The styloid process allows the hand to lock into the wrist bones, giving humans the ability to apply greater amounts of pressure to the hand. This allows humans to make and use tools. Courtesy of University of Missouri
Posted on 12/18/2013 10:11:55 AM PST by null and void
The styloid process allows the hand to lock into the wrist bones, giving humans the ability to apply greater amounts of pressure to the hand. This allows humans to make and use tools. Courtesy of University of Missouri
COLUMBIA, MO – Humans have a distinctive hand anatomy that allows them to make and use tools. Apes and other nonhuman primates do not have these distinctive anatomical features in their hands, and the point in time at which these features first appeared in human evolution is unknown. Now, a University of Missouri researcher and her international team of colleagues have found a new hand bone from a human ancestor who roamed the earth in East Africa approximately 1.42 million years ago. They suspect the bone belonged to the early human species, Homo erectus. The discovery of this bone is the earliest evidence of a modern human-like hand, indicating that this anatomical feature existed more than half a million years earlier than previously known.
"This bone is the third metacarpal in the hand, which connects to the middle finger. It was discovered at the 'Kaitio' site in West Turkana, Kenya," said Carol Ward, professor of pathology and anatomical sciences at MU. The discovery was made by a West Turkana Paleo Project team, led by Ward's colleague and co-author Fredrick Manthi of the National Museums of Kenya. "What makes this bone so distinct is that the presence of a styloid process, or projection of bone, at the end that connects to the wrist. Until now, this styloid process has been found only in us, Neandertals and other archaic humans."
The styloid process helps the hand bone lock into the wrist bones, allowing for greater amounts of pressure to be applied to the wrist and hand from a grasping thumb and fingers. Ward and her colleagues note that a lack of the styloid process created challenges for apes and earlier humans when they attempted to make and use tools. This lack of a styloid process may have increased the chances of having arthritis earlier, Ward said.
The bone was found near sites where the earliest Acheulian tools have appeared. Acheulian tools are ancient, shaped stone tools that include stone hand axes more than 1.6 million years old. Being able to make such precise tools indicates that these early humans were almost certainly using their hands for many other complex tasks as well, Ward said.
"The styloid process reflects an increased dexterity that allowed early human species to use powerful yet precise grips when manipulating objects. This was something that their predecessors couldn't do as well due to the lack of this styloid process and its associated anatomy," Ward said. "With this discovery, we are closing the gap on the evolutionary history of the human hand. This may not be the first appearance of the modern human hand, but we believe that it is close to the origin, given that we do not see this anatomy in any human fossils older than 1.8 million years. Our specialized, dexterous hands have been with us for most of the evolutionary history of our genus, Homo. They are – and have been for almost 1.5 million years – fundamental to our survival."
You are a self-proclaimed non expert on the subject (Dawinian evolution, or, if you please Neodarwinian evolution) and claim you will not be arrogant, yet you were, shall we say, dismissive in your post 102, 95, and 140 to your correspondents. In your post 133 you even referenced your faith.
As far as you know there are no supernatural forces, but as far as you know there might be supernatural forces. There may be metaphysical truths, such as, there are other minds than yours out here in the universe.
You say your point of view is meaningful only on what matters are true. I applaud that. I hope you will continue with that psychodynamic. Truth….we will get that that later. Since it matters to you, you will not take offense at the truth.
You reference Knowledge as expanding most thoroughly through rigid scientific scholarship and not common sense or comforting thoughts. Good! We have made great progress in this pronouncement. I think your last sentence you reserve as a 'get out of jail card' statement. Perhaps we can unpack that notion, too. It is, again, as in your post 133 a statement of faith. We need to examine that notion, as it, no double, ks is part of the tool you use to arrive at your conclusions….evolution or not.
So, this is your belief…..without epistemological certitude, ….it is , in other words, your FAITH.
If it is, that is fine, notwithstanding your previous vilification of others on posts, 24,78,89,102, and 140. Even as your correspodants asserted their faith view, and now you acknowledge this is your belief, that is to say your faith.
If my assessment is unfair to you, please clarify.
You act intelligent but play dumb. “Parts of my body? Huh? What parts? I’m so confused.” As though you don’t have a brain. You know as well as I that you have a million working parts like eyes that see and ears designed not only to hear but to work as a gyroscope and a brain, central nervous system and plumbing that work together in sync to make your whole body work like a machine or a city. I’ve said all this already and you want me to keep repeating myself. You look at what I’ve posted on this thread and tell me why just about every part of your body isn’t evidence of purposeful design (use the parts I happened to mention if you have to but that’s just scratching the surface).
I’m not so arrogant to claim I know truth, but I guess arrogant enough to dismiss preposterous ideas not backed up by science or logic. I didn’t write a couple of those posts you referenced though.
“There may be metaphysical truths, such as, there are other minds than yours out here in the universe.”
There could be lots of things one could imagine. Just because you can imagine it doesn’t mean it exists.
Again, post 133 is not me. I am not of the clearest mind at this hour, but I don’t remember posting anything about my faith.
“we will get that that later” and “We have made great progress”
I’m afraid you are going to be disappointed.
Um, no. Linguistic trickery is not an honest way to carry on a discussion.
And again, you referencing posts I did not make. I realize you are itching to throttle me with what you consider logic, but you’ll have to do better research than that to do it effectively.
Asked and answered.
Read carefully. Tell me of other Metaphysical Truths which exist out there in the universe.
I understand. I too am very tired. I have a good feeling about you. I will bet on your allegiance to the truth. Lets take it up tomorrow.
Hope you have a Merry Christmas.
What was the first metaphysical truth you think I agreed with? Imagination?
I am still tired….so I will talk to you tomorrow.
You are speaking to another mind. This is a metaphysical entity not made of matter. You are the metaphysical materialist. Unless you can account for the physical matter which makes us mind you have referenced another metaphysical truth. You are corresponding with another mind.Although not a metaphysical entity, logic has a sort of metaphysical nature. I t is in fact an abstract, universal entity, as is reason ( the application of laws of the logic), numbers, sets, and beauty, objective morality, and mind.
Unless you can account for these immaterial entities with matter, I am afraid your commitment to materialism exceeds your devotion to Truth. If you can epistemically account for these entities, and other universal abstract entities, please share it with me. I really do want to know the answer.
Aware of Behe. Also aware that at least some of his examples, as well as his basic argument, has been sufficiently debunked. But that wasn't really my point. Behe published his book 17 years ago. And even so, ID proponents can't agree on when, where, or how this design happened. There is, as far as I know, no research program attempting to answer those questions. There are no testable predictions. There is nothing but an assertion of ignorance (and an assertion that the ignorance is permanent) followed by a "God of the gaps" argument.
> Evolution predicted that human and chimpanzee genetic
> material would be similar, before DNA structure was known.
Yes, and human dna and pig dna are very close, too.
In fact, one evolutionist is running around saying that the human race is the result of a mating between a chimp and a pig. Real scientific, that.
Respectfully, I am not playing dumb. What’s happening, I think, is that your lack of biological understanding is hindering you from approaching the issue in a scientific way.
Yes, you have repeated over and over how incredible our bodies are. I agree wholeheartedly. (Well, there are a bunch of odd things that were simply byproducts of our evolution, but we’ll not bother with them now.)
When discussing evolution at anything beyond 9th grade level, we don’t discuss “human body,” we don’t discuss “OMG THE EYE!,” we discuss very specific parts of specific parts.
Regardless, you mentioned our eyes (clearly evolved for savannah living and not home computing), our ears (rather terrible little things, relative to other species - also a outcome of our evolution; we stood and thought and became predators so the need to rely on super-hearing was not important) and our brain (clearly an awesome thing), central nervous system (our fish ancestors’ have rather cool ones) and our plumbing system (then one right next to our reproductive/pleasure areas? I have a bone to pick with your designer on that one.)
Ok, so you’ve narrowed it down to maybe 2 years worth of core study. Probably about 200 meters of a stack of papers on these things. And who knows how many terabytes of information online.
We’re getting there. I just asked my son to pick one and he chose “ears.”
Before I get going on this, are you willing to read a shit-ton of work and study done by hundreds of scientists over the course of many decades? To fully understand how our ears - and yes, our gyroscopic inner ear mechanisms - evolved requires you to accept the factual age of the earth and that there are extinct species that inhabited it.
What you will find is that the evolution of the ear is one of the most understood and comprehensive bits of our anatomy, with a very clear lineage all the way down to invertebrates, to fish skull bones, to reptilian pre-ear jaw bones, to mammalian ear bones. It’s a beautiful continuum.
I should also mention that no, we don’t have all the answers. Just a few years ago someone published a paper challenging the the status quo regarding early invertebrate jaw evolution (which later gave rise to our ears).
Because that’s how science works.
I already said I have no interest in a philosophical discussion because it doesn’t interest me.
I also said ‘as long as you aren’t picky about the answers’ and you get so picky as to take one imprecise word ‘believe’ and claim I have faith after my views on the matter are clear to anyone who apparently researched my posts enough to list a number of them, some correctly.
Gotcha tactics like that aren’t honest debating tactics. Attempting to lead another person into a logical train wreck of gibberish with leading questions that misrepresent my position, is also not an honest tactic. Something I suspected you would engage in from your very first post to me, politely asking if you could ask me some questions.
Saying you are looking to me for answers is also ridiculous as I’ve stated clearly I have no ‘answers’ and don’t claim to be an expert. That’s not false modesty as it is true of you as well, or any person that has ever lived on the planet. There are those who dedicate their lives to these subjects and may be considered more qualified to speak on them, but they also are not to be looked at as having the answers, only better qualified provided their work can be tested, repeated and meet rigid scientific standards, all of whom should be well aware a new discovery could change everything tomorrow.
You are obviously looking to play word games in an attempt to say ‘gotcha’ instead of honestly looking for my position.
It’s why I try to be very precise in my answers instead of just saying yes or no to questions that presume incorrect positions of mine or others in the question and I’ve asked for clarification of definitions several times.
Speak directly and you may get a better response. You want to discuss meaning of life and metaphysical planes of existence, you will have to do with someone who is interested in such pursuits.
To be clear though, I have seen no evidence of such an existence in measurable terms outside the pursuits of philosophy. The mind is not metaphysical and I did not agree that it was to begin with. You found one word and presumed way too much. Though many works on this issue can be interesting and worthwhile to investigate, it’s not scientific, even if brain waves that create the concept of mind can be measured scientifically.
Your mind is nothing more than a manifestation of natural processes. The mind is only a separate entity based on a philosophical construct, not a scientific one.
I said it earlier that just because you can imagine something doesn’t mean it exists. You can also formulate a question that is complete nonsense and dismissed out of hand as being ridiculous to even consider answering, like what color is love?
I could imagine a unicorn, but they don’t exist and there is no evidence that they actually have ever existed. That doesn’t make unicorns real or prove any metaphysical plane of existence. It also doesn’t mean they aren’t real, btw.
Consciousness is a result of physical processes, not separate from it. There are no immaterial entities for which to account when they are merely a creation of the brain, a physical, natural process, itself.
> Minor point, all data and observation is evidence for something.
Yes, but just like the Global Warmists, the evolutionist assumes all data is evidence for his pet theory, regardless of how absurd the gyrations must be to make it so.
You appear to be quite unfamiliar with how things actually work. Not accepting statements of what is best known to be true to the best of our abilities based on set, rigid testing procedures is actually built into the process.
Should a more reasonable explanation based on these standards arise, whatever conclusions drawn would have to change based on the new evidence. Incredulity for those conclusions is by itself evidence of nothing other than contempt for scientific methodology.
I’ve searched for drawings showing the comparisons between ape/primate and human hands. I couldn’t find any. Can anyone post a comparison?
“I couldn’t find any.”
This might come off as rude, I assure you it’s not intended as such, but seriously?
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