Synaesthesia

Let's hope the creationists are right about kinds.

If they are, bacteria are limited in the number of adaptations they can aquire to our medicine.

Have faith in God, let's stop developing new antibiotics!

lpetrich

Tools that require some serious construction, such as a twig stripped of leaves for capturing termites.

I wonder what would qualify as "justice" here.

Ed

I was pretty specific in my early posts to Oolon. Refer back to those.

Quote:

lp: And if biologists decide that the taxon Hominidae is to include all the members of Pongidae, or vice versa, what will you then conclude? Will you conclude that our species and the great apes form a single "created kind"?

No, the differences are too great, I dont think I could ever be convinced that they belong in the same family. It would probably be based more on philosophy rather than science.

Quote:

lp: And don't laugh at such a possibility, O Ed. That has happened before: Pinnipedia (seals, sea lions, walruses) is a subtaxon of Carnivora (dogs, cats, etc.) in the recent classifications I've seen. Cetacea (dolphins, whales) is a subtaxon of Artiodactyla (even-toed ungulates) in some recent classifications; Artiodactyla sometimes being renamed Cetartiodactyla. The traditional classifications are partially based on rather obvious phenetic considerations; the newer ones, and Hominidae being made a subtaxon of Pongidae, are justified on cladistic grounds. And the success of doing cladistics is strong evidence of evolution.

I gave the problems with cladistics in an earlier post.

Quote:

[Ref a flood at the time of Gondwanaland’s breakup, 100 million years bp] (Ed on supposedly universal cultural memories...) OC: Cultural memories dating back before there is any evidence modern mammal groups, let alone humans? I ask seriously: are you serious?? Ed: If the Christian God exists then such a thing is quite possible. lp: And it is at least as possible that Ed is simply a brain in a lab that has fake sensory inputs calculated for it by some supercomputer complex.

No, we actually have evidence from logic that God exists there is no evidence for the above theory.

Quote:

Ed: Actually I did present some evidence for the flood, ie huge jumbled piles of bones in certain areas all over the earth. See my post on the Flood thread. lp: A TOTAL non sequitur. See that thread for my response.

See my response to yours.


[b] No my experience confirmed that He is not.

lpetrich

Ed, point them out to me. I won't waste my time on a wild goose chase.


Ed, how do you tell whether or not a taxon is a "family"? How do you distinguish from a taxon that is a "family" from one that is not?

Point out that earlier post.

Ed, a Muslim could use your "logic" to demonstrate the existence of Allah.

And what makes you so sure that there is no evidence for the brain-in-a-jar scenario that I had mentioned?

Graveyards are scattered across geological time, and interspersed with an abundance of non-graveyard deposits. That is strong evidence that they were not produced by a single event, but instead by circumstances that would happen repeatedly over geological time.

Ed, tell us about your supposed "experiences of God"? What does God look like? Does he ever tell you anything? The next time you see God, I'd like to know the answers to these questions:

How many CPU chips does my computer contain?
How many monitors are connected to my home computer?
What resolutions have I set those monitors to?
Do I use the computer's built-in speaker?
What have I named my home computer's hard-disk partitions?
What apps do I keep my OS's equivalent of the Windows Taskbar?
What previous computers have I owned?
When have I bought the computers I have owned?
What operating systems have I run on them?

An omnipotent being would have no trouble answering these questions. Tell God that I am willing to become his follower if he delivers correct answers to those questions, and that I will continue to be his follower as long as he continues to show a similar capability for delivering correct answers to similar such questions. And I mean actual delivery, and delivery of precise responses, not attempts to evade these questions or delivery of vague responses.

Vorkosigan

This thread is getting increasingly off-topic for this forum.

Vorkosigan

Oolon Colluphid

lpetrich, Ed was indeed “pretty specific”. It’s on pages 5-6 of this thread, in late March.

He did not, however, actually answer the question.

Yet, ref Homo habilis OH24 (and A africanus STS5):

(Here’s OH24 again. Everyone note how much is missing... and how much of it there is.)



Also:

So basically, the boundary between A’piths and Homo are to do with “cranium size and shape, size and shape of the jaws”.

But despite us repeatedly asking for further clarification, Ed HAS NOT said what about them forms a boundary. He has not said why the differences between erectus and sapiens are within the same ‘kind’, yet similar subtle changes cannot possibly connect A africanus to H habilis.

Or why, when he accepts palaeoanthropologists at other times, he rejects some habilis fossils as being ape really. This despite the fact that

1) the whole point of how a fossil species is identified is by its members all sharing more features than with any other species, and / or by being in the range of morphology of comparable modern species, and

2) the range of morphology within habilis fossils is surely no greater than the differences between erectus and sapiens, which are identified as distinct species.

Ed thinks “cranium size and shape, size and shape of the jaws” etc is the boundary. But doesn’t know why, or what about them.

He doesn’t know because he’s not an anthropologist. But he’ll disagree with anthropologists whenever he likes, nevertheless.

There’s an English expression for people like that. It’s “tosser”.

Oolon

Ed

Maybe between species but between genuses and larger taxons the divisions are often quite stark, such as unable to interbreed.

Ed

[quote]Originally posted by lpetrich:
[QB]
(deleted subjects covered in previous posts)

Quote:

Ed: Again you seem to be implying that Australian aborigines are more apelike because of their erectus characteristics. That is not very nice Oolon! lp: I don't feel any bit bothered by the thought of some human populations being somewhat more apelike than others. Consider variations like straight vs. curly hair and more vs. less body hair. In fact, I freely accept that I'm on the apelike side in these features.

There is no evidence that these features make a person or race more apelike than a person or race without these features. You are starting to sound like the evolutionists of the 19th and early 20th centuries classifying certain races as being more closely related to apes by utilizing such characteristics and then oppressing them accordingly. Of course, if evolution is true then why is being considered apelike derogatory? No one species is any better than another, right?

Quote:

OC: Why is this creature not just what evolution anticipates? Why no mention in the bible of so many nearly-men and abnormal apes? Ed: Why is that creature just what evolution anticipates? It doesnt mention nearly men because they didnt exist. And abnormal apes are irrelevant to its message, it is not a primatology text. lp: OC has a good question: if the Bible is supposed to be the greatest universal history book ever written, then one has to wonder why it has omitted many important details.

Why are these important details?

Quote:

lp: Also, Ed, you and your fellow creationists never tire of claiming that evolutionary biology predicts that intermediates ought to be exist. So don't play dumb.

Yeah but they dont so your point is....?

Quote:

Ed: That is not my statement, that is what anthropologists believe. Right, he is human, ie homo sapiens "erectus". lp: Ed, Ed, Ed, Ed, Ed, why are you making youself look so stupid? Homo erectus != Homo sapiens erectus. Furthermore, Homo erectus had once been classified as Pithecanthropus erectus. If we accept that classification, that means that these creatures are no longer human, right?

No, as shown in the website about the Kow Swamp fossils homo erectus was plainly human.

Ed

I think that case is relevant given that there were humans with Homo erectus size skulls living possibly with homo sapiens. How do you tell the difference between cave paintings by Homo erectus and Homo sapiens given that they both lived at the same time and in the same places? (remember the Kow swamp fossil website).

Quote:

lp: However, predecessor species were no slouches; they had made stone tools, which decrease in complexity the farther back one looks in time. A reasonable explanation is that as time wore on, greater brain capacity allowed the working out of more complex tool-making techniques.

See above about being able to tell the difference between such artifacts.

Quote:

OC: You do know that those are just the names the fossils are assigned to, don’t you? ‘Southern Ape’ is just the name, it doesn’t confer any greater ‘apeness’ on the fossils! Ed: Fraid so. That is how they decide what to classify it as. ... lp: Ed, why do you think that paleontologists are much, much, much more trustworthy in assigning such taxon names than they are in working out patterns of evolution?

Because classification seems to predict very well what occurs in nature while evolution does not.


[b] Not if it was just a fragment of the skull and many evolutionary hypotheises are based even less data than that.

lpetrich

I wonder what kind of wildlife biologist Ed is, because a professional one would have used "genera" and "taxa". Also, there have been lots of ambiguous and controversial higher taxa in classification schemes; one of the nice things about molecular biology is that it has resolved several long-standing controversies.

I wonder what Ed considers hairiness.

Because they are a part of our species' history.

Ed, the most charitable hypothesis is that your perception develops convenient blind spots about this subject. The supposed absence of intermediates is a favorite creationist argument; someone who approvingly uses creationist arguments ought to have come across the no-transitional-forms argument.

In what way?

Homo erectus is never associated with cave paintings. Homo sapiens (sapiens) is. This can easily be worked out from how there are no known cave paintings before the emergence of Homo sapiens (sapiens).

How so?

Like which ones?