thinking gal

Yet another reason I'm glad I'm agnostic. I was talking with a friend of mine who's a Jehovah's Witness about evolution. She was like..."so you believe that we came from some monkeys?" I told her that I accepted evolution as scientific fact...that there are fossil records to prove it. Then she proceeded to tell me about nephilim, which apparently is how J.W. explain away these fossil records. Well apparently these angels came down and mated with women on earth to produce giants. These giants are what made the fossils. Holy cow...I can't believe that anyone could believe that! Well, being the tolerant agnostic I am...my response was "hmm...that's interesting." And they think evolution is crazy?!?!

Camaban

*blinks*

*shakes head slowly*

*is sometimes ashamed to be human and related to these people*

braces_for_impact

Jw's aren't the only ones that believe that little story, it's becoming prominent with a lot of fundies now too.

lpetrich

I wonder what they think about Erich von Daniken's view that these "nephilim" had been visitors from another planet who were doing crossbreeding experiments with Earthwomen.

KC

How many of thes Nephilim were plants?

Cheers,

KC

Amen-Moses

"From the Ashes of Angels" - a book by Andrew Collins (ISBN 0-451-18926-4).

Collins argues that the Angels (or Watchers) were a race of people living in the highlands above the fertile crescent (in either Iraq or Turkey). The Nephilim were the result of mxed breeding between them and other races, i.e in modern parlance they would be half breeds.

Basically he uses myths and legends from all over the region to build up a picture of a race that were taller, thinner, very pale skinned, blue eyed and white haired (no this isn't an aryan supremecy book ). The half breeds (at least some of them), possibly the result of rape, were distinguished by some or all of these characteristics and were seen as demonised by the other races.

It is a good read and does explain the origins of things like the "evil eye".

The "superiority" of these people over the lowland dwellers came in their use of advanced stone age technology (Turkey is the original mining centre of Europe which supplied extremely sharp and well tooled weaponry well into the early bronze age) but they faded when metal tools were developed, i.e his entire hypothesis is set back in the stone age.

Amen-Moses

Oolon Colluphid

Welcome to E/C, thinking gal!

I know this isn’t what you were asking about, but you need to make two points to this misguided JW person.

1. humans are NOT descended from monkeys. We share a pretty distant common ancestor with them. We also share a (more) distant common ancestor with lemurs, bats, elephants, frogs, fish, the bacteria in our guts and bananas (we share 50% of our genes with bananas, btw. Genes get passed down generations, yeah?) Does this person not believe that chihuahuas and great danes share a common ancestor? Same thing, but spread out over MUCH more time. Clearly, chihuahuas are not descended from great danes; nor are we from monkeys, fish or bananas, or any other presently living organism.

2. You are correct, there’s fossils to prove it. I suggest that you print off this picture:



Point out that these skulls are in chronological order (except the first, which is just for comparison), and that these are a tiny tiny fraction of just the fossil evidence... then ask her to say:

(a) which are apes, and which are human, and/or

(b) which precisely of these is the angel-impregnated form.

If you need further information / ammunition, the best one-stop-shop is probably these Talk Origins pages:

<a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/" target="_blank">http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/</a>

Best wishes, Oolon

MrDarwin

Hmmm... just to quibble (which is really what I do best): if the common ancestor of monkeys and humans were alive today, it would probably be classified as a monkey. That's because "monkey" is a grade, not a monophyletic clade. Apes are more closely related to Old World monkeys than either group is to New World monkeys, i.e., "monkeys" are paraphyletic with respect to apes (a group which includes humans).

Oolon Colluphid

Quibble accepted between ourselves, of course, but rejected wrt the main point. When creationists claim that "No monkey was my uncle", the thing they have in mind is a modern monkey, and that is what is so disingenuous. It's like Gish's cartoons of a cow morphing into a whale.

It doesn't matter how similar or different the modern organisms are; the last common ancestor of them may be overtly like one, or the other, or neither. If still around, Osteolepiformes would undoubtedly be classified as fish; the last common ancestor of eukaryotes would probably be called a bacterium; and the first RNA replicator might well get called a virus. But that's the point: using modern names for these things is misleading.

I am not (whatever cladists may say) in fact a monkey, nor am I a fish, a worm, a sponge or a bacterium. Or only unless the modern organisms we call bacteria are also human. There comes a (necessarily ill-defined) point at which calling, say, terrestrial vertebrates 'fish' no longer tells you much of use about them.

There is clearly a sense in which we still are of a particular lineage; it is equally clear that using modern terms can be irrelevant and in most practical ways plain wrong. Call all vertebrates Amphioxus if you like, but...

What I guess I'm saying is that, if one is going to think in cladistics terms, then the proper cladistic names for groups should be used, not the colloquial, misleading ones: placental mammals should be Eutheria; humans should be Catarrhini rather than 'monkeys' and Hominidae rather than 'apes'. ('Primates' is awkward as it is in common usage. Maybe we should pronounce it 'pre-maa-tez' .)

Cheers, Oolon

Valentine Pontifex

I guess the J.W.s got their human evolution fossil info from a comic book or a caveman movie. Except for Homo erectus/ergaster and latter the fossil hominids are of rather small creatures -- not large ones.