Who Really Invented the Alphabet -- Illiterate Miners or Educated Sophisticates?

Biblical Archaeology Review ^ | August 2010 | Anson F. Rainey & Orly Goldwasser

[D Rider]

In regards to Hebrew the author wrote “The pictorial meaning “house” is always discarded.” This is not true. Hebrew consists of not only sounds but pictures that when grouped together make complex ideas. The real question is which came first the written or the oral hebrew. Here is an example of how it works. ABBA is written aleph beth, that is the picture “bull+house” bull = strength, leader. Ie... leader or strength of the house otherwise known as Father. The whole language is that way. It is really quite fascinating.

[TalonDJ]

Remember, once DNA was discovered and we began to be able to analyze it, the old "missing link" stuff was no longer relevant.

That makes no sense. There is nothing in DNA that shows things can evolve huge leaps all at once without needing 'missing links'. All DNA does is show us that mutations are much simpler and much more complex than Darwin imagined. DNA does not necessarily remove the need for intermediary stages. Mostly it just gave scientists something more productive to do than dig for bones.

[muawiyah]

DNA demonstrated that you didn't need gradual changes ~ you could, for example, flip a single basepair in a control gene and get a Primal Dwarf ~ a fully human creature less than 2 feet tall!

Other research reveals that you don't even need changes in genes ~ just the number of identical genes can get you dramatically different results.

Genes work in a quantum fashion.

The latest word is that your common seasponge has 70% of the same genes that human beings have.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks D Rider!

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Joe 6-pack (for all your replies here, starting with #12)!

[SunkenCiv]

Heh... for those who dunno, the transitional forms needed by straight-up good old fashioned Darwinism from Chuck’s “Origin of Species” are not found because, for some reason best characterized as random chance, those strata were selectively eroded away. That’s GB’s analogy.

While ideas have been changed here and there since the middle of the 19th c, that selective erosion remains one of the silly artificial problems brought about by the Victorian reliance on gradual uniform change. The evidence for catastrophism on the other hand consists of those very paleontological strata in which (mostly) now-extinct forms were laid down in short periods of time, sometimes cauterized, then rapidly buried, preserving them enough that they could fossilize.

And what muawiyah said about DNA points to a big problem for Darwin and his apologists, living and dead — the modern schoolbook version of Darwinian evolution is, “mutations arise at random, and are either neutral, beneficial, or detrimental. If detrimental, they lead to extinction; if beneficial, they lead to an advantage in natural selection; if neutral, they may be retained indefinitely, or lost, or become beneficial or detrimental when paired with a later mutation.”

The fact is, since 1980 the realization that mass extinction has been due to accidental forces external to all biological systems on Earth, and those catastrophes have had nothing to do with natural selection, despite ex post facto claims to the contrary (best summed up by the hilarious false claim that “catastrophism has always been part of uniformitarianism”) has been a threat to the church of Darwin over in the United Magic Kingdom — mutations arise at random, and can lead to speciation, and there *is* nothing else at work. The “research” to try to debunk the Alvarez theory has been nursed by institutions in the UK.

[Joe 6-pack]

Thanks...I love the whole field of semiotics, although admittedly my forte is Christian iconography of the middle ages, when you had a genuinely illiterate population with an extensive visual vocabulary expressed in the painting, the sculpture the architecture and the stained glass :-)

[muawiyah]

Back to last month's Science News magazine. They found a sort of fossil of what may have been one of the earliest multicellular life forms on Earth. It's in deposits that are dated (using modern methods) about 2.54 billion years old ~ which is quite a bit older than previously imagined possible.

The critter looks remarkably like a small sea sponge.

The current sea sponge has about 70% of the exact same genes that modern humans have.

So, let's say that the 2.54 billion year old spongelike form is not terribly different from the modern spongelike form (from which we broke off about 600 million years ago), that would mean that the 30% difference between sponges and people had develop over a mere 600 million years, or at the rate of 1% in 20 million years.

If that rate is applied to the whole enchilada, from the primitive sea sponge to our last common ancestor sea sponge, that first 70% worth of evolution took 1,400,000,000 years ~ giving us an idea of how long it would take the theoretical "random mutation" to arrive at people ~ at the same time, if the sponge was actually floating around a billion years earlier than that, maybe the rate of change sped up as life got more complex ~ an entertaining thought ~ definitely no uniformitarianism there.

Or, horror of horrors there is no rate of change applicable to genes at all and some other cause external to the genome is busy adding genes, subtracting genes, or stacking duplicates on top of each other ~ in a directed effort.

There, that simplifies matters ~ evolution occurs because something wants it to happen and takes appropriate actions.

The Demiurge of the Universe appears to me in a flash ~ or is that just my humor pulling loose from my retina?

[r9etb]

Motives. I want motives.

Because they needed something to do with their spare time and pent-up energy after spending all day digging out turquoise by hand.

[SunkenCiv]

Well, I love your use of the word "semiotics", gives me something to learn today. :')

[Moose Burger]

Dunno. They say, “I have nothing better to do, let’s be the first ones to codify language into a discrete versatile symbolic-set system”. Maybe, but it’s still a bit loose on details.

[Moose Burger]

“The bull of the house”, then “the house of the bull”, and it reads the same both ways. Nice, deep meaning. Hadn’t thought about it.

[SunkenCiv]

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[SunkenCiv]