ZELL MILLER!
Posted on 12/03/2003 4:53:26 PM PST by Pharmboy
LONDON (Reuters) - Fossils discovered in Ethiopia's highlands are a missing piece in the puzzle of how African mammals evolved, a team of international scientists said on Wednesday.
Little is known about what happened to mammals between 24 million to 32 million years ago, when Africa and Arabia were still joined together in a single continent.
But the remains of ancestors of modern-day elephants and other animals, unearthed by the team of U.S. and Ethiopian scientists 27 million years on, provide some answers.
"We show that some of these very primitive forms continue to live through the missing years, and then during that period as well, some new forms evolved -- these would be the ancestors of modern elephants," said Dr John Kappelman, who headed the team.
The find included several types of proboscideans, distant relatives of elephants, and fossils from the arsinoithere, a rhinoceros-like creature that had two huge bony horns on its snout and was about 7 feet high at the shoulder.
"It continues to amaze me that we don't have more from this interval of time. We are talking about an enormous continent," said Kappelman, who is based at the University of Texas at Austin.
Scientists had thought arsinoithere had disappeared much earlier but the discovery showed it managed to survive through the missing years. The fossils from the new species found in Ethiopia are the largest, and at 27 million years old, the youngest discovered so far.
"If this animal was still alive today it would be the central attraction at the zoo," Tab Rasmussen, a paleontologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri who worked on the project, said in a statement.
Many of the major fossil finds in Ethiopia are from the Rift Valley. But Kappelman and colleagues in the United States and at Ethiopia's National Science Foundation (news - web sites) and Addis Ababa University concentrated on a different area in the northwestern part of the country.
Using high-resolution satellite images to scour a remote area where others had not looked before, his team found the remains in sedimentary rocks about 6,600 feet above sea level.
All that I wish to add is that our (current) inability to predict the effect of a cause does not mean that the effect would have happened without the cause. Thus the sum cause/effect is preserved over a perceived timeline from a beginning. Moreover, even if the cause were a random effect generator it would nevertheless be a cause which would not exist except as the effect of the beginning cause.
My point of bringing this up is that it is characteristic of a strongly deterministic worldview.
To the contrary, my Christian worldview allows for non-spatial, non-temporal and non-corporeal existents - and in the area of physicality, extra spatial and time dimensions.
BTW, Doctor Stochastic, how did you achieve randomness via programming in the gaming example?
Two words: Not so.
Let's parse this.
Bestiality should not be so [a subject in which you have a keen interest] if you (and everything else on this planet) 'evolved' for it would be ingrained in our jeans to do so. Your words.
You are saying you would not have a keen interest in bestiality if you and everyone else on this planet had evolved. Therefore, you are saying your keen interest results from not having evolved (this I can see). Since the debate is between evolution and creation and you claim not to have evolved (hence your keen interest in bestiality), you must have been created. Therefore, from your own words, your interest in bestiality is the result of your creation. Since you believe God created you, then you are saying it's God's fault you have a keen interest in bestiality. I told you not to go there.
I have not twisted your words. If you meant to convey something else, you did a right poor job of it. Of course, being that I have an extensive journalistic background and a couple of college courses in logic behind me, I regularly get the opportunity (and take it) to parse others' words to see just exactly what they saying. This is most fun with political speech, but can be enjoyable on the occasional Free Republic thread, too.
As I recall, the word "random" is not used as much in some of the more recent articles. That is, instead of "random mutation/natural selection" the phrase used was something else like "mutations and natural selection" but I don't recall the exact phrase.
Sorry, I think the term "substance" was a bit misleading.
What I meant is that in your model a human mind can only be implemented in spirit but not in matter. Now my problem is that I don't see why this must be the case i.e. that patterns (which a human mind obviously is) which exist in this "spirit" cannot be implemented in matter.
So in other words, what do "ordinary" atoms lack that they cannot be used to make a human mind (where the mind is a process in a brain which consists of "ordinary" atoms)?
Oh, and also keep in mind that the 19th century notion that "matter=determinism" is no longer valid as Doctor Stochastic (and others) has mentioned above.
That is exactly what I am saying except that there is no “stuff” to it.
OK, "stuff" may not be the correct term but still, if this spirit exists then it is something in which these dynamic patterns, which make up our mind, exist.
But this means that in your model a human mind is also a process, although not one in matter.
Matter without information (communication, mind, consciousness, etc.) is dead, inert, not alive.
What is matter without information? Maybe tortoise can shed some light on this because this doesn't make any sense to me.
Also, what we consider to be alive resp. not alive may be quite clear in the case of higher animals or plants at one end and rocks on the other but with viruses or complex organic self-replicating molecules the situation is much more ambiguous.
So at the moment I don't see why some kind of "vital force" (animism) in addition to chemical processes is needed to explain life.
It should still be impossible to tell "when" a kaon decays in this case.
I would argue that if you knew the exact quantum state of the components of the kaon, you could predict the decay. It appears random simply because of the random phase of the wavefunction of the undecayed particle. (The random phase assumption is of course a can of worms).
Likewise is there an absolute size of an object that can avoid de-coherence?
Decoherence of what with respect to what?.
In my worldview, the mind (consciousness, spirit, soul) is non-temporal, non-spatial and non-corporeal. There is no requirement of physical laws that it be anywhere, at any time or contained within or be comprised of anything corporeal.
That is why IMHO artificial intelligence may lead to a devise which cannot know that it is not alive.
Ryle's arguments may be of interest to you, if only to refine your own.
I would not ask for a metaphor because I don't really think that's possible. But I also don't think the physicists themselves have any clear consensual idea as to how QM works, how probability becomes actuality, let alone its ramifications. Some are doubtlessly closer to the truth than others (i.e. among the physicists), but no one knows who.
You can probably also "count me in" along with a belief in a non-spacial, non-temporal "ether". There is some "medium" underlying or overarching or interpenetrating physical reality. My 3 cents, this time.
But even in your model the mind must consist of patterns which follow certain rules. Otherwise it doesn't make sense to even speak of a 'mind'.
I mean how are memories, for instance, stored in this non-temporal, non-spatial and non-corporeal mind? What changes when you learn something new?
More specifically, in my Christian worldview, the relationship between the mind and the physical body is one of sensory utility. IOW, it is the mind that uses the body not as Pinker would have it, that “the mind is what the brain does.” Evidently, your worldview is much closer to Pinker's.
And this is why I think that your model introduces more problems than it solves (actually I don't think it solves any problems because it just transfers them to a higher level).
This mind which exists in an other dimension or realm doesn't interact with the physical world except with some organic molecules that form a lump of matter which we call "brain". Now how does it do this? How are these molecules manipulated? And what kind of device do we need to detect it directly?
I mean if it can interact with molecules in a brain then it shouldn't be harder to detect than neutrinos for instance.
To the contrary, I would say that the mind can be simulated in matter by artificial intelligence. It would nevertheless be a simulation and not the real thing.
Well, then this mind is implemented in matter and not uh... spirit. So why shouldn't it be the real thing, especially if you cannot tell the two systems appart? If they are equivalent, you can't.
And even if you can create an artificial brain, how can you know that what you observe is only the product of this material brain and not a non-temporal, non-spatial and non-corporeal mind that has just connected to this brain?
Not at all. Viruses and bacteria have information content. The genetic code is much like a database and the living organism – of whatever size – communicates successfully among its members and its environment. At bottom, it is this information (successful communication) that separates the living from the non-living.
So a cyclohexane molecule doesn't have information content?
According to your definition every self-replicating molecule can be considered alive but some people think they're not and neither do they consider viruses to be alive.
So again, at this level the terms "alive" and "not-alive" become rather fuzzy.
And the funny thing is that in a sense this ghost is also a machine ;^)
Let's parse this.
Bestiality should not be so [a subject in which you have a keen interest] if you (and everything else on this planet) 'evolved' for it would be ingrained in our jeans to do so. Your words.
You are saying you would not have a keen interest in bestiality if you and everyone else on this planet had evolved. Therefore, you are saying your keen interest results from not having evolved (this I can see). Since the debate is between evolution and creation and you claim not to have evolved (hence your keen interest in bestiality), you must have been created. Therefore, from your own words, your interest in bestiality is the result of your creation. Since you believe God created you, then you are saying it's God's fault you have a keen interest in bestiality. I told you not to go there.
Ok... let's parse THIS!!
Bestiality should not be so [a subject in which you have a keen interest] if you (and everything else on this planet) 'evolved' for it would be ingrained in our jeans to do so.
Your words are in RED Junior; not mine.....
You stick something from YOUR mind into MY sentence and then give ME credit for it!!
How outrageous! [but bold: this concept of putting words into others mouths]
You are saying you would not have a keen interest in bestiality if you and everyone else on this planet had evolved. Therefore, you are saying your keen interest results from not having evolved (this I can see). Since the debate is between evolution and creation and you claim not to have evolved (hence your keen interest in bestiality), you must have been created. Therefore, from your own words, your interest in bestiality is the result of your creation. Since you believe God created you, then you are saying it's God's fault you have a keen interest in bestiality. I told you not to go there.
Shameful conduct Junior........ tsk tsk tsk
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