Origin of humans on the Earth

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Saint,
there are some who even believe the following:
That the story of the great flood, Noah and his ark is really a story orally passed on over many generations originally told in a way that simple folk could understand. That it is about how an AGW event occurred on a planet and the extinction event forced the residents to build an ark ( star ship) filled with all the DNA they could find, sent to a planet found that was called Earth. Thus seeding the planet with their DNA and allowing their strand of homo sapiens DNA to continue and thrive only to repeat the failings with their own AGW. They also sent with the ark the early ideas of that led to the writing of Genesis so that the newly evolving and ignorant race has some sort of understanding of their creation. Born intelligent but utterly ignorant.

Evidence: 'tis all in the bible, and an understanding of human nature helps.
eg.
40 days and forty nights - 40 days of cryostasis for Noah and his family ( traveling over oceans is often considered as a cryptic metaphor for unconsciousness)

then there are people who believe.....
 
Saint said:
Pig also has similar gene as human, but we don't believe pig and human are of same origin.
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I think that pigs and humans do have the same origin, in a very literal sense.

If we trace back our own family trees - parents to their parents, to their parents, to their parents... and if we do the same thing with today's pigs... we will eventually arrive at ancestors that both we and the pigs have in common if we go far enough back in time. Many millions of years. At least we will arrive at members of the same interbreeding population of animals ancestral to both of our lines. Humans and pigs are quite literally distantly related family members.

That's what explains the fact that we share very similar genetic codes, cellular physiology, why we are both chordates, mammals, quadripeds, have two eyes, two ears, mouths with teeth and tongues, faces arranged roughly the same way, have analogous organs (heart, lungs, brain etc.) and all the rest. It's family resemblance.

This BTW, is why I expect that space-aliens won't share much anatomical, cellular or perhaps even biochemical similarity to human beings. There won't be any family resemblance if they are the products of an entirely different origin of "life" (in some basic functional sense) and an entirely different evolutionary history in different extraterrestrial conditions.

Looked at biologically, the similarities between humans and pigs are even more remarkable than the differences. We are kind of like bizarrely distorted versions of each other.

If we go back far enough and look at life at the cellular level, all life seems to be related in that way, all deriving from what biologists call LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor. Which might not turn out to be a particular ancestral cell, but rather an ancestral cell type from which all existing life on Earth is descended.
 
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it is very funny to think that single cell life can transform into multi-cell life.
many biology books just teach superstition of science.
 
Gawdzilla Sama said:
Saint fails to understand the need for reproducible results. I remember back in the '80s when some guy came up with table-top fission. -_O
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Fusion. Which isn't that big a deal, actually.

Table-top fusion reactors not only exist, they are (relatively) easy to make. Many amateurs have made them (and a few have killed themselves doing it, mostly from the high voltages necessary) and fusors have attracted lots of interest in the "maker" community.

Fusors were proposed in the 1930's by the extraordinary Philo Farnsworth. (The most important inventor that nobody's ever heard of. He invented the electronically scanned television too.) Farnsworth's thing was dreaming up extremely exotic vacuum tubes (like TV picture tubes).

I don't think that anyone actually made a fusor until the late 1940's or early 1950's. That was Farnsworth again. Since then, they have attracted continuing low-level attention from nuclear physicists and are commercially used as neutron sources.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor

The challenge with these things, as with all nuclear fusion reactors, is making the reaction attain break-even, such that more energy comes out than goes in. (Nobody's succeeded yet, certainly not on a lab-bench.)

But just getting nuclear fusion to take place isn't all that hard. The fact that it's occurring on the lab bench can be verified by the emission of distinctive fusion products.

http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/FTI/pdf/fdm1119.pdf

https://makezine.com/projects/make-36-boards/nuclear-fusor/

https://www.fusor.net/
 
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Saint said:
it is very funny to think that single cell life can transform into multi-cell life.
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I don't know that I'd agree that it's 'funny', but it certainly is mysterious.

There's a big scholarly literature about why multi-cellular organisms suddenly appeared in the "Cambrian explosion". Not only appeared, but already seemingly included the ancestors of most of our existing animal phyla. (Various worms, the ancestors of chordates, arthropods...) The initial origin of this kind of widespread multicellularity seems to date back prior to the Cambrian, into the little-known Ediacaran period. We just have cryptic hints about the kinds of organisms that were first appearing then and we know next to nothing about their functional anatomies or developmental biologies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ediacaran_biota

Nobody is really sure why previously single celled protozoa suddenly started forming into multicellular organisms with distinctive anatomies, the beginnings of differentiated tissues and the cells that make them up, and the appearance of developmental biology that makes it all happen in the right order.

Of course, multicellularity is much older than that in some respects. We see prokaryotic bacteria linking together in chains, forming microbial mats and so on. But we don't see real multicellular organism with organs and tissues appearing until quite suddenly, rather late (600 million years ago) in a history of life stretching back more than 3 1/2 billion years.

My guess (that's all it is) is that some kind of molecular biological advance appeared in gene regulation. In how genes are turned on and off in other words. That allowed particular cells in a colonial organism to be programmed into a particular future fate, such as becoming a nerve or muscle cell or whatever. A very early development seems to have been the appearance of Hox genes, that determine a head-tail gradient in multicellular organisms. The amazing thing is that pretty much all animals have very similar hox genes, so they must have originated before the lines diverged. The same thing that makes humans have a head at the top end is what makes worms and insects have front ends too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hox_gene

many biology books just teach superstition of science.
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I don't think that I'd agree with that.

But it's true that many layman's books that we find in the neighborhood bookstores pretend that science knows a lot more than it really does. It's not until students take more advanced classes, sometimes in graduate school, that they start to learn how little we actually know.
 
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Saint said:
Why some apes are not transformed by evolution into humans?
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They refused. Said they were fine, didn't want to go naked and crazy.
Saint said:
it is very funny to think that single cell life can transform into multi-cell life.
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And yet, here you are: egg + sperm >>>> another little saint
Saint said:
many biology books just teach superstition of science.
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Yeah. Those were commissioned by the Dark State school boards.
 
Saint said:
Why some apes are not transformed by evolution into humans?
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It would be kinda neat if you were really curious about that because we could explain it to you, but since the question is disingenuous it would be a waste of time.
 
Saint said:
it is very funny to think that single cell life can transform into multi-cell life.
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You think cancer is funny?
many biology books just teach superstition of science.
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Which ones, I have never seen one that teaches superstition.

It must suck to work work so hard to stay ignorant!
 
Saint said:
Why some apes are not transformed by evolution into humans?
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Because evolution takes place in the context of ecological niches. Modes of life, in other words.

Apes are very well adapted to their ape mode of life, so there wouldn't be a whole lot of selective advantage to most of the genetic changes that they might undergo.

Evolution takes off when ecological conditions change and changes in an animal's mode of life become necessary. Maybe old foods become scarce and the animal needs to adapt to new foods. Avoiding new diseases or new forms of predation. Hotter, colder, wetter or drier conditions. Coming down out of the trees and starting to walk bipedally.

If human encroachment doesn't drive the great apes to extinction, I would expect them to evolve more rapidly as a result of having us to deal with. But that wouldn't result in them becoming humans, but rather something new in their own line.
 
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Yazata said:
Coming down out of the trees and starting to walk bipedally.
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pondering simple differences...
fetal development in a different relationship to gravity ?

blood flow to brain different ?

maybe larger (thicker)stronger heart required for walking than swinging in the trees ?

massive change in cardio-vascular ?
determining blood flow to frontal lobes etc ...
change in long term orientation to blood pooling and circulation to brain frontal lobes specifically ?
etc ...
pooling lack of oxygen, adequate drainage resulting in long term increased oxygen levels etc ?
musing ...
 
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