs form the Spanish.

This is an infantile, submissive worldview perpetrated by someone who wants the world to be a nursery and refuses to take reponsibility for their failings.

Once again, did you actually read the book?

"Racist" is the modern-day version of "heretic". People shriek it when they see something they don't want to have to deal with or think about that contradicts their worldview. Like "heretic", it is a peculiar, intractable, unprovable one-word slander that has come to mean essentially nothing. Galileo was a heretic, you know. He was also right.

Galileo was right because the evidence backed up his ideas. The evidence also supports Mr. Diamond’s ideas.

35 posted on 02/20/2002 7:25:01 AM PST by Gerfang
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To: PatrickHenry
I say again, the evolutionists are looking at the wrong end of the "lineup" or whatever you want to call it of hominid and human types. The problem is at the near end and not the far end.

Recent studies of neanderthal DNA turned up the result that neanderthal DNA is "about halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee", and that there is no way we could interbreed with them or be descended from them via any process resembling evolution. That says that anybody wishing to believe that modern man evolved has to come up with some closer hominid, i.e. a plausible ancestor for modern man, and that the closer hominid would stand closer to us in both time and morphology than the neanderthal, and that his works and remains should be very easy to find, since neanderthal remains and works are all over the map. Of course, no such closer hominid exists; all other hominids are much further from us than the neanderthal.

An evolutionist could try to claim that we and the neanderthal both are descended from some more remote ancestor 200,000 years ago, but that would be like claiming that dogs couldn't be descended from wolves, and must therefore be descended from fish, i.e. the claim would be idiotic.

That leaves three possibilities: modern man was created from scratch very recently, was genetically re-engineered from the neanderthal, or was imported from elsewhere in the cosmos.

There is no rational way to believe that modern man evolved here on Earth. Only a wilfully ignorant person could believe that.

36 posted on 02/22/2002 5:43:07 PM PST by medved
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To: medved
Ever wonder why the evos like to talk about the little freak-show items like the archaeopteryx and platypus the way they do? Basically, it's because so little is known about those things that they can talk about them all day long and not look or sound anywhere near as STUPID as they do when talking about ordinary things like flying birds (which I have explained) or modern man. In the case of modern man, there is not only zero evidence of our evolving, there is provably nothing on the planet we could have conceivably evolved FROM. Neanderthal DNA has been shown to be "about halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee" thus eliminating him altogether as a plausible ancestor of ours, and all other hominids are much further removed from us THAN the neanderthal. You'd need some other hominid closer to us both in time and morphology, and the works and remains of such a thing would be all over the place if he had ever existed; they aren't, and he didn't.

Logically, you only have to think about it a little bit to realize how stupid it really is.

You are starting out with apes ten million years ago, in a world of fang and claw with 1000+ lb. carnivores running amok all over the place, and trying to evolve your way towards a more refined creature in modern man. Like:

HEY! Ya know, I'll betcha if I put on these lace sleeves and this powdered wig, them dire-wolves an sabertooth cats'll start to show me a little bitta RESPECT!!!"

What's wrong with that?

The problem gets worse when you try to imagine known human behavorial constants interacting with the requirements of having the extremely rare to imaginary beneficial mutation always prevail:

Let's start from about ten million years back and assume we have our ape ancestor, and two platonic ideals towards which this ape ancestor (call him "Oop") can evolve: One is a sort of a composite of Mozart, Beethoven, Thomas Jefferson, Shakespeare, i.e. your archetypal dead white man, and the other platonic ideal, or evolutionary target, is going to be a sort of an "apier" ape, fuzzier, smellier, meaner, bigger Johnson, smaller brain, chews tobacco, drinks, gambles, gets into knife fights...

Further, let's be generous and assume that for every one chance mutation which is beneficial and leads towards the gentleman, you only have 1000 adverse mutations which lead towards the other guy. None of these mutations are going to be instantly fatal or anything like that at all; Darwinism posits change by insensible degree, hence all of these 1000 guys are fully functional.

The assumption which is being made is that these 1000 guys (with the bad mutation) are going to get together and decide something like:

"Hey, you know, the more I look at this thing, we're really messed-up, so what we need to do is to all get on our motorcycles and pack all our ole-ladies over to Dr. Jeckyll over there (the guy with the beneficial mutation), and try to arrange for the next generation of our kids to be in better genetic shape than we are..."

Now, it would be amazing enough if that were ever to happen once; Darwinism, however, requires that this happen EVERY GENERATION from Oop to us. What could possibly be stupider than that?
37 posted on 02/22/2002 5:44:09 PM PST by medved
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To: medved
The really big lie which is being promulgated by the evos is that the dialectic is between evolution and religion. That's BS. In order to have a meaningful dialectic between evolution and religion, you would need a religion which operated on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution, so that the debate would be between the evolutionists, and the voodoo doctors: Dick Dawkins vs Jr. Doc Duvalier.

But the real dialectic is between evolution and mathematics. Professing belief in evolution at this juncture amounts to the same thing as claiming not to believe in modern mathematics, probability theory, and logic. It's basically ignorant.

Evolution has been so thoroughly discredited at this point that you assume nobody is defending it because they believe in it anymore, and that they are defending it because they do not like the prospects of having to defend or explain some expect of their lifestyles to God, St. Peter, Muhammed...

To these people I say, you've still got a problem. The problem is that evolution, as a doctrine, is so overwhelmingly STUPID that, faced with a choice of wearing a sweatshirt with a scarlet letter A for Adulteror, F for Fornicator or some such traditional design, or or a big scarlet letter I for IDIOT, you'd actually be better off sticking with one of the traditional choices because, as Clint Eastwood noted in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:

God hates IDIOTS, too!

The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.

Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.

For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.

In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.

All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.

And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.

Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.

Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.

And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record (despite the BS claims of talk.origins "crew" and others of their ilk) to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:

Guys, we need flight feathers, and wings, and specialized bones, hearts, lungs, and tails, and we need em NOW; not two years from now. Everybody ready, all together now: OOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....

You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.

But it gets even stupider.

Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.

Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).

Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:

1. It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could see or hear them, they wouldn't be witches...) The best example of that sort of logic in fact that there ever was was Michael O'Donahue's parody of the Connecticut Yankee (New York Yankee in King Arthur's Court) which showed Reggie looking for a low outside fastball and then getting beaned cold by a high inside one, the people feeling Reggie's wrist for pulse, and Reggie back in Camelot, where they had him bound hand and foot. Some guy was shouting "Damned if e ain't black from ead to foot, if that ain't witchcraft I never saw it!!!", everybody was yelling "Witchcraft Trial!, Witchcraft Trial!!", and they were building a scaffold. Reggie looks at King Arthur and says "Hey man, isn't that just a tad premature, I mean we haven't even had the TRIAL yet!", and Arthur replies "You don't seem to understand, son, the hanging IS the trial; if you survive that, that means you're a witch and we gotta burn ya!!!" Again, that's precisely the sort of logic which goes into Gould's variant of evolutionism, Punk-eek.

2. PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...

3. PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.

4. PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.

5. For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.

The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.

And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:

The don't even bother to try to provide a mechanism or technical explaination of any sort for this "punk-eek"

They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:

ASSUMING that Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happens, then the rest of the business proceeds as we have described in our scholarly discourse above!

Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.

I ask you: How could anything be stupider or worse than that? What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?

38 posted on 02/22/2002 5:46:10 PM PST by medved
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To: medved

Some useful references:

Major Scientific Problems with Evolution

Evol-U-Sham dot Com

Many Experts Quoted on FUBAR State of Evolution

The All-Time, Ultimate Evolution Quote

"If a person doesn't think that there is a God to be accountable to, then what's the point of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges? That's how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all came from slime. When we died, you know , that was it, there is nothing..."

Jeffrey Dahmer, noted Evolutionist

Social Darwinism, Naziism, Communism, Darwinism Roots etc.

Creation and Intelligent Design Links

Catastrophism

Intelligent Versions of Biogenesis etc.

Talk.origins/Sci.Bio.Evolution Realities


39 posted on 02/22/2002 5:47:31 PM PST by medved
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To: medved

[Plato the Platypus says: "I eat bats for breakfast."]
40 posted on 02/22/2002 6:10:42 PM PST by PatrickHenry
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