Did humans descend from other primates?

[McCulloch]

Man did not descend from the primates.

Did humans descend from other primates?
Are humans primates or should there be special biological taxonomy for humanity?
Please cite evidence.

[SailingCyclops]

Yet, you seem to be avoiding the question about 'how do you explain the last common ancestor for microcephaline lived a total of 800,000 YEARS before MT-eve?

Please explain that. You seem to be avoiding that question.

I believe (and I may be wrong) that creationists avoid discussing chronology like the plague. The 800,000 years you mention and document, blows a big hole in the "tens of thousands of years" time span creationists need to support their "human creation model". If indeed humans existed as far back as 800.000 years (not to mention 1 to 1.6 Million years), then the model as presented, must be patently in grave error.

Bob

[Goat]

Yet, you seem to be avoiding the question about 'how do you explain the last common ancestor for microcephaline lived a total of 800,000 YEARS before MT-eve?

Please explain that. You seem to be avoiding that question.

I believe (and I may be wrong) that creationists avoid discussing chronology like the plague. The 800,000 years you mention and document, blows a big hole in the "tens of thousands of years" time span creationists need to support their "human creation model". If indeed humans existed as far back as 800.000 years (not to mention 1 to 1.6 Million years), then the model as presented, must be patently in grave error.

Bob

Plus the fact that the gene is much older than the 'mt-eve'. Their model does not cover that at all.

[Grumpy]

otseng

The migration patterns for both mtEve and yAdam are virtually identical.

Yes, man includes both males and females in the same population, living in the same places, doing the same things. They react to the same climate changes and move together to different places.

But mEVE had already spread her mitochondrial genes throughout the population at the time of yAdam, it is entirely possible that they THEN migrated together, supplanting earlier forms of man. By the time of yAdam ALL females had descended from mEve so the migrations would of course be identical(or nearly so).

Is there any theory, hypothesis, or even a model for human origins from an evolutionary point of view?

The theory is called evolution, and just like there is no separate micro or macro, there is no separate theory or evidence that makes man's evolution different from all creatures great or small.

It's not entirely logical if one assumes naturalism for the sciences, and then say that the sciences show that non-naturalistic explanations is not possible.

Science does show that naturalistic explanations are the only ones supported by the evidence. It would be foolish to accept any other explanations(especially magical ones)that are not supported by valid evidence. Science does not say that non-naturalistic explanations are NOT possible, it says that such explanations do not fit the facts we know and have no valid evidence to support them. Shazzaamm is not a scientific principle.

I find it quite ironic that people accuse Christians of being dogmatic. Yet, evolutionists constantly say, "Evolution is a fact" and do not see the irony that they make dogmatic statements.

Evolution IS a fact, it is also a theory...

A theory is a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena. In science it is an explanation or model that covers a substantial group of occurrences in nature and has been confirmed by a substantial number of experiments and observations. A theory is more general and better verified than a hypothesis.

We've gone down this very same path before. Evolution has occurred throughout the history of life on Earth, it is going on today in nature and in the lab. It cannot be denied except by those ignorant of the facts(sometime willfully)or those determined to push an agenda where the facts are inconvenient things to be manipulated, twisted or just plain lied about. But facts are stubborn things and no amount of distortion will change them.

Evolutionary theories, on the other hand, are just our current best understanding of the fact of evolution, subject to revision given better understanding and new facts.

An example: In past times the sun was thought to circle the Earth. Perfectly understandable given the evidence of the time. But then came Bruno, Brayhe, Galileo, etc. and gave us both additional evidence and better understanding, showing us that the Earth obeyed the same laws of gravity as everything else we see in our skies(IE it is not unique nor central in the Universe)and orbits the sun, turns on it's axis and presents different portions to the sun at different times giving the illusion of circling the Earth.

At one time man knew nothing about life on Earth except what his experience showed him during his lifetime. Theology being the dominate paradigm at the time led, inevitably, to explanations(Creationism)that fit within that paradigm. Then came science, not a collection of beliefs handed down from above, but knowledge gained from the bottom up, building a new paradigm based on logic and evidence, not superstition, fear, wishful thinking and dogma. As each new insight built on those before all the things attributed to gods were found to have logical, natural explanations. The exact same thing is true of Creationism, it was found that it just ain't so. Not one single thing in the Creation story stands up to even the most perfunctory scientific investigation(if it is an honest one). The Flood is a fairy tale, as is the Garden of Eden, neither happened in reality, it is a total fabrication by scientifically ignorant and superstitious men and they are wrong on the facts, wrong on History, certainly wrong on biology. In fact, the Bible is chock full of things that are just ridiculous in the light of reality(of course, no other religious text is any better). Mankind of the period 4000 years ago(when the Old Testament was written)were so besotted by religious, superstitious nonsense of many kinds that it is extremely difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, the valuable from the useless, the true from the made up in almost all of the texts of the times. Gods were the explanation for everything not understood and all events, Christianity is just one of the younger religions of that time but it was no more correct in it's explanations than any of those that came before it, or after it, for that matter.

The term "model" is used in science. So, the term itself is not unscientific.

No, it is not scientific to call your statements a model. Models must have explanatory power, "God did it" is just an admission of ignorance and is indistinguishable from magic, they both explain nothing and put any explanation beyond the reach of intellect. "God did it" is not a theory, it has no supporting evidence. It is not even a hypothesis as it gives no clue on how to proceed with an investigation into possible explanations, in fact such inquiries are actively suppressed as a loss of faith(at least where Creationism is concerned)no matter what the evidence supports(and that is evolution). Creationism is Christian propaganda, not science.

Then if you do not suggest that evolution cannot make predictions, is there a list of predictions in regards to the origin of humans?.

Im sure a list could be created..

By all means then.

I gave you one which you proceeded to distort. The traits of men show progression back to millions of years ago, getting less human and more like chimps the further back in time you go. Lucy, 3.5 million years ago, had hips, knees and feet virtually indistinguishable from the ones in your legs(except she was less than 4 meters tall). She was either our direct ancestor or a side branch of that lineage. No other creature on Earth has(or has ever had AFAWK)legs and hips like man does and it definitively identifies man. But Lucy's brain was nearly identical to modern chimps in size, about half the size of modern man's, her upper body and arms were chimplike rather than manlike. There is a diverse series of "improved"(more manlike)versions up until "Modern Man" emerged about 200,000 years ago. Homo Sapiens Sapiens only appears about 75,000 years ago, it may have been Toba that caused the impetus of our evolution, maybe only the smart would have survived the conditions worldwide.

"In 1998, Ambrose proposed in the Journal of Human Evolution that the effects of the Toba eruption and the Ice Age that followed could explain the apparent bottleneck in human populations that geneticists believe occurred between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. The lack of genetic diversity among humans alive today suggests that during this time period humans came very close to becoming extinct."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 142739.htm

By the way, it may have been this very event that allowed mEve and yAdam to become so dominate in our gene pool.

This would be a stretch. How can one confirm that "humans" were responsible for supposed intentional grooves?

Tool marks.

I think it's quite ironic that evolutionists cannot accept things such as DNA is a result of intelligent design, but a groove in a formless rock is evidence for an intelligent cause.

There is no sign of intelligent design, it is simply your incredulity coloring your intellect. And the rock is not formless and has tool marks. It may be a rock that someone saw a figure in that he improved by scratching, but the tool marks indicate man.

One can seriously dispute that it looks like a human body.

My son showed me a "mommy" that looked a lot like that stone when he was four, but he used Playdo instead of stone. Noone claimed it was a good likeness, but it is a likeness deliberately altered to appear as a woman with big...chest. It was not the end point of art, but nearer to the beginning of representational art.

I can't even discern what is the "head" and "arms". Perhaps it was done by an abstract artist?

Or one barely able to conceive of art or without the intellect or ability to produce good art, like a four year old boy(which is about where chimps stand in relation to us, intellectually). You sound like you were expecting Leonardo DiVincy in the early stone age, a completely unreasonable expectation. I would expect the first art to be rather crude, and this statue is rather crude but recognizable as a woman.

Grumpy

[SailingCyclops]

Let's start discussing the stone artifacts (tools).

[...]

Acheulean

The artifact that typifies the Acheulean is the biface (or handaxe).





This one is 29 cm long and weighs 2 kg:


[...]

Bifaces are found practically all over the world.

So, it is quite surprising that "primitive" man would make and use the biface all over the world, and yet us "advanced" modern man cannot even determine what they were actually used for.
[...]

Whether or not we know exactly what they were used for is irrelevant. My question to you is this: Were the artifacts pictured above manufactured by man or beast? By "man" I mean Man as you have defined him in your "Creation Model".

Bob

[otseng]

For a good description of how drift affects mtDNA and the y-chromosome, I recommend reading this blog post.[1]

I read through the blog post. But still fail to see how it explains things. Could you cite the parts where you feel answers the issue?

I'm referring to the section beginning "If we treat genes as individual organisms, we can create a "gene genealogy" - a gene family tree - for individual genes. Here's an example I just made. ... " The blogger's model shows in practice what others in this thread have been saying in words: Probabilistic birth-death processes (like those within animal populations) can cause an arbitrary past individual to become the MRCA for a particular gene (or mtDNA or y-chromosome) without requiring the kind of extreme post-flood bottleneck you think this implies.

However, the question is what can explain that all other female lines disappeared? In terms of the probability that only one female is the progenitor of all, I'm going to ask Zeeby in my next post about that.

Phylogeny of y-chromosomal variants recovers the same African deep ancestry found in mtDNA lineages. Even in your flood model there is only one surviving male progenitor. If you accept the logic of this phylogeny, then you are admitting that your model is at variance with the data.

The top of the Y-chromosome mapping is the A and BT haplogroups.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Y-ch ... aplogroups

Here is another diagram:

https://www.sanger.ac.uk/Teams/Team19/chr-y.shtml

Haplogroup A is not limited to Africa.

Haplogroup A is found mainly in the Southern Nile region and Southern Africa. However, at lower frequencies, M91 is found in many areas of Africa, including Morocco, Egypt, and Cameroon. Outside of Africa, it has been detected in European males in England, Portugal, the Mediterranean islands of Sardinia, Italy, and Lesbos, Greece, and the Eastern Mediterranean regions of Anatolia, the Levant, and Southern Arabia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_A_%28Y-DNA%29

For Haplogroup BT, it is a hypothetical grouping and no human actually has a BT Y-chromosome. Same also goes for CT and CF.

Haplogroups BT, CT, CF, are hypothetically. Until today, no male in haplogroup BT or CT or CF has yet been discovered.

http://my.opera.com/ancientmacedonia/bl ... acedonians

"No male in haplogroup CT* has yet been discovered."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_CT_%28Y-DNA%29

"The haplogroup is hypothetical because no male in haplogroup CF* has yet been discovered."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_CF_%28Y-DNA%29

Also there is no definitive place of origin for BT either, though sources say that it probably originated in North East Africa.

Haplogroup BT split off from haplogroup A 70,000 years bp , probably originating in North East Africa from Y-chromosomal Adam. It contains all living human Y-DNA haplogroups except for A.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_BT_%28Y-DNA%29

The F Haplogroup contains more than 90% of the world's population.

In human genetics, haplogroup F or FT is an enormous Y-chromosome haplogroup spanning all the continents. This haplogroup and its subclades contain more than 90% of the world's existing male population.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_F_%28Y-DNA%29

It is theorized that it originated in the Middle East area.


http://www.familytreedna.com/public/F-YDNA/default.aspx

Because BT, CT, and CF are all hypothetical and not found in any human, it is entirely possible that F can be located nearer to the root of the tree. And since it accounts for 90% of the current population, this would make it seem more likely that it is close to the root.

So, though this is tentative for now, it's possible to arrange the Y-chromosome tree into 3 descendants off of a common ancestor: AB, CF, and DE.

If the only features we could compare were morphological, there might be cause for confusion (since different sequences can sometimes encode similar structures).

Then the use of fossil evidence would be unreliable.

However, we know a mechanism that can cause the the hierarchical differences in species' sequences.

That is what we are debating now with the concept of macroevolution.

Note that every phylogenetic tree we make assumes homology.

Would even phylogenetic trees based on genetics also assume homology?

simply show that different genes from the same set of organisms infer the same tree no more often than randomized trees.

OK, let's spend some more time on this then.

If different genes from the same organisms point to different evolutionary pathways, these would be different trees correct?
What would constitute randomized trees?

Conversely, you have not yet described the mechanisms by which species are designed or what types of genetic data can be used to falsify this hypothesis. Maybe you will elaborate in your response to my other post.

I already addressed your post.

In terms of the mechanism that a species is designed, it not necessary to know how something is designed to posit a designer.

One example would be the SETI program. If researchers find a signal from another planet, it would not be immediately rejected because they do not know how an alien civilization created the signal.

And I did present a way for genetic data to falsify my model. But just because the bar is high doesn't mean that I have not presented a way to falsify it using genetic data.

[otseng]

I'm back from my adventure in population modelling. Here are the main features of my model:
- start with 5000 females (tying in with population bottleneck of 10000 humans)
- each female produces a random number of offspring (and in this case it is relevant to mean breeding female offspring)
- the total population grows fairly slowly due to competition for resources (so not all offspring survive)

Within 1000 generations, the number of surviving female lines had dropped from 5000 to around 50. Why? The reason is due (almost entirely) to the 3rd point above. When one line flourishes (through chance), it can further dominate the other lines, as if it produces many offspring one generation, the other lines will be reduced, but if it produces less, the other lines do not necessarily produce more.

Naturally there are limitations with this model (offspring die independently, whereas in reality natural disasters would be more likely to kill individual lines; I limited surviving offspring per female to between 0 and 3 fairly arbitrarily) but it does serve to show that lines can die out naturally fairly easily.

Could you do something with your simulation? Determine what are the odds of having only one female progenitor (all the females lines would drop to just 1).

[Zeeby]

I'm back from my adventure in population modelling. Here are the main features of my model:
- start with 5000 females (tying in with population bottleneck of 10000 humans)
- each female produces a random number of offspring (and in this case it is relevant to mean breeding female offspring)
- the total population grows fairly slowly due to competition for resources (so not all offspring survive)

Within 1000 generations, the number of surviving female lines had dropped from 5000 to around 50. Why? The reason is due (almost entirely) to the 3rd point above. When one line flourishes (through chance), it can further dominate the other lines, as if it produces many offspring one generation, the other lines will be reduced, but if it produces less, the other lines do not necessarily produce more.

Naturally there are limitations with this model (offspring die independently, whereas in reality natural disasters would be more likely to kill individual lines; I limited surviving offspring per female to between 0 and 3 fairly arbitrarily) but it does serve to show that lines can die out naturally fairly easily.

Could you do something with your simulation? Determine what are the odds of having only one female progenitor (all the females lines would drop to just 1).

Certain, given enough time. Eventually the population of Earth would be forced to stabilise due to lack of resources, and then the process highlighted above takes over.

Really the question is whether the (insert estimate) number of years since mtEve lived is plausible for all other lines to be removed - as obviously it wouldn't back up the model if it took 20million generations or something crazy. Regarding that, I would have a hard time giving a probability, as it depends on largely unknowable factors such as
- fairly precise population history (size, distribution)
- particular diseases, natural disasters, etc
so the uncertainty on any result would be massive.

In terms of the theory, all I can really say is that it's not ridiculous.

[SailingCyclops]

Determine what are the odds of having only one female progenitor (all the females lines would drop to just 1).

Pardon my ignorance of genitics. But if there was a literal Adam and a literal Eve (A first couple), wouldn't there by default be only ONE female line in all the world's population? Wouldn't all mitochondrial dna have to be identical since it all came from Eve?

Bob

[otseng]

Let's look at the art from your source.



It claims "The oldest known art of prehistory. A cupule at the Auditorium Cave at Bhimbetka, Madhya Pradesh, India. It dates from (290,000-700,000 BCE)."

It is disputable that this would be considered art, or even made from man.

Not disputed actually.
Cupules

From your source, even they are a bit ambiguous if it is considered to be "art".

Are Cupules a Genuine Type of Art?

This question is based upon the rather dubious assumption that we know what art is. Allowing for the moment that we do, our definition of art would certainly be wide enough to include a non-utilitarian cultural activity practised worldwide by people of almost every race and colour. Its ubiquity alone, never mind the huge effort required, commands our attention. One could go further and say that cupule-creation is a much more powerful cultural expression than a pickled tiger shark or a skull decorated with platinum and diamonds, both of which are icons of contemporary art, courtesy of Damien Hirst.

The last word on the subject belongs to Bednarik himself who admits that he finds it "difficult to see [cupules] as an artefact of our taxonomy." Our only option, he says, is to "consider them as the surviving traces of specific behaviour patterns. In some form or fashion, they represent an endeavour of penetrating into rock in a very specific way".

Also, the amount of time and effort to produce even one cupule is amazing.

Cupule 1, worked to a depth of 1.9 mm, required 8,490 blows involving 72 minutes of actual working time. Cupule 2, worked to a depth of 4.4 mm, required 8,400 blows involving 66 minutes of actual working time, before the tester reached exhaustion. Cupule 3 required 6,916 strikes to reach a depth of 2.55 mm; Cupule 4 took 1,817 strikes to attain a depth of 0.05 mm (then abandoned); Cupule 5 required 21,730 blows and reached a depth of 6.7 mm.

And this is just for one cupule. The article states finding over 500 cupules in one location.

"Given that Daraki-Chattan has over 500 cupules, one can readily appreciate the serious nature of the endeavour.Cupule-making was no trivial exercise - at least not where hard stone was involved."

And what exactly is the meaning or intent behind a cupule? And why do not recent people create cupules as art?

As the source states "No paleo-expert has yet produced a convincing explanation of the cultural or artistic meaning of cupules: nor should we expect one."

And as you stated, it is found nearly all over the world. Why would groups of people all over the world (most likely with no contact with each other), all decide to pound many small dents into hard rock thousands of times?

Also, it appears that almost all the cupules are perfectly symmetrical. It would require a lot of precision for this to be accomplished by an ancient man.

[otseng]

What is it about humans that you believe is novel, as compared to the other primates?

I'll quote Juan Luis Arsuaga:

We are unique and alone now in the world. There is no other animal species that truly resembles our own. A physical and mental chasm separates us from all other living creatures. There is no other bipedal mammal. No other mammal controls and uses fire, writes books, travels in space, paints portraits, or prays. This is not a question of degree. It is all or nothing; there is no semi-pedal animal, none that makes only small fires, writes only short sentences, builds only rudimentary spaceships, draws just a little bit, or prays just occasionally.

The Neanderthal's Necklace: In Search of the First Thinkers