I am suggesting here that humans evolved from a sea mammal (now extinct) rather than apes. This is an extension of the God Gametes theory that I have discussed before on this forum. My argument here is that, after hundreds of years of trying we still do not have a fossil record that links us to the ape.

If we evolved from an ape like creature that lived in Africa 150,000 years ago, and migrated to the rest of the world, we would have finished up as several different species. For example; it would have been impossible for an earlier ancestor of man to have evolved on different continents, in different climatic conditions and for all these different regions to have produced the same species of modern man.

The migration would have been impossible. The idea that early ancestors of man crossed the Atlantic Ocean from Africa to America is ridiculous. And the argument that the Australian Aboriginal descended from Peking man is equally ridiculous. The Australian Aboriginals have been here for 60,000 years and the suggestion that they were some how washed out of a river in northern China on bamboo rafts and finished up in Australia is a ludicrous argument.

The God Gametes argument is that there is a purpose for the evolution of more complex species. In particular there needed to be a species with a consciousness. If we allow that this may be true then the two major problems with the above (ape to human) arguments can be overcome with the sea mammal hypothesis.

There is no problem associated with migration for our early ancestors simply swam from continent to continent. And I am arguing that a sea mammal simply gave birth to a human. This may seem hard to swallow but we know our immune system can mutate sections of DNA at one million times the background mutation rate, and then re-arrange it to code for antibodies to fight invading antigens; sometimes to fight off antigens or man made chemicals that have never existed before. If it is possible to mutate several thousands nucleotides, at a precise location on a section of DNA, re-arrange them to code for a specific antibody then it is possible for a sea mammal to mutate and re-arrange the several thousand genes that are needed for her to produce a human.

So we know that this rapid evolution can happen. But we know there is no fossil record for the slow evolution; not only for our species but for pretty well every species. And, according to the Darwinian model, it would be impossible for an earlier ancestor of man to evolve on different continents and finish up as the same species. It would also have been impossible for ancient man to have migrated between continents. But there is nothing in my suggestion that is impossible in terms of what we know can happen. One copy of our human DNA is about 75 mm and only 2% (15 mm) of this codes for making body parts. There would of course need to be some modifications for a sea mammal to give birth to a land dwelling creature. But basically it would only require the substitution of flippers with arms and legs. Probably this could be done with the mutation and re-arrangement of 1 mm of DNA. But if it took the mutation and re-arrangement of 5 or 10 mm of DNA then this is a lot more likely proposition than the suggestion that the early ancestors of the Aborigines survived a journey from northern China to Australia on a bamboo raft.

It is not unreasonable to argue that there needs to be a purpose, or a reason, driving the evolution of more complex species. The alternative argument, that it just happened, is what is difficult to believe. For further information on the God Gametes theory visit www.godgametes.com

My argument here is that, after hundreds of years of trying we still do not have a fossil record that links us to the ape.


Ok. May I ask then why there also isn't a fossil that links man to a marine mammal? And what is the origin of this sea mammal?

I am suggesting here that humans evolved from a sea mammal (now extinct) rather than apes. This is an extension of the God Gametes theory that I have discussed before on this forum. My argument here is that, after hundreds of years of trying we still do not have a fossil record that links us to the ape.
We have enough, as much or more than we should expect.
Do you have a problem with the belief that placental mammals evolved from marsupial mammals? There is no perfect detailed fossil record for that either, theres just enough evidence to support it and there is enough evidence to support that man evolved from a more primitive primate. Can you name one case of their being a fossil record linking one creature to another as detailed and complete as you demand from the ape to human fossil record?
There is also the fact that man is a primate, so unless this extinct marine creature was a primate you don't have much of a case.

If we evolved from an ape like creature that lived in Africa 150,000 years ago, and migrated to the rest of the world, we would have finished up as several different species. For example; it would have been impossible for an earlier ancestor of man to have evolved on different continents, in different climatic conditions and for all these different regions to have produced the same species of modern man.
We have races, which are the early stages of a new species. The different races have remained the same species because they had no reason to turn into new ones, the homo-sapien is a rather successful design, minor adaptions assisted in different environments and thus we branched out into different races but changing species is a drastic step that was not called for. Killer whales live all over the world also, and remain the same species, because their basic design can work anywhere. Same with humans.

The migration would have been impossible. The idea that early ancestors of man crossed the Atlantic Ocean from Africa to America is ridiculous. And the argument that the Australian Aboriginal descended from Peking man is equally ridiculous. The Australian Aboriginals have been here for 60,000 years and the suggestion that they were some how washed out of a river in northern China on bamboo rafts and finished up in Australia is a ludicrous argument
During the ice age there was no where near as much ocean as their is today, certain continents were connected with land bridges that all sorts of animals managed to migrate accross. I've never seen someone try to claim human ancestors washed up anywhere.

The God Gametes argument is that there is a purpose for the evolution of more complex species. In particular there needed to be a species with a consciousness. If we allow that this may be true then the two major problems with the above (ape to human) arguments can be overcome with the sea mammal hypothesis.
ugh "consciousness":rolleyes:
There are lots of things wrong with this, firstly assuming there are no species other than humans with a "consciousness"(I've never seen an awake animal or not-unconscious animal without a consciousness) and also just boldly saying "there needed to be an animal with a consciousness" like "ofcourse", what do you base that on? Thats just a big leap out of no where for no apparent reason.

It is not unreasonable to argue that there needs to be a purpose, or a reason, driving the evolution of more complex species. The alternative argument, that it just happened, is what is difficult to believe. For further information on the God Gametes theory visit www.godgametes.com
I don't find the "it just happened" part hard to believe because I can logically picture how it just happened. In fact the very system that is an eco-system is set up in a way that supports this.
I find it fascinating and spectacular how everything fits in so perfectly and how the biosphere is a machine with important parts all meshing together and relying on eachother, and the machine in turn relying on all those parts to be operating appropriately.
But I notice that the system is set up so it does "just happen" by default.
My views aren't as sterile as most atheists, but I still agree with them on all the mechanics and facts.

And I do not believe humans evolved from a marine mammal.
A river-bank mammal that relied on going into the water for food and to cross them to get to other banks etc? Yes i do believe that.
I definately think humans at some stage in their ancestral history were tied to the water.
You can see it now in basic human behaviour, real-estate prices are even an indication of this.
Humans love the water, being near it, wallowing in it, looking at it, etc etc, where as other strictly land based mammals do not possess this interest.
Elephants too obviously have a more aquatic past than they are living now, and you can see how elephants and humans are similar in this left over instinctual urge to be near and in water.
I believe humans evolved from a semi-aquatic primate, but not an extinct group of land mammals that swam from continent to continent.

Spuriousmonkey - quote:

Ok. May I ask then why there also isn't a fossil that links man to a marine mammal? And what is the origin of this sea mammal?
I am saying that evolution happened in very big steps. Basically there were no intermediate species so the fossils for the intermediate species do not exist.


Dr.Lou Natic- On the fossil records: quote:

We have enough, as much or more than we should expect.
Do you have a problem with the belief that placental mammals evolved from marsupial mammals? There is no perfect detailed fossil record for that either, there is just enough evidence to support it and there is enough evidence to support that man evolved from a more primitive primate. Can you name one case of their being a fossil record linking one creature to another as detailed and complete as you demand from the ape to human fossil record?
There is also the fact that man is a primate, so unless this extinct marine creature was a primate you don't have much of a case.
I agree. As I said in my original post there are very few complete fossil records. This however is supportive of my argument for I believe the evolution in big steps happened in all complex species; not just our species. Basically my argument is that there is a purpose for evolution and that purpose requires the evolution of greater complexity. That the genetic formula for all life exists throughout the greater universe so if it was necessary for species to evolve from marsupials to primates (or from marine mammals to primates) in one big step then this could happen.


Dr.Lou Natic - On speciation: quote:

We have races, which are the early stages of a new species. The different races have remained the same species because they had no reason to turn into new ones, the homo-sapien is a rather successful design, minor adaptions assisted in different environments and thus we branched out into different races but changing species is a drastic step that was not called for. Killer whales live all over the world also, and remain the same species, because their basic design can work anywhere. Same with humans.
The evolution of humans is not an example of one species branching out. The earlier ancestral species that moved out of Africa 150,000 years ago was not the same species as modern man. If for example it still existed today it would not be possible for us to reproduce with it. So what happened is this; an earlier ancestor of modern man moved to different continents, different climatic conditions, different environments, but all regions and all environmental conditions produced the same species from a different ancestral base. This would be impossible unless there was close interbreeding among all human races on all continents over the 150,000 years that our species was evolving. This interbreeding would have been possible for killer whales but it did not happen with our species. And I expect this is why we now have these pathetic arguments about Peking Man drifting out of a river in northern China on bamboo logs and finishing up in Australia.

You say that we are a “successful design”. I do not know what you mean by this. We are a successful species but, from en evolutionary point of view, we are a very poor design. The hairless ape with a big head is not a good design for surviving a natural environment. Natural selection would not have driven the design of our species. For that matter the single cell organism is by far the best adapted to all environments so natural selection would not have driven the evolution of any complex species.


Dr.Lou Natic - On consciousness: quote:

There are lots of things wrong with this, firstly assuming there are no species other than humans with a "consciousness" (I've never seen an awake animal or not-unconscious animal without a consciousness) and also just boldly saying "there needed to be an animal with a consciousness" like "ofcourse", what do you base that on? Thats just a big leap out of no where for no apparent reason.
Sorry Dr. Lou Natic I did not explain this too well. I wrote this post for another forum where the participants are a little more familiar with the God Gametes concept (but decided to let sciforums have a go at it). Basically the God Gametes theory argues that we evolved for the purpose of hosting the human consciousness. This may sound a little “fruity” but the GG model argues that our universe is part of a multiverse, that each level of the multiverse is the reproductive system of the level above, that all life on earth is part of a female reproductive system of that next higher level and our human consciousness is the male reproductive cell it hosts. So if you have stayed with all of that then the evolution of greater complexity makes sense. And if the GG model were true then the genetic formula for all life would be part of the gene pool of our “parent species” on that next higher level of the multiverse.


Dr.Lou Natic - It just happened: quote:

I don't find the "it just happened" part hard to believe because I can logically picture how it just happened. In fact the very system that is an eco-system is set up in a way that supports this. I find it fascinating and spectacular how everything fits in so perfectly and how the biosphere is a machine with important parts all meshing together and relying on each other, and the machine in turn relying on all those parts to be operating appropriately. But I notice that the system is set up so it does "just happen" by default. My views aren't as sterile as most atheists, but I still agree with them on all the mechanics and facts.
But how was it set up so perfectly? This is what I mean by how did it “just happen”. And if it did just happen then where did all the matter come from, where did all the heat in 100,000,000,000 stars in 100,000,000,000 galaxies come from and where did the gravitational forces that hold it all together come from? The God Gametes model does not attempt to answer these “who created it?” or “how does it work?” questions but merely puts forward a theory that tries to explain “what it is doing”.


Dr.Lou Natic – Aquatic mammal: quote:

And I do not believe humans evolved from a marine mammal. A river-bank mammal that relied on going into the water for food and to cross them to get to other banks etc?
Well a river bank mammal is not going to cross the Atlantic or populate the Pacific Islands. The sea level dropping during an ice age does not explain migration to Australia, New Zealand or Tasmania. And it is very unlikely that any early ancestors of man would be heading for Tasmania or the south island of New Zealand during an ice age even if there were a land bridge.

not to pick, but species don't evolve from other current species. both species diverged from an earlier species. carry on.

and what's that about races? sorry no. there is no significant genetic difference between "races", which are little more than a social invention. dogs are as varied as can be but they're not on their way to speciation either.

Are different breeds of dog a "social invention"? :rolleyes:
No they are groups of dogs comprised of relatively closely related individuals.
Which is what races are, which is what species are.
Species have just become so unrelated and changed so much that they can no longer breed with the species they branched off from. (and of course their are many other little details on the gene level that I'm not interested in)
"A social invention" ?
What does that mean exactly?
Surely you aren't implying that races are just labels that people invented?
I really hate it when the truth is neglected in favour of senseless political correctness.
They are as real as families, are families a social invention?

I agree. As I said in my original post there are very few complete fossil records. This however is supportive of my argument for I believe the evolution in big steps happened in all complex species; not just our species. Basically my argument is that there is a purpose for evolution and that purpose requires the evolution of greater complexity. That the genetic formula for all life exists throughout the greater universe so if it was necessary for species to evolve from marsupials to primates (or from marine mammals to primates) in one big step then this could happen.
Gradual evolution has supporting evidence and isn't at all contradicted by fossil records, it is also backed up by the very fact we can see it occur before our eyes. Dog breeding a good example, people have not only witnessed evolution but made it happen themselves many times, and it happened to occur in a gradual fashion.
Big steps of evolution have no supporting evidence whatsoever and are actually contradicted by the process of natural and sexual selection(that can be observed anywhere), there is no reason to believe in big steps of evolution and many reasons to not believe in it. There are many reasons to believe in gradual evolution and no reasons at all to not believe in it. Pretty easy choice in my opinion.

The breeding of domestic animals actually showed evolution at an accelerated rate because humans could strictly and swiftly select traits and breed for them, nature is slower, and even dog breeding(or manually evolving dogs if you will) is a gradual process. Compared to what you are trying to put forward.

The evolution of humans is not an example of one species branching out. The earlier ancestral species that moved out of Africa 150,000 years ago was not the same species as modern man. If for example it still existed today it would not be possible for us to reproduce with it. So what happened is this; an earlier ancestor of modern man moved to different continents, different climatic conditions, different environments, but all regions and all environmental conditions produced the same species from a different ancestral base. This would be impossible unless there was close interbreeding among all human races on all continents over the 150,000 years that our species was evolving. This interbreeding would have been possible for killer whales but it did not happen with our species. And I expect this is why we now have these pathetic arguments about Peking Man drifting out of a river in northern China on bamboo logs and finishing up in Australia.
The human species definately was the human species when it branched out around the world. Whether the human species ancestor moved out of africa before then or not is not an issue, we can be sure whatever happened, and from wherever it started, the human species was the human species before it branched out, perhaps they started in europe or asia and came back to africa, these are the questions to ask, what you are saying is not feasible.
All races definately have the same ancestral base, this is where you start from and then make queries on the rest of it if you must, the part you are attacking is the part which is irrefutable.

You say that we are a “successful design”. I do not know what you mean by this. We are a successful species but, from en evolutionary point of view, we are a very poor design. The hairless ape with a big head is not a good design for surviving a natural environment. Natural selection would not have driven the design of our species. For that matter the single cell organism is by far the best adapted to all environments so natural selection would not have driven the evolution of any complex species.
Our big brains and mannerisms are part of the design. Nothing would be a good design if you seperated its body from its behaviour. Humans are a successful design.
Natural selection doesn't drive the design for a species or aim for a design*, whatever is allowed to get through does.
(*atleast, not untill a political structure with complexities in the sexual selection details is established, ie- lions, you could say natural selection is "aiming" to make lions more equipped for combat with other lions, but they are not the norm, and even so it is the species own behaviour that is creating this directed and focussed form of evolution).
There are far worse designs than humans, in a way the most impressive designs are also the worst. The most impressive being the animals that become extremely specialised. They always have amazing interesting adaptions but at the same time they have been screwed over because the globe changes and you have to be able to change with it, in this sense the human design might be the best, but there are others of course, basically it is the opportunists that have the best designs, raccoons for example, thats a good design, they will making a living practically anywhere. Polar bears are a remarkably impressive design, but when this planet thaws out they'll be up shit creek.
The single celled organism is a fine design but it leaves alot of space, alot of space that has the potential to be filled, where there is potential there is a way when we are talking about evolution, there were other livings to be made and so inevitably they were made.
Single celled organisms are still selected upon by nature, individuals can possess shortcomings that cause them to be unsuccessful, this is enough for evolution to occur.
Shortcomings do not make individual humans unsuccessful, there is no need to even keep a streamlined phenotype/genotype, let alone change it.

Sorry Dr. Lou Natic I did not explain this too well. I wrote this post for another forum where the participants are a little more familiar with the God Gametes concept (but decided to let sciforums have a go at it). Basically the God Gametes theory argues that we evolved for the purpose of hosting the human consciousness. This may sound a little “fruity” but the GG model argues that our universe is part of a multiverse, that each level of the multiverse is the reproductive system of the level above, that all life on earth is part of a female reproductive system of that next higher level and our human consciousness is the male reproductive cell it hosts. So if you have stayed with all of that then the evolution of greater complexity makes sense. And if the GG model were true then the genetic formula for all life would be part of the gene pool of our “parent species” on that next higher level of the multiverse.
I remember you and your theory.
I've started biology classes(on the 11th grade level, I'm very un-formally-educated, trying to fix that) recently and noticed something that inspired the beginning thoughts of a new theory to emerge or possibly extend on my working theory.
I think in a sense cells look a little like solar systems, and perhaps solar systems are the cells that make up the universe which itself is a big body of some kind that we can not see as we are merely the tiny part of a cell.
Of course it would be ridiculous to think the body was an animal or plant in the way we know but perhaps it is some totally unknown and indescribable in the english language type of body of something that we could not fathom.
Seeing as how the nucleus of each of his cells is made of fire he would have to be pretty different.
Thats my new theory.
Out there, but fun IMO :)

But how was it set up so perfectly? This is what I mean by how did it “just happen”. And if it did just happen then where did all the matter come from, where did all the heat in 100,000,000,000 stars in 100,000,000,000 galaxies come from and where did the gravitational forces that hold it all together come from? The God Gametes model does not attempt to answer these “who created it?” or “how does it work?” questions but merely puts forward a theory that tries to explain “what it is doing”
Good questions, maybe the "universe"(or jim as i like to call him from now on) was birthed like you and me?;)

Well a river bank mammal is not going to cross the Atlantic or populate the Pacific Islands.
Well, obviously I do not believe they did.
When i see land bridge i don't mean a bridge of ice or anything, sea level was down very far, land would have connect australia to asia, you know? as it does under the water now?

Dr Lou Natic wrote: quote:

Dog breeding a good example, people have not only witnessed evolution but made it happen themselves many times, and it happened to occur in a gradual fashion. … The breeding of domestic animals actually showed evolution at an accelerated rate because humans could strictly and swiftly select traits and breed for them, nature is slower, and even dog breeding (or manually evolving dogs if you will) is a gradual process.
You are correct in saying that the breeding of domestic animals will be quicker and has dramatically changed the physical appearance of animals (such as dogs) in just a few generations. But up until now animal breeders have only created different “races” of animals not a single new species.

quote:

… there is no reason to believe in big steps of evolution and many reasons to not believe in it. …
I could say the same about natural selection. Natural selection certainly has not been proven and has many holes. But what is irritating is that the scientific establishment will not entertain any model that goes against the Darwinian paradigm and those, such as myself, that suggest there must have been “something” that kick-started it are dismissed as cranks. If Darwinism is to be the accepted dogma then the scientific establishment should provide the evidence to support their case. They need a fossil record to establish the gradual evolution (which does not exist) and they need to show how complex design can evolve from mistakes (or mutations) which again is impossible. Unless the wholes in the Darwinian paradigm can be plugged then it is fair game for those who wish to criticise it.

quote:

The human species definately was the human species when it branched out around the world.
This is not true. It was not the human species that moved out of Africa 150,000 years ago. It was an earlier ancestor of humans; not modern man. It was a different species but it moved to different continents, in different climatic and environmental condition but produced the same species everywhere. This of course flies in the face of Darwinian natural selection.

quote:

Whether the human species ancestor moved out of Africa before then or not is not an issue, we can be sure whatever happened, and from wherever it started, the human species was the human species before it branched out, perhaps they started in Europe or Asia and came back to Africa, these are the questions to ask, what you are saying is not feasible.
So not only did the Australian Aborigines make it to Australia on bamboo rafts they made the occasional trip back to Africa to do some interbreeding just to make sure they did not branch off a new species of modern man. And you are telling me that my arguments are not feasible?

quote:

Polar bears are a remarkably impressive design, but when this planet thaws out they'll be up shit creek.
Yes this is true. True of all complex species and is the reason why natural selection would never have driven the evolution of a complex design like our species.

quote:

The single celled organism is a fine design but it leaves a lot of space, a lot of space that has the potential to be filled, where there is potential there is a way when we are talking about evolution, there were other livings to be made and so inevitably they were made.
But natural selection demands that the best adapted, and the quickest to adapt to change, will win out in the “survival of the fittest”. The single cell organism will win out against the more complex species every time. Not only can they change more quickly, they can live just about anywhere there is water. This includes acid baths, being frozen, being flash heated to1,500 degrees Celcius, they have been found in high pressure thermostatic vaults 6 miles beneath the earth surface making a living metabolising rocks and survived 30 months on the moon. Any species that has evolved past the single cell organism has dramatically reduced its chances of survival.

quote:

I've started biology classes (on the 11th grade level, I'm very un-formally-educated, trying to fix that) recently and noticed something that inspired the beginning thoughts of a new theory to emerge or possibly extend on my working theory.
That’s great; I am also an amateur scientist. (I originally bombed out of high school without completing year 10.) All I suggest is that you do not believe all you read in the text books and keep thinking for yourself.

quote:

I think in a sense cells look a little like solar systems, and perhaps solar systems are the cells that make up the universe which itself is a big body of some kind that we can not see as we are merely the tiny part of a cell.
This is sounding close to God Gametes. God Gametes argues that there must be more than one of everything; so why not more than one universe. Plenty have argued the above point but GG makes the observation that if universes have life, then they are cyclical, and if they are cyclical then they reproduce. So GG suggests that the multiverse is hierarchical, with each level being the reproductive system of the level above. Check out www.godgametes.com

quote:

Of course it would be ridiculous to think the body was an animal or plant in the way we know but perhaps it is some totally unknown and indescribable in the English language type of body of something that we could not fathom.
I do not think that is ridiculous.

quote:

Well, obviously I do not believe they did. When i say land bridge i don't mean a bridge of ice or anything, sea level was down very far, land would have connect Australia to Asia, you know? as it does under the water now?
Yes I know what you mean but the best evidence is that there would not have been a land bridge to Australia at the time when it is thought the Aborigines arrived there. And there was not a land bridge connecting Africa with America; or Asia with all the Pacific islands that were populated with our species.

there is insignificant genetic difference between races, and there is as much difference within the same race. any given family will be just as different from all the other given families of no relation. the trivial variability among races is nothing important enough to cause branching out.
if an ashkenazi semetic and a navajo mongoloid can breed, there was no subspeciation regardless of how different their phenotypes.

i'm not exactly sure what you're getting at with the land bridge discussion. were you not aware that the continents were joined and then drifted?

I am suggesting here that humans evolved from a sea mammal (now extinct) rather than apes.With every year increasing the processing speed of computers and allowing DNA analysis and comparison to proceed more quickly and more extensively, the probability of your theory being true has, for all purposes except speculation, reached zero.

Some amazing things have been discovered. Cetaceans turn out to have evolved from ungulates, rather than the various other hypothesized ancestors including bears and pinnipeds. Manatees are neither cetaceans nor pinnipeds. But humans are primates, there is simply no second-guessing that conclusion. If our DNA overlapped chimpanzee DNA any more closely, we'd probably be able to hybridize with them.

As for the aquatic ancestor theory, that's been explored extensively on SciForums. I suggest you look it up and join the discussion. We are the only primates with those little vestigial webs between our fingers. It's possible that our African ancestors came down from the trees and quickly entered the lakes, where the competition for food wasn't as tough as on the land. An aquatic environment requires thinking in three-dimensional spacial relationships, which correlates with higher intelligence, as evidenced by marine mammals. When we clambered back out of the lakes to try our luck on land again, our brain development had raced past that of the other apes who stayed in the trees, giving us the advantage we needed to compete with the other land animals. (Arborial living is also three dimensional, which correlates with the high intelligence of all primates. But swimming freely appears to be an even bigger boost to IQ development.)This is an extension of the God Gametes theory that I have discussed before on this forum. My argument here is that, after hundreds of years of trying we still do not have a fossil record that links us to the ape.It's time to stop trying to settle all evolutionary issues by waiting for new fossils to be discovered. Paleontology is a slow science. They keep discovering new pockets of fossils of hitherto unknown species. It could be a thousand years before the fossil you're looking for is found. How much more of a link do you need between humans and the other apes than our DNA? We've already got the bits of fossils of earlier species of hominids that clearly point to a common ancestry with gorillas and chimps. The evidence is overwhelming.If we evolved from an ape like creature that lived in Africa 150,000 years ago, and migrated to the rest of the world, we would have finished up as several different species. For example; it would have been impossible for an earlier ancestor of man to have evolved on different continents, in different climatic conditions and for all these different regions to have produced the same species of modern man. The migration would have been impossible. The idea that early ancestors of man crossed the Atlantic Ocean from Africa to America is ridiculous. And the argument that the Australian Aboriginal descended from Peking man is equally ridiculous. The Australian Aboriginals have been here for 60,000 years and the suggestion that they were some how washed out of a river in northern China on bamboo rafts and finished up in Australia is a ludicrous argument.You really need to study your anthropology and biology a little more extensively. There are some big gaps in what you've learned. The creatures that migrated out of Africa sometime between 200,000 and 100,000 BCE were Homo sapiens. The most current linguistic research using massively parallel multiprocessing suggests that they had already developed language, since mounting evidence is leading to the conculsion that there might ultimately be only one language family. Language may, in fact, have been the key factor in allowing them to thrive in so many different environments.

Man did not come to the Western Hemisphere from Africa, he came from Asia. They've got the regions in Mongolia where he set out from identified practically down to the house numbers. They came in three waves, the first no more than 25,000 years ago and no later than about 14,000 BCE. They may have crossed the Bering land bridge on foot during an ice age, or they may have sailed along the coasts of Asia and North America in watercraft. Those were the ancestors of the Athabascan people, the dominant ethnic group in the New World, which includes all of the New World civilizations (Inca, Olmec, Maya, Aztec) and all tribes south of the Rio Grande, as well as most tribes east of the Rockies. The second wave arrived around 4,000 BCE, this time almost certainly on foot, and their descendants are the Na-Dene people who are generally the tribes west of the Rockies. The last wave was the Eskimo-Aleuts around 2,000 BCE, who found the place pretty well settled and stayed in the arctic regions that they had already adapted to during their long stopover in northern Asia.

The Australians probably did not float down from China, although considering the impressive seafaring ability of the East Asian people in 25,000 BCE, this scenario in an earlier era is not totally implausible. I'm not as familiar with the anthropology of that region, but populating Australia can't have been too much harder than the Malayo-Polynesian islands. At any rate the Australians are Homo sapiens descended from that single African foremother, "Lucy," like the rest of us.The God Gametes argument is that there is a purpose for the evolution of more complex species. In particular there needed to be a species with a consciousness. If we allow that this may be true then the two major problems with the above (ape to human) arguments can be overcome with the sea mammal hypothesis.There is no major problem. You just haven't taken enough classes yet.There is no problem associated with migration for our early ancestors simply swam from continent to continent. And I am arguing that a sea mammal simply gave birth to a human. This may seem hard to swallow but we know our immune system can mutate sections of DNA at one million times the background mutation rate, and then re-arrange it to code for antibodies to fight invading antigens; sometimes to fight off antigens or man made chemicals that have never existed before. If it is possible to mutate several thousands nucleotides, at a precise location on a section of DNA, re-arrange them to code for a specific antibody then it is possible for a sea mammal to mutate and re-arrange the several thousand genes that are needed for her to produce a human.I'll let the real scientists on SciForums tackle this one. You're basing your hypothesis on events with a far lower probability than the accepted theories. Parallel evolution happens, e.g. kangaroos and deer, but it does not ever result in convergence of DNA. The overlap in DNA between deer and kangaroos is about the same as between humans and kangaroos, nowhere near as great as between humans and orangutans, much less chipanzees. But I'd like to direct you to the threads right here on SciForums that will keep you busy for hours reading up on the aquatic ancestor theory.So we know that this rapid evolution can happen. But we know there is no fossil record for the slow evolution; not only for our species but for pretty well every species.As I said ealier, paleontology is not the only science that contributes to this research. DNA, lingustics, and anthropology are just as helpful. Several years before DNA analysis was widely available, comparisons of dental charts were used to identify the three ethnic groups in the Americas. Even dentists are scientists.And, according to the Darwinian model, it would be impossible for an earlier ancestor of man to evolve on different continents and finish up as the same species. It would also have been impossible for ancient man to have migrated between continents.And as I also said earlier, you've got some really confused versions of the actual migrations that spread Homo sapiens across every major land mass on Earth, as well as the chronology of the evolution of Homo sapiens from our ape and hominid ancestors, as well as the role played by Neanderthals and other genetic dead ends.

But there is nothing in my suggestion that is impossible in terms of what we know can happen. One copy of our human DNA is about 75 mm and only 2% (15 mm) of this codes for making body parts. There would of course need to be some modifications for a sea mammal to give birth to a land dwelling creature. But basically it would only require the substitution of flippers with arms and legs. Probably this could be done with the mutation and re-arrangement of 1 mm of DNA. But if it took the mutation and re-arrangement of 5 or 10 mm of DNA then this is a lot more likely proposition than the suggestion that the early ancestors of the Aborigines survived a journey from northern China to Australia on a bamboo raft.Your assessment of probabilities is subjective. Earlier humans accomplished some astounding feats. Kennewick Man is a case in point. Although it's far more recent than the settlement of Australia, the ability of a European to travel all the way to the Pacific coast of North America, at a time when the human tribes in Europe had not yet even progressed into the Neolithic era, is inspiring.

It is not unreasonable to argue that there needs to be a purpose, or a reason, driving the evolution of more complex species.It may not be "unreasonable," but it is unscientific.The alternative argument, that it just happened, is what is difficult to believe.For you perhaps. For those of us who have been studying science for several more decades than you have, it is both believable and scientific.For further information on the God Gametes theory visit www.godgametes.comI'll check it out. But unless you have not presented it fairly, it clearly belongs in the forums on religion or the paranormal, not science.

DNA analysis and other new disciplines made possible by massively parallel computing are rapidly bulldozing over pseudoscientific theories that have been used to explain things that were previously unexplainable. The common ancestry of humans and the other apes is far beyond the point of disputability. The settlement of the Western Hemisphere has been neatly broken into three waves, their origins have been located, and the biggest unknown is whether the first wave walked or sailed.

It's interesting that the lay community ignores the results of DNA analysis even when it supports their own theses. Case in point: Dogs and wolves are not two distinct species. The difference in DNA between a random mongrel dog and a wolf is less than that between a Chihuahua and a Tibetan mastiff. It is even less than that between a human from Iceland and a human from Borneo. It is correct to identify the wolf as merely one breed of dog: the oldest. For decades, dogs have been identified as Canis familiaris while wolves were identified as Canis lupus. Humans had actually been given credit for creating a new species.

That turns out to be wrong. Humans have not yet created a new species. You'd think that the anti-evolution crowd would be happy to learn and publicize this. But they're not. I think they're afraid that this is an anomaly and the results of most DNA analysis will work against their cause.

Swedish Fish: quote:

i'm not exactly sure what you're getting at with the land bridge discussion. were you not aware that the continents were joined and then drifted?
The great landmasses of Laurasia and Gondwanaland broke up over 100 million years ago. Our “so call” ape ancestors were meant to have moved out of Africa 150,000 years ago.


Fraggle Rocker: quote:

With every year increasing the processing speed of computers and allowing DNA analysis and comparison to proceed more quickly and more extensively, the probability of your theory being true has, for all purposes except speculation, reached zero.
This assumes that DNA can give us the whole picture. I can remember being told that the human genome project would eventually sequence all of our “100,000” genes. That was before it was discovered our species only had 35,000 genes; about the same number of genes as a mouse and a few more than the drosophila. Richard Lewontin’s (in “Not in our Genes”) makes the point that even when the genes are almost identical there are still differences. And Colin Tudge found that a lizard is more closely related to a bird than a crocodile. Tudge also notes that British fish mongers will often sell dog fish to the unsuspecting public instead of salmon. Not that it matters much for both species are identical in taste and appearance. But the dog fish is more closely related to a horse than a salmon. We need to remember that 98% of DNA does not code for making body parts and we do not know why it is there. But humans and Chimps have almost identical DNA and the similarity is common to both the coding and non-coding regions of DNA. (According to Morris Goodman Chimp and Human DNA is 99.6% identical.) So, given the obvious physical and intellectual differences in humans and chimps, it is extremely unlikely that DNA is the sole determining factor making us what we are.

quote:

The Australians probably did not float down from China, although considering the impressive seafaring ability of the East Asian people in 25,000 BCE, this scenario in an earlier era is not totally implausible. I'm not as familiar with the anthropology of that region, but populating Australia can't have been too much harder than the Malayo-Polynesian islands. At any rate the Australians are Homo sapiens descended from that single African foremother, "Lucy," like the rest of us.
Recent carbon dating has put the Aboriginal in Australia at 40,000 to 60,000 years ago. I do not have references (and am not an expert on paleontology) but I recall reading that Lucy was too old and did not support the chronological map that the traditional Darwinian evolutionary theory had hoped for.

quote:

Your assessment of probabilities is subjective. Earlier humans accomplished some astounding feats. Kennewick Man is a case in point. Although it's far more recent than the settlement of Australia, the ability of a European to travel all the way to the Pacific coast of North America, at a time when the human tribes in Europe had not yet even progressed into the Neolithic era, is inspiring.
It would be inspiring if they actually did it. It would also be inspiring if the Aboriginals made it to Australia from northern China on a bamboo raft or walked over a land bridge that did not exist. But that did not happen either.

quote:

It may not be "unreasonable," but it is unscientific.
So it is unscientific to argue that there needs to be a “purpose” or a “reason” for things to happen. I am only an amateur scientist but I thought things always happen for a reason. Well I had better get to work and read some more books and maybe I will eventually understand that all the energy in 100,000,000,000 stars in 100,000,000,000 galaxies just appeared for no reason. And that the gravitational force that holds it together, and life and consciousness, just happened for no reason. Sorry for my sarcasm, and I recognise that we all benefit from modern scientific discoveries, but if the scientific establishment want to scorn those who suggest a reason or purpose for creation then they should first plug some very big holes in their interpretations of how it all got started. No reasonable person would question Newtonian physics or Einsteins theory of relativity but the “it just happened” theories that underlay the big bang theories and Darwinian evolution are unfounded. This type of science is claiming priority; something that science has traditionally (and justifiably) criticised the religious establishment for doing.

The great landmasses of Laurasia and Gondwanaland broke up over 100 million years ago. Our “so called” ape ancestors were meant to have moved out of Africa 150,000 years ago.Once again, your only flaw appears to be the minor and inevitably rectifiable one that you are simply too young to have learned everything that a highly intelligent person needs to know about a field in which you have great interest. Please be more open to the possibility that you have overlooked important facts.

A trivial example that you can verify merely by looking at a good map is that all of the originally separated continents, except Australia and Antarctica, were subsequently reconnected by drifting back into each other in a different arrangement. Humans in great numbers have traveled by foot between Africa and Asia Minor throughout recorded history, over the isthmus of Suez. During ice ages when the Red Sea was much smaller than its present size, that journey did not require more than a minimal sense of direction.

150,000 years is a brief moment on the tectonic scale. The speed of continental drift is a few inches per year. 150,000 years ago the continents were, to an observer unaided by precision instruments, in exactly the same places as they are today. During the journey from Africa into Asia and thenceforth into Europe, the walking was the easy part.

The Bering Land Bridge between Siberia and Alaska periodically flooded between ice ages and was not always an easy walk. But the late Mesolithic Asians of 15,000-25,000 BCE had already developed the technology to boat across the small distances between the islands in the Bering Strait, and to walk across the ice floes.

Please read up on the details of the prehistoric migrations of Homo sapiens. Your picture of this is vastly oversimplified and inaccurate.Colin Tudge found that a lizard is more closely related to a bird than a crocodile.Yes, and that perfectly matches the conclusions of paleontologists. Birds are descended from certain species of dinosaurs. Dinosaurs were not true lizards but were probably as closely related to them as snakes are. Lizards are birds' closest living relatives. One of the hallmarks of science is that the independent discoveries of different scientific disciplines eventually converge.

Having re-read this quote from your reply in the context of the next quote, I suspect you have committed the same fallacy twice. I.e., perhaps you're saying that lizards are more closely related to birds than they are to crocodiles. Read on for a discussion of the fallacy of the converse.Tudge also notes that British fish mongers will often sell dog fish to the unsuspecting public instead of salmon. Not that it matters much for both species are identical in taste and appearance.As I said previously, parallel evolution results in a convergence of characteristics required to occupy an ecological niche, but never in a convergence of DNABut the dog fish is more closely related to a horse than a salmon.Oh come on now. I'd like to see the peer review on that one. It's an obvious case of the fallacy of the converse. (That's not exactly what this is but it's the closest similar type of fallacy that I can put a name to.) Apparently the dogfish is a more advanced species, a member or close relative of the family of fish from which the land vertebrates descended. The fact that the horse (or any mammal) is more closely related to the dogfish than to the salmon does not imply that the dogfish is more closely related to the horse than to the salmon.

Birds are obviously more closely related to the lizards than to any other order or suborder of reptiles. But that does not imply that lizards are more closely related to birds than to turtles, snakes, or alligators.

And even if this were true, it hardly shatters any scientific paradigms. Paleontoligsts are fond of saying, "The dinosaurs never died out. You're eating one right now in your chicken sandwich." The same goes for horses and dogfish. Perhaps we're all highly advanced species of dogfish. Again, no scientific paradigm has been shattered.We need to remember that 98% of DNA does not code for making body parts and we do not know why it is there.Once again, you simply need to catch up with your studies. There has been so much research into that issue in the past couple of years that a bit of it has been dumbed down for summarization in the popular press. Please check into it.But humans and Chimps have almost identical DNA and the similarity is common to both the coding and non-coding regions of DNA. (According to Morris Goodman Chimp and Human DNA is 99.6% identical.) So, given the obvious physical and intellectual differences in humans and chimps, it is extremely unlikely that DNA is the sole determining factor making us what we are.Faulty reasoning. The physical and intellectual differences between a Lhasa Apso (small, built for clambering up and down snowy Himalayan cliffs, the IQ of a crowbar, and this from a lover of the breed) and a standard poodle (large, built for running and swimming, highly intelligent) are impressive, but both are not only closely related but members of the same species. The differences are entirely the result of selective domestic breeding over a mere 12,000 years.
Recent carbon dating has put the Aboriginal in Australia at 40,000 to 60,000 years ago.I'm quite aware of that. And the same reports said that they came in boats, more or less on purpose.I do not have references (and am not an expert on paleontology) but I recall reading that Lucy was too old and did not support the chronological map that the traditional Darwinian evolutionary theory had hoped for.No, you are not an expert in paleontology. I believe you have drawn a false conclusion about Lucy. She is the ancestor of all Homo sapiens and she lived in Africa long before the species developed language and began its migration out of that continent across the Isthmus of Suez.quote: Although it's far more recent than the settlement of Australia, the ability of a European to travel all the way to the Pacific coast of North America, at a time when the human tribes in Europe had not yet even progressed into the Neolithic era, is inspiring.

It would be inspiring if they actually did it.What now? With your shaky grasp of archeology you're refuting the DNA analysis of Kennewick man, which identified him as a European? With nothing to support your argument? The skeleton of Kennewick Man generated a very high profile dispute between the Indian tribes of the state of Washington and the scientific community. It was resolved by reminding the members of those tribes that their ancestors, the Na-Dene people, had not yet arrived in the Western Hemisphere when Kennewick Man was buried in 7,000BCE, and that, therefore, they have no legal claim to the remains of a human being that could not possibly have been one of their own ancestors. This issue has been big news here in the Pacific Northwest for a long time and even laymen are familiar with the details. I implore you to complete your studies of anthropology before you start passing judgment on things that are happening thousands of miles from your home and have been exhaustively reviewed by the scientists, religious leaders, politicians, the military, and the media over here.It would also be inspiring if the Aboriginals made it to Australia from northern China on a bamboo raft or walked over a land bridge that did not exist. But that did not happen either.Once again you both misstate an anthropological hypothesis and refute it without substantiation. This is not science that you are practicing.So it is unscientific to argue that there needs to be a “purpose” or a “reason” for things to happen.That is correct. This is the realm of the priest or the philosopher, but not the scientist. Scientists search for "reasons" only in the narrow sense that if there were vineyards in England in the Thirteenth Century, the weather must have been quite a bit warmer than it is today. "Why we are here," or "Why the speed of light is 300,000 km/sec," or "Why the laws of the universe are the way they are," are not scientific questions.I am only an amateur scientist but I thought things always happen for a reason.That statement should read, "I am only a young, idealistic scientist, therefore I thought things always happen for a reason. Well I had better get to work and read some more booksYes indeed. You have a lot to learn about genetics, plate tectonics, and human prehistory.Maybe I will eventually understand that all the energy in 100,000,000,000 stars in 100,000,000,000 galaxies just appeared for no reason. And that the gravitational force that holds it together, and life and consciousness, just happened for no reason.Look to your religion or your favorite philosopher for those reasons, but don't expect to find them in a science book. The job of the scientist is to find out how things work, not why.Sorry for my sarcasm, and I recognise that we all benefit from modern scientific discoveries, but if the scientific establishment want to scorn those who suggest a reason or purpose for creation then they should first plug some very big holes in their interpretations of how it all got started. No reasonable person would question Newtonian physics or Einsteins theory of relativity but the “it just happened” theories that underlay the big bang theories and Darwinian evolution are unfounded."It just happened" is a very poor transcription of the average scientist's answer to a question of this type. "I don't know," would be a more accurate rendition, and "I don't know" is the most fundamental statement of science, from which all the rest of it sprang.This type of science is claiming priority; something that science has traditionally (and justifiably) criticised the religious establishment for doing.Now that you've misstated science, or at the very least taken out of context the rude responses of scientists fed up with questions that are not theirs to answer, you attack the straw man that you yourself have created. Once again you are committing the error you accuse others of: failure to practice good science.

Many scientists, as pure speculation and/or fun, have hypothesized that there are an infinite number of universes in which every possible set of natural laws can be found. In that multiverse, there does not need to be a "reason" that our physical laws and constants are what they are. It's just an accident of the universe we happened to be born into. It's no more or less wondrous than the fact that you and I are sitting here in comfortable homes with a refrigerator full of food and a job or school to go to tomorrow, talking to each other from nearly opposite sides of the globe using personal computers, instead of starving in cardboard shacks with no ability to read or write -- just an accident of the countries we happened to be born into.

Other scientists have just as much fun with the very old theory of the "watchmaker's universe." A Supreme Being does (or did) indeed exist, but merely a member of a much larger scale civilization, who created our universe as simply an artifact of his toolset, wound it up, set it down, and is watching it run. Perhaps the creation myth is true and this alien creature really did create what we think of as our universe a few thousand years ago, with all the fossils buried and all the light waves that appear to have been in transit for billions of years created instantaneously in mid-voyage. Of course then we have to wonder about the creation of that larger universe.

Other scientists are just as religious as you are, but don't see the conflict that you do between what they have discovered through science and what they believe in faith.

And other scientists, again out of pure fun and speculation, postulate that the universe is a closed system with no beginning or end, that time is not a linear dimension. In some models it oscillates back and forth between a Big Bang and a Big Crunch, or goes around forever in a Big Loop. In others time is an antilogarithmic scale, not the linear one that we deduced from our tiny sample, and the time of the Big Bang was actually minus infinity. The issue of "creation" does not necessarily apply to a universe that has always existed.

Many of these hypotheses-for-the-sake-of-entertainment (read a whole lot more science fiction by the scientist-authors like James P. Hogan if any of these theories are new to you) are not mutually exclusive. You can have an infinity of universes that have always existed, each with its own set of natural laws, and each either oscillating back and forth, or going around in a loop, or having an infinite time span. Or some of each.

So in closing, in addition to imploring you to please finish your studies before you consider yourself even an amateur scientist, I have only one further suggestion. Please avoid mixing science with faith. It is unnecessary and it compromises your ability to practice either well.

The earliest Hominid fossills found so far are about 8 million years old. Cro Magnon man (our closest ancestor), was around about 1 million years ago. Homo Sapiens, in co-existence with Cro Magnon and Neanderthal are thought to have been around for close to a million years, but didn't really evolve sentience until about 40,000 years ago, which seems a very short time within the general timescale of 8000000 years.

The single most important event that 'woke up' human intelligence was apparently the invention of (complex) language. Up until then, man hadn't expressed any greater degree of intelligence than the other hominids that shared his time and space, as has been demonstrated by the similarities in ancient artworks, weapons and utensils unearthed by archaeologists and attributed to the various species.

The newly 'intelligent' humans probably annihilated any remaining remnants of previous species as soon as they realised that they were competitors to their own food chain, thus, setting the pattern for the future, only now, we call it ethnic cleansing.

If language has only been in existence for 40,000 years, it means the invention of gods or religions is an even more recent phenomenon. The written word is more recent still. So, why would any modern person believe in the assertions of ancient humans, which are rife with fantasy based on ignorance and superstition?

The single most important event that 'woke up' human intelligence was apparently the invention of (complex) language.There's no compelling reason to assume that the complexity of what we recognize as language occurred so suddenly. It might just as credibly have started out on the level of prairie dog oral signals, then evolved into something richer like the songs of whales, up through the primitive proto-linguistic capability of an infant, and only after tens of thousands of years of slow progress, develop the syntax and other attributes that we require of a language. Up until then, man hadn't expressed any greater degree of intelligence than the other hominids that shared his time and space, as has been demonstrated by the similarities in ancient artworks, weapons and utensils unearthed by archaeologists and attributed to the various species.That's quite a remarkable degree of intelligence to dismiss so casually. The crafts and, at least to me, especially the arts, are an order of magnitude beyond the toolmaking abilities of the crows and monkeys, and the abstract thinking evidenced by parrots and apes only after they began living among and learning from humans. It could be just an accident of history that we developed our language to the level necessary to support the next stage in social organization faster than the Neanderthals or other hominids. We can't even dismiss Jean Auel's intriguing idea that even though the Neanderthal brain didn't have as well developed an oral speech center as our own, they might have been well on their way to creating a rich language of hand signals.The newly 'intelligent' humans probably annihilated any remaining remnants of previous species as soon as they realised that they were competitors to their own food chain, thus, setting the pattern for the future, only now, we call it ethnic cleansing.Or, as has been suggested by other scholars, we may simply have outbred them because of our ability to support larger tribes and cover more ground. We may have hybridized with all those other species. It's much less of an indictment of our own species and no less plausible to suppose that they were merely absorbed into the sapiens community and live on inside us. Just like the medieval Jews who found their way to tolerant China were not killed off, but simply disappeared through assimilation.If language has only been in existence for 40,000 years...The post that started this thread said that Homo sapiens began migrating out of Africa more like 150,000 years ago. If the hypothesis is true that language is what made the migration possible, it pushes the horizon way back.It means the invention of gods or religions is an even more recent phenomenon. The written word is more recent still. So, why would any modern person believe in the assertions of ancient humans, which are rife with fantasy based on ignorance and superstition?The precise dating doesn't have much bearing on your assertion so let's respond to it. The reason "modern" persons believe in those assertions is not because they've been passed down, but because they are hard-wired inside us. They're called "archetypes" and the same basic set pops up in all cultures during all eras. The hard-nosed scientists say they're just accidental results of the evolution of our synapses. The anthropologists say they're the result of natural selection because the instincts they represent were survival advantages. The religionists say that the goddess breathed them into each one of our souls on our way to the birth canal, to help us accomplish the apparently daunting task of recognizing ourselves in each other and feeling a kinship to all humans. Whatever, archetypes exist independently of the particular embellished version that is passed down orally or in writing within a particular community.

Just as Robert is well advised to study anthropology in more detail and get his facts straight about the migrations of our ancestors, the rest of the readers would do well to catch up with Jung, or at least one of his more accessible popularizers like Joseph Campbell, in order to get up to speed on the current level of understanding of our dreams and myths. It's a rich subject and it really helps sort out and make sense of some of our outrageous, incurable behaviors.

Fraggle Rocker – quote:

Once again, your only flaw appears to be the minor and inevitably rectifiable one that you are simply too young to have learned everything that a highly intelligent person needs to know about a field in which you have great interest. Please be more open to the possibility that you have overlooked important facts.
Firstly I am not young. I am 56 years old but have only been studying science in my spare time for about 10 years. I hit upon the God Gametes concept in 1993 when holidaying in the Philippines and it took over my life. For most of the time since 1993 I have worked full time except for 15 months I took off to write my book.

You ask me to read more. This is fine and I wish I could but I really do not think it would change my opinion about anything. I find that people tend to have an innate predisposition for a particular point of view and it seems to matter little how much they read they will stay with their given position. For example, a person may read Genesis and come to the conclusion that it was a load of rubbish. Do you think you would change that person’s opinion by getting him to read the rest of the Bible or to spend the rest of his life reading Christian related literature? I can remember the first time I was introduced to the Darwinian concept (when I was young) and its basic premise grated on every nerve in my body. I recall arguing that it was treating life as something mechanical and overlooking the fact that living creatures had a “property” that can not be defined in purely mechanical or scientific terms. Since then everything I have read on Darwinism has strengthened my conviction that Darwin got it wrong. So, like many others, I do not think that reading more books that push the same mistaken concept will convert me to the cause.

Fraggle Rocker - quote:

A trivial example that you can verify merely by looking at a good map is that all of the originally separated continents, except Australia and Antarctica, were subsequently reconnected by drifting back into each other in a different arrangement.
You say this; then the following -:

Fraggle Rocker - quote:

150,000 years is a brief moment on the tectonic scale. The speed of continental drift is a few inches per year. 150,000 years ago the continents were, to an observer unaided by precision instruments, in exactly the same places as they are today. What is the point of arguing that the continents drifted back into each other if it happened tens of millions of years before humans evolved? And if “subsequent reconnection” did not include Australia then it still does not explain how the Australian Aboriginals made it to the continent “down under” 60,000 years ago.

Fraggle Rocker - quote:

Yes, and that perfectly matches the conclusions of paleontologists. Birds are descended from certain species of dinosaurs. Dinosaurs were not true lizards but were probably as closely related to them as snakes are. Lizards are birds' closest living relatives.
You make several comments about my earlier post which dealt with DNA. I will not respond to each but basically I was trying to make the point that I do not believe you can accurately trace the evolutionary process by studying DNA. I argued previously that DNA does not tell the whole story and gave supporting evidence for this; (i.e. Richard Lewontin’s “Not in our genes”). In God Gametes I have a section on convergent evolution where I deal with things like Cichlids (a fresh water fish that have converged on similar mating habits) that have been found in Africa and South America. My point here is that there are over a thousand species of Cichlids that occupy over a thousand different environmental niches but they still converge; and converge in ways that would appear unrelated to their environment. There are hundreds of examples of convergence that confound Darwinists. And you say that species converge but DNA doesn’t. Not according to Natalie Angier in her article “When Evolution Creates the Same design Again and Again”, New York Times, December16, 1998. In this article Angier gives an example of molecular convergence of gene sequences that code for antifreeze in two unrelated fish; the Northern Cod that evolved its antifreeze in the Arctic 3,000,000 years ago and the Notothenioid that hit upon the exact same formula for coding antifreeze in the Antarctic 7 to 15 million years ago. Given the almost infinite number of ways it is possible to code for antifreeze it is likely that this is the first documented case on convergence at the molecular level.

Fraggle Rocker - quote:

The skeleton of Kennewick Man generated a very high profile dispute between the Indian tribes of the state of Washington and the scientific community. It was resolved by reminding the members of those tribes that their ancestors, the Na-Dene people, had not yet arrived in the Western Hemisphere when Kennewick Man was buried in 7,000BCE, and that, therefore, they have no legal claim to the remains of a human being that could not possibly have been one of their own ancestors.
Yes; I do not have a clue about Kennewick man. And it does seem that a contentious court case will give legitimacy to the scientific evidence being presented. But the courts will find according to the best scientific evidence of the day and that can change; as evidenced by the fact that a lot of previous court findings are now being overturned by DNA fingerprinting.


Fraggle Rocker - quote:

Look to your religion or your favorite philosopher for those reasons, but don't expect to find them in a science book. The job of the scientist is to find out how things work, not why.
I do not agree with this. If scientists did not look for a “reason” or try to answer the “why” question then they would not discover anything. Darwin himself knew this. I can not quote my source but I recall reading that he was told, before leaving on the Beagle, that nature is a book and his job was merely to read its pages and he would learn the truth. But he was later to say that he learned nothing from simply observing nature and that his breakthroughs came by conceptualising and asking “why”. His theory of Natural Selection is evidence of this. The Darwinian model did not come from observing nature but from reading Thomas Malthus’s “Essay on the Principle of Population”. Darwin was reported to have been elated when the penny dropped. He apparently said that at last he had a model that explained the reason “why”.

You criticise me for asking the “big questions” and say it is not scientific. But lets look at my reasoning and then perhaps you can tell me where I have gone wrong. 500 years ago it was thought there was one sun, one moon and one earth. Then it was discovered that the earth was merely a planet and the sun a star. We then assumed there was one galaxy only to find out there are billions of galaxies. We now of course assume there is one universe? There are not many absolutes but if we say there is always more then one of everything, that all life is cyclical and all life reproduces then few would challenge these statements. God Gametes holds that there is more than one universe, that universes are living entities (even if we are the only life in this universe then this statement is still true), that universes are cyclical and that universes reproduce. From here I have looked for a model that would explain how life on earth would fit these basic premises that would appear to be universal truths. The God Gametes theory argues that universes are hierarchical and that each level of this hierarchy is the reproductive system of the level above.

Is this unscientific? Is it wrong to take what few universal truths we have and to build a model around these truths? Might this not help the analytical mind get a better grasp on what is possibly the purpose of life on earth? Is not this a worthwhile thing to do?

There's no compelling reason to assume that the complexity of what we recognize as language occurred so suddenly. It might just as credibly have started out on the level of prairie dog oral signals, then evolved into something richer like the songs of whales, up through the primitive proto-linguistic capability of an infant, and only after tens of thousands of years of slow progress, develop the syntax and other attributes that we require of a language.

I agree, that's why I wrote 'complex' language...complex language=complex ideas.

That's quite a remarkable degree of intelligence to dismiss so casually. The crafts and, at least to me, especially the arts, are an order of magnitude beyond the toolmaking abilities of the crows and monkeys, and the abstract thinking evidenced by parrots and apes only after they began living among and learning from humans.

I'm certainly not dismissing their achievements; I was simply making the point that we were indeed more similar to these previous species than the religionists claim, at least until the breakthrough of complex language.

I don't think that complex language would have been a prerequisite for migration out of Africa necessarily; necessity would have been be a more likely cause.

Interesting discussion. I don't know much about all this but one comment. There is no evidence that, as someone suggested, human beings only became sentient 40,000 years ago. Sentience is not intelligence, and even intelligence is tough to define. It seems likely that Lucy herself was sentient.

One needs to be wary talking about sentience and consciousness in evolutionary terms. Neither are thought by Neo-Darwinists to have any evolutionary purpose or impact on fitness and it is therefore tricky to talk about their evolution.

Interesting discussion. I don't know much about all this but one comment. There is no evidence that, as someone suggested, human beings only became sentient 40,000 years ago. Sentience is not intelligence, and even intelligence is tough to define. It seems likely that Lucy herself was sentient.


Sentience was actually the wrong word, I probably meant high-intelligence (or human intelligence as we know it).

I was quoting the theory of a certain highly acclaimed professor, who suggested that according to ancient artefacts found so far, humans hadn't seemed to really get into gear intelligence-wise (not that they'd been stupid, just very slow to develop), until about 40,000 years ago and that the reason was probably the invention of language. He say's that up to that point in time, humans hadn't really produced anything profoundly different or more significant than the Cro Magnons and Neanderthals.

Personally I find it slightly incredulous that language per se hadn't been invented until so recently, I agree with Fraggle Rocker that there must have been some forms of language in existence, even if they had been based on signs, grunts and yelps. This is why I wrote 'complex' language.

Quote from Tablaraddim:

>>> I was quoting the theory of a certain highly acclaimed professor, who suggested that according to ancient artefacts found so far, humans hadn't seemed to really get into gear intelligence-wise (not that they'd been stupid, just very slow to develop), until about 40,000 years ago and that the reason was probably the invention of language. He say's that up to that point in time, humans hadn't really produced anything profoundly different or more significant than the Cro Magnons and Neanderthals. <<<
If we assume that intelligence is what identifies us as humans then this figure of 40,000 years is somewhat problematic for the Darwinian theory of evolution. 40,000 years ago our human ancestors (I say “our human ancestors” for without a consciousness I do not believe they could be regarded as our species) had dispersed around the world. They had been in Australia for 20,000 years before having a human consciousness! So we are meant to believe that this development of language drove our species to evolve greater intelligence; and what ever did it caused it to happen with all our human ancestors that were dispersed around the world. And how did the Australian Aborigines construct their bamboo rafts 60,000 years ago (20,000 years before they had human intelligence) and sail it from northern China to Australia.

There are other problems with looking at human intelligence from the Darwinian point of view. Firstly there were no survival benefits for human intelligence with our ancestors. Other species seem to cope well without anything like our human intelligence. The larger head would have caused problems for mothers giving birth (as it still does today) and the extended child care would also have been a tremendous burden for the early ancestors of our species.

There is however a bigger problem for those who whish to look at human intelligence (or human consciousness) in terms of an “earthly” evolutionary process. Quantum physics has found that our consciousness can disrupt the behaviour of a quantum particle. For example quantum particles have spin and the axis of the spin will always point in the direction of the observer. And more interesting is that the observer can not measure both the position and momentum of a quantum particle. The mere act of measuring the momentum (for example) will disrupt the position. There are volumes written on the principle of “quantum uncertainty” but the point I want to make here is that it is now recognised that the “observation” of one quantum particle can disrupt the behaviour of another quantum particle; and this disruption is instant (that is faster than the speed of light). Potentially an observation on a quantum particle here on earth could instantly disrupt another quantum particle that is light years away. Refer to the section in Paul Davies “Superforce” on the Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen experiments, page 43.

It seems to me that science has totally disregarded the overwhelming evidence that human consciousness could not have evolved as part of the evolutionary process on earth. The problem is that science wants provable answers and they know that giving a purpose or meaning to life is something that can not be proven scientifically. But it is obvious that there must be a purpose and meaning. If not nothing would exist. I do not know if I will bother to write again to this forum (or any other science forum) but it is disappointing to me that science has closed the door on metaphysics. I suppose if you are good at science then it is hard to think “out of your little box”. But do not assume you will find all the answers in your little box when all the evidence suggests you will not.

Are different breeds of dog a "social invention"? ahh, yes, they were bred for diff climates, reasons, functions & ideas of beauty

Surely you aren't implying that races are just labels that people invented? yes, use your google, search for the answers

start here, or visit other sites:
http://racerelations.about.com/library/weekly/aa021501a.htm
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/first/race.html

I really hate it when the truth is neglected in favour of senseless political correctness. me too, especially pre-conceived or tightly-held ideas, lets look for answers

They are as real as families, are families a social invention? ahh, yeah, that would be in Mass, SF & NH, where the avant-garde is inventing social ideals as we speak.

There are other problems with looking at human intelligence from the Darwinian point of view. Firstly there were no survival benefits for human intelligence with our ancestors.

No? I'm not exactly a biologist, but even I can see that the simple fact there are 6 billion of us, here with our greater intelligence, suggests there is, and therefore there was, for our ancestors. Look at tool use among apes, or the way that various animals appear to cope with changing surroundigns, by using their intelligence.


There is however a bigger problem for those who whish to look at human intelligence (or human consciousness) in terms of an “earthly” evolutionary process. Quantum physics has found that our consciousness can disrupt the behaviour of a quantum particle. For example quantum particles have spin and the axis of the spin will always point in the direction of the observer.
*Splutter*
Could you say that again please? Who and where has it been shown that the axis of spin of a quantum particle always points at the observer?

Angier gives an example of molecular convergence of gene sequences that code for antifreeze in two unrelated fish; the Northern Cod that evolved its antifreeze in the Arctic 3,000,000 years ago and the Notothenioid that hit upon the exact same formula for coding antifreeze in the Antarctic 7 to 15 million years ago.Convergence of particular gene sequences that provide a specific attribute, sure. Antifreeze in unrelated species of fish. Large, conical beaks for eating large, hard seeds in unrelated species of grosbeaks. Teeth suited for chewing tough, fibrous plant material in kangaroos and deer. I am not claiming that there is anything too remarkable about that. That is normal evolution at work.

What would be remarkable would be to add a number of zeros to the exponent of that probability, which is what it would take for the majority of the speciating gene sequences in humans converge with those in the other apes. Your fish have exactly one survival trait in common, otherwise their DNA have no greater overlap than any other fish species at the same level of taxonomy (order, suborder, family, whatever it is). Deer and kangaroos have similiar dentition, otherwise ther DNA have no greater overlap than any other marsupial-ungulate order-level comparison. Grosbeaks are all fringillids, and except for the beaks you won't find their DNA to have any greater similarity than to goldfinches or vireos. (Except for the the two in genus Pheucticus that actually are kin who evolved on opposite sides of what is now the USA.)

Humans and chimpanzees have a level of DNA overlap that cannot be attributed to reconvergence. If our putative marine ancestors found themselves deposited in the same environment as the ancestral apes, they would have evolved attributes necessary to survival, but there's no way they would have been exactly the same attributes. The cetaceans are ungulates, they would more readily have devolved back into quadruped grazers rather than tree-climbers.

The ancestors of the primates were small, slow-moving sloths. They looked longingly at the fruit growing on the newly evolved angiosperms and evolved just enough musculature for a lightweight animal to slowly climb up to it, and a digestive system that could provide just enough nutrition for the survival of a small animal who didn't need the energy to escape from predators that couldn't yet climb trees. Over the next sixty million years they perfected the arboreal form, got bigger, stronger, faster, smarter, more social, and more efficient digestion, and came to rule the arboreal ecosystem in an uneasy truce with the feline predators who had also developed the ability to climb trees. (The snakes may have had a head start on both of them -- I'm no herpetologist -- but they had their own developmental handicaps and that's another tale.)

For a marine mammal, which in those days were already the size of dolphins -- and in fact had always been at least that large since their terrestrial hippopotamus-like ancestors first walked back into the ocean -- to re-adapt to life on land would have been a daunting prospect. It was one thing for the fish to do it at a time when there were no other land vertebrates. All they had to compete with were arthropods. The alleged marine ancestors of mankind would have beached themselves on a land mass teeming with competitors well adapted to every niche in the ecosystem, as well as carnivores that were far more mobile. Slithering into the nearest river wouldn't have been much of an escape, since alligators were already fluorishing.

For these mammals to have evolved the musculature and digestion necessary to adapt to the arboreal environment in which our more recent ancestors lived, quickly enough to avoid extinction through predation or overcompetition for the food supply, is, again, bucking trans-astronomical odds.

But to do it in such a way that they just happened to end up with the same gene sequences as the chimps and gorillas? How far do you want to stretch credulity?

I find it a consistent problem with religionists, that they simply have no intuitive understanding of probability. On one day they say it's utterly impossible that life could have evolved from the random combination of organic building blocks that were readily forming in the primordial ooze -- over a time span of several billion years. Yet on the next day they say it's perfectly possible that two animals from different orders of the class Mammalia could have evolved convergent, nearly identical gene sequences -- over a time span two orders of magnitude shorter.

This reasoning is just plain inconsistent. The former is a quite reasonable possibility. The latter is one that my computer doesn't have enough zeros to express even in scientific notation. Please make up your mind!

I'm sorry to have mistaken you for a precocious high school student, but this is the kind of "error of inconsistent scoping" that they make every day.

There are other problems with looking at human intelligence from the Darwinian point of view. Firstly there were no survival benefits for human intelligence with our ancestors. Other species seem to cope well without anything like our human intelligence.No survival benefits??? Good grief! Have you actually taken more than a superficial look at the course of our evolution?

A tribe of chimp-like creatures, on one of their forays down out of the trees, looked at all the animals grazing happily at ground level and thought, hey why can't we do that? Curiosity and speculation: markers of higher intelligence. They tried sharing the grazing land, but found that the larger, better adapted grazers kept muscling them out of the area. Their prehensile hands gave them a bit of an advantage in being able to harvest and carry large amounts of foliage off to a safe place and eat it at their leisure, but it was still a precarious existence -- with no hoofs, horns, bulk, or running muscles, their only defense against the ubiquitous predators was to stay close to the trees and climb back up. Leaving the harvest behind for the wildebeests.

After a few million years of this, they got the bright idea (* marker of higher intelligence), hey why don't we just eat the herbivores? It's a more concentrated source of nutrients and it seems to work for the hyenas. They didn't have the teeth, claws, and strength to kill anything bigger than a rodent, but after a few million years of eating rodents they developed a pretty good hunting technique (* marker of higher intelligence) involving the use of tools like rocks and sharp sticks (* marker of higher intelligence) and the planning of a cooperative hunting effort that was not instinctive (* marker of higher intelligence).

We would simply not be here, on the ground, eating meat, keeping the predators at bay, were it not for the superior intelligence of our ancestors. Whether we're talking about the generally accepted scenario of apes climbing out of the trees to live on the savannah and developing the intelligence by natural selection, the more controversial yet plausible one of them spending some time in an aquatic environment first in order to develop that higher intelligence, or even your "alternate theory" (to use the polite SciForums jargon) of cetacean ancestors crawling back onto the land with the higher intelligence they had already developed in a marine environment -- any way you look at it, intelligence was a major, decisive factor in the ultimate arrival of Homo sapiens on this planet.

I stand by my original suggestion. You simply need to learn what is already known about evolution in general and the recent history of the hominids in particular, much of which is the result of research done in the past ten or twenty years, before you can hold your own in this arena.

In an earlier post I wrote that there were no survival benefits for evolving greater intelligence. I stand by this claim (and I did give reasons for making it) but I probably should have said “no net survival benefits”.

Guthrie wrote:

>>> No? I'm not exactly a biologist, but even I can see that the simple fact there are 6 billion of us, here with our greater intelligence, suggests there is, and therefore there was, for our ancestors. Look at tool use among apes, or the way that various animals appear to cope with changing surroundings, by using their intelligence. <<<
6 billion is not many when compared to bacteria. And the single cell organism will win the survival of the fittest contest every time. I am sure I mentioned this in an earlier post but single cell organisms can live just about anywhere there is water. They can survive being flash heated to 1,500 degrees C and being frozen, they have been found living in acid baths and making a living metabolising rocks in high pressure thermostatic vaults 6 miles underground. They survived unaided for 30 months on the moon and can adapt more quickly to changing environments than more complex organisms like humans.

From Stephen J. Gould’s “Life’s Grandure” page 194. (I think this book of Gould’s was published in the US with the title “Full House”.)

>>> Not only does the earth contain more bacterial organisms than all others combined (scarcely surprising, given their minimal size and mass); not only do bacteria live in more places and work in a greater variety of metabolic ways; not only did bacteria alone constitute the first half of life's history, with no slackening in diversity thereafter; but also, and most surprisingly, total bacterial biomass (even at such minimal weight per cell) may exceed all the rest of life combined, even forest trees, once we include the subterranean populations as well. Need any more be said in making a case for the modal bacter as life's constant center of maximal influence and importance? … Finally, we may need to make a complete reversal of our usual perspective and consider the possibility that our conventional surface life, based on photosynthesis, might be a very peculiar, even bizarre, manifestation of a common universal phenomenon usually expressed by life at bacterial grade in the shallow interior of planetary bodies. Considering that we didn't even know only ten years ago such interior life existed, the transition from unknown to potentially universal must be the most astonishing promotion in the history of favorable revisions! … The modal bacter, in other words, may not only dominate, even by weight, on earth, but may also represent life's only common mode throughout the universe. <<<
There are of course some benefits to greater intelligence but these do not compensate for the far greater disadvantages that complexity brings. Our greater intelligence meant that our female ancestors had to give birth to offspring with a larger head. We were (and still are) dependent on parental support for far longer and are far less likely to adapt well to environmental change. Natural selection would not have driven the evolution of greater complexity of any species and certainly would not have driven the evolution of human intelligence.

Guthrie wrote:

>>> *Splutter* Could you say that again please? Who and where has it been shown that the axis of spin of a quantum particle always points at the observer? <<<
Quote from Paul Davies, “Superforce” page. 32 – 33.

>>> In the quantum world, however, at the level of atoms and their constituents it is no longer possible to treat direction and orientation naively. An electron orbiting a nucleus cannot be pinned down at any given moment to lie in a particular direction from the nucleus because its position is fuzzy. A beam of photons or other particles cannot be used as a direction-pointer because the particles do not follow well-defined paths; they roam about in an undisciplined way.

In spite of this, there does at first seem to be one promising candidate for an unambiguous definition of direction. It has been mentioned that neutrinos possess a sort of internal rotation or 'spin'. In fact, spin is a property possessed by nearly all subatomic particles, most notably electrons and quarks. It is tempting to picture such a particle, e.g. an electron, as a tiny ball revolving about an axis, like a scaled-down version of the rotating Earth. Obviously, to make sense of such a picture the axis of spin must point along some direction. If this direction can be determined in a measurement, we should have at hand a means to define direction unambiguously, even at the quantum level. Such measurements can be carried out, but here we encounter a most peculiar thing.

Suppose the experimenter sets up his apparatus, and first picks a particular reference direction against which to measure the orientation of the particle's spin. In practice this reference direction could be defined by a magnetic or electric field. The experimenter wishes to know what angle the particle's spin axis makes to the line of the field. He carries out the measurement and he finds to his surprise that the spin happens to point exactly along the direction of the field. The experiment is repeated many times, but the result is always the same. The spin always points along the reference direction chosen. The experimenter suspects some sort of conspiracy and adjusts the angle of his apparatus, but the spin of the particle always follows suit. Try as he may to catch the spin pointing obliquely to the reference direction, the experimenter gets nowhere. He is perplexed by the fact that the particle seems to be reading his mind, because it always anticipates the direction he has freely chosen as his reference.

Frustrated, the experimenter hits upon a devious strategem. He will set up two different reference directions, A and B, and measure the angle of the spin relative to both. As the spin of the particle cannot possibly point in two directions at once, at least one of the measurements will show the spin at an intermediate angle. Proceeding on this assumption the experimenter makes the first measurement. He is no longer surprised to find the spin pointing along direction A. The next measurement he makes very quickly, before something can cause the spin to reorient itself. Direction B has been chosen to lie at 25 (degrees) to direction A, and so naturally the experimenter, who has just determined to his satisfaction that the spin points along axis A, expects to find the spin pointing at 25 (degrees) to axis B. To his consternation he finds that nature has out manoeuvred him. Somehow the particle was one jump ahead, and has miraculously re-aligned its spin to coincide precisely with axis B. Furious, the experimenter re-measures the angle relative to axis A, and, behold, the spin is back at its original angle!

Weird effects like this are now part of established physics, and physicists have long accepted that the spin of a particle will always be found to point along whichever axis is chosen by the experimenter as his reference. It is a property which completely undermines any attempt to make sense of the concept of direction in the quantum domain. It also introduces a bizarre subjective element into the physical world. If the spin of a particle is destined to follow for ever the experimenter's random choice of reference direction, the experimenter's freewill somehow intrudes into the micro world. The uncanny slavishness that obliges all spinning particles to adopt the experimenter's definition of angle is suggestive of mind over matter. In Chapter 3 we shall see that these subjective elements of quantum physics demand a complete reappraisal of the traditional concept of reality and the role of consciousness in the physical universe. <<<

Fraggle Rocker:

>>> For these mammals to have evolved the musculature and digestion necessary to adapt to the arboreal environment in which our more recent ancestors lived, quickly enough to avoid extinction through predation or over competition for the food supply, is, again, bucking trans-astronomical odds. But to do it in such a way that they just happened to end up with the same gene sequences as the chimps and gorillas? How far do you want to stretch credulity? … On one day they say it's utterly impossible that life could have evolved from the random combination of organic building blocks that were readily forming in the primordial ooze -- over a time span of several billion years. Yet on the next day they say it's perfectly possible that two animals from different orders of the class Mammalia could have evolved convergent, nearly identical gene sequences -- over a time span two orders of magnitude shorter. <<<

Yes; both propositions are “stretching credulity” or “bucking trans-astronomical odds”. But the scientific explanation is trying to explain “how it happened”; I do not. I am not trying to give an explanation for creation. The model I support merely puts that one in the “too hard basket”. Too hard for religionists, too hard for science, too hard for anyone. We know however that it happened or we would not be here to contemplate its existence. All I have done in presenting my model is to suggest; “what it might be doing”.

The point is this. Darwinist dismiss the presence of a God and claim a scientific basis for creation. They argue that creation happened as a result of a rational, scientific process. If not currently understood then it will ultimately yield its secrets to scientific enquiry. So science has to buck the “trans-astronomical odds”; I do not. The God Gametes model merely argues that the formula for complex design was already there. It did not have to be found, it did not result from so called “beneficial” errors when stitching up DNA at the point of fertilisation. But if you start from the premise that “something” must have kick started it, and that “something” wanted life on earth to evolve greater complexity, then you will never explain creation (something that science will never do anyway) but at least you do not need to wed yourself to a doctrine that you yourself seem to agree “stretches credulity” and is “bucking trans-astronomical odds”.

>>> I find it a consistent problem with religionists, that they simply have no intuitive understanding of probability. … I'm sorry to have mistaken you for a precocious high school student, but this is the kind of "error of inconsistent scoping" that they make every day. <<<
I am neither a precocious high school student or a religionist. It seems that you are determine to stick a label on me. I think you will find that once you have excluded “precocious high school students” and “religionist” then there is more than 50% of the population that believe there must be more to it than Darwinian coin flips. I am one of those more than 50% of the rational, unbiased, population.

>>> No survival benefits??? Good grief! Have you actually taken more than a superficial look at the course of our evolution? (* marker of higher intelligence) (* marker of higher intelligence) (* marker of higher intelligence) <<<
Yes; (* marker of higher intelligence). But definitely not a “net” survival advantage when these advantages are offset by the greater costs associated with evolving complexity. So if greater intelligence does not confer a survival advantage then evolutionary theory can not explain why it happens. See also my post to Guthrie that deals with the same subject.

>>> I stand by my original suggestion. You simply need to learn what is already known about evolution in general and the recent history of the hominids in particular, much of which is the result of research done in the past ten or twenty years, before you can hold your own in this arena. <<<
I do not dismiss the quality of work that has been done on evolutionary theory. Darwinism initiated a tremendous growth in knowledge, in a range of academic disciplines, from which all students of life have benefited. But his suggestion (never proven) that there was no creator was (and still is) a ridiculous notion. I suppose there must have been people ask Darwin; “where did all the matter come from?” and “where did all the energy in 100,000,000,000 stars in 100,000,000,000 universes come from?” But it seems these questions must have been ignored back then as they are today.

You seem to scorn my lack of knowledge on the subject of evolutionary science but it is a topic I have studied in my spare time for more than 10 years now. Your suggestion is that if I knew more, I would see the error in my logic, and I would inevitably gravitate to the conventional scientific dogma. I do not agree with this. The more recent discoveries have made it less likely that the traditional Darwinian model will hold up. There appears to be a paradigm shift happening but, as always, the scientific establishment is reluctant to embrace change.

I probably should have said “no net survival benefits”.Yes, and also, "no long-term survival benefits." Many species have evolved to take advantage of then-current conditions, only to be swept away in the universe's next capricious change to the environment. Dinosaurs and arctic megafauna are obvious examples. We may be next, and ironically we may be the universe's instrument of changing our environment beyond our ability to adapt. Clearly arthropods are more tolerant of environmental change than vertebrates, and clearly bacteria have the ability to mutate or at least recombine DNA more quickly in order for at least a small population to survive and repopulate the new environment.

But there is no conflict within the general principle. Triceratops, woolly rhinoceros, and Homo sapiens all were able to evolve from their ancestral species because there was a niche in the ecology at the time of their arrival for which they were better suited than their competitors. A few billion years from now all vertebrates may be extinct. Perhaps conditions and the luck of the draw in the DNA will have been right for another intelligent animal to have arisen, spent a few million years in the limelight, and vanish after an asteroid hit or self-made catastrophe.

Or it could be that before this happens we will perfect interstellar travel and plant colonies in other parts of the galaxy. That will make it vastly more difficult for the universe to extinguish us. The whole galaxy will have to go. Not that this may not eventually happen, but the cockroaches and bacteria (except for the lucky ones who shipped out to the stars with our explorers) will be long gone, "evolutionary advantage" or no.

If your context is a long enough time span, intelligence becomes absolutely essential to survival. When this planet goes, our entire carbon-based, DNA-architectured tree of life goes with it if somebody hasn't taken samples to another planet.If the spin of a particle is destined to follow forever the experimenter's random choice of reference direction, the experimenter's freewill somehow intrudes into the micro world. The uncanny slavishness that obliges all spinning particles to adopt the experimenter's definition of angle is suggestive of mind over matter.This entire analysis is presented within the context of the classic Euclidean three-dimensions-plus-time universe. This model is rather passe. Last time I checked, the people who are determined to hammer out the G.U.T.E. had an eleven-dimensional model that accounted for many of the universe's unruly habits. E.g., the ability of a given "thing" to be both a wave and a particle, the strange ratios of the sizes of the elementary particles, and they were even getting a handle on the Heisenberg Principle. It's not that the observed particle just happens to end up right where we're looking, rather that it's a waveform in those other dimensions, and its oscillation intersects every "plane" of observation in our three-dimensional laboratory.The point is this. Darwinist dismiss the presence of a God and claim a scientific basis for creation. They argue that creation happened as a result of a rational, scientific process. If not currently understood then it will ultimately yield its secrets to scientific enquiry.That's a cheap shot at the hard-core Darwinists who treat science as a religion. Or at least it would be a cheap shot if so many scientists didn't fit that description. ;)

Science and faith have made their peace and reached a grudging agreement on the boundary between their turf. Plenty of scientists believe in something bigger than the visible universe, even if some of them are revulsed by the monotheistic, patriarchal religions of Abraham whose followers keep threatening to destroy civilization. The Pope, who is as good a representative of those religions as anyone, has publicly stated that much of the verbage in the Bible is just the mythology of our civilization and should not be interpreted as contradicting science.

The universe is here and we can study it. We've figured out an awful lot about how it works, and we even have some promising hypotheses about how it worked when it was very new. (Although others of us hold to a different way of measuring time so that it is never "new" or "old" but just "is".)

As to how it got here, or more fundamentally, why there is a universe (or several of them) at all, that remains a philosophical question. We keep pushing back the limits of what we don't know. The earth is not flat, it's not 6,000 years old, it's not the center of the universe, it and its neighbors are not the only planets, the universe that contains it probably has many more than three spatial dimensions, and we're open to the possibility that we're not the only civilization that's pondering these things.

We keep re-stating the question to reflect the new things that we now know, but that doesn't make the question go away.There appears to be a paradigm shift happening but, as always, the scientific establishment is reluctant to embrace change.Yes, and as always they forfeit their right to be regarded as the "scientific establishment" by so doing. These are the spiritual descendants of the "scientists" who rebuked Galileo because they were afraid to stand up to the Church. Now they are afraid to stand up to the Church of Science, which is supported by government grants and publishes its research in the popular press.

There are people out there who are exploring the new frontiers in science. The eleven-dimensional model of the universe is proof of their existence. And the fact that you apparently aren't familiar with that model is proof that the Church of Science is very effective at keeping their work hidden from view and hungry for funding.

Fortunately the other Paradigm Shift that is underway is the Information Age -- the computer revolution and the internet. Much science can be practiced now very cheaply, using resources that can't be easily controlled. College students routinely build huge virtual "massively parallel multiprocessors" by encouraging internet users to leave their PCs up and connected while they're sleeping, so they can be networked to attack huge problems.

Just as in our workplaces, much of the work of today's science is "knowledge work" that does not require much physical travel or huge new laboratories. This is a revolution that cannot be stopped.

I'll leave the biology to Fragglerocker, he knows more about it. (althought I thought the traditional darwinian model was too narrow and not descriptive of every part of observed reality.)
But as for the statement you made above- first, it would help if you made it clearer. Saying human consciousness can disrupt the behaviour makes some people think that means we have a direct line into quantum stuff. Which nobody has satisfactorily shown.
Right, what we have here is a manifestation of the point of Quantum phenomena, ie, the obsever cannot pin them down completely. When you mesure the spin of the particle, you have to apply a field of such strength that you force the particle to align with your applied field. This is used in NMR and in hospitals in MRI machines. You can flip the electrons spin through 180 degrees and get a signal pulse off it, and use this to meaasure whats there by analysing the pulse. It is not an argument for the experimenters free will intruding into the quantum world. Nor is it suggestive of mind over matter. What it means is that you cannot know what spin direction the particle has before and after you measure it. Like with measuring the position of say a nucleus by kicking an electron off it, you cause it to fly off in a direction you cant measure. Its the good old quantum world messing us about again.

As for 11 dimension theorys, I Know bits and pieces about them, and otehr stuff like Brane theory, by reading magazines like "new scientist" and "scientific american". I am under the impression that the 11 dimension theory stuff isnt either finished or compellingly correct, in that its missing some explanatory powers, or requires the universe to have properties that have not been observed. So we'll just have to wait and see. Perhaps you migh tlike to explain more about what paradigm shift is occuring.

Perhaps you might like to explain more about what paradigm shift is occuring.The "Paradigm Shift" is the name that seems to have been standardized on for what Toffler was calling "The Third Wave" about fifteen years ago.

The First Wave was the conversion of human society from hunter-gathering to agriculture. Some of the key attributes of the new lifestyle were:

Permanent settlements instead of following the game and the wild crops through the seasons.

Larger tribes due to cultivated crops and managed herds supporting a greater population density than hunting and gathering.

A surplus of production, resulting in commerce, division of labor, and more activities not essential to survival such as art.

Ultimately, civilization, as agriculture became more efficient and transportation systems were developed, allowing people not directly involved with producing food to live in cities.

The Second Wave was industrialization. No need to describe the effects of that. There are still a few countries which only entered the Industrial Era during the last century and they can be studied first-hand.

The Third Wave is the Post-Industrial Era. Electronics has made it possible for people to accomplish more from home, from phoning in a merchandise order to watching an entertainment performance on TV. Automation has reduced the need for on-site hands-on labor, shifting the balance of human labor into "knowledge work," which, at least theoretically, can largely be done from home. The managers of my generation can't figure out how to manage the work of people they can't see, so we'll probably have to all die off or at least retire before telecommuting becomes a reality. And then there are the dinosaurs -- the auto and petroleum industries -- who account for a huge share of the GDP and are not going to ride off quietly into the sunset. But inevitably human settlements will reverse the trend of the past ten thousand years and begin decentralizing, as virtual communities replace physical ones. The result of less time spent schlepping one's body back and forth across the landscape every day will be more time spent with one's family, which will be the single greatest factor in the restoration of the family unit -- less divorce, more parental oversight of children, etc. Less reliance on convenience food, less money spent on day care, work attire, parking, etc., will cause a fundamental change in the economy that is difficult to predict. A slow emigration from the price-inflated real estate close to cities toward places where people really want to live will also occur and will have both positive and negative impacts on the economy, ecology, and national character. It is possible that this augurs structural changes in the financial sector and may even affect the status of the corporation as the aristocracy of the Industrial Era.

This is wat I meant by "paradigm shift".

Copyright 1994-1999 Encyclopædia Britannica

Kuhn, Thomas S., in full THOMAS SAMUEL KUHN (b. July 18, 1922, Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.--d. June 17, 1996, Cambridge, Mass.),

American historian of science noted for The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), one of the most influential works of history and philosophy written in the 20th century. (see also Index: science, history of) Kuhn earned bachelor's (1943) and master's (1946) degrees in physics at Harvard University but obtained his Ph.D. (1949) there in the history of science. He taught the history or philosophy of science at Harvard (1951-56), the University of California at Berkeley (1956-64), Princeton University (1964-79), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1979-91).

In his first book, The Copernican Revolution (1957), Kuhn studied the development of the heliocentric theory of the solar system during the Renaissance. In his landmark second book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he argued that scientific research and thought are defined by "paradigms," or conceptual world-views, that consist of formal theories, classic experiments, and trusted methods. Scientists typically accept a prevailing paradigm and try to extend its scope by refining theories, explaining puzzling data, and establishing more precise measures of standards and phenomena. Eventually, however, their efforts may generate insoluble theoretical problems or experimental anomalies that expose a paradigm's inadequacies or contradict it altogether.

This accumulation of difficulties triggers a crisis that can only be resolved by an intellectual revolution that replaces an old paradigm with a new one. The overthrow of Ptolemaic cosmology by Copernican heliocentrism, and the displacement of Newtonian mechanics by quantum physics and general relativity, are both examples of major paradigm shifts. Kuhn questioned the traditional conception of scientific progress as a gradual, cumulative acquisition of knowledge based on rationally chosen experimental frameworks. Instead, he argued that the paradigm determines the kinds of experiments scientists perform, the types of questions they ask, and the problems they consider important. A shift in the paradigm alters the fundamental concepts underlying research and inspires new standards of evidence, new research techniques, and new pathways of theory and experiment that are radically incommensurate with the old ones. Kuhn's book revolutionized the history and philosophy of science, and his concept of paradigm shifts was extended to such disciplines as political science, economics, sociology, and even to business management. Kuhn's later works were a collection of essays, The Essential Tension (1977), and the technical study Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity (1978).

Ahhh, that paradigm shift the futurologists have been blessing us with for the past 20 years or so. I bought the third wave years ago, thought it ok then, but am not so certain now. (besides, i've forgotten most of it.)

Unfortunately its turned out to be to a large extent mince.
I wouldnt say human settlements are going to reverse the current trend any time soon. For example, in the UK, London is sucking in youngsters and spitting out retirees at a greater rate than ever. The same process is occuring now in Scotland, where Edinburgh has been increasing in population and jobs. for all the hype about jobs that can be do