Ok, now I know why you atheists get so spittin' mad at some believers.

by Julia Orwell 62 Replies latest jw friends

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  Jeffro

  The Watch Tower Society doesn't seem very sure what to say about Neanderthals. Neanderthals haven't been mentioned in The Watchtower since 1964!

  In other publications, their approach has been to completely ignore the time period of Neanderthals and instead focus on similarities to modern humans.

  Even then, they just keep wildly stabbing in the dark.

  *** lf Question 4 p. 28 Has All Life Descended From a Common Ancestor? ***
  Question: Is brain size a reliable indicator of intelligence?
  Answer: No.

  *** g81 6/22 pp. 14-15 Were There “Cavemen”? ***
  NEANDERTHAL MAN is also one of the better-known parts of the so-called evolutionary chain. When the first skull portion was found one scientist called it the skullcap of an idiot. ... And rather than his being an idiot, it is now admitted that Neanderthal man had a larger brain than most modern men!
• 

  LisaRose

  Aren't they still around? I see them in Geico commercials all the time.
• 

  Jeffro

  Their abysmal Origin of Life brochure (quoted above) is full of terrible 'reasoning'. From just the same chapter as the quote above, they claim (relying on an extremely naive audience with no concept of the periods of time involved) that transitions between species are 'unreliable' because they're 'too close together':

  *** lf question 4 p. 23 Has All Life Descended From a Common Ancestor? ***
  Let us assume that the estimates of researchers are accurate. In that case, the history of the earth could be represented by a time line that stretches the length of a soccer field (1). At that scale, you would have to walk about seven eighths of the way down the field before you would come to what paleontologists call the Cambrian period (2). During a small segment of that period, the major divisions of animal life show up in the fossil record. How suddenly do they appear? As you walk down the soccer field, all those different creatures pop up in the space of less than one step!

  And then, on the next page, they claim that transitions between species are 'unreliable' because they're 'too far apart':

  *** lf question 4 p. 24 Has All Life Descended From a Common Ancestor? ***
  Specimens placed in the series are often separated by what researchers estimate to be millions of years. Regarding the time spans that separate many of these fossils, zoologist Henry Gee says: “The intervals of time that separate the fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through ancestry and descent.”34
• 

  rmt1

  http://discovermagazine.com/2013/may/09-archaeologists-find-earliest-evidence-of-humans-cooking-with-fire#.UpP8U43zZts
• 

  clarity

  Syme ...

  I recently had my DNA sequenced, and yes it showed a 2.7% of Neanderhal DNA

  How do you go about getting this done? plse

  clarity
• 

  Band on the Run

  I heard you pay about $200. to National Geographic or Genealogy.com. When the price comes down, I am going to have it done. A friend whose family was from Greece was able to trace his DNA back thousands of years to a specific town in northern Greece. I know several African-Americans who had it done. They were surprised they had so much white DNA. The countries in Europe were interesting, too. I hope I have Neaderthal DNA. My understanding is that most Europeans do. I was taught how they were not human. Homo sapiens was so much brighter. Also, I saw a TV show that said that anthropologists had misinterpret what they looked like. Very interesting.
• 

  jgnat

  My haplogroup (J*) can't be nailed down so neatly. Perhaps my ancestors migrated a lot.
• 

  LV101

  BOTR - Seriously, what's this about right wingers refusing to accept facts. Not the ones I know. They're not all evangelicals or Christians of any type - many are athiests but adamant about protecting religious rights in this country.
• 

  jonahstourguide

  Jeffro, I am currently wading through all the cherry picking in wt publications.

  I note that in your comment on the question in lf p 28 q 4 you only quote part of the

  printed answer. Is that because you feel it is irrelevant or have the quotes in the lf brochure

  been cherry picked. It is coincidental as I am currently pursuing these subjects at this time

  seeing that, fortuitously, my "cognitive dissonance" is receding. I wanna prove or disprove

  many things for myself.
• 

  Jeffro

  jonahstourguide:

  I note that in your comment on the question in lf p 28 q 4 you only quote part of the printed answer.

  I quoted what was sufficient to make my point about the contrast to the older Awake!

  I have not checked the context of the original sources, but whether they were taken out of context is outside the scope of the comparison I provided.