New human-like species discovered • Hacker News Board

Re: New human-like species discovered

#131

Post by lordnacho » Thu, Sep 10, 2015, 4:09 PM UTC

wpankey wrote: post #122

RogtamBar wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a political thing. Species definition is messy, to the point of absurdity. Indeed, the differences between long-separated human populations are such that even non-racist scientists acknowledge subspecies.. http://dienekes.blogspot.sk/2009/09/is-homo-sapiens-polytypi...

Thanks for posting this. It has always baffled me that we are led to believe that all of humanity springs from one common root. Absolutely ridiculous and goes against common sense -what other species (of anything) has just one single representative??? Who's been selling this and why???

Nobody is saying there was a single pair of people at some point. But something like a population bottleneck resulting from the Toba eruption would mean all future people were descended from a small group of survivors.

And those types of events happen a lot.

Re: New human-like species discovered

#132

Post by peter303 » Thu, Sep 10, 2015, 4:12 PM UTC

mklim wrote: post #77

ceejayoz wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do seem to remember being taught in school that the definition of species is "organisms that can reproduce and generate fertile offspring". Which is problematic for extinct animals. We have no way of knowing if modern humans would be able to produce offspring with Neanderthals, for example.

The current body of evidence suggests that we could and did, since Neanderthal DNA is present in some modern humans [1]. [1] http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33226416

I call them a Neanderthal "race' not species. Then it might be unclear how different they appear from modern man.

Re: New human-like species discovered

#133

Post by iso8859-1 » Thu, Sep 10, 2015, 4:14 PM UTC

thomasfoster96 wrote: post #47

> "human-like" Aren't all species of the genus Homo called humans?

No. But scientists can't even agree if Neanderthals belong within Homo sapiens: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/evolution/are-neanderthals-huma... I assume this article would not have been written if all homos were human.

Re: New human-like species discovered

#134

Post by iso8859-1 » Thu, Sep 10, 2015, 4:16 PM UTC

kaonashi wrote: post #118

(extinct) I only add this because I got really excited by the title at first.

I applaud you for being that naive. :)

Re: New human-like species discovered

#135

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 10, 2015, 4:20 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #123

ceejayoz wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typing too fast, thanks! The difference probably won't help bridge the millions of years gap though. :-)

Yet we have Neanderthal dna? Oh, right, that's only 40,000 years. Not 1-3 million.

[deleted]

Re: New human-like species discovered

#136

Post by PavlovsCat » Thu, Sep 10, 2015, 4:24 PM UTC

3pt14159 wrote: post #104

paxcoder wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that AI will ever truly become I, let alone surpass humans, but why would you want your clone to live in the future?

Because I want to live in the future. Assuming the future is something like The Culture it would be very fascinating. Edit: I don't understand the down votes. If you view conciousness as a mathematical identity what is the difference between being made up as atoms or being made up of bits?

If I made a perfect copy of you, then that copy would share your memories up to the point when I made the copy, but you yourself would not even necessarily know the copy exists; so how would that help you?

Re: New human-like species discovered

#137

Post by duaneb » Thu, Sep 10, 2015, 4:28 PM UTC

wbhart wrote: post #69

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we still depend on bone structure to define species? DNA analysis is indisputable. Its all speculation until that is done.

Is there any chance of doing DNA analysis on 3 million year old (presumably fossilised) bones? If in fact that is how old they are.

No. There is basically 0 chance without some sort of extraordinary preservative (like ethanol).

Re: New human-like species discovered

#138

Post by biomcgary » Thu, Sep 10, 2015, 4:30 PM UTC

kissickas wrote: post #70

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we still depend on bone structure to define species? DNA analysis is indisputable. Its all speculation until that is done.

A species cannot be clearly defined until you try to mate it with something else and it fails to produce a viable offspring, as far as I'm aware. No DNA analysis is indisputable with what we currently know.

Actually, "species" has multiple competing definitions in the scientific literature. For details see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_problem

The biological species concept is probably one of the most popular and very similar to what you are suggesting. In this concept, a species is an interbreeding population that is reproductively isolated from other populations (either due to genetics or geography).

Re: New human-like species discovered

#139

Post by gus_massa » Thu, Sep 10, 2015, 4:38 PM UTC

SEJeff wrote: post #105

at-fates-hands wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who spent a fair amount of time in academia, this is pretty common. As much as we all like to pat each other on the back, there are always contrarians who want to tamp down or be skeptical of another scientists conclusions. Even after a few years, I learned there is always in-fighting when a major discovery like this is made. Regardless of where these bones should be classified, it's an incredible find no…

But isn't a healthy dose of scepticism simply good Science? Peer reviewed results are hard to be sceptical about. My favorite thing about science is that you often have strongly opposing sides both with super intelligent scientists. When everything has been fleshed out, the best and brightest tends to come to the top (not always, but as a generalism it is true). Virtually everyone was sceptical of the guy claiming to…

The supposed thrust of the EmDrive is very small. But the device has a lot of wires with current that can be equivalent to an electromagnet, and very hot parts that can create air currents, and ...

If you have not done few physics labs, it's easy to underestimate the measurement problems and the level of noise in experiments.

Most of the Physics community thinks that this is an experimental error. One symptom is that at lunch in a Physics department nobody talks about this. If this were real it would be a groundbreaking result because it breaks some of the most fundamental Physics laws.

Re: New human-like species discovered

#140

Post by stefantalpalaru » Thu, Sep 10, 2015, 4:38 PM UTC

douche wrote: post #119

stefantalpalaru wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we can learn each other languages in a matter of weeks Not so fast. Even if you limit yourself to a vocabulary made of the most common 10000 words, you still need a lot more practice to differentiate between nouns that have a gender in Italian and another in Spanish, irregular verbs, idioms, etc. Understanding a language is one thing. Speaking and writing it is a whole new level.

Gendering nouns that aren't actually gendered is one of the stupidest concepts humanity has inflicted on itself.

It's not. Even Old English had grammatical gender, you just lost it with time, along with proper vowel pronunciation ;-)