Evolution

[Godslayer Jillian]

I never said that. You never said "who was your great grand daddy?"
You asked where we come from.
You're either an idiot, or you're trying reductio ad absurdum and failing miserably.

[Cicero]

Originally Posted by Slap Your Love

Almost completely unrelatable.
There is a gap present. Therefore homo sapiens can't evolve
from them if they're dead way before homo sapiens even emurged.

I'm off to work. I'll continue this later after everyone else jumps in
while I'm gone.

Considering the total number of hominid fossils we've discovered barely fills the back of a pick-up truck there's no fucking surprise there's a gap. Some species we only know about because of a single skull fragment. Paleoanthropology is based on a lot of speculation and guesswork, but what evidence has been found that we most certainly did evolve from something is very hard to deny.

So until we dig up more bones to fill in the gaps, here's a basic example of what our family tree may look like:

http://www.austmus.gov.au/human_evolution/tree.htm

Note a lot of question marks, and no exact link between the Australopithecines and Homo genus. That's because we still aren't sure which species we evolved from there, and we may have evolved from an entirely different branch altogether.

With regard to Neanderthals not being our direct ancestors... Not only that is extremely old news (and barely even suspected, even from the beginning), you might notice on the diagram that a current possible contender for that is Heidelbergensis. If that answers your question at all.

[Slap Your Love]

Originally Posted by Godslayer Jillian

I never said that. You never said "who was your great grand daddy?"
You asked where we come from.
You're either an idiot, or you're trying reductio ad absurdum and failing miserably.

That's obviously what I meant since I was talking about direct descent.
So you're the idiot for not noticing.

Originally Posted by Cicero

Considering the total number of hominid fossils we've discovered barely fills the back of a pick-up truck there's no fucking surprise there's a gap. Some species we only know about because of a single skull fragment. Paleoanthropology is based on a lot of speculation and guesswork, but what evidence has been found that we most certainly did evolve from something is very hard to deny.

So until we dig up more bones to fill in the gaps, here's a basic example of what our family tree may look like:

http://www.austmus.gov.au/human_evolution/tree.htm

Note a lot of question marks, and no exact link between the Australopithecines and Homo genus. That's because we still aren't sure which species we evolved from there, and we may have evolved from an entirely different branch altogether.

With regard to Neanderthals not being our direct ancestors... Not only that is extremely old news (and barely even suspected, even from the beginning), you might notice on the diagram that a current possible contender for that is Heidelbergensis. If that answers your question at all.

In truth, it doesn't matter whether the fossil record is complete or not. If it is complete, meaning a large percentage of fossil life has been preserved, then the fossil record does not support evolution. If, however, the fossil record is very incomplete, meaning a small percentage of past life forms have been preserved, what right does science have to fill these gaps with imaginary animals for which there is not the slightest material evidence of their existence?

[Godslayer Jillian]

What right do statisticians have to form patterns?

Let's better believe that their ideas are godgiven and drop science altogether.

What's funny is that I'm half expecting you to agree.

[Slap Your Love]

Because they're stretching for a link.
Despite millions more fossils having been unearthed since Darwin's day there are still not the many thousands of transitional forms predicted by the fossil record - only a few doubtful examples. These, upon closer examination, or the unearthing of more complete specimens turn out to be non-transitional.

For most species there are near perfect fossil records. But no direct
link for homo sapiens? Odd.

[Cicero]

Most species have near-complete fossil records? Are you kidding me?

Fucking think for a moment. We have millions of species on this earth, and millions of years of evolution to consider for every one.

Now consider the fact that a large majority of organic remains will crumble to nothing unless very specific environmental conditions are met.

I mean fuck, when I'm searching for bones of recently deceased animals I'll find only the tiniest fraction of what's actually died in a particular area. That's with a few weeks between the time of death and time to discovery. Now try a few million years.

It's amazing we've found as much as we have, and every year the story is becoming more and more complete.

[Slap Your Love]

I'm just quoting from stuff I've read and guessing it's true
because the same information is appearing a lot.

I feel extremely sick and don't really care about this conversation
anyways so I'm dropping it and sleeping. Night.

[Cicero]

After a quick google search on what you're talking about, I think I know what you've been reading. Most seems to include 'god' in the url.

I can safely say that's all bullshit. They're all using carefully selected quotes from 'well known evolutionists' out of context and ignoring the rather extensive fossil record that does include a good number of transitional species.

[VXTip]

no scientific evidence from either side is going to alter the division, people who believe keep believing, people who dont wont.
evidence exists and its skewed for better or worse for both sides, and this trendy atheism fad requires more faith in the unknown than any religion but we all go on believing whatever we've been believing, and the atheists continue to belch science and their self defeating, self worshiping attitudes and nothing changes, this discussion has solved nothing.

[Drake Dun]

Originally Posted by VXTip

no scientific evidence from either side is going to alter the division, people who believe keep believing, people who dont wont.
evidence exists and its skewed for better or worse for both sides, and this trendy atheism fad requires more faith in the unknown than any religion but we all go on believing whatever we've been believing, and the atheists continue to belch science and their self defeating, self worshiping attitudes and nothing changes, this discussion has solved nothing.

I notice it's always the people on the religious side who insist that no conclusions can ever be reached, that the evidence is useless, that we all need to stop talking about it... Cooincidence? If you want to bring something meaningful to the table and not just a string of unsupported personal insults, feel free to come on back.

My next response to SYL should be fun. :P

[PortraitOfSanity]

Originally Posted by VXTip

belch science

Excuse me your holiness, I belch methane gas. Suck science mother fucker!

[Cicero]

I'm awaiting the trendy animism fad, then we can belch spirits instead.

[PortraitOfSanity]

Don't step on that rock you cruel bastard! It has a soul too you know!

[Mir]

Originally Posted by Godslayer Jillian

Neither do your comments, so what's your point?

That it might be a better idea to focus on the present, and pro-actively do something to better the lives of those around us, as opposed to arguing, and telling people to fuck off etc..

Trying to prove people wrong is just stroking one's own ego for self gratification.

[Mir]

There is only this moment, and the moment is eternal.

[Godslayer Jillian]

This might sound like an attack, but in any case, I hope you don't feel your posts are illuminating in any way.
They all end up being self defeating and inconsequential.

[Drake Dun]

Okay, I'll just leave aside the claims you have quietly dropped (goodbye gradualism strawman? goodbye fine tuning?), and get to the stuff you have transitioned to instead. Chasing creationists from one hastily abandoned claim to the next equally weak one can be fun, for a while.

Originally Posted by SYL

I wasn't trying to disprove evolution.

"Try to disprove" would be too strong, granted. But you were attempting to cast doubt on the theory, albeit in an offhanded way designed to avoid being called out on it. It was only after you couldn't sneak that by that you played your hand more openly (don't worry, we'll come to that).

They [progressive creationists] do believe in evolution on the micro level [such as adaption]
but not macro due to the fossil records not showing graduation and many other things such as molecular biology disproving a DNA link from human erectus and homo sapiens.

Those are definite claims about questions of empirical fact related to evolution. When I called you out on them, you responded with this:

Whichever hominids. Not a lie. Look at the mtDNA Sequence Variation Among Modern and Ancient Hominids.

I noticed that even though you can't even get basic terms like "gradualism" and Homo erectus right, you were able to shoot out a comparatively obscure term like "mtDNA sequence variation" - an obvious sign of cookie cutter copying from some apologetics site (the fact that you carefully omitted a reference to your source was also revealing - standard creationist dissimulation). So I plugged that into google and found, without surprise, that one of the first links that came up was to the same apologetics site you recommended last time:

http://www.godandscience.org/evoluti...iregional.html

I then assumed that this was the article you were referring to.

Wrong article [<-withheld citation goes here].

I should also have noticed at the time all the capital letters. I then would have realized that I was looking at a title, and would have been able to find the other mtDNA thing on the same apologetics site:

http://www.godandscience.org/evolution/evol2003.html

That article's sole reference is to the peer reviewed article you cited more recently, a fact which I take to be a dead giveaway. Now that I have successfully uncovered your tracks, would your highness deign to confirm that this is the article we're talking about?

I was partially saying what Drake said I didn't specify on that molecular biology abolishes the multiregional model. Which was what I meant.

That's funny, because unlike the first article I thought was your source, the new one doesn't say anything about the multiregional hypothesis (it's very much like the text of your previous posts in that regard). Anyway, either way you slice it, you've got an argument against the multiregional hypothesis, or an argument against descent of Homo sapiens from Homo neanderthalensis, neither of which is what you initially claimed and neither of which is a particular problem for the theory of evolution or even human evolution. QED. I guess it's a good thing you weren't trying to disprove evolution.

But hey, that's okay. If changing the subject works once or twice, why not a third time?

As well as there is no established form for which homo sapiens evolved from... There is a gap present... If, however, the fossil record is very incomplete, meaning a small percentage of past life forms have been preserved, what right does science have to fill these gaps with imaginary animals for which there is not the slightest material evidence of their existence?

A police man walks into a room after hearing a loud noise and finds a man holding a smoking gun over a dead body. There is arterial splatter on the man's clothes, and the one bullet found in the body is later matched to his gun. Upon investigation it turns out that the victim was having an affair with the suspect's wife.

"But your honor, nobody saw me shoot him."

In science, we are limited to working with honest thinking tools - pattern recognition, aduction of evidence, inductive reasoning, etc. We don't get to just throw up our hands and pretend that we have a magical direct pipeline to Ultimate Truth via dead goat herders, the way we do in religion. When we're reconstructing historical or prehistorical events, there are always going to be gaps, because that's the nature of reconstructing events in the distant past.

Still, you pose a legitimate question - what right do we have to feel confident about our model in spite of those gaps? The answer is that we have some very powerful heuristics in our toolbox, the intuitive usefulness of which should be obvious to anyone who once hears about them. I'll tackle just two of them here:

1) Predictive power. Suppose I have a modern form A, and a fossil form C. I hypothesize that A is descended from C. Well, if that's true, unless A and C are very close, it should be the case that there are intermediates. Now suppose I go digging and, sure enough, an intermediate B turns up. But intermediate B is still pretty different from modern form A. Clearly I still have gaps in the picture.

But hang on - if I weren't onto the right track with my hypothesis in the first place, it's a pretty bizarre cooincidence that intermediate B turned up at all. What reason would I have to expect to find any such thing in the fossil record? And suppose further that I date B and find that, sure enough, it falls between A and C temporaly - and not only that, but the place where I dug it up is located geographically right where it should be according to my proposed story.

Suppose further that I can tell you what I should not find in the fossil record (i.e., I give you a falsification criterion). I say, for example, that features x, y, z, etc., which are found in separate lineages, will *not* be found in any fossils which would otherwise be morphologically classified as belonging to lineage C-B-A. And then we dig up fossil after fossil in lineage C-B-A without finding any instances of x, y, or z.

How is it that I can make all these predictions? Well... it's simple. Because even if my model is not complete in every last detail, its fundamental premise is dead right.

2) Converging lines of evidence. Suppose further that my fossil record evidence is backed up by multiple lines of genetic evidence. The phylogeny I have constructed based on morphology turns out to mesh perfectly with evidence genome markers like endogenous retroviruses, DNA vestiges which occasionally give rise to atavisms, chromosomal similarities and differences as in the striking case of human chromosome 2, etc. Just maybe with one line of evidence, even if it looks good, we could find out that we were getting overexcited and seeing patterns too early. But when we get the same story again and again from logically unrelated forms of evidence, it's the scientific equivalent of a smoking gun.

For most species there are near perfect fossil records.

Lol. I'm glad someone else already tackled this for me, because there is no way I could remain as calm while doing so.

And I think that's about enough of chasing the weasel around the bush. If you want to continue this discussion, please identify *one* line of argument about one topic, which we can pursue to actual completion.

[Drake Dun]

Originally Posted by Mir

That it might be a better idea to focus on the present, and pro-actively do something to better the lives of those around us, as opposed to arguing, and telling people to fuck off etc..

Trying to prove people wrong is just stroking one's own ego for self gratification.

Maybe you're right, but I hope you can see the irony. Here you sit, arguing that we should not be having this conversation, as opposed to pro-actively doing something to better the lives of those around us.

[Wednesday Friday Addams]

By that same logic that mir is stating we shouldn't have movies, music or computer games. Only difference is evolution is a important block in medical science.

[Mir]

I see the irony of it, sure. But, I am not sitting here arguing with you. That would require my post count to be a lot higher than two (which includes this one). And as long as I act on what I say, I'm quite content with irony, and self defeatism. And no, you cannot compare a movie/music to arguing with someone about something as self evident as evolution. Watching a movie for the umpteenth time is far more profitable than arguing that the Earth is not flat.

[Wednesday Friday Addams]

Sorry I thought you meant the study of evolution.
Either way it helps me to explain science to those less in the know which is vital for any scientist.

[Methadrine]

Originally Posted by Slap Your Love

what right does science have to fill these gaps with imaginary animals for which there is not the slightest material evidence of their existence?

Funny, when we said the same thing about religion you called us blind idiots...

[Joker_in_the_Pack]

Slap, you are amazing.

You're the only person I know to get into arguments everywhere and be wrong every time.

By the laws of probability you should have at least won once.

[Drake Dun]

Originally Posted by Mir

Watching a movie for the umpteenth time is far more profitable than arguing that the Earth is not flat.

Yet that would not be the case if you were living in a time and place in which a huge portion, even a majority of the people around you believe that it is flat, and that because it's flat we have to have laws forbidding people from sailing out of sight of the coastline, and continually harass people whose heads are too round because they do not live up to our flatness ideal.

[Slap Your Love]

Originally Posted by Joker_in_the_Pack

Slap, you are amazing.

You're the only person I know to get into arguments everywhere and be wrong every time.

By the laws of probability you should have at least won once.

Na. I'm just too lazy to carry an argument out properly.
I get bored with it or just have no time to argue on here.

Take drake's last post to me for example. I read maybe a paragraph of it
and didn't care. Doesn't matter to me.