Ed

That is not what I said. Please read my post next time before responding. I said that the reason there is some disagreement among creationists and even evolutionists about Homo habilis is that the evidence is somewhat fragmentary like that skull you posted with huge chunks missing. Also, I agree with Lubenow that the Homo habilis collection is a mixture of human and ape fossils.

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Ed: As I told rufus, cranium size and shape, size and shape of the jaws among other things, not being an anthropologist I dont know all the criteria. But generally any fossil classified in the genus Homo, I consider human. OC: How about something looking like this: To remind you, this is what a modern human skull looks like: The first is Homo erectus (or ergaster). It has a cranial capacity at the very bottom of the range (or outside it, depending on where you check) of that which modern humans have. So tell me about “the size and shape of the cranium, the size and shape of the temple bone, and the amount of protrusion of the jaw” in this case.

While there is some protrusion of the jaw it is not to the extent of apes. And the cranium is relatively large compared to an ape's. Homo erectus is definitely human, homo erectuslike skulls have been found in populations of Australian aborigines only 10,000 years old.

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OC: Here’s another Homo, Homo habilis, OH 24. And here’s another skull: Oh, but that’s an Australopithecus africanus, STS 5.

Both skulls appear to be apes, except the habilis skull is missing so much skull that it is somewhat difficult to be sure. See above about the habilis collection.

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Ed: any fossil classified in the genus Homo, I consider human. I dont consider us apes. OC: But you can’t say why you think so (apart from adherence to belief).

No, not just belief, there are major differences in mental abilities.

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Ed: It was back in college when I read them which was over 15 years ago, I cant remember the titles right now, I will try to refresh my memory. Some of them did include those species. OC: So did you look at those links?

Yes.

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Ed: [I am] A wildlife biologist. OC: I was going to just say thanks, but on second thoughts that sounds a little odd. I’ve not actually heard of that as a branch of biology. Wildlife cameraman I can understand, but ‘wildlife biologist’...? Do you study ethology, population genetics, ecology, biodiversity, predator-prey interactions, parasites, what? “Wildlife” where? Which wildlife, what species? Could you link to some of your published papers?

It is probably a term used more often in America than Britain. All those things (except genetics) you mentioned and more are studied. My specialty was fisheries in grad school. The primary duty of most wildlife biologists is the maintenance of wildlife and fishery habitat, ie wildlife and fishery management. I don't have any published papers. My grad school advisor tried for a while to have my thesis published but it never worked out.


[b] Parasites and pathogens would have surivived in their host organsims that were on the ark or floating on vegetation mats. Land plants would have survived either by Noah putting some on the ark, some floating on mats, and some surviving as seeds and later germinating. In ancient times aquatic organisms may have been like present day anadromous aquatic organisms. Migration.

Oolon Colluphid

So to repeat, you don’t know which it is. Why should it be so difficult to tell an ape from a human?

Again, what is the difference? Where do you draw the line?

Ref KNM-WT 15000’s skull:

Nor is it as reduced as in modern humans. And where’s its chin?

And far smaller than a modern human’s.

Yet earlier ones have some distinctly non-modern-human features, such as cranial keeling, relatively small thoracic spinal canal diameter, smaller cervical and lumbar swellings, as well as smaller cranial capacity. [Edited to add: see also <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=58&t=000555" target="_blank">this thread</a> on H erectus's teeth.]

All of which is what evolution expects.

Sure, could be, if the multiregional hypothesis is correct. References please. You have evidence that these skulls are the ancestors of the aborigine population in question? That’s quite some evidence, if you can provide it. A test of the multiregional versus African erectus / ergaster out-of-Africa. Come on, let’s see it!

Sure. Okay, here’s STS 5 again:



And here’s a different habilis, KNM-ER 1813:



And here’s ergaster / erectus again, KNM-WT 15000:



(split cos too many pics)

[ April 02, 2002: Message edited by: Oolon Colluphid ]</p>

Oolon Colluphid

What makes one human and the others ape? If differences as great as between this:



and this:



can be the result of selection, what makes you so sure that the rather more subtle differences in the hominid skulls above cannot be? Why is there a line to be drawn?

Sure. There are now. But just suppose evolution is correct. What would you expect to find in the fossil record? It wouldn’t be a stepwise increase in cranial capacity, would it? Cos that’s just what we’ve got. OH24’s 638cc, for instance, is well above that of living apes. The habilis / rudolfensis KNM-ER 1470 has 775cc. KNM-WT 15000’s 900cc, is well below the norm for modern man. Sure, there’s debate about which lineage eventually led to modern sapiens. It seems there was a good deal of branching. There is not, however, some massively obvious line to be drawn on an issue so important to creationists.

<a href="http://www.fionatye.co.uk/reevestye/hikers/book1.html" target="_blank">http://www.fionatye.co.uk/reevestye/hikers/book1.html</a>

"What? Yes? Is that all you’ve got to say? Yes! One word!
Ed shrugged.
'Well, there are a hundred billion words in the bible, and that only leaves a limited amount of space in my brain,' he said, 'and I don't know much about the fossil record of course.' "

What, exactly, do you think those fossils show, if not fish becoming tetrapods and reptiles giving rise to mammals??

I guess you can have a stab at resolving Morpho’s argument then?

[Ref the flood]

I sort of figured that. So you’re saying that those living on the ark had typhus, cholera, amoebic dysentery and encephalitis, Ebola, Lassa, malaria, filariasis, schistosomiasis, hep B, rabies (imagine being surrounded by all that water!), influenza, leishmaniasis, trypanosomiasis, diphtheria, syphilis, anthrax, typhoid, gonorrhoea, tuberculosis, and plague. Not to mention bot-flies, sand fleas, mosquitoes, human fleas and lice. To name but a few. And then there’s all the stuff that affects animals...

How prescient of all those to jump onto those mats! But most of those won’t survive outside their hosts... so they must have been on board...

So tell me Ed: how did anything get off the ark alive?

So which was it for cacti? They’d not survive on mats (I merely overwatered my Mammillaria bombycina once and it became a soggy heap); there’s no mention of Noah collecting plants too (or did they come to him like the animals?); and he’d’ve been hard pressed finding all of them flowering at the same time in order to gather their seeds.

What, all of them?! For those not aware, that means ascending rivers from the sea for breeding, like salmon. I assume you mean this to ‘solve’ the problem of adding so much fresh water to the seas? If so, just how much ‘microevolution’ are you expecting in the, what, 4,000 years since the flood? All the physiological adaptations for osmoregulation that mean fish cannot survive in the wrong environment have come about in that time? This is a rate of evolution orders of magnitude faster than any observed evolution. And what of the delicate ecologies of coral reefs?

What, hummingbirds migrated across the Atlantic to South America? Marsupial moles tunnelled their way to Australia? All the penguins swam only to the Antarctic, and all the puffins to the north? Fossas and lemurs made it to Madagascar, but no monkeys or cats? How, precisely, did plants migrate -- and why did cacti only go to the Americas, and (now) endemic species of mosses only to Africa? Sequoias marched like wakened Ents to the Sierra Nevadas, and nowhere else? How come seas are now such a geographic barrier to species? How did dodos get to Mauritius, and the flightless cormorant Nannopetrum harrisi to the Galapagos, and why nowhere else? How about the numerous species of creatures endemic to particular caves, such as blind salamanders (eg Typhlomolge rathbuni) and insects (eg the Hawaiian cave planthopper Oliarus polyphemus)? Do you have the slightest idea what biogeography is? Do you have the slightest evidence for this dispersal?

TTFN, Oolon

[ April 02, 2002: Message edited by: Oolon Colluphid ]</p>

GunnerJ

[Mimictype:Ed] No, they all micro-evolved from the "disease" kind. [/Ed]

Ed

Fraid so.

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lp: Also, it suggests that the Bible was sloppily written. Ed: Not if that was the style in ancient times. lp: Pure whitewash. A perfect book would not contain such carelessness; all such skipping over ought to be carefully noted.

It just appears careless compared to modern genealogies where we are more concerned about the little people. You have to remember that God used ancient people as his writers of the scriptures and much of it is written from their perspective.

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lp: ... That does not explain why the caverns stayed in place before Noah's Flood. Ed: I dont know how they stayed in place. I am not a geologist. Maybe it was a supernatural event. lp: Miracles can explain anything.

If there is a personal creator as I demonstrated on the other thread then supernatural events are quite plausible.


[b] Maybe the cracks were larger in the past.

Ed

Hello Morpho. Thanks for the question. I am afraid I am going to have to go with your partner. I think he is right about the system being too unstable.

Oolon Colluphid

Maybe, maybe, maybe. And maybe the universe, our memories and all, was created by a superintelligent hamster in my basement last Tuesday. Have you ever heard the term <a href="http://www.skepdic.com/adhoc.html" target="_blank">ad hoc</a>? If the cracks were once bigger, I suggest you find some evidence.

Oolon

Oolon Colluphid

Well I wasn’t following it closely, but as for what you ‘demonstrated’, it just looks as if everyone got bored and went home. However, since you believe things were literally created by an entity who cares for us in some way, what I’d like to know is: why did it create, for instance, the pathogenic organisms I listed above? Parasites and pathogens are exquisitely shaped for their lifestyles. And these are just the sort of ‘design’ features that creationists usually trumpet as evidence for a designer. Here’s a few:

<a href="http://www.path.cam.ac.uk/~schisto/Parasitology_Practicals/Malaria_Lifecycle.html" target="_blank">Life Cycle of Plasmodium</a>

<a href="http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol4no2/azad.htm" target="_blank">Life Cycle of Rickettsia</a>

<a href="http://homepages.uel.ac.uk/D.P.Humber/akhter/trans.htm#cycle" target="_blank">Life Cycle of Leishmania</a>

<a href="http://www.biosci.ohio-state.edu/~parasite/lifecycles/schistosoma_lifecycle.html" target="_blank">Life Cycle of Schistosoma</a>

<a href="http://martin.parasitology.mcgill.ca/jimspage/biol/filaria.htm" target="_blank">Life Cycle of Filaria</a>

<a href="http://web.missouri.edu/~vmicrorc/Arthropods/Diptera/Cochliom.htm" target="_blank">Life Cycle of Cochliomyia hominivorax</a>

This is the way they live; they are superbly adapted to living like it; they are totally reliant on their hosts, and many are specific to humans. Normal Christians have to wonder why a loving god would allow these things to evolve, but doubtless they can wriggle and twist their way out of implicating their Big Sky Daddy. But if these things did not evolve, your loving god must have created them. Thus creationists insist that this god deliberately made things that cause phenomenal amounts of suffering and death, throughout all of history and throughout the natural world (and the above are merely the tip of the iceberg -- would you like me to go into more details?).

So please define 'loving'.

Oh, and before you say they didn't used to be pathogenic, I'd suggest you look closely into their biology.

TTFN, Oolon

Quetzal

Hi Ed, Thanks for your reply.
What’s your rationale? If you’re arguing S=CA^z, I don’t think it necessarily applies in this case. First off, the riparian corridors connecting the fragments represent contiguous canopy forest. This means, IMO, gene flow and source/sink equilibrium can be maintained between zones. Outside of small, isolated fragments (~1 ha, no interzonal linkage), there was high diversity (53 mammal species, incl. 3 primates, and at least 3 large Felinidae; 65 bird species, including manikin (Chiroxiphia lincornis fastuosus,a deep-forest species) and at least 2 hawk species and 2 eagle species; 15 reptiles, including at least one deep-forest viper (Bothriechis schlegelii) and given the rodent population it wouldn’t surprise me if there were others – the locals claimed they’d seen a Bothrops but I have my doubts; 103 butterfly and moth species, etc). Vegetation in the larger fragments was also “normal” in diversity for a rainforest, with 55-60m trees and healthy epiphyte gardens including a number of orchid species (two of which may be new – we’re still waiting final confirmation), tank bromeliads, and other species which are fairly sensitive to dessication. Given a fair number of what are commonly considered as rainforest keystone species (i.e., a complete functional community group), no evidence of dessication, high diversity, etc, why would the system be unstable? Look, I never argued we’d see homeostasis (rainforests are typically heterogenous anyway, and we may be missing some microecosystems in the remaining fragments), but I maintain the realized biota in the concession was diverse enough to sustain the ecosystem. If you don’t agree, why not?

MrDarwin

Anybody else see the irony in this statement?

Many Christians (and Jews) believe in evolution, and that the creation myths of Genesis tell a story of creation that the people who were alive at the time could understand--i.e., that "God used ancient people as his writers of the scripture and much of it is written from their perspective."