pangloss

Yes, and what an amzing display Dembski's post was! Filled with ad hominems and nothing else...

As for the BB, well, their actions spoke louder than your empty words.

Shroud of Turin? Wow....

Now, is that PROOF of ID?

LOL!
<img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" /> <img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" />

Principia

[ April 18, 2002: Message edited by: Scientiae ]</p>

ohwilleke

Other reasons, in addition to extinction, for the fact that there is only one species:

(1) Humans are a young species and homo is a young genus. 5-7 million years (the age of the first hominids) is a tiny fraction of the 100 million years give or take that primates have been around, and the billion plus years that life has existed on the planet.

(2) Homo sapien is a species with a very wide range, and hence sex between distant groups of humans keep the the species as a single population.

Probably less than a century passed, between the arrival of the first humans in North America, and the presence of human villages in the Southern most mountains of South America. This without horses, oceangoing ships or mechanized travel.

Species tend to separate when populations are isolated from each other, so, if intermarriage occurs between distant groups due to travel, one would tend to think of humanity as a single or small number of populations, and hence unlikely to speciate.

Evidence of trade and exchange of ideas, such as the rapid spread of horticulture worldwide to almost every human population ca. 10,000 years ago, suggests that human populations were linked to neighboring human populations in one single world wide group, since well before history was recorded.

(There is actually considerable dispute over whether interbreading plus survival of individuals, or intergroup warfare killed off the previous species).

(3) Related to #2, much of the world has been inhabited by humans for a relatively short period of human evolutionary history.

The Americans have only had humans for something on the order of 12,000-20,000 years. Humans have been in Austalia only about 100,000 years and in some parts of the Pacific for a considerably shorter period. Humans reached Siberia about 300,000 years ago. Modern humans are believes to have a common "out of Africa" origin dating to perhaps only 500,000 years ago. The first hominids left Africa probably around 2 million years ago.

Thus, the most isolated human populations are also the youngest, providing little time for evolution to work. Had the first humans reached Australia 10 million years ago, instead of 100,000, aboriginal humans might well have evolved into a separate homo species -- but, the same cultural evolution forces that allowed humans to get to Australia in the first place (ocean going ships), also led eventually to the technologies that permanently linked Australia to the rest of humanity.

Also, this means that the range humans had to have to maintain a single population was, for most of the relevant time period, fairly small.

(4) The fact that human's have a wide range also influences selective pressures on humans. It does not just give us a single population. Since a human may experience many different environments in a lifetime, human survival is dependent upon being a generalist, rather than being particularly adapted to a narrow environment.

(5) The human ability to adapt culturally, reduced the need of humans to adapt physically.

(6) Humans have developed adaptations to local environments through evolution. There has simply been no evolutionary benefit to sexual incompatability between populations (one definition of species).

(7) Humans have been a very successful species. While there are some species that can pose a real threat to individual adult humans (lions, tigers, bears, sharks, certain snakes, certain spiders, certain poisonous frogs, etc.), there is no predator which is a serious threat to whole communities of humans. We are also good at handling almost every kind of weather and natural disaster. Disease has been the only real species threatening event in our evolutionary history -- but the evolution which has taken place due to disease has not been significant enough to create a new species (in part because many diseases were spread throughout the human population).

In the game of evolution, once you are "good enough" selective pressure declines rapidly and evolution slows down.

[ April 18, 2002: Message edited by: ohwilleke ]</p>

Quetzal

An in another amazing development, it appears I may have been wrong. It really might be Dembski hisownself (or not - but at least the style on the new thread is similar to the majority of his other works, unlike the first one.) You judge: <a href="http://www.arn.org/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=13;t=000091#000013" target="_blank">Dembski's reply to Forrest's emai</a>.

Interestingly enough, good old leonard doesn't appear to be any more coherent there than here. Called ME a troll!

leonarde

Posted by Pangloss: No, it's not. The evo forum here is
only a fraction of this message board, or hadn't
you noticed? I said NOTHING in my prior post about
ID. But the (average)scientific literacy of this
board WAS somewhat reflected by the 18 pages of that thread which touched on matters of physiology
anatomy, archaeology, palynology(glancingly) and
the like. And guess what? Just about all of my 30
or so opponents (including Scientiae who mostly
used sneering personal attacks)not only didn't
have a CLUE on those---YES scientific--- subjects
but they expressed annoyance with me for even consulting with competent authorities (books and
URLs). Some of the very people who SNEER and mock
YECs in these pages for their ignorance of the
age of the earth, thought NOTHING of giving a no-
nothing opinion, or 2 or 3 or 6 about postmortem
bleeding, the immediate cause of death in a crucifixion etc. And why? Irony of irony! Because
a (possibly)authentic Shroud doesn't fit into their religious belief system!!!!

Cheers!

cricket

Ohwilleke, you're one of my heroes, but this is an abomination!

All the way down the side of the world in a century?!

cricket

Man's historical rate of "travel" has been something like 30-40 miles of migration per year! We know of times when, under certain conditions, it's been faster than that. But typical hunter-gatherer migration has been 35-ish miles per year. Some years faster, if following a herd of wild game, for example. Other times, if tribesmen are content, the camp stays in one spot for years.

To go the distance to South America's tip in a century seems like a sprint to me. Their remains at the southernmost tip have been dated at 9,000-12,000 years old. If they began the migration from the Bering Strait 20,000 yrs ago, they could have had 8000 years to meander all the way south.

A migration of this distance needn't take 8000 years. But it surely took at least 500.

[ April 18, 2002: Message edited by: cricket ]</p>

katerina

no fair to annihilate yourself before I get a chance to read you.

what.

do you think I have nothing else to do?

pfft!

pangloss

I am surprised that a self-described
'humo(u)rist' cannot recognize sarcasm....

Nah... no I'm not...

leonarde

Sarcasm: a form of ironic humor frequently laced
with hostility and anger. Generally used and then
overused by teenagers. Rapidly dispensed with by
most post-teen adults except on the rarest of occasions.

Apparently I do know what sarcasm is.....