Synaesthesia

Ed,
The division between species must in the end be arbitrary. Since the gradients of similarity shade off into distant anscestors your position is simply absurd.

lpetrich

Yes, less apelike.

And Ed, what would NOT be explainable by the actions of this supposed designer? And what makes you sure that there is only one? Why not two or three or even a whole community of designers?

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.

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.

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.

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?

Evolution, O Ed, by any other name, is still evolution.

Ed

Molnar may have been exaggerating a little. And Lubenow may have been referring to the fact that the brain can be as small as 700cc and still function normally. See about man with mostly fluid for brain post.

Quote:

Ed: No, they plainly do make a distinction between humans and apes. It is how they differentiate between Australopithicines and the Homo "species". 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!

Fraid so. That is how they decide what to classify it as. If it has more ape characteristics than "human" then it is classified as ape and if the reverse is true then it is classified as human. And probably if we could see the soft tissue the differences would even be greater.

Quote:

OC: Why then the problems with whether Homo habilis is an ‘ape’ or a ‘human’?

See above about habilis.

Quote:

OC: You can provide references, of course [for the 90% cerebral-fluid-filled college lad’s head]? Ed: Yes, see my post to lp above. OC: Thanks. I’d already checked that, see my post of 23/4.

See above how it applies to the size range of normal human brains. He was normal in intelligence.

[b] They are classified as reptilians, are they not? If just a skull of the platypus was found it would probably have been considered a bird. Without the soft tissues of these reptiles (which is the major difference between reptiles and mammals) I dont think we can be definitive about them being the ancestors of mammmals.

Valentine Pontifex

Care to actually providing some evidence for this claim. I bet it is not true. You are not talking about the superficially bill-like structure are you?

This is outright false. There are quite a few differences in the skeleton between modern mammals and modern reptiles.

lpetrich

However, that is not a typical case, so I don't think that it really relevant. What is relevant is the overall average, and Homo erectus and earlier species had distinctly smaller brains for their body size. They also had much more horizontal foreheads, if any recognizable "foreheads" at all, and thick brow ridges and no sticking-out chin.

Furthermore, there is evidence of a big behavioral jump between H. sapiens (sapiens) and earlier species, including even H. neanderthalensis. This is evident from a variety of artifacts, such as cave paintings, the manufacture of bone tools (more difficult to work than stone), lots of carvings and jewelry, and evidence of clothing and constructed housing (huts made out of mammoth bones and the like) -- these features of the Cro-Magnons start appearing in Europe and northern Asia about 50,000-40,000.

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.

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?

LOL. The skulls are too different.

Ed

Cladistics cannot directly see the lack of a character, because it does not make pairwise comparisons between objects. Instead it compares data structures, called cladograms. The cladograms are compared by determining how well they nest the characters of the objects. The determination is made by counting the presence of identifiable characters. The cladist can look at a cladogram and counted the nested characters, or the cladist can count the non-nested characters. But the cladist cannot count the lack of a character, because there is not a reference point for making this comparison.

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Ed: In addition, studies of the their skull endocasts show that their brains were typical of reptiles. OC: Which Synapsids? References please. Ed: All of them. "Evolution of the Brain and Intelligence" by H. Jerison. OC: Sorry, you’ll need to state what Jerison says, because according to André Wyss (‘Digging Up Fresh Clues About the Origin of Mammals’, Science, Vol 292, No 5521 (2001), p 1496-1497): quote: The new fossil, Hadrocodium, is distinctive in numerous ways, perhaps the most striking of which is its exceedingly small size (its estimated body mass is about 2 g). Meticulous anatomical and phylogenetic analyses by Luo and colleagues reveal that Hadrocodium diverged before the appearance of the most recent common ancestor of monotremes and therians. So, strictly speaking, it is not a mammal, but is a member of the Mammaliaformes--a broader grouping comprising mammals and some of their closest fossil allies. However, as the nearest securely identified relative of mammals, Hadrocodium has proved uniquely valuable for documenting the sequence of morphological changes that led to the emergence of mammalian ancestors. If it were not for the synapsid fossil record, we would know only that myriad evolutionary novelties--such as three middle ear bones and a lower jaw composed of a single bone--appeared sometime before the divergence of monotremes and therians, and sometime after the divergence of mammals and their nearest living relatives, the reptiles. Instead, from analyses of Hadrocodium and many other fossils, we have a detailed understanding of the long sequence of changes that resulted in these unique structures. Hadrocodium is firmly positioned as the nearest fossil relative of mammals, thereby clarifying which morphological features are ancestral for Mammalia.

This last statement is circular reasoning. Its position is DETERMINED by the morphological features that are assumed to be ancestral to mammals. So how can its position clarify the features that are ancestral?

Quote:

OC: Besides three middle ear bones and a single jaw bone, Hadrocodium shares other evolutionarily unique features with mammals, such as an advanced configuration of the secondary palate and an elevated and anteriorly shifted craniomandibular (jaw) joint. Another intriguing feature of Hadrocodium is its cranium, which is enormous compared to those of its contemporaries. Remarkably, mammaliaforms exhibit a huge range in cranium volume (relative to skull width). This wide variation evinces the plasticity of this feature among mammaliaforms and the considerable evolutionary convergence (or reversal) associated with cranial enlargement during mammaliaform evolution. This is by no means the only feature of mammaliaforms noted for its plasticity. In fact, mammaliaform features exhibiting convergence or reversal are almost as numerous as features considered to be evolutionarily more stable.

So basically all these characteristics could just as well be evolutionary convergence between mammals and reptiles and not any type of ancestral relationship at all.

Quote:

oc: And Zhe-Xi Luo (‘A New Mammaliaform from the Early Jurassic and Evolution of Mammalian Characteristics’, Science Vol 292, No 5521 (2001), p 1535-1540) says: quote: The second suite of derived features is related to the enlargement of the brain in Hadrocodium (Fig. 3). Its cranial vault is wider and more expanded in the alisphenoid and parietal region than those of all other nonmammalian mammaliaforms (7, 10, 14, 23) and all other Jurassic mammals (31-34) known to this date. The brain vault in the parietal region in Hadrocodium is comparable to those of the mammalian crown group (31-34), but wider than in nonmammaliaform cynodonts (24, 25), Sinoconodon (14), Morganucodon (10, 33), and Haldanodon (23) (Fig. 3). On the basis of the allometric scaling of a large sample of living and fossil mammals, the brain vault of Hadrocodium is larger than expected for the mammals of its comparable skull width (Fig. 5A) and far wider than in any other Triassic-Jurassic mammaliaforms. Our scaling analysis shows that the small size of Hadrocodium, in and by itself, is not sufficient to explain its large brain (Fig. 5A). Related to the expansion of the brain vault, the cerebellar portion of the brain cavity is expanded more posteriorly than the level of TMJ (Figs. 1A and 3D). The occipital (posterior) wall of the brain cavity is convex posteriorly beyond the lambdoidal crest (Fig. 1A), instead of concave or flat as in cynodonts, other mammaliaforms, and all Jurassic mammals known to this date (7, 10, 14, 23-27).

So basically he is saying that a major part of the brain, ie the occipital wall, is unlike the all jurassic mammals. Again how does this prove an ancestral relationship? This article is supporting my position quite a bit!

[b] Huh? He mentioned how their brain differs from mammal brains in your quote above.

[ June 02, 2002: Message edited by: Ed ]</p>

Ed

If you can answer my question above then maybe there isnt a brick wall.

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(lots of nasty pathogens and parasites...) Ed: Well you have to remember that after Man rebelled against the king of the universe(Genesis 2) there were immediate repercussions throughout the universe and it started malfunctioning. ... lp: Ed evades the question of how Noah and his family had carried all these nasty bugs, since they had supposedly been created during the original time of creation. Their trip on the Ark might have been a great opportunity to rid the planet of these diseases. Also, that seems very vindictive of a supposedly loving being. If I sadistically beat you up and broke several of your bones just because you had called me some insulting name, would you say that I am perfectly loving? Ed: See my post to OC. Your analogy is inadequate to explain God's justice. A better analogy would be that I was in the progress of laying the groundwork for something 1000 times worse than the Nazi Holocaust. What kind of punishment would I deserve? lp: And why is that supposed to be a good analogy, O Ed?

Because our rebellion against God is far worse than just calling him names, our sinful actions are what brought about the existence of hell and presently they help send people there.

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lp: And I notice that you evaded the question of how Noah and his family managed to carry such a big load of pathogens and parasites. Or were they all the result of superfast evolution after the Flood?

They were not all pathogenic at the time and some may have been out floating on debris.


[b] However, it is unlikely to be by natural selection, because natural selection is atheistic by definition.

lpetrich

I wonder where Ed gets his ideas of cladistics from, because the absence of characters is one input into constructing cladograms.

That hamster would exist at that initial point in time as a result of doing time travel, and that supposed logical contradiction would vanish.

The God you believe in must be an extremely thin-skinned entity, O Ed. And a god who does not what his creations to rebel against them could easily imprint the psychological incapability to rebel.

And if free will causes its possessor to sin, then these parts of the Bible suggest what to do about it: "MT 5:29-30, 18:8-9, MK 9:43-47 If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off." In effect, just get rid of it or not allow it to exist. Period. I'm a creator of sorts in my career as a computer programmer, and that's EXACTLY the sort of thing I do to my creations.

Which requires a heck of a lot of that E thing, evolution. Also, many pathogenic/parasitic organisms seem very well "designed" to spread, causing a variety of modifications to their hosts that have this effect:

Coughing
Diarrhea
Open sores
Willingness to bite ("mad dog" symptoms of rabies)
Making the host easier to catch and become eaten (toxoplasmosis in rats makes them less afraid of cats)
Castration (may produce a lifetime of immature-state continued growth)

Some of these symptoms would cause severe logistical difficulties for carrying only two of most of the species. Imagine a snail infected with a trematode that has castrated it. Or a dog with rabies.

Natural selection is no more "atheistic" than the electricity theory of lighting or the Newtonian-mechanics theory of planetary motions. For all we know, there might be some God who likes watching it in action.

GunnerJ

Well, I had thought Ed was on my ignore list, but I guess not...

Whenever Xians say things like this, I have to laugh. They must not realize that they make their god look like some apathetic shopping mall security gaurd kicking a teenager out because he went in a "employees only" area. "Hey, don't get mad at me. I don't make the rules, I just carry them out."

Ed

I am flattered that you had to get help from a paleontologist, especially given I am not one.

OC: Mr Ed, the Talking Creationist, spake:


Ed: Also, if you are referring to James Hopson's Therapsid Series, his series
is problematic.

OC: Says who? In any case, the "therapsid series" is not simply something that Jim Hopson dreamt up. There is a very extensive literature on stem-group synapsids (= ‘mammal-like reptiles’, the group that includes the therapsids, as well as the more primitive pelycosaurs such as Dimetrodon), representing the work of dozens of different scientists, and all agree that these animals form the ancestral line to mammals. {/b][/quote]

See my post above about convergence.

Quote:

Ed: There is also the possibility that the mammal-like reptiles which have left no living representatives might have possessed features in their soft biology completely different from any known reptile or mammal which would eliminate them completely as mammal ancestors OC: Quite so. It is also possible that your late great-uncle Fred was actually an alien who only looked human but had a completely different biology. < looks to the audience, shrugs exasperatedly > Seriously, does this guy have ANY understanding of how science works? You have to go by the actual data!

I think I do. Especially empirical evidence, there is no empirical evidence for macroevolution. And there is nothing magical about time.

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OC: In this particular case, all the known attributes of mammal-like reptiles (preserved hard anatomy, bone histology) indicate unambiguously that they form the ancestral group for mammals. Their soft biology is simply unknown (except in so far as we can draw inferences about it from the skeleton), and there is nothing more that can be said about it. Period. To try to use imagined non-mammalian characteristics, for which there is no direct or indirect evidence at all, as evidence against a mammal-therapsid relationship is simply laughable. Even creationists usually manage to do better than that.

Again see my post above about convergence.

Quote:

Ed: just as the discovery of the living coelacanth revealed features in its soft anatomy which were unexpected and cast doubt on the ancestral status of its rhipidistian relatives. OC: No surprise that Ed has misunderstood this story. It is true that Latimeria proved to have some unexpected features, notably on the physiological front (it achieves osmotic balance with the surrounding sea water by concentrating urea in its blood, in the same way as sharks), but it also has some strikingly tetrapod-like features. Notably, it retains a vestigial lung (now filled with fat and functioning as a buoyancy organ) and a pulmonary vein, which strongly suggests that it had ancestors for whom air-breathing was significantly relevant. Molecular phylogenetic analyses (based on DNA sequences) also place it close to lungfishes and tetrapods.

How do you know it is vestigial lung? Please demonstrate how the gradual filling with fat of an organism's lung does not kill the organism.

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OC: In any case, ‘rhipidistians’ are actually a lot more tetrapod-like than coelacanths in their skeletal anatomy, and include obviously transitional forms like Panderichthys; their ancestral status is in no sense affected by the physiology or whatever of Latimeria.

There is no evidence of a fin turning into a forelimb and the skull changing from two parts to a single solid piece.

End of part I of my response. [/b][/quote]