Posted on 08/15/2007 2:51:14 PM PDT by blam
Not breeding obvious in splits of human evolution
Simon Grose
15 August 2007
ABOUT 353,000 babies will be born into the world today, about 700 of them in Australia. Same as yesterday and same as tomorrow. Many of their parents will worry about being able to properly feed them, or whether they may have contracted HIV in the womb. Whatever circumstances today's new children and their families face, every birth evokes a degree of hope. Firstly, that the baby is fit and well. Beyond that, a myriad of hopes can be evoked to lead their nation, to be rich, beautiful, a sporting champion, and so on. But no parents cradle their newborn child and wonder if they have spawned a new species. For the estimated 150,000-200,000 years that our species has trod the globe, its members have made billions of babies and none have broken the Homo sapiens mould.
Within that mould there has been much genetic variation. Some individuals are much taller or shorter than normal, others markedly more or less intelligent than normal, and people with Down syndrome carry one more chromosome than is normal. But none of these variations are sufficient to define them as other than Homo sapiens.
It happens though. The uncountable millions of species of plants and animals living now or in the past were all the product of a genetic shift from their forebears. For Homo sapiens, the fossil record contains evidence of at least 14 species who preceded us on the evolutionary pathway over the past 4.6million years, either as direct ancestors or as relatives of those ancestors. Fossil finds from the banks of Lake Turkana in Kenya, revealed in the science journal Nature last week, opened a window on to this process, as well as exposing different interpretations by experts and how the media can be led to exaggerate the implications of scientific research.
"The discovery of two fossils has challenged the belief that our ancestors Homo erectus evolved from Homo habilis, according to a new study [that] suggests that the two species may in fact have co-existed for some 50,000 years in East Africa," Agence France-Presse said in a report indicative of coverage around the world.
However, towards the end of the Nature report, the authors acknowledge that "it is nonetheless possible that H.erectus evolved from H.habilis elsewhere, and that the Turkana basin was a region of secondary contact".
For Professor Colin Groves, of the Australian National University's School of Archaeology and Anthropology, the findings are interesting but untoward. "It just shows that habilis was there till much later than we thought and reinforces that primitive species live alongside their descendants," he said yesterday. "I don't know whey they puffed it so much."
Nor do the Nature paper authors deal with the fact that the fossil they classify as Homo erectus would be classified by others including Groves as Homo ergaster.
This highlights ongoing differences over classification of ancient species in the fascinating area of human evolutionary theory. Whereas Groves and others see sufficient variation between fossils to classify Homo ergaster and Homo erectus as separate species, others see sufficient similarities to classify them both as Homo erectus.
For those who classify them separately, Homo ergaster existed from 1.8 to 1.2million years ago and Homo erectus branched off from this line about 1.3million years ago, possibly surviving till as late as just 100,000 years ago. For the other camp, it was the same species all along. If the first theory is correct, Homo erectus was not a direct ancestor of ours because our line branched off from Homo ergaster after Homo erectus branched off. If the second is true, Homo erectus was one of our direct ancestors.
It's all a matter of degree because the longer a species survives, the more it changes. Although, in his judgment, Homo erectus existed as a species for about 700,000 years less than the Nature authors believe, Groves says "the end ones certainly are strikingly different from the early ones", particularly in the larger size of their brains. This process of evolution within a species is termed anagenesis.
The more dramatic event, when a species divides into two, is known as cladogenesis. For this to occur, a group of individuals must become geographically isolated. "When a small part of a lineage becomes separate from the rest, changes occur very quickly in that small group until finally new characteristics become fixed," Groves said.
Isolation is necessary for cladogenesis and time. The fossil record between us and what most believe to be our immediate ancestor, Homo heidelbergensis, includes two dated at 195,000 years ago of which Groves says one has several characteristics akin to Homo sapiens. These individuals were single genetic steps in a process that took tens of thousands of years, triggered by isolation of a core group.
So new parents should not expect their babies to be anything other than Homo sapiens. And with about 200,000 more births than deaths each day around the world, there is a diminishing likelihood that any group of Homo sapiens will become sufficiently isolated to kick-start a new breed.
Simon Grose writes on science and technology.
So... pygmys don’t count?
< < Sigh! > > Now, you are really confusing me!
Congratulations, you've almost figured out why evolution is just another form of junk science. The whole thing is driven by information and the only information there is in humans is that of humans. The information to have a kid with horns and poison fangs simply isn't there.
I want to say that at some point they found some Aboriginal group that had a different number of autosomes normally.
The discovery of two fossils has challenged the belief that our ancestors Homo erectus evolved from Homo habilis,
Cultural anthropologists have learned that Homo erectus migrated in large numbers to San Francisco.
Genes.
I think your understanding of the science is... a bit imperfect.
One of the explanations for racial diversity is that the small migration out of Africa spread to Central Asia, India, and down the coast toward Australia. The Toba eruption triggers global cooling, and destroys much of India. THe human population falls from tens of thousands to 1-10,000. Small populations with great isolation = lots of room for mutation/adaptation.
The groups isolated in east Asia develop the typical asian traits. Those in Australia are the ancestors of the aboriginies. Those living in Central Asia adapt to the cold grasslands, growing lighter in complexion and becoming Proto-European.
If they’d been isolated for another couple dozen millenia, those racial groups could have become species.
"The last glacial period was preceded by 1000 years of the coldest temperatures of the Late Pleistocene, apparently caused by the eruption of the Mount Toba volcano. The six year long volcanic winter and 1000-year-long instant Ice Age that followed Mount Toba's eruption may have decimated Modern Man's entire population. Genetic evidence suggests that Human population size fell to about 10,000 adults between 50 and 100 thousand years ago.
"The first group to arrive are held to have come from the north because the cranial measurements of the surviving skulls of this type are affinial with the skulls of the Afanasevo culture in particular, which was located in the Sayan-Altai/North Mongolia area, and with the skull types of steppe people living much further to the west. This group is called "Proto-European" by Mair and Mallory, and it can be dated to have arrived in Xinjiang about 1800 B.C.E. or somewhat earlier. "
Very interesting. The author does a pretty good job of explaining those latest findings. Thanks for the post!
Makes shape alone rather like hard and soft fingernails.
On the other hand, it's in the proportions of torso to the long bones of the arms and legs that the greatest differences are found, and those differences appear closely related to the mean annual temperature at different latitudes.
When it comes to your liver, though, that's directly related to the amount and quality of the meat your ancestors ate. Seal eaters had to "evolve" systems to purge excess iron buildup. Same for those who followed reindeer herds, and at a later date, those who engaged extensively in raising hogs.
Up until quite recently (1901 let's say) human populations remained quite divided in terms of food availability ~ both in quantity and in kind. Eskimos rarely if ever ate bananas. Today, it's feasible for them to eat bananas every day. No doubt they will die early from Type II diabetes for engaging in a diet heavy in starch.
Sounds like making excuses and, as excuses go, that one's about as lame as is possible. Punctuated equlibria has its own set of problems which is worse if anything than the pure Darwinism it was meant to replace. If nothing else, as has been noted, you need a certain level of population before you'd ever see a "beneficial mutation", assuming such a thing were ever to happen, and the tiny "peripheral" groups which Gould and others postulate would not supply them.
Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on or off the
"Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list or GGG weekly digest
-- Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
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Whew, I was worried
As a man of faith I’d like to believe that God’s hand was in the Toba eruption...
Simon Grose:
ELECTRIC UNIVERSE IN THE NEWS
Simon Grose, Canberra Times, 12 April 1999.
http://www.kronia.com/thoth/ThoIII08.txt
http://home.planet.nl/~gkorthof/kortho39.htm
Are retrogenes changing Darwin’s Natural Selection Paradigm?
Retrogenes: genes that don’t behave - Reverse transcription: who needs it?
a review by Gert Korthof
21 Feb 1999 (updated: 29 Feb 2004 )
“Congratulations, you’ve almost figured out why evolution is just another form of junk science. The whole thing is driven by information..”
Thats pretty much it in a nutshell. Information. You just can’t trust information.
I haven't seen anyone on this thread mention PE. In fact, I don't see what it has to do with anything in this article, or in blam's post. Why are you bringing it up?
The last paragraph of the article does in fact refer to the basic idea of PE.
Nope, nothing about punk eek here. The author's talking about the potential (or lack there of) for future allopatric speciation, which can happen either under punk eek or gradualism.
You should read more about the various mechanisms of speciation (allopatric, sympoatric, parapatric, and heteropatric). It's fascinating.
Nope, nothing about punk eek here....
You should read more about...
Really? When was the last time you bred with an individual from the deepest African rain forests or the Kalahari Desert?
Cross-breeding is insufficient to explain speciation because the first two speciation events of life (i.e. abiogenesis and then the 2nd species to form) had no such cross-breeding options.
Further, the author of this article is claiming that mutations and new species are more possible with 10,000 pre-humans than with 6 billion modern humans.
That dog won’t hunt. For that matter, even the “isolation leads to speciation” theory fails to explain why pigeons in Australia are the same as pigeons in New York City or London. It’s not like they’ve been flying across oceans to breed for the past million years...
But it doesn't. There are perfect examples of speciation from isolation still living -- with all of the intermediate forms (transitionals, or "missing links") still in place!
Just google "ring species!"
Ring species provide unusual and valuable situations in which we can observe two species and the intermediate forms connecting them. In a ring species:
- A ring of populations encircles an area of unsuitable habitat.
- At one location in the ring of populations, two distinct forms coexist without interbreeding, and hence are different species.
- Around the rest of the ring, the traits of one of these species change gradually, through intermediate populations, into the traits of the second species.
A ring species, therefore, is a ring of populations in which there is only one place where two distinct species meet. Ernst Mayr called ring species "the perfect demonstration of speciation" because they show a range of intermediate forms between two species. They allow us to use variation in space to infer how changes occurred over time. This approach is especially powerful when we can reconstruct the biogeographical history of a ring species, as has been done in two cases. Source
Two different colors of the same salamander or warbler do not make for different species any more than two different colors of humans makes for two different species.
Now we know who bred with the offspring of Adam and Eve.
Please read the information I posted and linked.
It is not the color of the salamanders but their inability to interbreed at the ends of the ring!
That is the definition of a species.
Biologists have *two* mutually exclusive definitions of speciations: any change or the inability to cross-breed.
As for inability, there is a grand difference between lack of desire from that of lack of capability.
That the same salamander “can’t” breed with the same salamander but of a different color is preposterous. That one color salamander wouldn’t *want* to breed with the same species in a different color is far more plausible.
Some white guys don’t fancy black girls. No big deal. But they *could* breed with black girls. Big difference between “don’t want to” from that of “can’t do it physically.”
For that matter, even the “isolation leads to speciation” theory fails...I pointed out examples where that is not correct.
Your counter-arguments (i.e., "there is a grand difference between lack of desire from that of lack of capability") do not change the fact that interbreeding does not occur at the endpoints of ring species.
In these cases, isolation has indeed led to speciation. No theory needed, just observation.
Junk science or not, it is pointless. Many years ago, I asked a Muslim friend of mine what he thought about evolution. He shrugged. What does it matter?
We are what we are now by God’s will. (he did not use the word Allah). But the article makes a good point. We’re not going to change. That being said, I don’t think he acknowledges that the evidence shows that species, even microorganisms, are more resistant to change that Darwin ever dreamed. Regression to the norm seems to be the rule.
Isolation does *not* lead to speciation. If it did, then pigeons in New York would be different from pigeons in Australia.
And “ring species” are no such thing...just the same species in different colors.
More than that, it's a rule that never gets violated. The fruit fly experiments proved that.
You obviously have don't have the foggiest idea of what punctuated equilibrium is.
You obviously have don't have the foggiest idea of what punctuated equilibrium is.
So now they teach evolutionism including the ****ed attitudes in econ courses??
PE was an attempt to get around at least three of what Gould and several of his compatriots viewed as the big problems of standard Darwinism, i.e. the lack of intermediate fossils, the Haldane dilemma, and the fact that evolutionary dogma was preventing palaeontologists from publishing papers which dealt with questions of stasis in the fossil record.
"Allopatric speciation" is precisely the thing which the Haldane dilemma forbids. A reader would therefore be correct to assume ( as I did and you didn't know enough to) that the final paragraph of the article above referred to the possibility of small groups being isolated as Gould and others describe (i.e. ala PE).
Are there any other unrelated topics which the econ degree makes you an automatic expert at?
A pigeon is just a pigeon, and it is well known that they are all exactly alike. (Except, of course, when they're not: Dove & Pigeon Species Listing)
And “ring species” are no such thing...just the same species in different colors.
You should publish this. You'll be famous.
You should be a comedian. You’ll get just as many laughs...
Ideas from the evolutionary sciences are being applied to certain cutting edge areas of finance, which is my specialty. Hence I developed an interest in evolutionary science and studied some, as an elective, while in grad school. It's not the focus of my research, but I keep current in the latest developments throughout my field. It's so new, that it's not covered in the required Ph.D. level finance courses, yet, but one of the professors I worked for in grad school has published several papers applying lessons from evolutionary biology to finance. He also manages a hedge fund, where he has put actual money at stake using these ideas, and they have worked remarkably well.
PE was an attempt to get around at least three of what Gould and several of his compatriots viewed as the big problems of standard Darwinism, i.e. the lack of intermediate fossils, the Haldane dilemma, and the fact that evolutionary dogma was preventing palaeontologists from publishing papers which dealt with questions of stasis in the fossil record.
Wow. There's so much wrong with that paragraph, I don't know where to begin.
First of all, the so-called Haldane dilemma has nothing to do with Punctuated Equilibirum. Why are you so intent on liking together all these unrelated concets? First it was punk eek and allopatric speciation. Now it's punk eek and Haldane's so-called dilemma. What gives?
Let me educate you a little. Back in the 1950's, Haldenae published a paper that purported to find a "cost" to natural selection, which in turn, he thought, would make evolution so slow as to make it impossible for man and ape to share a common ancestor. Well, genetics has advanced a lot since the 1950's, and other researchers have found he made some big errors in his math. This website outlines it quite well:
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB121.html
Yes, it's a popular site, not a peer-reviewed paper, but the site has references to the peer-reviewed literature that refutes Haldane, which no geneticist or evolutionary biologist takes seriously anymore. You can look up the references for yourself.
As to the notion that before Gould no paleontologist could get published, well, that's just plain absurd.
Punctuated Equilibrium was proposed because the fossil record, in many cases (not all cases!), exhibits long periods of stasis (on the order of millions and sometimes tens of millions of years), as well as relatively "rapid" periods of evolution. "Rapid," in this case, however, isn't rapid according to a human time scale. Rather, it's "rapid" in terms of geological time, which means something on the order of hundreds of thousands of years.
This has absolutely nothing to do with either Haldane's so-called dilemma, nor allopatric speciation.
The interesting thing is Gould and Eldridge weren't the first to come up with Punk Eek. They got credit for it, IMHO, undeservedly. At best, you can credit them for coining the term, and perhaps showing that the fossil record tends to fit it. But it was Darwin himself who proposed the idea of punctuated equilibrium in the Origin of Species. He doesn't actually use the term, but the idea is clearly there:
"It is a more important consideration ... that the period during which each species underwent modification, though long as measured by years, was probably short in comparison with that during which it remained without undergoing any change."(Origin of Species, Ch. 10, p. 428)
That pretty much sums up all there is to punk eek, coming straight from Darwin!
"Allopatric speciation" is precisely the thing which the Haldane dilemma forbids.
Sorry, but that's just wrong. Haldane's so-called dilemma was simply an (unsuccessful) attempt to measure a "speed limit" on the acclamation of beneficial mutations through natural selection. It had absolutely nothing to do with speciation through geographic separation.
A reader would therefore be correct to assume ( as I did and you didn't know enough to) that the final paragraph of the article above referred to the possibility of small groups being isolated as Gould and others describe (i.e. ala PE).
Sorry, but you're wrong again. Erst Mayr formulated the idea of allopatric speciation in 1942, 30 years before Gould and Eldridge published their first paper on punctuated equilibrium. Neither concept depends on the other. Allopatric speciation could be true without punk eek, and punk eek could be true without allopatric speciation. The evidence, however, suggests that both are the predominant (but not only) way in which evolution actually happens.
Educate yourself first.
I have, thank you very much. Now it's your turn.
There IS NO application of evolutionary theories to finance.
Hence I developed an interest in evolutionary science and studied some, as an elective, while in grad school. It's not the focus of my research, but I keep current in the latest developments throughout my field. It's so new, that it's not covered in the required Ph.D. level finance courses, yet, but one of the professors I worked for in grad school has published several papers applying lessons from evolutionary biology to finance. He also manages a hedge fund, where he has put actual money at stake using these ideas, and they have worked remarkably well....
That would be an extreme case of God looking out for idiots as he sometimes does. Do not put any of your own money at risk by counting on such a run of luck to continue very long.
PE was an attempt to get around at least three of what Gould and several of his compatriots viewed as the big problems of standard Darwinism, i.e. the lack of intermediate fossils, the Haldane dilemma, and the fact that evolutionary dogma was preventing palaeontologists from publishing papers which dealt with questions of stasis in the fossil record.
Wow. There's so much wrong with that paragraph, I don't know where to begin.
You got the second part of that right....
First of all, the so-called Haldane dilemma has nothing to do with Punctuated Equilibirum. Why are you so intent on liking together all these unrelated concets? First it was punk eek and allopatric speciation. Now it's punk eek and Haldane's so-called dilemma. What gives?
PE has EVERYTHING to do with the Haldane dilemma (the dilemma is one of the two primary motivations for it) but, again, this may not be obvious from a cursory reading of material intended for yuppies and you have to dig just a tiny bit for it, mostly in the writings of Ernst Mayr. Again, I have and you, obviously, haven't e.g.
"...The claim of rapid evolutionary advance in large, widespread, populous species was questioned, on a theoretical basis, as far back as 1957 by Haldane and more recently by some mathematical population geneticists (Newman, Cohen, and Kipnis, 1985; Lande, 1985)...."
Let me educate you a little. Back in the 1950's, Haldenae published a paper that purported to find a "cost" to natural selection, which in turn, he thought, would make evolution so slow as to make it impossible for man and ape to share a common ancestor. Well, genetics has advanced a lot since the 1950's, and other researchers have found he made some big errors in his math. This website outlines it quite well:
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB121.html
The talk.origins website is maintained by a collection of uneducable ideologues.
As to the notion that before Gould no paleontologist could get published, well, that's just plain absurd.
"...The attitude of population geneticists to any palaeontologist rash enough to offer a contribution to evolutionary theory has been to tell him to go away and find another fossil, and not to bother the grownups."
"Allopatric speciation" is precisely the thing which the Haldane dilemma forbids.
Sorry, but that's just wrong. Haldane's so-called dilemma was simply an (unsuccessful) attempt to measure a "speed limit" on the acclamation of beneficial mutations through natural selection. It had absolutely nothing to do with speciation through geographic separation.
Wikipedia and other sources define allopatric speciation as occuring between large groups of the same animal which have been separated. The Haldane dilemma describes the impossibility of passing genetic change through large groups, separated or not.
The most simple minded description of the dilemma goes like this:
(Remine)Along the relevant primate line, our supposed pre-human ancestors had an effective generation time of 20 years. (I quote sources and details in my book, so I'll spare you here.) Imagine ten million years ago -- (that is two to three times the age of the alleged chimp-human split) -- that's enough time for 500,000 generations of our presumed ancestors.
Imagine a population of 100,000 of those organisms quietly evolving their way to humanity. For easy visualization, I'll have you imagine a scenario that favors rapid evolution. Imagine evolution happens like this. Every generation, one male and one female receive a beneficial mutation so advantageous that the 999,998 others die off immediately, and the population is then replenished in one generation by the surviving couple. Imagine evolution happens like this, generation after generation, for ten million years. How many beneficial mutations could be substituted at this crashing pace? One per generation -- or 500,000 nucleotides. That's 0.014 percent of the genome. (That is a minuscule fraction of the 2 to 3 percent that separates us from chimpanzees). [or of the devide between humans and neanderthals which is generally described as about half that for that matter]
That isn't complicated; that's basically more like higher arithematic than like higher math and there's no real way to argue the point. That says that in the 10,000,000 years which supposedly separate us from our "ape-like ancestor", the furthest any ape could evolve would be into an ape with a slightly shorter tail.
Again, you need to educate yourself first.
So now you presume to lecture a finance professor about finance.LOL. Yeah, whatever you say.
PE has EVERYTHING to do with the Haldane dilemma
Okay, so in you own words, please explain how the so-called Haldane dilema motivates punctuated equilibrium. And no, throwing up quotes by Mayr that don't even address the question doesn't count.
Wikipedia and other sources define allopatric speciation as occuring between large groups of the same animal which have been separated.
Yey, you finally got something right, though the way you express it is very unclear.
The Haldane dilemma describes the impossibility of passing genetic change through large groups, separated or not.
Now you're confused again. Allopatric speciation has nothing to do with passing genetic changes "through" separated groups, whatever that means. The whole point is that the separated groups don't exchange genes. They form seperate gene pools, which then start to become more and more different over time.
Again, this has nothing to do with punctuated equilibtrium, and was known some 30 years before Gould and Eldrige published their first paper.
That isn't complicated; that's basically more like higher arithematic than like higher math
Yeah, it's arithmatic based on highly flawed assumptions. For instance, it assumes a singe benefitial mutation only changes one gene per generation. That's a bad assumption, as a single mutation can affect multiple genes. It ignores the effect of genetic recomination and "crossing over." It ignores splitting and fusing of chromosones, which can also cause big changes in the genome in one generation. In short, the calculation ignores pretty much all the developments in the field of genetics over the last 50 years, which isn't surprising given that it was published in 1957! That makes his so-called "dilema" meaningless today.
So now you presume to lecture a finance professor about finance.LOL. Yeah, whatever you say.
Don't flatter yourself. If I'm going to imitate something it will be something worthy of imitation.
PE has EVERYTHING to do with the Haldane dilemma
Okay, so in you own words, please explain how the so-called Haldane dilema motivates punctuated equilibrium. And no, throwing up quotes by Mayr that don't even address the question doesn't count.
It isn't complicated. In plain language, the two motivations for PE were:
Wikipedia and other sources define allopatric speciation as occuring between large groups of the same animal which have been separated.
Yey, you finally got something right, though the way you express it is very unclear.
The Haldane dilemma describes the impossibility of passing genetic change through large groups, separated or not.
Now you're confused again. Allopatric speciation has nothing to do with passing genetic changes "through" separated groups, whatever that means. The whole point is that the separated groups don't exchange genes. They form seperate gene pools, which then start to become more and more different over time.
To do that, both groups obviously have to pass myriads of genetic changes through their populations. A typoical real-life case would be the cats. In real life after the continents separated, you had large populations of cats on both sides of the Atlantic which became lions and leopards in Africa and Jaguars in the Americas. None of them became dogs or bears. Aside from that being impossible for probabilistic reasons, the Haldane dilemma forbids it; the populations on both sides quickly became too large.
That isn't complicated; that's basically more like higher arithematic than like higher math
Yeah, it's arithmatic based on highly flawed assumptions. For instance, it assumes a singe benefitial mutation only changes one gene per generation. That's a bad assumption...
It's the only assumption which gives evolution any sort of a prayer at all and it's only a prayer. In real life, the overwhelming bulk of all mutations are harmful or fatal and if you start passing ten or twenty of them through a population simultaneously, the herd will most definitely die out in a few generations.
The common English term for "mutation" is "Birth Defect". Ever notice the women walking around collecting for the Mothers' March of Dimes? Ever notice that they are ALWAYS collecting for research to PREVENT mutations and never to CAUSE them? Think there might be some sort of a reason for that???
Try thinking a bit. You've somehow or other convinced yourself that it's possible to be a Christian and an evolutionite at the same time and it most definitely is not, any more than you could be a Christian nazi or a Christian communist. Evolution is junk science and, as junk science goes, a spectacularly dangerous variety of junk science with something like 200,000,000 dead bodies to its credit after a mere century and a half.
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