Ergaster

A brief excursion, if I may:

Don't worry, Oolon. Oxnard is not, of course, claiming that australos and orangs are particularly similar. Here is a quote from the actual article in question, on which Bait has never actually laid eyes, I warrant:

"...it is clear that the overall mode of locomotion of the orang-utan is not the model for these creatures." (p. 394)

Also note, please: all of the fossils that Oxnard mentioned belong to South African australos; he'd not examined A. afarensis.

The analysis in the article was strictly functional in nature. It was prompted by the prevalent belief at the time (of which a main proponent was Owen Lovejoy) that australos (again, on evidence from A. africanus and P. robustus) walked pretty much like modern humans do. Oxnard disagreed, and concluded that the fossils he examined showed signs of climbing ability in the upper limb--they fell closest to orangs among the apes along the main principle components axis in a very few features of the shoulder and upper limb. In most other features they were not "likened to orangs". Furthermore, he did not (nor has he ever) deny that they were bipedal--just that they were not bipedal like modern humans. That notion was largely dismissed at the time, but nowadays that is exactly what we believe about australo locomotion: they were bipedal, perhaps with some arboreality, and they were not bipedal identically to modern humans.

Naturally you and I understand that the mode of australo bipedality is not why we know that they are ancestral (in a broad sense) to us....

More later,

Deb

Valentine Pontifex

Many points by Bait have been refuted. Here is another. He wrote:
I am familiar with Bernard Wood, notice the spelling, and he does not disagree with the notion that australopiths were bipedial.
His position is that Praeanthropus the genus he put Lucy into, was a biped that was also a good climber. See "The Human Genus" in Science 284: 65-71 (1999).

Oolon Colluphid

I can’t access the Nature article Ron mentions (can anyone else??), but it looks pretty unlikely that Wood thought the A’piths to be quadrupedal. From the review article LordV cites:

Oolon

Oolon Colluphid

Just remembered this:

I’ll be generous; phylum will do. Back in my A Level days, it seemed simple. There was Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. But this is what Stewart, Cohen and Pratchett call ‘lies to children’ – the simplifications of the world we use in order to get a handle on it. It is not that simple. Try this:

Phylum: Chordata. This is the level you think is equivalent to the biblical ‘kind’, so all things within it are related. Okay.

From <a href="http://tolweb.org/tree/eukaryotes/animals/chordata/chordata.html" target="_blank">here</a>:
Within this is the sub-phylum Craniata – animals with skulls. Ring any bells?
Within this is another lower level, Vertebrata – animals with backbones.
Within this is another lower level, Gnathostoma – vertebrates with jaws.
Within this is another lower level, Sarcopterygii – lobe-finned fish and terrestrial vertebrates.
Within this is another lower level, Amniota – animals with ‘amniotic’ eggs.
Passing through Synapsida and Therapsida, we finally get to:

Class: Mammalia: Animals with all of the above, plus suckling of young. Includes the monotremes, marsupials and...
Eutheria – all of the above, plus a placenta.

We then pass through some more sub-branches to the taxon level called Order. Here we find rodents, edentates, bats, cetaceans, artiodactyls, carnivores, perissodactyls etc... and primates.
From <a href="http://helios.bto.ed.ac.uk/icapb/collection/museum/beth97/order.htm" target="_blank">here</a>:
Primates are unguiculate (with nails or claws), claviculate (with a clavicle), placental mammals. They share a set of features which includes: opposable thumbs and usually opposable toes, toes with a nail or without any hard part, eyes reinforced by a bony post orbital bar or orbital ring and stereoscopic vision, testes scrotal, penis pendulous, two pectoral mammae, cutaneous ridges on fingers and palms and a brain with a posterior lobe. More generally they have three teeth types at some stage in their life, a well developed caecum and very sensitive fingertips. There are also trends in the primate lineage towards shorter snouts, convergence of axes of vision, enlargement of brain, lessening of olfactory ability and prolongation of postnatal growth period.

Within that, we have the Catarrhini – apes and old world monkeys. Again, all of the above features plus many of their own.

Then we get to the level of Family. Here the classification names become, perhaps, more controversial . Because here is the Family Hominidae. More shared features, such as a lack of a tail, significant encephalisation, etc.

Then, finally, we get to Genus and Species. Each group nests within the higher ones, each sharing their own characteristics plus all those of the higher groupings.

So tell me Ron... if Phylum is approximately equivalent to ‘kind’... if for example capybaras (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris)



and the house mouse (Mus musculus)



share so many features that they are put in the mere Order Rodentia... if this



this



and this



(and the other two above) are merely Class Mammalia...

...please tell me how two creatures as similar as chimpanzees and humans can possibly be in separate ‘kinds’? Please explain.

Oolon

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Oolon Colluphid

All you do is put the URL of the picture (note: the pic, not the page it’s on) inside the tags {img}URL{/img}, but replacing { with [ etc.

You get the URL thus: assuming you’re using Windows (not sure exactly otherwise), find a page with a pic on you want, right click on the pic and go to Properties, which shows the URL. You can then copy and paste it tightly (no spaces at either end) between the tags. Good luck!

Cheers, Oolon

Kosh

What if the picture you want is not at a valid
URL? Ie, it's just on your local machine. Is
there no way to reference it then?

Oolon Colluphid

Sorry, don't know. I've always assumed that it needs to be on the web somewhere. Maybe ask in Bugs etc?

Oolon

Ergaster

Once again, Bait plays fast and loose with the truth.

This fossil has NOT been assigned to "Homo sapiens", ESPECIALLy in Johanson's book.

At the time the book was published, the maxilla (NOT a "mandible"; Bait clearly has no knowledge of anatomy, either, which makes me wonder anew just how he is at all competent to judge anatomical evidence...) had been assigned only to Homo sp. This means that it is of the genus Homo, species unnamed. The unitalicized "sp." means "species". Not "sapiens". The specific nomen in a binomen is always italicized and never abbreviated (Homo sapiens is a binomen. It is always italicized. The first part is the genus name, and it is always capitalized. It is always written out in full on the first reference to it, and abbreviated to the first initial on subsequent references in the same article. The second part, "sapiens", is the species--or specific--name. It is never capitalized, and never abbreviated).

Of course, if Bait is relying upon well-agendaed creationist sources which tend to be rather far removed from the original information (one is tempted to say "reality"...), he may have an explanation for his ignorance, but surely not an excuse. There is no excuse for citing references whose content one has never actually examined for oneself.

Subsequently, this maxilla (which is the UPPER jaw and palate, whilst "mandible" is the lower jaw, of course), has been assigned to Homo habilis.

Kimbel W. et al. (1997) Systematic assessment of a maxilla of Homo from Hadar, Ethiopia. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 103:235-262

(Bait: please note the name of the journal. That is a peer-reviewed professional journal. Peer-reviewed professional journals are where one finds the evidence. Not in popular magazines. Not in newspapers. Not on websites. Often not even in popular books written by scientists.

btw: also note the name of the journal Oolon has referenced...that too is a peer-reviewed professional journal. Oolon knows where the evidence is...and where it isn't...).

Of course, one is led to ask: if A.L 666-1 is never "brought up", why does it rate two life-sized images on a large colour page in Johanson's book? That is rather an odd way of supressing a find--announce it across two pages in one of the best-selling paleoanthro books out there....

Probably more later,

Deb

edited for lousy UBB coding

[ March 27, 2002: Message edited by: Ergaster ]

[ March 27, 2002: Message edited by: Ergaster ]</p>

lpetrich

Just to set the record straight, at the expense of seemingly splitting hairs, several peer-reviewed professional journals now have an online presence. But Ergaster's statement is entirely true of non-professional-journal websites.

Reading the professional literature can be very intimidating for a nonspecialist; much of it assumes that its readers know an abundance of background for the research described, much of it has a lot of jargon vocabulary, and some of it is highly mathematical.

Also, many papers are work on rather small details or are essentially work-in-progress; it may be difficult to form an overall picture unless one studies a lot of papers on some subject. However, review articles can be very helpful for forming an overall picture; they are typically longer than the usual journal articles.

Another helpful feature is the abstract, a summary of a paper that is typically one or two typical paragraphs. An abstract may often contain what one is looking for, especially if one wants some overall picture.

Finally, some people seem to have little competence at even the simplest mathematics; I remember an employee of a local deli, a middle-aged woman who was likely in the business for some time, who fumbled when counting up the change for a purchase -- and who was totally unable to do the calculation in a non-reflexive fashion.

Ergaster

Not to split hairs even finer , but in most cases the on-line journals require some kind of subscription, so the best the average joe is going to do (without trudging off to the local university library) is find the abstracts. I am fully aware of all that, and of the specialized nature of the professional literature.

My point was somewhat different, though. Bait roars in, strewing quotes all over the place that supposedly can be interpreted to mean certain things, and implying that experts in anatomy and functional morphology are incompetent fools, and thus my insistence that he demonstrate that he knows what he's talking about. The best way to do that, as we all know, is to demonstrate familiarity with (if not outright competence in) the areas one is critiquing. And that requires knowing something of the current professional literature and who is writing what in it.

Right?