randman

What if this board was up and running when the Neeanderthal man was first being discovered, and I came on here and said, look guys, ya'll are way overstating your case in claiming he is a ape-man. You could just as easily be dealing with an old man with arthritis, and argued correctly that Neanderthal was not a separate species, but a homo sapien.
Ya'll would have posted the same inane stupidity that you typically do here because rather than trying to discover the truth, you would have been looking to find something to strengthen your argument for and beleif in evolution. The fact you do this is actually evidence that evolution is still very speculative, but more to the point here, this is not science. As scientists, there shoudl be a careful regard for the truth and avoiding overstatements, such as passing off speculative theory as fact, but the exact opposite is true.

[ March 09, 2002: Message edited by: randman ]</p>

Viti

Hiya randman. I have been staying out of your current threads as I am not a scientist, nor do I have the knowledge of Mr. Darwin, Patrick and the myriad other worthies who have debated you. Apparently, you are closer to my level of knowledge on such things, so I felt the need to answer this one. Here goes:

What are you talking about? I have never heard anyone assert that Neanderthal was any kind of "ape man". They are "man" either a subspecies (Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis) or a separate parallel species (Homo Neanderthalensis) there is some debate...but they are human and evidence suggests they coexisted with Homo Sapiens Sapiens at some point.

edited for spelling

[ March 09, 2002: Message edited by: LadyShea ]</p>

Kosh

DNFTT.

scigirl

If you are interested in finding out how scientists deal with controversial new findings, there is NO NEED to guess. Every week I read the news pages of Science or Nature and notice a new type of fossil or gene that is in dispute. The way they deal with controversy - they have meetings, conferences, debates. They do more studies and look for more fossils. A lot of "old" controversies were resolved by simply doing more science.

Your statement "maybe its a little old man with arthritis." Please, randman. Get a clue. Don't you think scientists think of the simple and obvious first? Like, duh! If one of my experiments contradicts a well - known principle, I go back and make sure I did it correctly before trying to overturn a theory with a lot of evidence. That's just common sense, and yes the scientific community has it.

Randman do you realize that a lot of evidence for evolution is discovered sort of "on accident?" Let me give you an example:

My lab studies neutrophils, a type of white blood cell. These cells are important in fighting off bacteria, but also cause disease if overactivated (like arthritis). We are trying to figure out how neutrophils work so that we could potentially cure diseases. That is our motiviation, ok? Now, one of the ways we study neutrophils is to compare them among species. For instance, a project we have going on is to sequence the NADPH Oxidase proteins (the bacterial killing mechanism) in a variety of species, and see if the sequence differences correlate with functional differences.

This data, we found out, does support the evolutionary tree of mammals quite nicely. But note - we did not generate the data to "promote evolution." In fact, if we did fabricate our data to make it "fit evolution" (not that we need to because it already does but play along for a second), than that would hurt our research because we really truly need to know the actual sequences!!!!

Much data for evolution was generated in a similar manner. If scientists actually wanted to finally settle this evo/cre matter, they quite possibly could. But alas, a lot of scientists aren't even aware of the controversy. And, they are too busy trying to cure diseases to waste their time arguing with YECS.

scigirl

DMB

DNA analysis has shown that Neanderthals are sufficiently different from modern homo spiens to be unlikely as our ancestors, but, of course, the difference between science and religious belief is that science is always open to changes of opinion based on good new evidence, whereas abrahamic religion relies on outdated and inadequate books that have to be stretched to breaking point to provide explanations for what is known in the modern world.

MrDarwin

Randman has been arguing against his own personal, private, made-up, cartoon version of evolution, and he's winning quite handily.

I might just as well declare that Christians believe that God is a 3-headed monster, and then go about showing how silly this is, and therefore there must not be any God at all!

[ March 09, 2002: Message edited by: MrDarwin ]</p>

scigirl

One more thing,

Once again you demonstrate your complete lack of understanding how the scientific process works.

This is not surprising, I see it a lot from creationists.

randman, part of science is of course the detailed observation you allude to. But science doesn't stop there. It is also speculation, guessing, inference, summary, making connections. When a scientist publishes his/her work, there are several parts of the paper (I feel I am qualified to talk about this, since my paper just got accepted):

1) Introduction: what are you studying and why?

2) Methods and data: What exactly did you do (so other people can reproduce your work and make sure you aren't lying!) and what were your results? There is no speculation allowed here -that is called "scientific misconduct."

3) Discussion. This is the part where the scientist summarizes the findings, and relates them to other findings. Do they support other findings out there? If not, why not? A scientist may propose one or several hypotheses about what the data actually means. Also, most researchers will indicate caveats of the work (what you can and can't infer from the data), and importantly, what studies to do next.
A scientific paper is like an episode in a tv series, not just a movie with a beginning and an end.

Inferences like these are very important to how science works. Without them, than I could only state, "On January 30, the neutrophils I isolated migrated through fibrin sealant at 1 mg/ml" and I would NOT be able to say, "My findings indicate that this fibrin sealant is a good biomaterial for preventing post-operative adhesions and thus save lives."

Instead of forcing the scientists to quit doing science, you should instead become an advocate for better understanding about how science works. You may want to start by learning about this process yourself.

scigirl

scigirl

Well, there is the old testament and the trinity. . .

scigirl

Valentine Pontifex

Of course what Randman does not mention is that the Boule made the Neandertal's into such brute was his extreme anti-Darwinian bias that he shared with the French scientific establishment. A scientific establishment that was very conservative and church dominated at the time.

For Boule there simply had to be a very definite dividing line between humans and non-humans. If something was not definately us, as the Neandertals were not, then they simply had to but brutes and "animals."

And even outside of France, Darwinism was not to become become established until the late 1930s/early 1940s.

Automaton

randman: I, for one, am sick of your shit. You are worse than Eternal. At least that nut posted honest questions, instead of just incoherently rambling on, punctuated with childish insults. You have not broken any board rules (as far as I know), but you are an extreme annoyance and are clogging up valuable bandwidth. So do us a favour and please go away.