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A chimp-pig hybrid origin for humans?

m.phys.org

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Re: A chimp-pig hybrid origin for humans?

#51

Post by nitrogen »

hetman wrote: post #45
nitrogen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a tautology. Of course visionaries are the ones who were vindicated. That doesn't mean that being perceived as a crackpot is a reliable indicator of being a visionary. It's similar to the argument that opposition equals confirmation -- some religious groups and conspiracy theorists argue that the fact that people oppose them means they are right.

I never said crackpots are guaranteed to be visionaries, though I'm sure it made a convenient strawman for you to argue against. My only point was that you can't be certain either way a priori, to be sure you must actually investigate it (and history tells us even then that's not always going to guarantee certainty).

The depth of investigation should be proportional to the probability of correctness, weighted by the cost of being wrong. Crackpots are called such because the probability of correctness is very low.

Given all the evidence, I consider the MFAP origin hypothesis to be significantly less likely than the primate evolution theory. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Re: A chimp-pig hybrid origin for humans?

#52

Post by tokenadult »

Gah. Another crap submission from PhysOrg. This has been going on so long that many HN participants have called that out as a bad source before. PhysOrg appears to have been banned as a site to submit from by Reddit (according to what I've read here on HN). I learned from other participants here on HN that there are better sites to submit from.

Comments about PhysOrg:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3077869

"Yes Physorg definitely has some of the worst articles on the internet."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3198249

"Straight from the European Space Agency, cutting out the physorg blogspam:

http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1116/ (press release),

http://www.spacetelescope.org/videos/heic1116a/ (video),

http://www.spacetelescope.org/static/archives/releases/scien... (paper).

"PhysOrg: just say no."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3611888

"The physorg article summary is wrong, I think."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108857

"Phys.org is vacuous and often flat wrong."

Re: A chimp-pig hybrid origin for humans?

#53

Post by Houshalter »

goldfeld wrote: post #31
twstws wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. The author makes the absurd claim that because many hybrids are fertile, any hybrid could be fertile. Using hybridization between two closely related birds to support the notion that pigs and apes could breed is ridiculous.

The scientist behind this hypothesis makes no such claim: "For my own part, curiosity has carried me away from my old idea of reality. I no longer know what to believe. Is it possible that so many biologists might be wrong about the nature of human origins? Is it possible for a pig to hybridize with a chimpanzee? I have no way of knowing at present, but I have no logical or evidential basis for rejecting the idea. Be…

Well that's an interesting point. There is survivorship bias. If the key event for life to thrive never happened, then we wouldn't be here to talk about it, but maybe some other world would have evolved intelligent life instead and they would be.

If you assume that a hybrid is necessary for intelligent life (which is a crazy, unlikely, implausible assumption, I know) then it doesn't matter if it only happens in one out of a billion worlds, on the one world it does happen in, there will be intelligent people around to talk about how unlikely it is.

Now maybe it's not so implausible. Pigs are some of the smartest animals, and something weird happened a few million years ago to jump start human evolution such a crazy amount. Still seems pretty unlikely IMO though, but I'll raise my probability estimate of it slightly.

Re: A chimp-pig hybrid origin for humans?

#55

Post by mistercow »

mr_luc wrote: post #23
a-priori wrote: post #19

So colour me skeptical. As they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this theory is making several extraordinary claims: 1) A hybridization event indeed occurred in the relatively recent genetic history of homo sapiens (rather than the unusual anatomic features being produced some other way). 2) The hybridization was with a close relative of pigs (rather than another family that has some simi…

Claims, yes. But he doesn't claim it. He puts it forward as a hypothesis. All useful hypothesis are, by definition, extra-ordinary.

>All useful hypothesis are, by definition, extra-ordinary.

Not in the sense of that applies to that saying. In this context "extraordinary claim" means "claim with a very low prior probability". The saying can be expressed more precisely as "in order to upgrade to the level of expectation a hypothesis with a very low prior probability, it is necessary to make an observation of very low probability generally, but high probability given that the hypothesis is true." In other words, it's essentially just Bayes' theorem.

And by no means are very-low-prior hypotheses inherently more useful. Certainly they have more impact than higher-prior hypotheses if they are validated, but in general, a very low prior means that a hypothesis is not worth wasting time considering.

In some cases, a hypothesis can be so extraordinary that it becomes practically impossible to verify by experiment. In this case, for example, the hypothesis is so unlikely that it is quite difficult to imagine an experiment (or set of experiments) whose outcome was so unlikely that it would actually make us expect that humans were descended from ape-pigs.

Re: A chimp-pig hybrid origin for humans?

#56

Post by tankbot »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #30
a-priori wrote: post #19

So colour me skeptical. As they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this theory is making several extraordinary claims: 1) A hybridization event indeed occurred in the relatively recent genetic history of homo sapiens (rather than the unusual anatomic features being produced some other way). 2) The hybridization was with a close relative of pigs (rather than another family that has some simi…

If you ask a cannibal what's the taste of human flesh, he will say "pork", which makes this hypothesis funny. That said, this is way, way too far fetched. Proposing that a primate and a primitive ungulate can produce an hybrid is already a big stretch, let alone producing a fertile one. Then, he supports his claim by refusing the genetics, and hand picks morphology aspects from the suinae that confirm his theory. Wha…

Going way out on some limbs here.

A primate/primitive ungulate don't need to produce a hybrid or fertile offspring since obviously aliens mixed chimpanzee and pig DNA to create us, a race of slaves to mine gold for them.

They also removed our ability to synthesize vitamin C in the process as a method of control.

Re: A chimp-pig hybrid origin for humans?

#57

Post by coldarchon »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #30
a-priori wrote: post #19

So colour me skeptical. As they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this theory is making several extraordinary claims: 1) A hybridization event indeed occurred in the relatively recent genetic history of homo sapiens (rather than the unusual anatomic features being produced some other way). 2) The hybridization was with a close relative of pigs (rather than another family that has some simi…

If you ask a cannibal what's the taste of human flesh, he will say "pork", which makes this hypothesis funny. That said, this is way, way too far fetched. Proposing that a primate and a primitive ungulate can produce an hybrid is already a big stretch, let alone producing a fertile one. Then, he supports his claim by refusing the genetics, and hand picks morphology aspects from the suinae that confirm his theory. Wha…

No, human flesh is said to taste somewhere between veal and chicken, with the consistency of pork.

Re: A chimp-pig hybrid origin for humans?

#58

Post by beambot »

hetman wrote: post #45
nitrogen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a tautology. Of course visionaries are the ones who were vindicated. That doesn't mean that being perceived as a crackpot is a reliable indicator of being a visionary. It's similar to the argument that opposition equals confirmation -- some religious groups and conspiracy theorists argue that the fact that people oppose them means they are right.

I never said crackpots are guaranteed to be visionaries, though I'm sure it made a convenient strawman for you to argue against. My only point was that you can't be certain either way a priori, to be sure you must actually investigate it (and history tells us even then that's not always going to guarantee certainty).

That wasn't a strawman at all. The GP said visionaries are subset of crackpots and Prob(crackpot) >> Prob(visionary).

Re: A chimp-pig hybrid origin for humans?

#59

Post by bobbydavid »

nitrogen wrote: post #51
hetman wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never said crackpots are guaranteed to be visionaries, though I'm sure it made a convenient strawman for you to argue against. My only point was that you can't be certain either way a priori, to be sure you must actually investigate it (and history tells us even then that's not always going to guarantee certainty).

The depth of investigation should be proportional to the probability of correctness, weighted by the cost of being wrong. Crackpots are called such because the probability of correctness is very low. Given all the evidence, I consider the MFAP origin hypothesis to be significantly less likely than the primate evolution theory. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

to play devil's advocate: consider the extreme absurdity of einstein's theory of relativity, the theory that time may speed up or slow down depending on your velocity.

Re: A chimp-pig hybrid origin for humans?

#60

Post by bobbydavid »

nitrogen wrote: post #51
hetman wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never said crackpots are guaranteed to be visionaries, though I'm sure it made a convenient strawman for you to argue against. My only point was that you can't be certain either way a priori, to be sure you must actually investigate it (and history tells us even then that's not always going to guarantee certainty).

The depth of investigation should be proportional to the probability of correctness, weighted by the cost of being wrong. Crackpots are called such because the probability of correctness is very low. Given all the evidence, I consider the MFAP origin hypothesis to be significantly less likely than the primate evolution theory. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

to play devil's advocate: consider the extreme absurdity of einstein's theory of relativity, the theory that time may speed up or slow down depending on your velocity.
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