Posted on 01/27/2004 8:08:04 AM PST by blam
'Your forefathers were not Neanderthals'
January 26 2004 at 02:30PM
By Maggie Fox
Washington - You may think your grandparents act like Neanderthals, but United States researchers said on Monday they had strong evidence that modern humans are not descended from them.
A computer analysis of the skulls of modern humans, Neanderthals, monkeys and apes shows that we are substantially different, physically, from those early humans.
New York University paleoanthropologist Katerina Harvati said Neanderthals should be considered a separate species from Homo sapiens, and not just a sub-species.
"We interpret the evidence presented here as supporting the view that Neanderthals represent an extinct human species and therefore refute the regional continuity model for Europe," she and colleagues wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Some anthropologists believe that Neanderthals, who went extinct 30 000 years ago, may have at least contributed to the ancestry of modern Europeans.
There is strong evidence that Homo sapiens neanderthalis, as they are known scientifically, interacted with the more modern Cro-Magnons, who eventually displaced them. Cro-Magnons are the ancestors of modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens.
Some research has suggested they may have interbred to a limited degree, although this is hotly disputed in anthropological circles.
At least one study that looked at fragments of Neanderthal DNA suggested any Neanderthal-Cro-Magnon offspring did not add to the modern gene pool.
Harvati and colleagues combined modern computer technology and the tried-and-true method of determining species that uses physical comparisons.
They examined the skulls of modern humans and Neanderthals and 11 existing species of non-human primates including chimpanzees, gorillas and baboons.
They measured 15 standard skull and face landmarks and used 3-D analysis to superimpose each one on the other.
"From these data, we were able to determine how much variation living primate species generally accommodate, as well as measure how different two primate species that are closely related can be," Harvati said in a statement.
Their computer analyses showed that the differences measured between modern humans and Neanderthals were significantly greater than those found between subspecies of living monkeys and apes.
Size is real. It's a barrier that can't be crossed without human intervention. If we have the two true-breeding populations, a mutation in one will not be found in the other.
If it doesn't happen in the wild, they're different. Lions and tigers can be crossbred (I don't know whether the offspring are fertile), but they breed true in the wild.
Us and the Neanderthals. I guess the answer hinges on how long the populations were separated, ie how much genetic distance had built up. Still, there seems to be some kind of major change in our lineage about 100-70 kya, possibly related to the evolution of language. But, without the nuclear DNA, it's hard to say what was possible or common. My gut feeling is that our ancestors were more likely to hunt and eat 'em than raise "halfbreeds"
Well in the case of horses the trunk would be the Eohippus and the roots would be earlier mammals.
The evidence which actually exists could as easily if not more easily be explained by claiming that Jehovah, Wotan, or Allah or somebody simply didn't know what sort of horse would thrive on this planet and therefore created fifty or sixty different kinds of them and let natural selection sort the thing out and weed out all the losers.
No it wouldn't on many levels
But the main one is if what you say happened then why do you find these horses in a perfectly sorted in a time wise way to suggest evolution. And before you say that's because the "Winners" would have out lasted the "Losers", Well OK but by the time the "Losers" got weeded out many individuals of the winners would have also lived out their lifespans and died so we should find a mix between the species.
For example The modern horse and triceratops probably lived in the same type of niche. Obviously there were many generations of triceratops but for the sake of argument lets just say there was only 3 generations before triceratops "Lost" and got weeded out and though I would bet Triceratops would have a longer lifespan than horses let's just assume for the sake of argument that they have similar lifespans. Well by the time all 3 generations of Triceratops lived and totally died out 3 generations of horses would have also lived and also died so if what you are saying is true that all animals lived together at once than we should find modern horses and triceratops fossils together which we don't.
No, not coincidence, design.
Again, the appearance of retroposon - or lack thereof - in any grouping of animals does not allow any sort of proper scientific conclusion to be drawn about evolution as the origin of species.
Can you come up with a specific prediction of creationism that can be tested?
Two of the most fundamental laws of science. The first and second laws of thermodynamics are predicted by the theory of intelligent design. Evolution is contrary to both laws.
Of course, you will provide rebuttal stating that the second law is a "tendency" toward entropy ... and we could go on and on. You might as well be a rabbi arguing with an me as an imam about whether YHWH or Allah is true God. Our problem is that we have both made up our minds about things we cannot possible know with 100% certainty.
Yes, I saw the link and read through it. And yes, I saw that the title of the link indicates observed changes from one species to another (speciation.) But then I saw that the citations provided show no such ability for an organism to change into another kind.
Have you actually thought through your position?
Absolutely. Your above statement is exactly why I should know better than to get into these arguments. Almost every evolutionist I've ever met assumes that the creationist is a dumb zealot. (Admittedly, I've also known many creationists who talk to evolutionist as if the evolutionist is a soulless heathen.)
Your inability to admit your bias is as strong as mine and my inability to put my bias aside means we will never do better than a standoff.
Personally, I think the word "confidence" is far preferable to "faith" in the scientific context. "Faith" is belief in the absense of evidence. The principles of science, going all the way down to its most fundamental axioms, are all supported by evidence -- and no counter-evidence. That takes such matters out of the realm of faith.
When we've had to refute the same old tired arguments on every crevo thread for the past five years, we begin to wonder. The evidence indicates your average creationist either suffers from short-term memory loss or willful ignorance of the evidence. Either way, it doesn't speak well for the creationist side.
Just one small example: your average evolutionist posting on these threads keeps abreast of science -- not just the popular science, such as the Mars missions, printed in the paper -- but the leading edge research. We have a number of actual, working scientists posting here who will more than gladly back up their contentions with links to recently-published scientific papers. Even us non-scientific types go out of our way to read about the latest research through either the published abstracts of the paper (which is about as far as I can wade) or through publications devoted to presenting such science to the layman. Many of us also have extensive collections of books on various scientific subjects (I happen to keep a small library on extinct megafauna).
Your average creationist gets his information from creationist websites and literature. Most of this stuff is demonstrably decades old (just check any posting of "quote salad" made by a creationist) -- and, if this stuff was ever valid, it is no longer is the case. Also, creationist websites have been shown to blatantly falsify information such as quotes from researchers; I cannot tell you how many times the various evolutionists on these threads have dug up the real quotes and shown the creationist version to be 180º out. Your inability to admit your bias is as strong as mine and my inability to put my bias aside means we will never do better than a standoff.
My "bias" is based on evidence, not faith. Your bias causes you to throw aside 150 years of research because it makes you uncomfortable. If you wish to remain ignorant, that's your call, however, you cannot present your views as a viable alternative to an evidentiary-based theory such as evolution.
Not really. In fact that's the point which scientists telling the truth about this sorry affair are trying to make. The eohippus would have to preceed the others in time to serve as a trunk in this case and it simply doesn't; fossils show it running around at the same time as the others.
Nonetheless, not to be deterred by reality, evolutionist biologists show the horse sequence in textbooks arranged as if they did constitute a time continuum with the eohippus and smaller, multi-toed creatures coming first and the larger coming later. That's basically lying for Darwin.
Creationists, too, get tired of answering the same old tired arguments ...
Btw, my favorite quote from that dusty old book:
Yes, Mr. Darwin, it is.
Thank you for proof positive you are ignorant at best and disingenuous at worst. The whole Darwin quote is thus:
To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated; but I may remark that, as some of the lowest organisms, in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibility.
Note how, just a sentence after your selective quoting, Darwin goes on to explain that such gradations can actually be found. But hey, you don't care. You think you've pulled one over on those evilutionists. Unfortunately, when you don't actually know of that which you speak, you make blatantly stupid errors like the one above. Hell, even the folks at Answers in Genesis claim the excerpted quote should not be used because it was taken out of context and its use makes the user look like a complete idiot:
Darwin’s quote about the absurdity of eye evolution from Origin of Species. Citing his statement at face value is subtly out of context. Darwin was talking about its seeming absurdity but then said that after all it was quite easy to imagine that the eye could be built step-by-step (in his opinion, with which AiG obviously disagrees—see Darwin v The Eye and An eye for creation).
As has been noted before: "Creationism is never having to say you're sorry."
And how about all the plagiarize material, posted without attribution and without links to the source? How about the bogus credentials of creationists? How about the refusal to recognize verifiable facts? How about the continuous slanders (communist, nazi, etc.)? How about the never-used phrase: "I'm not an expert on this, but ..."?
Matthew 7:20 Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.
This has been extensively rebutted already on this very thread. Eo is ancestral to and not contemporary with most of the horse species so far found. You're just making a point of not understanding what is shown you so you can be back dumb as a stump trolling for suckers tomorrow.
Yes, they'll abandon the thread. But they won't abandon their creation "science." And they'll be back in the next thread, spouting the same stuff all over again.
You just happen to have independently, while reading Origin of Species, thought of the same dishonest out-of-context-quoting stunt (namely citing a rhetorical proposition and conveniently losing the answer which follows immediately) as about 2,500 creationist quote-mining idiots on the Internet. Oh, yeah!
A hopelessly bogus post from start to finish.
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