by cofty 266 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
I didn't, I said 'I doubt' not that 'I know', though you did just confirm I was right. I also think you're being deliberately obtuse, but I don't know that either, nor do I know what you're trying to achieve here. I guess I can argue semantics with the best of them.
It's good to see you admit what you are posting about me has no basis in reality. I appreciate the honesty.
at some point, you have to have one of those ancestors categorized as human and the one before it not - JWS
I find your thinking on this very puzzling JWS.
Any attempt to draw a line would be arbitrary.
How can a mother give birth to a child of a different species?
Kate - Dawkins never called all church-goers ignorant. Stop trying to derail the thread.
just human, half of scientists are religious....
Anyone can become a scoentist, you just need evidence. You can cahsnge the world justhuman, go prove them wrong....
Thats hoe science works...
"How can a mother give birth to a child of a different species ?"
This is true of the usual definition of "species" I guess, that different ones cannot interbreed , even close species produce a hybrid usually, so what we are saying is that at points along this road , what we now term different species must have been able to breed with those somewhat more "advanced", but eventually the evolutionary process moves on to the point where much later generations would not be able to breed with those much earlier ones.
Cofty HELP ! I am not expressing this well at all, just struggling to understand really.
Let's go back around 6 million years and consider a population of hominids who would have looked not too different from a modern chimp.
Somewhere among those creatures is a female - lets call her Pan - who would become the mother of all humans, chimps and bonobos.
One of her offspring would establish a lineage that led to modern humans while a sibling became matriach to a different tribe. Her group became isolated from other members of the species and produced offspring who would eventually lead to modern chimps. Along the way her lineage also experienced a split around 3 million years ago leading to a new family that became the ancestors of modern bonobos.
In every generation siblings were all but identical but very gradually, imperceptibly the cousins were growing apart. The change was so slight that it could only be observed in retrospect when considering specimens that were separated by many hundreds of generations.
If we went further back and observed Pan's ancestors we would see similar branches in her ancestry that led forward to modern gorillas (8 million years ago) and orangutangs (16 million years ago).
@Kate
"He makes sweeping generalisations like calling people "uneducated church goers"
Shame on you, Madam, i thought you were better educated than that!
Some church-goers ARE uneducated - many in fact. Nowhere is he saying all (anything) are UCGs!, so no sweeping generalisations!
Are you feeling personally attacked by the phrase? You seem to have it in for RD, from what I have read from you over recent months.
Cliff
The video may clear up a few misunderstandings but it is a simplification of the evidence we have. As recently as October last year 'The Guardian' reported that a skull of homo erectus throws the story of human evolution into disarray. It is not elementary, my dear Watson.
Yes of course its a simplification. Its explaining a difficult concept in 4 minutes.
There are constant disputes about how many boxes to put hominid fossils into.
Its mostly arbitrary decisions about where to draw the lines. It doesn't effect the bigger picture in the slightest.
The fact that there are so many great fossils to argue about is exciting.
Even if there were no fossils at all it wouldn't matter. The real evidence for common ancestry is in the genes of every cell in your body.
You will be pleased to know, Cofty, that on your recommendation I am now reading 'Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life'. Once I have completed that I will comment on the matter of genes but it doesn't look as if that is straight-forward either.
cofty wrote:
I find your thinking on this very puzzling JWS.
Any attempt to draw a line would be arbitrary.
How can a mother give birth to a child of a different species?
Can we draw a line between a human and a dog? Or is that too arbitrary? A one cell organism and a human? Or is that line too abitrary?
The question asks about the first human? The first what? Human. We have an idea of that, but what is the exact definition of human? If we are going to find out if there was a first human, we need to know what one is. You are one, I am one. We can agree on that. But that in itself is arbitrary.
We need a specific defintion of what a human is. And the criteria may be arbitrary and include a wide variety of classifications. But once the criteria is decided upon, it eliminates the arbitrary in applying it. And that goes for ANYTHING. Animals, objects, shapes. If you have a definition, you can apply it to a thing. Does it match the definition? Yes or no? And the question is was there a first human. So the term human is a thing and needs a definition.
With a definition, we can compare it to each of our ancestors going backwards. At some point in the past, one of our ancestors didn't fit the definition, if ever so slightly. That's were the previous incarnation ended and humanity began. The last ancestor to fit the definition of human was the first human.
It's all about definitions. Either you fit a definition or you don't. What is so puzzling about that? If you can't define what a human is, then we're all just organisms. Why call a dog a dog or a cat a cat? Why not call everything an animal or an organism?
A mother can give birth to a genetic variation from her own DNA. That's the mechanics of evolution. At some point, that variation fit the definition of human, wheras the parents did not. The change would have been tiny, but just enough to cross that line.
Like with the gradient example. Let's say I define red as an RGB value where Green and Blue are both 0 and Red is a red value of 192-255 (C0-FF). That's an abitrary definition I made up just as biologists could choose what they feel makes up "human". But with definition in hand, I can now use it as a measuring stick. When has the blue changed to red? At the first column that meets the definition for red. Slight change from the pixel before? Sure, but now it meets the definition and the previous one didn't.
Let's say you have an animation of a circle that slowly morphs into a square. When does it become a square? We have a specific definition of a square. A 2D object with 4 sides that comprise 4 lines of equal length and 4 right angles. The circle may start to look like a square as the animation nears completion, but it is not a square until it meets the exact definition.
And BTW, I think the term human would have to encompass variations. We have several races, heights, sizes, hair colors, etc. Just like a red RGB value might be defined by several R values. Still, what meets the definition and what doesn't? If we can't define human then we're the same as everything in that deck of cards.
Hope that clears up the puzzle. And BTW, enjoy reading your posts.
