The concept of species is a construct of language.
It's the educated person's way of saying "This thing looks different from this other thing."
It's a bit more specific actually: this thing can't mate with that thing and produce viable offspring.
3.8M-year-old skull of an early ape-like human ancestor discovered in Ethiopia
101–110 of 142 posts
Re: 3.8M-year-old skull of an early ape-like human ancestor discovered in Ethiopia
#102Prof Haile-Selassie? Is Haile-Selassie a common last name or has he anything to do with the other Haile Selassie?
Haile Selassie means 'Power of the trinity' in Ethiopic. Given Ethiopia is quite religious (Orthodox Christian), it seems like it'd be common enough.
Re: 3.8M-year-old skull of an early ape-like human ancestor discovered in Ethiopia
#103The impression I got from a recent PBS Eons video on the non-existing missing link[0] is that interbreeding happened all the time and that a very realistic possibility for the answer is "most, possibly all of them" . [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwW40Dj5Sro
A PBS show was my first though too.
It seems pretty clear that rather than various "species" and isolated lines that there is all sort of mingling of the lines and trees, and to some extent you can expect it happened in places that you otherwise might not have assumed before.
Re: 3.8M-year-old skull of an early ape-like human ancestor discovered in Ethiopia
#104Prof Haile-Selassie? Is Haile-Selassie a common last name or has he anything to do with the other Haile Selassie?
The naming conventions in Ethiopia are different than the western world. My Ethiopian friend explained it to me that the first name is their name, second is father's name, third grandfather's. I'm not sure about the hyphen though.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_conventions_in_Ethiopia...
Re: 3.8M-year-old skull of an early ape-like human ancestor discovered in Ethiopia
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
My impression is that we just don't have enough data to draw an accurate timeline, much less a tree, and are an order of magnitude away from being able to study second-order phenomenon like introgression. I think fewer than 10,000 early hominid individuals have been found, most with very partial skeletons. And they aren't distributed uniformly across time and space; you might find a dozen in one cave, then nothing fo…
Is it wrong to believe at this point that instead of macro evolution, we could be looking at several differing extinction points?
I think the point is that we know so little that we might look at a huge number of wildly different scenarios.
So... keep digging!
Re: 3.8M-year-old skull of an early ape-like human ancestor discovered in Ethiopia
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Teaching well-established scientific knowledge in schools is essential Well established? It's simply not proven, period. You should only teach kids what you are 100% sure about, and when you're not than you have to honestly say that it's an assumption. Otherwise it is not teaching but conditioning. > Evolution wasn't just made up, it was figured out from the evidence, just like gravity, electricity, chemistry, etc.…
> Well established? It's simply not proven, period. You should only teach kids what you are 100% sure about Forget teaching science at all, then. That's not how scientific knowledge works. Evolution is not "proven". No empirical science theories are ever "proven". But evolution as a theory is pretty much as good as it gets. Yes, some details get reworked from time to time, but the fundamentals are our best bet. > Gra…
> Other people have told you multiple times no-one believes apes evolved into humans
You're kidding me? That's what I see with most ape -> human believers, they are 100% sure about things they assume or cannot know. Typical example, thx for that.
Re: 3.8M-year-old skull of an early ape-like human ancestor discovered in Ethiopia
#107Evolution is simply not sufficient. Dr. David Gelertner, a CS professor from Yale, penned an essay in May that lays out the high level argument against Darwin/Evolution, including references to background material. https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/giving-up-darwin/
Ugh, no. Intelligent Design strikes again I see. Almost everything in that article is wrong (and also, the same tired pseudoscientific arguments), starting from the fact he claims "Darwinism" is a "credo". Also, Stephen Meyer is not brilliant and he is a quack. Also, a Computer Science professor has no business arguing about evolution. Or rather, his opinion is as informed as yours or mine, i.e. not very.
Sometimes it's no harm to have eyes from outside a discipline have a look at things.
Re: 3.8M-year-old skull of an early ape-like human ancestor discovered in Ethiopia
#108Sure, this isn’t a popular opinion around here but I find all of these theories such nonsense. Creationism, to me, is a lot kore logical than a random big bang - fast fwd apes / fast fwd humans. So many random events with hardly any logic attached to it. Humans have grown to be so full of themselves, especially in this tech age, where a lot of us find it hard to believe there’s a more intelligent being out there that could have placed us here in the first place. Human arrogance is destroying us from the inside.
Re: 3.8M-year-old skull of an early ape-like human ancestor discovered in Ethiopia
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're making a whole lot of unfounded and unproven assumptions here! For example: what if the current genetic diversity on Earth is the result of genetic engineering by ancient aliums? That's a facile example, but there are serious deeper issues here. The mechanisms of gene transfer are too complex for us to explain presently, including things like viruses, horizontal transfer, etc. You're assuming a simplistic darw…
> what if the current genetic diversity on Earth is the result of genetic engineering by ancient aliums? What if? Obviously they must have engineered it such that current evolution theories have the best predictive value for their achievement. A clever bunch, no doubt, but unfortunately outside of the realm of science because it can't be falsified.
But that's the point: current evolution theories have no predictive value and are based on circular logic.
We assume species have a common ancestor because they have similar DNA, and similar DNA is supposed to be proof of a common ancestry.
Re: 3.8M-year-old skull of an early ape-like human ancestor discovered in Ethiopia
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
My impression is that we just don't have enough data to draw an accurate timeline, much less a tree, and are an order of magnitude away from being able to study second-order phenomenon like introgression. I think fewer than 10,000 early hominid individuals have been found, most with very partial skeletons. And they aren't distributed uniformly across time and space; you might find a dozen in one cave, then nothing fo…
Is it wrong to believe at this point that instead of macro evolution, we could be looking at several differing extinction points?
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