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New human-like species discovered

bbc.co.uk

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Re: New human-like species discovered

#141

Post by thwarted »

PavlovsCat wrote: post #136
3pt14159 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Which of the instances is the last "you" in your question?

Re: New human-like species discovered

#142

Post by dragonwriter »

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.

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

The objects referred to by nouns aren't inherently gendered, gender is a feature of grammar (sex is a feature of some classes of objects, and fairly recently the grammatical term was adopted as a euphemism for sex by people afraid of the word "sex", and even more recently, inspired by that use, as a name of a social construct associated with, but distinct from, biological sex.)

But grammatical genders, while in some languages they have some correlation to sex distinctions, have no necessary relation to them, as gender distinctions may be on other axes entirely.

So the whole statement seems based on not understanding what "gender" is at all.

Re: New human-like species discovered

#143

Post by thomasfoster96 »

iso8859-1 wrote: post #133
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.

Ah, right, I must be confused then. I've seen a lot of texts refer to Homo sapiens sapiens as 'anatomically modern humans', so I assumed that other species of the genus Homo were also commonly called 'humans'.

Re: New human-like species discovered

#144

Post by 3pt14159 »

PavlovsCat wrote: post #136
3pt14159 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This a very long discussion, but essentially if you think Star Trek teleportation preserves identity, then I would get into the future.

Re: New human-like species discovered

#145

Post by scrollaway »

samfoo wrote: post #23

Awesome to see the Rising Star Expedition on HN! I was working in Johannesburg while the expedition was active and my partner managed, through a serious of very fortunate events to become a caver on the expedition. Here she is carrying up some of the first bones they extracted - https://i.imgur.com/IfT4PQz.jpg . For those of you interested, the expedition was sponsored by National Geographic, and there was/is a fairl…

Is this a correct mirror for the video? The player on natgeo is not even sort of working here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_r3UnkjcL0

Re: New human-like species discovered

#146

Post by nitrogen »

njharman wrote: post #26

Something I've never understood (since highschool some 30 years ago) is; when getting partial skeletons perhaps from only a single individual, how can they claim new species? I mean what's diff with that and some hypothetical future anthropoligist looking at siberian with roundish skull thicker brow ridges and that of six foot tall masai with long face and then a sub 5 foot native peruvian and declaring them all diff…

Geographic and chronological/geological isolation probably play a role. Populations separated by kiloyears and megameters are probably more likely to be considered species.

Re: New human-like species discovered

#147

Post by jharger »

jessriedel wrote: post #128
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yea, I wonder how that's reconciled. The Neanderthal DNA comes from a 38k year-old specimen: > The researchers recovered ancient DNA of Neanderthals by extracting the DNA from the femur bones of three 38,000-year-old female Neanderthal specimens from Vindija Cave, Croatia, and other bones found in Spain, Russia, and Germany.[8] Only about half a gram of the bone samples (or 21 samples each 50–100 mg[1]) was required…

Either that, or it was preserved in amber ;D

Re: New human-like species discovered

#149

Post by biot »

mcv wrote: post #116
lev_k wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe "scientists who are girls" would be more befitting? I suppose that the phrasing "girl scientists" first emphasizes the fact they are girls before they fact that they are scientists (clearly the more relevant of the two traits).

As opposed to "scientists who are boys"? How old are scientists these days?

In modern speech, the opposite of "girls" is "guys". Think "girls night out" vs. "guys night out". I have female friends approaching their fifties who refer to themselves and their female friends as "the girls". Perhaps this is a regional thing, where saying "women" sounds old-fashioned and stodgy.

Re: New human-like species discovered

#150

Post by scarmig »

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.

There are multiple definitions of species, and we choose whichever abstraction is most useful for a given approach.

The concept of species exists purely as a human, scientific abstraction: evolution/biology doesn't give us absolute categories that you can unambiguously put any organism into.

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