Evolution - A serious question.
- Thread starter TroutBum
- Start date
♪alt13
Well-Known Member
I'm not certain that this is consensus but I think it's the other way around. We are weaklings because of our hands(as opposed to: we have hands because we are weak). One doesn't need to be the biggest dude around if he can use a weapon. It's pretty straightforward to see how tool use would lead to less strength but I don't think there is a clear reason why a lack of strength would lead to tools or the hands needed to use them.
Our hand is a refinement/re-purposing of a climbing limb. The driver of the change seems to be the tools themselves. Once you have developed tools any change that allows you to use them more effectively will be highly advantageous.
I was thinking the same thing. Do you have a link? My gut feeling that it's a bit of both. A self-reinforcing feedback mechanism.
♪alt13
Well-Known Member
Sorry, I don't. I imagine you are right and it is a little of both. Primarily I think it is the tool use that allows for lack of strength.
Strength is not actually all that it's cracked up to be. It takes a lot of calories. If you don't need the extra strength to survive and procreate it will be selected out by famine and hardship.
Also a social group that uses less calories per "unit" can be larger. More hands = more weapons to take territory.
♪alt13
Well-Known Member
You're preaching to the choir.
I hope I don't sound preachy, I'm just super into the 'drivers' of evolution. **** is fascinating. I think metabolism is often over looked.
Oh, not at all. It's a fairly common idiom... I just meant that I hold a similar view. The combination of deft tool manipulation with sufficient intelligence is a far superior than more traditional physical tools as a measure of fitness. Energy use is a simplification, of course, but it is often used in evolutionary arguments, and it is instructive. Like always at this hour, I'm in bed reading and too lazy to type long responses from my tablet, but I agree with you.
Darkwing Duck
Well-Known Member
Usable hands is a byproduct of bipedalism. Prevailing thought used to be that ancestors of humans developed bipedalism as a result of dwindling forest and rising grassland. Recent finds date bipedalism to before vast loss of African forests, so that thought proved incorrect.
Current thought so far as I know is bipedalism was a desired trait because it opened up the males in particular to better help with food acquisition.
Quick search has this article saying it's an adaptation to more flexible branches. https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/talks/wonac/sue.d/Thorpe-et-al-Science-2007.pdf
Current thought so far as I know is bipedalism was a desired trait because it opened up the males in particular to better help with food acquisition.
Quick search has this article saying it's an adaptation to more flexible branches. https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/talks/wonac/sue.d/Thorpe-et-al-Science-2007.pdf
Red
Well-Known Member
As recently as 50,000 years ago, there were at least 4 species of humans on Earth. Ourselves, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and an unknown group. Europeans all have some Neanderthal genes. Australasians have some Denisovan ancestry. Probably better seen as subspecies since Homo sapiens was able to breed with these other human groups....
https://www.sci-news.com/otherscien...-neanderthal-genome-fourth-lineage-01624.html
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/denisovan-genome/
https://www.livinganthropologically.com/anthropology/denisovans-neandertals-human-races/
https://www.sci-news.com/otherscien...-neanderthal-genome-fourth-lineage-01624.html
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/denisovan-genome/
https://www.livinganthropologically.com/anthropology/denisovans-neandertals-human-races/
Red
Well-Known Member
Very nuanced rebuttal.....
Red
Well-Known Member
Sorry, must have missed your question. No, not my find. The Mrs. found a small one years ago, and I hunt one site that yields Late Paleo forms. The one pictured was found in Ohio. Yes, been an artifact hunter for many years. Belong to the American Society for Amateur Archaelogy(ASAA). Dr. "Mike" Gramly's working group. Recently undertook further excavations at the Sugarloaf site in Deerfield, Ma. Gramly considers it the largest Clovis habitation site in North America. The peopling of the Americas is the most exciting frontier in American archaeology at the moment. Now that we know people were here before the people who developed Clovis technology, it has gotten very exciting.
Anyway, I figured if I'm hanging around, needed to remove the Cotton avatar, lol...
Nice. I'm a 3rd generation hunter (back home in Kentucky we called it airhead huntin).
EXTENSIVE collection. Saddleback bannerstones, butterfly banners, 100+ axes, 200+ celts, cases and cases of needles, awls, hairpins, probably 50+ fluted points..
Most came from the Falls of the Ohio area. Now I live in the desert southwest. Tons of stuff but different. Pots, sandals, etc..
Red
Well-Known Member
Wow, sounds like a great collection. The trouble with hunting southeastern New England is most all the fields are picked over for generations by now. Years ago, we switched from fields to hunting the shoreline of our bays, Narragansett Bay mostly. Now even those spots are getting played out. Yeah, a whole lot bigger hobby in a place like Ky. We don't even have artifact shows up here. Just not as big as it is elsewhere. SW archaeology and prehistory is something I've always enjoyed. Would love to take my wife out there someday to show her all the great Anasazi ruins I visited in my own youth. Have a couple Hohokom pottery pieces I purchased last year, but 90+% of our collection are personal finds.
Red
Well-Known Member
I majored in History a lifetime ago. In graduate school, I concentrated on the History of Science. My thesis was an examination of the collaboration between Nobel prize winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli, and noted psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Jung's essay "Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle in Nature" was a seminal work, and Pauli recognized that understanding the place of consciousness in nature was a frontier of science that would certainly bear fruit in time. I was a bit ahead of my time. Noted historian of science Arthur Koestler recognized the importance of this collaboration of psychologist and physicist,and took much the same stance I did in his seminal study of Jung and Pauli's collaboration, in his book The Roots of Coincidence.
What you evidently consider nonsense, understanding the place of consciousness in nature, is one of the most important of scientific frontiers. It is people like Richard Dawkins who are destined for the dustbin of history. A failed paradigm called Scientism will join him there....
One of the bottom lines here is quantum physics is revealing a universe that more closely resembles a giant mind, which is in sharp contrast to the "universe as giant machine" that emerges from Newtonian physics. In view of Bronco70's question, I believe my reply to him was somewhat relevant to his inquiry. It bears no relation to the subject of evolution. But it certainly bears a relation to the questions he asked and the observations he was suggesting. If consciousness is something fundamental to creation, that pretty much changes everything as far as how we interpret reality. It is in this realm of study that the most fundamental paradigm shifts will occur. And as Thomas Kuhn observed in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, we can expect the old guard, protectors of the dogma of scientific materialism, to go out kicking and screaming all the way.
Seems like every generation thinks their paradigms are the final ones, nothing new to learn. Meteorite studies a good example of that. In the 18th century, French scientists dismissed reports by peasants that stones had been seen to fall from the sky as the rantings of "uneducated dolts". Science did not have to pay attention to French peasants. Yet, in that instance, the science that said stones cannot fall from a clear sky was very, very wrong. The old guard fights new ideas tooth and nail. Even just 20 years ago, you had better have tenure to suggest people were in the Americas before about 13,000 years ago. Careers ruined for suggesting there were people here before the Clovis hunters. Careers ruined for believing in the truth and suggesting better interpretations of the data. Should not work that way, but, in fact, human nature sees to it that that is exactly how progress is attained: by pitched battles in obscure journals between the New and the Old guard.....
Last edited:
Red
Well-Known Member
I used to supplement our personal finds with stuff from local collections. I did bring a few rare pieces into the collection that way. Other then local stuff, bought a few no brainer authentic fluted points. (And one real good reason to never buy is the great number of fakes out there). In recent years, selling everything but personal finds. Those will never be sold, but kept as a collection. The number of fluted points your family has found is amazing. Some folks have all the fun!
carolinajazz
Well-Known Member
50,000 years ago? Who told you this...the evolution "fairy?"
Truly reliable evidence of man’s activity on earth is given, not in millions of years, but in thousands. For example, in The Fate of the Earth we read: “Only six or seven thousand years ago .... civilization emerged, enabling us to build up a human world.”
The Last Two Million Years states: “In the Old World, most of the critical steps in the farming revolution were taken between 10,000 and 5000 BC.” It also says: “Only for the last 5000 years has man left written records.”
The fact that the fossil record shows modern man suddenly appearing on earth, and that reliable historical records are admittedly recent, harmonizes with the Bible’s chronology for human life on earth.
Nobel prize winning nuclear physicist W.F. Libby, one of the pioneers in radiocarbon dating, stated in Science: “The research in the development of the dating technique consisted of two stages—dating of samples from the historical and the prehistorical epochs, respectively. Arnold [a co-worker] and I had our first shock when our advisers informed us that history extended back only for 5000 years. ... You read statements to the effect that such and such a society or archaeological site is 20,000 years old. We learned rather abruptly that these numbers, these ancient ages, are not known accurately.
When reviewing a book on evolution, English author Malcolm Muggeridge commented on the lack of evidence for evolution. He noted that wild speculations flourished nevertheless. Then he said: “The Genesis account seems, by comparison, sober enough and at least has the merit of being validly related to what we know about human beings and their behavior.” He said that the unfounded claims of millions of years for man’s evolution “and wild leaps from skull to skull, cannot but strike anyone not caught up in the [evolutionary] myth as pure fantasy.”
Muggeridge concluded: “Posterity will surely be amazed, and I hope vastly amused, that such slipshod and unconvincing theorizing should have so easily captivated twentieth-century minds and been so widely and recklessly applied.”
DutchJazzer
Banned
I've run experiments where no "conscious" observer did a thing. A photodetector collapsed the wave function (I'm treating the existence of the collapse as a fact here, which it isn't), a computer recorder the results and made necessary computations. I learned about it the next day when I woke up.
Comrades, we must develop theories about how photodetectors preceded matter. Those so-called scientists and their anti-photodetectorism should get off their high horse and accept what photodetector mystics haven been saying since the start of this post.
Only nuanced rebuttals accepted please.
Last edited: