Posted on 10/02/2009 9:15:51 AM PDT by GodGunsGuts
Human exceptionalism received a boost today with the news that human beings apparently did not evolve from apes...
(Excerpt) Read more at firstthings.com ...
Yeah, yeah, "common ancestor", right. A common ancestor that would be indistinguishable from an ape if we saw it, so we might as well call it one.
Of course, to completely short-circuit this problem, somebody could actually dig it up and show us what it looked like.
Since they keep pushing the divergence date back, at the rate things are going, by the time we actually see this "common ancestor", we will have had time to evolve into something that doesn't care.
What does it verify? There is not much "common" about this ancestor. From the article:
"People have sort of assumed ... that the last common ancestor was more or less like a chimpanzee." Ardi suggests otherwise — that in fact the earliest known hominid was a "mosaic," ... "It's just a treasure trove of surprises"
“Human exceptionalism received a boost today with the news that human beings apparently did not evolve from apes”
—Is there anyone that can explain where the author got this idea from?
I don’t know what the ‘firstthings’ site is about, but I’ve read a number of articles on this fossil find and this the first I’ve seen of anyone suggesting such a thing - and the suggestion makes zero sense. I think they are really confused.
It used to be thought that the common ancestor would be essentially a chimp anatomically, and that it was humans that did virtually all the changing physically while chimps changed little since the common ancestor. But the fossil evidence indicates that humans changed less than thought while chimps changed more than thought, and so the common ancestor is as close anatomically to humans as it is to chimps. In other words, the common ancestor is probably as much human-like as it is chimp-like and is roughly an even mixture of both, instead of being mostly a chimp.
Perhaps they are confusing statements from scientists that the common ancestor is ‘less chimp-like’ than thought before for ‘not ape-like’?
And certainly not from a “lump of mud” as GGG so vigorously contends...
>> And certainly not from a “lump of mud” as GGG so vigorously contends... <<
And that women came from a man’s rib. I guess the fact that way Sex Chromosomes works was unknown to biblical scholars when they wrote the thing.
God would have had to take all of those cells from the rib and remove the Y chromosome and duplicate the X chromosome. But the bible doesn’t cover this so it must be completely absolutely unequivocally wrong! Based off the same sorta logic YECs use to try to discredit the scientific process.
Your comment sparked a thought. At least in my worldly view and knowledge, humans in their current (semi current) capacity as sentient beings have only existed for 5,000 years or so. I have always presumed we are a very young species as it relates to evolution. But as I think about what archaeologist of another, yet further evolved race might think say a million years from now, "humans" may very well be over 4 million years old as a race. It's a little abstract, I know.
Now consider this. It seems to me that most other mammals, reptiles, etc. that have been studied have shown significant evolutionary characteristics over that same time period. Mastodons into several species of elephants for instance. Human evolution over the past 5,000 years can be tracked and seems to evolve faster now than almost any other species, however subtle the evolution seems. Think about it. Some 5,000 years ago we can establish that several different cultures existed in different parts of the world and history in writing and story telling began. Humans were much smaller and didn't live near as long. Our heads continue to get bigger as well. Today, there are stark differences between oriental people, middle eastern people, African people, etc.
Is it conceivable that humans have more than one common ancestor? In other words, is there confusion about which "primordial" apes may have evolved into different human lineages. If primates diverged, then interbred after a significant divergence, a new hominid may have started quite suddenly.
Finally, the dinosaurs dominated the earth for hundreds of millions of years. Humans are far more adaptable. If the logic holds, we should have a billion years of evolution for our species even if you start it 4 million years ago.
Truly, at what point will humans decide trying to find out where we came from will become futile and they will cease to care?
>> And lest we forget, the Genesis story of Cain and his doomed brother, Ape. <<
His doomed brother’s name was “Ape-l” not Able, Abel, or Ape.
Minor translation error in a perfectly translated king James version. So if you want the “real” story on our creation one must read the Torah!
“And certainly not from a “lump of mud” as GGG so vigorously contends...”
The sheer arrogance on these threads continues to astound me.
What’s amazing to me is to live in God’s creation and treat it as such - and then in the name of ‘science’ or the ‘scientific method’ see His creation torn down into simplistic human theories.
So you’re going with the whole Adam/Eve/Cain Humanity-decended-from-incest route, eh?
Good luck with that.
The move from unicellular life to multi-cellular life was just a big of leap as it was life’s move to lifeforms (humans) capable of altering their environment and themselves by extension with their own willpower.
The eventual rise of the Human culture is the largest shift life has seen in a couple billion years. The whole of accumulated human knowledge has been doubling in smaller and smaller intervals ever since 100,000 years ago.
Elephants, Dolphins and a few other species have “cultures” of a sort but they lack some of the other mental and physical tools to effectively alter their environment.
We may be the first beings on this planet to be able to leave this planet with our own will and expand our territory to places we were not genetically designed to live in. This transcending of genetic limits through use of technology and knowledge is what makes us so special and sacred compared to other species. This is what also separates us from other “mere animals” and is why a Human life should be valued higher than other animal life.
“So you’re going with the whole Adam/Eve/Cain Humanity-decended-from-incest route, eh?”
Yes, and thank you for validating my point.
LOL!
Thanks for the ping!
From Steve Jone's book "Darwin's Ghost," page 285: we have ...
One set of genes is found everywhere. It translates the information coded in the DNA and allows it to make proteins. The job is so essential that such structures changed little over millions of years. To put them through the cladistic machine shows how biology has failed to notice some fundamental splits among its subjects.
Nature's new pedigree has three great domains. One emcompasses organisms whose DNA is contained within a nuclear membrane, together with, a little further away, a variety of single-cell gut parasites. The bacteria and - quite new - the archaea, tiny entities once seen as a mere subdivision of bacteria but in fact distinct, are each in a class of their own. Their dominion is divided not into a mere five kingdoms, but into dozens.
Maybe that's something we can all agree with.
That's what I think is most fascinating about this story. It's really hard to shake the unspoken idea that we're somehow the pinnacle of evolution. The notion that chimps have actually evolved more since our common ancestor than we have really shakes up that worldview.
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