Darwinist
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- JazX0
*pokes head back into thread
ehhhh....
- KuzII0
aye...
*breathes a sigh
- paraselene0
thank fuck it's not the bordello. i depend upon that income.
- KuzII0
hey, this'll cheer you up! did i tell you they're putting a warrant out for my arrest in america?
paraselene
(Jan 5 06, 05:38)wtf? that certainly does not cheer me up :/ is this cos youre in chronic debt to your creditors whom you refuse to pay and have skipped country?? or did the feds discover that bordello of teenage boys you were running? which is it?
- paraselene0
hey, this'll cheer you up! did i tell you they're putting a warrant out for my arrest in america?
haha.
i'm hoping it turns out to be one of those 'funny cos it's true' rather than 'funny cos it's sad' kind of things...
- KuzII0
legitimate resident??? what do you mean by that eh??? I was born and bred in this country! A true Yorkshire lad! Wud you be saying that to me if i were white?? No! You wouldn't! I'm sick of the blatant racism of some of my so-called friends! Sick to me back teef!
;)
- paraselene0
kuz, darling, if you want to be considered a legitimate resident of this nation, you should take a page out of my book, entitled "The Taming of the True: British Sarcasm Demystified."
;)
- KuzII0
para it's the one called The Root of all Evil presented by the world renowned Richard Dawkins. i think it's on at 8pm on Monday on Channel 4.
- Baskerville0
here you go para as requested:
- paraselene0
ah, post cross.
- skt0
Shit, I thought you were talking about Gay Vicars.
- KuzII0
aye Baskerville, i saw that programme advertised last night, am looking forward to it.
do you think it's breech of copyright that i'm posting articles from the economist that are like a week old and you have to pay for?
they had a whole christmas special on evoultion, its really fascinating. i'll post the other articles at a later date
- paraselene0
which program is it that you can't imagine an american channel airing?
gay vicars? or tony blair, rock star?
- Baskerville0
btw the program is called "The root of all evil"
- Baskerville0
sorry to add to another pointless evolution debate but...
this program is on channel 4 soon and it looks good:
http://www.channel4sales.com/pro…
I can't imagine an american channel airing this program, funny how the debate about evolution is onlly really big in america.
Dawkins rules. I saw him talk when I was at school.
And before you say anything Discipler, he is approx six thousand times more intelligent than you. Hmm, maybe that relates to the 6000 years that the earth has been here.
- paraselene0
haha. i was gonna say something yesterday but got distracted.
or something.
.
- Nairn0
woops, forgot most people don't have a subscription to the economist like me.
;)
just kidding, i'm news geek too.not usually as articulate as you, mind.
- mr_snuggles0
I am nothing...
- KuzII0
woops, forgot most people don't have a subscription to the economist like me. Here's the full text:---------
WHEN Homo sapiens emerged as a species, he was not alone. The world he entered was already peopled by giants and dwarfs, elves, trolls and pixies—in other words, creatures that looked humanlike, but were not the genuine article. Or, at least, not as genuine as Homo sapiens has come to believe himself to be.
Like the story of Homo sapiens himself, the story of the whole human family begins in Africa. About 4.5m years ago, probably in response to a drying of the climate that caused forest cover in that continent to shrink, one species of great ape found itself pushed out into the savannah, an ecological niche not normally occupied by apes. Over the next 300,000 years these apes evolved an upright stance. No one know for sure why, but one plausible explanation, advanced by Peter Wheeler of John Moores University in Liverpool, is that standing upright reduces exposure to sunlight. To an animal adapted to the forest's shade, the remorseless noonday sun of the savannah would have been a threat. Dr Wheeler's calculations suggest that walking upright decreases exposure at noon by a third compared with going on all fours, since less of the body's surface faces the overhead sun. Humanity, in the form of Australopithecus anamensis, had arrived.
AdvertisementAustralopithecines of various species lasted for over 3m years. But half-way through that period something interesting happened. One of them begat a species known to science variously as Homo rudolfensis and Homo habilis. All modern great apes make tools out of sticks and leaves to help them earn their living, and there is no reason to believe that this was not true of australopithecines. But, aided by hands that no longer needed to double as part-time feet, Homo habilis began to exploit a new and potent material that needs both precision and strength to work—stone. This provided its immediate descendants with a powerful technology, but also gave its distant descendants in human palaeontology laboratories an additional way of tracing their ancestry, for stone tools often survive where bones do not.
Homo habilis's successor species, Homo erectus, did not bestride the globe in the way that his eventual descendant Homo sapiens did, but he certainly stuck his nose out of Africa. Indeed, the first fossil erectus discovered was in Java, in 1891, and the second one, several decades later, turned up in China, near Beijing. It was not until 1960 that erectus bones were found in Africa.
Homo erectus is a frustrating species. His tools are found all over the southern half of Eurasia, as well as in Africa. But China and Java aside, his bones are scarce outside Africa. There are two skullcaps from Georgia and half of one from India. He did, however, leave lots of descendants.
Naming fossils is a game that beautifully illustrates Henry Kissinger's witticism about academic disputes being so bitter because the stakes are so low. The best definition of a species that biologists have been able to come up with is “a group of creatures capable of fertile interbreeding, given the chance”, which clearly makes it hard to determine what species a particular fossil belongs to. Researchers therefore have to fall back on the physical characteristics of the bones they find. That allows endless scope for argument between so-called splitters, who seem to want to give a new name to every skull discovered, and lumpers, who like to be as inclusive as possible.
Some splitters, for example, argue that the African version of Homo erectus should be called Homo ergaster. Whatever the niceties, it is clear that by 500,000 years ago, if not before, Homo erectus was breaking up into anatomically different populations. Splitters would like to turn the Georgia fossils, an early twig of the erectus tree, into Homo georgicus. There is also Homo rhodesiensis, found in southern Africa, Homo heidelbergensis from Europe, and a whole drawer's-worth of specimens known to some as Homo helmei and to others as archaic Homo sapiens.
How little is really known, though, was thrown into sharp relief by the announcement just over a year ago that yet another species, Homo floresiensis, had been found. It was discovered on Java's nearish neighbour island, Flores. Finding a new species of human is always exciting, but what is particularly intriguing about Homo floresiensis is how small it was—barely a metre tall when fully grown. Perhaps inevitably, though to the disgust of its discoverers, Homo floresiensis became known to journalists as the hobbit, after J.R.R. Tolkien's fictional humanoid. Homo neanderthalensis, the descendant of Homo heidelbergensis, by contrast, was if not a giant then at least a troll. Though he stood five or ten centimetres shorter than a modern European Homo sapiens, the thickness of his bones suggests he was a lot heavier.
Both Homo neanderthalensis and Homo floresiensis were certainly around when Homo sapiens left Africa—whichever version of that story turns out to be the correct one. There may also have been some lingering populations of other hominid species. That raises the intriguing question of what happened when these residents met the sapiens wave.
Some researchers believe there was interbreeding, echoing the ideas of an older school of palaeoanthropology called multiregionalism. The multiregionalists thought either that pre-sapiens hominids were all a vast, interbreeding species that gradually evolved into sapiens everywhere, or, against all Darwinian logic, that Homo sapiens arose independently in several places by some unknown process of parallel evolution.
As recently as 2002, Alan Templeton, then at the University of Washington at St Louis, claimed to have found a number of genetic trees whose roots were 400,000-800,000 years old, and yet which included non-Africans. That, if confirmed, would support multiregionalism. Meanwhile, John Relethford, of the State University of New York's campus at Oneonta, has criticised the conclusions of studies on mitochondrial DNA extracted from the bones of Neanderthals. This does not resemble DNA from any known modern humans, which led the authors of the work to conclude there was no interbreeding. Dr Relethford points out that Neanderthal DNA brought into the sapiens population by interbreeding could subsequently have been lost by chance in the lottery of who does and who does not reproduce. Similar losses are known to have happened in Australia, where mitochondrial DNA from human fossils is absent from modern Australians.
Most students of the field, though, think there was no interbreeding, full stop. Either Homo sapiens persecuted his cousins into extinction or, with his superior technology, he outhunted, outgathered and outbred them. The next question is where that technology—or, rather, the brainpower to invent and make it—came from.
- JazX0
Smote is what I use for @sscream
:O