Realistically, it doesn't change our understanding of evolution at all, in fact it's completely predictable that something like this fossil should exist. It's just another little fragment of the pattern that says Darwin was right.
A Breakthrough in Our Understanding of Evolution
- Thread starter SirJosephPorter
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Peter, Paul and Mary and I used to belong to a folk singing group that sang it. Yup, I is dat old.:lol:
I agree with some of the other posters.
This find is overblown and no big deal.
Another wee piece of the puzzle.
A small link in a very long and multi-stranded chain.
Trex
This find is overblown and no big deal.
Another wee piece of the puzzle.
A small link in a very long and multi-stranded chain.
Trex
As I said, I don't care if the deluded don't believe facts or not as whatever they believe is irrelevant if they don't accept reality. The fact is this is one more find that negates their silly notion of creation 6000 years ago.
Kinda looks like my Ex mother-in-law
I showed this pic to my Son yesterday, and told him that this could
very well be one of his ancient ancestors on his Mothers side from
the looks of things.
Had the same teeth , but no tail tho
Can't wait till the people that play with mud fill it out and we can see what it probably looked like.
Kinda looks like my Ex mother-in-law
I'm not sure I want to know how you know some of the more intimate
details of your Mother-in-Laws anatomy, but to each their own I guess.
Maybe your Mother-in-Law had a smaller tail that she could run down
one of her pant-legs when she knew company was coming over?8O
For anyone who objects to this humor, how could you possibly think that
this picture of that fossil wouldn't eventually lead to Mother-in-Law jokes?
Mitochondrial DNA, that which is passed on in the mother's genetic inheritance, and is far less subject to change or mutation than the male nuclear DNA, indicates that all human life originated from a single male and female parent, producing a radically unique genus, likely in past 100,000 to 200,000 years. The definition of a genus is that of genetic line that which can reproduce a fertile offspring. These human prototypes and their children then formed the entire human lineage.
The problem with the theory of evolution now, is that it cannot explain why, if human life developed out of hodge podge of near relatives, there is such consistency and exclusivity to the human genus. It cannot identify the mechanisms that produced this singularity in humans and other forms of life, from a single set of exclusive reproductively compatible parents.
The odds of these developing and pairing up, spontaneously, contemporaneously and independantly of each other within the evolutionary postulate, is astronomical, and yet every species we know of did just that, and is similarly constrained to its own genus. If the theory of evolution explains all, one has wonder why there is not a wide family of near relatives in the human strain that can interbreed and produce a smooth, homogenous spectrum of species amongst all the hominids.
We are left however with the fact that we have the phenomenon of man, which is utterly unique in intellect, social organization, language, conscience, aspiration to faith.. and all of the technologies and institutions that have developed from them. There seems to be a big black hole in evolution's premis that we all developed by accidental mutation and natural selection from one primeval single celled, asexual organism. Hence my doubts Ida has anything to do with us. :smile:
The problem with the theory of evolution now, is that it cannot explain why, if human life developed out of hodge podge of near relatives, there is such consistency and exclusivity to the human genus. It cannot identify the mechanisms that produced this singularity in humans and other forms of life, from a single set of exclusive reproductively compatible parents.
The odds of these developing and pairing up, spontaneously, contemporaneously and independantly of each other within the evolutionary postulate, is astronomical, and yet every species we know of did just that, and is similarly constrained to its own genus. If the theory of evolution explains all, one has wonder why there is not a wide family of near relatives in the human strain that can interbreed and produce a smooth, homogenous spectrum of species amongst all the hominids.
We are left however with the fact that we have the phenomenon of man, which is utterly unique in intellect, social organization, language, conscience, aspiration to faith.. and all of the technologies and institutions that have developed from them. There seems to be a big black hole in evolution's premis that we all developed by accidental mutation and natural selection from one primeval single celled, asexual organism. Hence my doubts Ida has anything to do with us. :smile:
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We are left however with the fact that we have the phenomenon of man, which is utterly unique in intellect, social organization, language, conscience, aspiration to faith.. and all of the technologies and institutions that have developed from them.
Coldstream, man is not unique in this respect. Apes and elephants (both highly intelligent animals) show similar social structure, intelligence, language, conscience etc.
Elephants have a highly developed social structure, if completely different from humans and apes. They are highly intelligent, there is evidence that they can pass knowledge from generation to generation (there have been instances of a matriarch leading her herd during a famine to a water source which she had never before accessed in her life). There have also been recorded instances where elephants mounted a fake raid at one place in the village, and while people were chasing them away, the real raid took place in another field, another farm, where they ate up all the crops. There have also been instances of chimpanzees launching fake raids.
Elephants have a rudimentary language, which includes the subsonic (which is inaudible to us). There is also evidence that they have a conscience or faith (or at least rudiments of it). When elephants pass the bones of other elephants in the jungle they perform a sort of ceremony around it. They circle the bones, they sniff at them etc.
Indeed, I think there was a competition between primates and elephants as to which species develops intelligence first, and I think primates won by a hair. If primates had not developed intelligence for another million years or so, it is quite possible that earth would be populated by intelligent elephants today, instead of intelligent primates.
And not only elephants, but whales, dolphins etc. also have well developed language (and dolphins are highly intelligent, unfortunately they took to water, so they had no chance to develop a civilization).
There is nothing unique about the man, he is just an intelligent animal.
Coldstream, man is not unique in this respect. Apes and elephants (both highly intelligent animals) show similar social structure, intelligence, language, conscience etc.
Elephants have a highly developed social structure, if completely different from humans and apes. They are highly intelligent, there is evidence that they can pass knowledge from generation to generation (there have been instances of a matriarch leading her herd during a famine to a water source which she had never before accessed in her life). There have also been recorded instances where elephants mounted a fake raid at one place in the village, and while people were chasing them away, the real raid took place in another field, another farm, where they ate up all the crops. There have also been instances of chimpanzees launching fake raids.
Elephants have a rudimentary language, which includes the subsonic (which is inaudible to us). There is also evidence that they have a conscience or faith (or at least rudiments of it). When elephants pass the bones of other elephants in the jungle they perform a sort of ceremony around it. They circle the bones, they sniff at them etc.
Indeed, I think there was a competition between primates and elephants as to which species develops intelligence first, and I think primates won by a hair. If primates had not developed intelligence for another million years or so, it is quite possible that earth would be populated by intelligent elephants today, instead of intelligent primates.
And not only elephants, but whales, dolphins etc. also have well developed language (and dolphins are highly intelligent, unfortunately they took to water, so they had no chance to develop a civilization).
There is nothing unique about the man, he is just an intelligent animal.
Actually, the problem appears to be that you don't understand it very well. The things you say evolution claims are simply not correct, so your argument is rooted in shifting sand. A genus, for instance, is not a genetic line that can produce fertile offspring, that's the definition of a species, nor did the human species, or any other species, evolve from a single breeding pair as you describe. There's no sharp line between species, that's just a human convention for classification purposes, nature doesn't care about that. All living humans are presumably capable of breeding with each other, which is what makes us a single species, and if you go back 3 million years to where the split with the chimpanzee lineage occurred, the same claim could be made about that entire ancestor population, but contemporary humans would not be fertile with that population if any were still around, any more than we are with chimps. We're a different species from that ancestor population, but there's an unbroken breeding line from them to us.
Humans aren't that unique.
Susan Savage-Rumbaugh on apes | Video on TED.com
We are just more dangerous and prolific.
This discovery is just another in a long series which support evolution theory. People who believe the bible literally will continue to believe God created the fossile record as a test of their faith.
Susan Savage-Rumbaugh on apes | Video on TED.com
We are just more dangerous and prolific.
This discovery is just another in a long series which support evolution theory. People who believe the bible literally will continue to believe God created the fossile record as a test of their faith.
Quite right.
Um, coldstream,
- Genus-differentia definition. Who is Genus-differentia definition? What is Genus-differentia definition? Where is Genus-differentia definition? Definition of Genus-differentia definition. Meaning of Genus-differentia definition.
One learns about classification in grade school, you know. I think it was grade 7 when I was in school.
There are actually no hard and fast rule of defining a genus or a species, which describe stipulated common characteristics of organisms rather that origins (check Wikipedia). Hence my assigning a definition of genus. However, for the sake of argument lets use your definition of a species as that which is able to breed and produce a fertile offspring.
There is still no explanation within evolutionary logic as to how two comtemporaneous and completely exclusive humans developed, unable to mate with any members of the wider hominid 'genus', and then themselves spawned the entire human race (or 'species'). And why there have been no subsequent evolutionary 'forks' that have produced any new 'species'. (That points to the difficulty in the terms species and genus, once a genetic evolutionary parting of the ways occurs within a species, it then becomes a genus with two reproductively exclusive branches.. which have to be reassigned in the category of new species).
As for the argument that elephants or monkies have anything resembling the human facility for symbolic language.. that just doesn't exist. Animals have a rudimentary form of communication that contains no symbolism or abstraction and is really not comparable to that of humans. The same is true of human organization, conceptions of faith and morality. It just doesn't exist in the animal world.
No other species have developed anything similar to the human ability to understand and transform its environment. If one chooses to assign that development exclusively to evolution one is left perplexed to how such higher level intellectual capacity coalesced, indeed even the necessity for it in a framework where only survival of and continuation of the species could dictate a succesful gene mutation. The only 'species' amongst tens or hundreds of thousands that have these gifts. Pure random happenstance you say, i'm not convinced.
There is still no explanation within evolutionary logic as to how two comtemporaneous and completely exclusive humans developed, unable to mate with any members of the wider hominid 'genus', and then themselves spawned the entire human race (or 'species'). And why there have been no subsequent evolutionary 'forks' that have produced any new 'species'. (That points to the difficulty in the terms species and genus, once a genetic evolutionary parting of the ways occurs within a species, it then becomes a genus with two reproductively exclusive branches.. which have to be reassigned in the category of new species).
As for the argument that elephants or monkies have anything resembling the human facility for symbolic language.. that just doesn't exist. Animals have a rudimentary form of communication that contains no symbolism or abstraction and is really not comparable to that of humans. The same is true of human organization, conceptions of faith and morality. It just doesn't exist in the animal world.
No other species have developed anything similar to the human ability to understand and transform its environment. If one chooses to assign that development exclusively to evolution one is left perplexed to how such higher level intellectual capacity coalesced, indeed even the necessity for it in a framework where only survival of and continuation of the species could dictate a succesful gene mutation. The only 'species' amongst tens or hundreds of thousands that have these gifts. Pure random happenstance you say, i'm not convinced.
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No explanation is necessary, because that's not how these things happen, not with humans, not with any species.
That's another error. In the relevant sense of random, evolution is almost precisely opposite to being random. You don't understand enough of evolution to discuss it meaningfully.
But that is evolution, that is all there is, accidental mutation and natural selection. That is the definition of randomness, random selection within random circumstances. Nothing else is presumed in the logic of evolution, no explanation of original origins, natural law is deemed necessary. I think it is your understanding of evolution that is lacking. :-?
You've identified your critical error yourself in two consecutive sentences. Natural selection and random selection are not the same thing. Back to the books for you.
It seems to me that there were branches of hominids that lived side by side in the past. Cro Magnon, Neanderthal and Homo sapiens sapiens probably could inter breed. Why the others died off maybe had something to do with superior weaponry, intelligence and/or adaptability.
I think you are going to have pick up your Darwin again Dexter, you're not giving the old boy his due. Accident and selection through survival of the fittest.. that is evolution.