Before "Lucy" -- New Evidence Regarding the Course of Human Evolution

Curiousguy01

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This is kinda a side point to this thread... many people are taking the term "Ape" far to literally. Many people generically refer to our ancestor as apes though genetically speaking they are related they are not the same. This thread would progress far more efficiently if people would stop arguing terminology and actually argue the points.

No matter what you believe evolution can still be scene today in a daily basis meaning it is part of our environment. God or not, what ever your beliefs he created evolution too. We all came from single celled organisms and therefore through the numerous splits over generations to develop specialized species we all have a common ancestor to when we were more primitive. Its an ego knock I guess to concede we were once lesser life forms but it is true considering you look back on human history and we've developed so much in such a short time.

What we know is that we've repeatedly split from lines of other evolution. Scientist today don't really care about proving evolution as much as seeing where our particular traits that differentiate over the years came from and what function we had in history. I'll add I am religious and believe that everything made was part of the same plan... it all makes sense because the balance is perfect excluding insane predilection to pursue our own destiny and the need to improve.
 

D_Kissimmee Coldsore

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On youtube I found an entire upload of a 2008 3-part UK Channel 4 television series, "The Genius of Charles Darwin", written and presented by Richard Dawkins.

I've not seen it yet, but plan to watch perhaps this weekend.

YouTube - The Genius of Charles Darwin - Episode 1 [1/5] HQ & Full Screen
It's quite good, but I've never been a huge fan of Dawkins as a documentarian. It's a Darwin documentary too, not necessarily an evolution documentray per sé. If I find a good one on that I'll post it here, this is a sort of side-project passion of mine.

On a related note, Prof. George Church and his team are maybe close to seeding a new tree... Toward Synthetic Life: Scientists Create Ribosomes -- Cell Protein Machinery
 

Zeuhl34

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Who knows? If we humans don't annihilate the planet, maybe in another 125 million years or so, it's possible that butterflies or penguins or bears could evolve into something greater than homo sapiens.

I know the Discovery Channel (possibly with the BBC, as they work together from time to time) ran a special a couple years ago about how scientists theorized life would develop in the future (barring human interference, so in the special, the humans were said to have left the planet). It was a very interesting special. It predicted mammals would be more-or-less extinct in about 200 million years and that squids would be the next dominant land species and could possibly evolve intelligence.

I'm aware this is all speculation (albeit scientific speculation, but speculation nonetheless), but it was an incredibly interesting special. I'll see if I can find a link to it.
 

D_Ireonsyd_Colonrinse

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Well-Hung-Nerd: Please, if you find a link, do post it.


I really need to get some intellectual stimulation going again just to keep fully balanced and sane. I don't think there's anything wrong with watching "How I Met Your Mother" or "Two and a Half Men"... 2 dumb shows I enjoy... but, I have an almost spiritual need to feed this curiosity I have about the world around me. I am not religious. I'm an atheist. But I still feel a drive to fill my mind with stuff of substance - and not just the consumer media products that television throws at us.


I bought a book called "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared Diamond which is extremely interesting.

PBS documentary: YouTube - Guns, Germs and Steel 1/18
 

JustAsking

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How noble of you, JustAsking, to recommend the work of a man who disagrees with you on another divinely important subject... :biggrin1:

If there is such a thing as biblical Heaven, I have no doubt you will be On The List.

...

Domi,
I appreciate the creativeness of what Dawkins contributed during his days as an active researcher. I also applaud his work in popularizing science. There is always a need for that.

I also applaud the part of his militant atheism that highlights the nastiness of religious fundamentalism. You would find me lining up in the trenches with Dawkins on that one.

As for the rest of his militant atheism, I find his writings to be kind of disappointing. I was hoping The God Delusion would have more meat to it, but it was mostly full of straw men fundamentalist representations of religion and arguments against them. I found myself agreeing with most of that book, myself.

And I don't agree with what you might call his "scientism". He himself is a kind of scientific fundamentalist. He places too much faith in a kind of Logical Positivism world view that even science doesn't claim for itself.

But all in all, if he were speaking around here, I would be one of the first to buy a ticket.


chunderwonder: That Tree of Life is amazing. Flickr Photo Download: Tree of Life poster


It kind of shows that evolution isn't only smooth steady progression, but happens in spurts and periods of (relative) rapidity.

...

Within limits that are surprisingly wide, the rate of evolution goes as fast as it needs to go. In other words, when conditions are stable species are stable, when they change, evolution can be rapid.

There are a lot of periods of relative stability followed by rapid spurts of evolution. Noted biologist Stephen Jay Gould called this "Punctuated Equilibrium".

The most vigorous one is the Cambrian Explosion that someone mentioned here. That is a pretty dramatic burst of evolution, but what we see in the fossil record exaggerates the burst because it was the beginning of species that had "hard parts". Since almost all fossils are from the hard parts (bones, teeth, exoskelotins, etc), it skews the apparent rate of evolution during that time because the species without hard parts don't fossilize much.
 

JustAsking

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Wiltom,
That tree of life poster is great. I wonder if that is available online somewhere. There is another kind of tree plot that is very impressive. One of the axioms of evolution is that organisms can be grouped by their traits (or their genome) into nested hierarchies of branches on the tree.

For example, when a branch of the tree forks to vertebrate creatures, all the future organisms on that branch retain the vertebrate trait. Then if some of those fork into a branch on another trait (say warm-bloodedness) then those on that branch retain the vertebrate and warm-blooded trait.

If you drill down as far as you want in traits, you will still see the groupings along the branch retain the nested hiearchies. Here is an interesting plot that highlights this.

I think you and I have similar interests. I found Guns, Germs, and Steel to be fascinating. I hate pseudoscience with a passion, but I do love honest scientific speculation and I enjoy reading about it.

I just finished a book called The Wolf in The Parlor. It is a somewhat lightweight book by a science journalist who is loosely passing on the slim research there is regarding the evolution of dogs from wolves, as they formed a symbiotic relationship with humans. Beautiful and lyrical science writing, though. I can see why this guy got two Pulitzers.

If would recommend the Dawkins books I mentioned before, and also Your Inner Fish. I can recommend more if you are interested.
 
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Pitbull

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Gaydoc

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This is really embarrassing, but I saw the picture of her, and I'm afraid some of her genes are definitely still present in some of my relatives. As for the statement that men never evolved from apes, considering 2 of my said cousins, I have to respectfully disagree with the point.
 
D

deleted213967

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Within limits that are surprisingly wide, the rate of evolution goes as fast as it needs to go. In other words, when conditions are stable species are stable, when they change, evolution can be rapid.

...and yet Evolution cannot run faster than the rate of (genetic) mutation, which (I was shocked to learn) is, by our human standards, staggeringly slow.

Dawkins shows how DNA itself evolved to replicate with such near-perfection that copying errors so very seldom surface.

Worse yet, natural selection rejects many of those mutations, making for a not-so-speedy Evolution. We humans just don't have time for this!

I am not done reading The Blind Watchmaker yet. Maybe you can post your own synopsis of The Greatest Show on Earth for our delight.
 

Zeuhl34

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Well-Hung-Nerd: Please, if you find a link, do post it.

I can't seem to find any videos, but I found out it was a miniseries that originally aired in 2003 called The Future Is Wild, but I'll keep looking because I'd like to re-watch it.
 

Phil Ayesho

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journalists also contribute to the confusion about evolution. Journalists like to remain as willfully ignorant about this stuff as creationists do, but for a different reason.
...Journalists, however, like to imply that each new discovery they hear of is an exception rather than the rule because there is more drama that way and they can sell more articles.

So very true and and a critical cause of the general public's misunderstandings...
 

Ramsey

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I find it ironic that so many people say that the creationists are all fundamentalists that loud/violent/whatever but many evolutionists are just as crabby and defensive as the creationists. It's striking a nerve for both of them. I've talked with a lot from both sides, and some are objective and willing to consider and work with stuff, others are fundamentalists (on BOTH sides) and will not allow any room to consider or discuss. Their minds are set, and they get pissed off no matter what you throw at them. I'm even sure though, that some creationists would use an older hominid than Lucy as an example that mankind has been around longer and with more of the fossil record than we thought before.
Both sides keep coming up with this evidence that will "trump" the other, and "they can't deny this-they must see they are ignorant buffalo humpers" but in the end-they never do.
 

D_Gunther Snotpole

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But besides the Creationists, journalists also contribute to the confusion about evolution. Journalists like to remain as willfully ignorant about this stuff as creationists do, but for a different reason....
Journalists ... like to imply that each new discovery they hear of is an exception rather than the rule because there is more drama that way and they can sell more articles. So they would be apt to report something like this as a big change in our conception of human evolution.
Of course.
Overplaying things like this has two effects.
One, the reader really thinks he's getting a nugget of new information, something that others don't have. He feels like he's vicariously standing on a leading edge of some sort. Readers are very attracted to this feeling.
The second effect is that having ideas in collision implies that people behind those ideas are also in collision.
Some sort of struggle is implicitly set up.
And the importance of struggle and contention is a basic principle of story-telling (ideally, in fiction, but the same principles work in non-fiction, too).

And unfortunately, one does have to hook readers.
It's all too easy for a reader to turn to the next page if he finds, after a sentence or two, that the story hasn't grabbed him.
Sometimes precision and accuracy are casualties.

A really bad journalist would have a headline that the Ardi finding "challenges our understanding about human evolution" or something like that.
Well, creating headlines is almost never the task of the writer. Headlines have to be made to fit the available space, which can't be known until a piece is being fit onto the page.
But the principle is bang on.
The writer could torque things, if not in the headline, then in the lede.
Happens all the time.
And if a copy editor finds a lede a bit 'soft,' he may sometimes torque things up on his own.
It can be frustrating for a writer.
 
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JustAsking

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I find it ironic that so many people say that the creationists are all fundamentalists that loud/violent/whatever but many evolutionists are just as crabby and defensive as the creationists. It's striking a nerve for both of them. I've talked with a lot from both sides, and some are objective and willing to consider and work with stuff, others are fundamentalists (on BOTH sides) and will not allow any room to consider or discuss. Their minds are set, and they get pissed off no matter what you throw at them. I'm even sure though, that some creationists would use an older hominid than Lucy as an example that mankind has been around longer and with more of the fossil record than we thought before.
Both sides keep coming up with this evidence that will "trump" the other, and "they can't deny this-they must see they are ignorant buffalo humpers" but in the end-they never do.

Ramsay,
Except all you are talking about is the public debate of laymen. The problem is that there is no such thing as a scientific debate outside of the referreed professional journals. Anything other than that is just bar room conversation.

Secondly, evolution science is not conducted with the goal of refuting any particular religions creation mythology. So in fact, scientists don't come up with evidence to trump creationists, just like physicists don't work on fundamental particles in order to trump the Navajo story of creation or the Hindu story of creation. What they do is simply investigate the natural phenomenon they observe and make testable and independently verified theories that are highly useful in the world of science and engineering.


The notion that there is any kind of public laymen debate about stuff like this is ridiculous. It makes as much sense as all of us in this thread debating various techniques for brain surgery. The creationists have been successful in convincing you that scientific truth can come out of a public debate. Nothing can be further from the truth when it comes to science.

The way you do science is to do research and publish it in professional journals for all to see, critique, and perhaps utilize in their own work. If you ever saw a real scientific journal article on something like speciation, you would see what I mean. If anyone has a problem with the notion of speciation, you don't ask for a public debate. What you do is research and publish something that shows why speciation could not be possible.

But you would have to refute about 10 train cars worth of scientific articles on speciation from the last 150 years.

If anyone wants to really refute evolution instead of just publishing books to entertain laymen, I suggest they get to work. The actual list is 1000 miles long and extends into anatomy/physiology, paleontology, anthropology, geology, microbiology, genetics, and so on. Each of these fields has their own 10 train cars worth of published science that needs to be refuted.

And by the way, all of this published research is contentious. Real scientists are extremely argumentative and sceptical about each other's work. They get up every morning wanting to demonstrate through solid research and professional publications that their notions are right where their colleagues are wrong.

But they are not so dishonest as to think they can use the public as some kind of jury. They have to publish their work in painstaking detail in professional journals and let it be subject to the careful scrutiny of their peers. Only when their work begins to be cited frequently in the work of others does it start to gain credibility.

Of all out intellectual pursuits, no matter how imperfect, science is our ultimate sceptical investigative process. The court of inquiry is always in session on every piece of scientific work. However, Creationists and ID proponents only stand outside the courtroom in the parking lot handing out leaflets. This is why no one takes them seriously.
 

JustAsking

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Of course.
...
Well, creating headlines is almost never the task of the writer. Headlines have to be made to fit the available space, which can't be known until a piece is being fit onto the page.
But the principle is bang on.
The writer could torque things, if not in the headline, then in the lede.
Happens all the time.
And if a copy editor finds a lede a bit 'soft,' he may sometimes torque things up on his own.
It can be frustrating for a writer.

To wit: The Nat Geo headline for this story was, Oldest "Human" Skeleton Found--Disproves "Missing Link".

I don't know how anyone can cram so much "stupid" into so few words as that.
 

Drifterwood

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Aristotle would have loved Darwin and evolution. I am not so sure about Plato.

There is no good or bad,, no right or wrong, just what works in certain circumstances. Change the circumstances and what worked won't. This to my mind, destroys any argument for intelligent design as well.

As stated above, because it is so slow for us, we (many of us) can't "see" it. Fast food it isn't.
 

jason_els

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A good example of scientific debate situation is Elaine Morgan's TED talk on the aquatic ape theory of human evolution. I've subscribed to this theory myself as I can't see any reason for it not to be true and the reasoning she gives is consistent with other evolutionary adaptations among other mammalian species adapted to aquatic life. To me it's obvious even if it isn't to other evolutionary theorists.
 

JustAsking

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A good example of scientific debate situation is Elaine Morgan's TED talk on the aquatic ape theory of human evolution. I've subscribed to this theory myself as I can't see any reason for it not to be true and the reasoning she gives is consistent with other evolutionary adaptations among other mammalian species adapted to aquatic life. To me it's obvious even if it isn't to other evolutionary theorists.

Jason,
Many years ago I read her book, The Descent of Woman, on that topic. Besides the aquatic theory, she developed many other arguments for why environmental pressure acted more on women than men. This gave rise to modern human traits that had more to do with women's roles as child bearer and raiser than it did with men taking to the savannah to hunt.

I am an avid reader of honest speculative science, so I enjoyed this particular book very much. However, I am reserving judgement to see how much of this particular point of view eventually finds some legs.