Bones of Contentions.

Thanks for the compliment.However, the validity of the theory of evolution isn't dependent on anthropologists' theories about how a particular human trait arose. As Crashfrog says, anthropologists have lots of different theories about why humans developed large brain sizes (in fact, sometimes it seems that inventing a new theory is part of the rite of passage for an anthropologist). But even if every one of these different theories proved incorrect that would have no bearing on the theory of evolution itself.

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

It sounds like you and Crashfrog do not agree that RAZD has actually refuted the argument and instead are offering alternatives.What we can say, based on the evidence, is the old notion that larger mutated brain size and associated intelligence was the key to survival (and exclusively successful reproduction where allegedly smaller brained hominids failed) has been largely invalidated - at least intelligence as measured by IQ.Would you agree?Can anyone detail the alternaitve explanations and the evidence that leads to those as potential solutions?Analytical Regards to "Big Headed" Hominids

I haven't followed RAZD's posts in this thread so I have no ability to judge. I'm simply offering an alternate line of discussion. Well, naturally. IQ measures education, not innate mental ability. Why would we expect to see a corellation between brain size and IQ? Between IQ and income level, perhaps. (Which we do.)A better question is, do our larger brains bestow mental abilities that we wouldn't have otherwise? I don't know. Does the fact that humans experience loss of faculty when portions of our brains are removed suggest that we do?

Thanks, but that is why I specified interconnectedness rather than raw area, but do note that raw area, like raw size provides opportunity for more interconnectedness, (especially in closely related species and "all else being equal" caveats).When neuron interconnections are maximized for a given area, and area is maximized within a given volume, what development could further increase brain power?Note that the evolutionary drive would be for greater intelligence (if it was benefical to survival or reproduction) and not directly for brain size. Thus more neurons to increase interconnections for a given area, more convolutions to increase area within a given volume, and more volume all come in to play. I would also expect the development of more neurons and more area to be "easier" to accomplish by selection for intelligence. And I would also expect a range of selected "solutions" to be existant within the populations - some with more area, some with more neuron density, some with larger heads - because the selection would be for intelligence by whatever means.Also, there appears to be some correlation with small sized brains and loss of intellectual capabilities in some humans, as noted in Message 124 (which I would put down to loss of opportunity for normal interconnectedness due to reduced volume): Other comments in the article were: And they also discuss the (rough) correlation of raw size, surface area and intelligence. The article at the bottom talks about some mice with increased cortical area by genetic manipulation, and it will be interesting to see further research in this area.Enjoyps -- You may have to pick "Sizing Up the Brain" from this link:
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20021116/
if the one above doesn't work.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

This is now twice that John Ponce has attacked me by inference in responses to other posts rather than respond to my posts.Note that he has not been able to refute a single point I have made, nor has he shown a single argument of mine to be logically invalid (as he has asserted in his ad hominum attack in Message 149) and is resorting instead to this cowards move.Again this, like his fallacious appeals to anonymous authority, just proves that he has no substantiation for his position and is just looking for ways to repeat it after it has been refuted.This is just more "shuck and jive" rather than honest debate.Enjoy.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

"In other words the multi-regional model favoured by Lubenow is more congenial to racism than the out-of-Africa model he calls racist."Lubenow doesn't "favor" the MRCM. That's a misreprestation of Lubenow's work since he considers all neo-Darwinist theories of human evolution to be racist and only uses the MRCM to point out how neo-Darwinist theorists disagree with each other." - any hypothesis which minimises the African contribution to the modern gene pool is likely to be favoured by racists who discriminate against "blacks."Since Lubenow considers all people to equally share in the common gene pool of all of our human ancestors who didn't descend from African apes, (Aboriginal Africans included) I will only point out that any "hypothesis which minimises" the Neandertal contribution "to the modern gene pool" is "likely to be favoured by" neo-Darwinist evolutionists who may naturally be inclined to harbor prejudicial feelings against the ancestors and descendents of Neandertal members of the human race, since they tend to regard them as an extinct species of 'cave-men,' unworthy of even being considered full and equal members of some highly intelligent and more advanced Homo sapiens species!

quote:

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...They tend to regard them as an extinct species of 'cave-men,' unworthy of even being considered full and equal members of some highly intelligent and more advanced Homo sapiens species!

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Few, if any, "evolutionists" consider neanderthals to be "unworthy" in any meaningful sense of the word. So the points you are trying to make are invalid.

"Indeed, perhaps the Aryan supremacists should focus on their neanderthal traits and persecute those with H. erectus or A. robustus like attributes."There is no more need to theoretically associate any people with Neandertals in such a way than there is to originally associate or classify aboriginal African people with non-human primates the way neo-Darwinist theorists do.

"Now your racism is showing ()... just to make sure that this is still on topic for this thread... "Don't forget the fact that all neo-Darwinst theories of human evolution are racist, especially regarding the relative merits of some human skulls possessing different cranial capacities, according to Crawford and Lubenow.

quote:

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...According to Crawford and Lubenow.

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Since neither Crawford nor Lubenow have a credible argument, there isn't much merit to the rest of the post.

"As evidence goes this is weak, why not quote some of the evidence, or provide the references Lubenow uses to support his claims? Unless you are just trying to drum up sales for Lubenow simply suggesting everyone read his book is a poor way to debate. You wanted to discuss his ideas, why aren't you prepared to provide the evidence neccessary to do so?"I wish I could, and if his book was in CD form, would, since it is so much easier to copy text than to manually enter it into a computer verbatim. If I start now, then there would be no end to it and my time and efforts would far excede the time and effort spent procuring the original publication for oneself. It would be so much easier if you had the book since then we could refer to chapter, page and the many hundreds of scientific notations. Besides, quoting outside sources and other professionals are just appeals to authority so I don't see why posters need to refer to them unless to back up their own understanding or interpretation of human evolution and creation."No one else thinks that different 'species' of African ape were involved for different modern populations, we are all thought to have evolved from the same species of African apes."Neo-Darwinsts only associate and connect the whole human race to some species of African apes by first theorizing and showing "evidence" that the first African people originated from apes there. Since the original African people didn't originate or evolve from apes at all, creationists are hard pressed to believe in and follow neo-Darwinist racial theories of sub-human evolution in Africa."How human is "very human", are you claiming that H. neaderthalensis and H. habilis are indistinguishable from H. sapiens?"Of course not, but "distinguishing" and classifying the fossilized remains of our human ancestors as different and separate 'species' in an evolutionist order of primates in the same family as apes, based only on differences in skull morphology, is no different than "distinguishing" and classifying people today on the basis of racial diversification and variety. Just because neo-Darwinists classify H. erectus, sapiens and neandertalis fossils as different and separate 'species,' doesn't mean they they are. How can they be all be different species and full and equal members of the human race at the same time. I thought neo-Darwinsts presumed that racial varieties were a sub-set of a species like H. sapiens and not the other way around. The way neo-Darwinsts go about classifying our human ancestors is to divide the human race up into sub-species."Why not exactly go into the details of which "African apes" you think modern evolutionary theories are ignoring the descent from for modern populations of humans.'You're asking the question backwards since neo-Darwinists aren't exactly sure which species of apes the first African people evolved from. Most of them prefer to tell us that we are all ancestrally descended from an African woman of our own species (no origin by evolution of species there) who is our common human ancestor. (That mimics the Adam and Eve theory of course) What neo-Darwinists don't like to talk about too much is that their racial theories also assume that African Eve's tribe of Homo sapiens were the exclusive chosen people (natural selection at work here) to pass on their chimpanzee genes to succeeding generations of African superwomen who eventually spawned, generated and re-populated the whole human race by genetic "replacement." As neo-Darwinsts would have it, all other pedigrees were extinguished, rather than becoming distinguished."Your very last point totally fails to answer the question I asked, in fact it seems to admit that the only 'racism' present is to populations which you claim are human but which are generally thought of as extinct related species. So in fact there is no current target for the supposed racism, this isn't a basis for racism against Africans, Chinese, Ameircan indians or any other modern day population."Depends on who different people think their human ancestors were, other than neo-Darwinist apes."In fact, as has been suggested, your own theory provides a much greater gap between the many modern populations in terms of ancestry, given the clear differences between the disputed populations, and therefore seems more conducive to racist interpretations."Now you're blaming the messenger for the message, just because I'm not the same 'scientific' type that you are.

"In this regard, bacteria and insects prove to be far superior to humans of any 'race' or species. Homo Sapiens are considered superior to other Homos purely in the quantifiable and self-evident sense that Homo sapiens survived, and the other ones didn't. We are not more superior than pigs evolutionarily speaking, until one of us becomes extinct or endangered."Thank you for introducing and adding neo-Darwinist concepts and notions of "superiority" in our discussion of human origins and evolution.It may be the case that one race has genes more adapted to surviving whatever climate change is upcoming than any other. However, we do not know which race that is, until such time as one race is extinct or near extinct."Why don't we substitute 'race' for neo-Darwinist concepts, notions and classifications of different and separate human 'species' within the previous human race whose existence is only evidenced by the remains of their fossilized skeletons, since such theoretical categories may only be established according to 'definition' and biologically determined by physical tests for interfertility."Whilst one can, at a push, describe this as racism (the belief that one race is superior to another), but it is unnecesarily emotive use of language, and is not conducive to clear communication. So in that, the language usage fails."I appreciate your linguistic insight into the matter here, and agree that human semantics and epistomolgy are the root of the problem in determining the truth about human origins."In this case, evolutionary racism, is quantifiable and not arbitrary, it also does not cause humans to treat others poorly or violently, and does not involve prejudice or discrimination in our social affairs."It has in the past and may do so again in the future. Lubenow claims that both past, present and future generations of human beings are being discriminated against as a direct result of prejudiced neo-Darwinst theories about human evolution out of African apes."And that is where the word racism really applies, to our social interactions, not to the interactions of an impersonal phenomenon we have identified."Yes, but we still have to have standard definitions of such terms as race and species, otherwise we shall never be able to distinguish between them. For instance; how do you tell the difference between the current human race and an extinct human species? Would you say that there was no racial variety in humanity before H. sapiens arrived on the scene or that racism didn't exist before sapiens replaced all other descendents of apes?"A dictionary definition might let you wangle the point, but if you pick up a book on racism, you'll find that racism means a lot more than the one or two sentence definitions the lexicographers are often limited to."I totally agree with you here and would add that there may be even more theories about the human race than are dreamt of in your philosophy."If the African race was dying out, due to climate change, would an evolutionist treat an African differently than a white man?"That's a good question, since neo-Darwinist evolutionists are not exactly well-known or famous for their humanitarian campaigns to raise money for starving African men, women and children."If so, the evolutionist is racist, not the theory which he accepts as the best theory to describe the diversity of life."Sorry. Neo-Darwinist theories are scientifically racist, not the everyday folk who unwittingly or inadvertently subscribe to them.

"Sounds like some ignorant creationist pulp. There is no strong evidence that Neanderthals left any descendents. They were a separate species and the strong indications are that there is no Neanderthal genetic material in Homo sapiens sapins genome."Since when do creationists or other people who believe in the Bible or Koran have to take the racist theories of neo-Darwinist geneticists at their word? Wake up and smell the God-given creationist coffee or go down with the sinking ship of neo-Darwinist racism.

"Since Homo neandertalensis et al. are not being denied jobs or other rights enjoyed by H. sapiens, it seems the point is rather moot."Moot only to the point that modern H. neandertalis descendants are being denied their common human ancestry and social heritage by neo-Darwinist biologists, psychologists and sociologists in public institutions which may be more culturally relevant and important than their getting a job with some neo-Darwinist corporation or Homo sapiens government institution.

"And I thought you Yanks didn't get irony...
Oops! Wrong Planet"What continent are you posting from?