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Author Topic:   What if Homo erectus was alive today?
Coyote
Member (Idle past 2133 days)
Posts: 6117
Joined: 01-12-2008


Message 3 of 49 (510223)
05-29-2009 1:00 AM


Erectus alive today
That's a very interesting question!
It touches on anthropology, evolution, civil rights, and a host of other topics.
Here's an opener: 100-300 years ago they would have been mostly wiped out by outside occupation and diseases to which they had no immunity.
Now they would be the subject of major civil rights battles in some countries and the subject of exploitation in others. The preachers would be battling the scientists for first crack at them!

Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Coyote
Member (Idle past 2133 days)
Posts: 6117
Joined: 01-12-2008


Message 17 of 49 (510634)
06-01-2009 11:08 PM
Reply to: Message 16 by bluegenes
06-01-2009 7:35 PM


Re: Noah was an Erectus, and Erectus built the Babel tower!
AustinG writes:
Obviously, a discovery of a living population of Homo erectus would stir up the EvC debate. My question is, would this be the smoking gun of evolution for creationists? If not, what arguments could be made in defense of creationism?
That Noah and the people who built the tower of Babel were Erectus, not Sapiens. This is already known to smart creationists like Kurt Wise, on the basis that Erectus is found on three continents, and therefore must be part of the scattering of tribes (Neanderthal too)!
http://EvC Forum: Did Homo Erectus build the Tower of Babel? -->EvC Forum: Did Homo Erectus build the Tower of Babel?
Another example of the anti-science and anti-rational approach creationists take in order to try to justify their beliefs.
They propose these wild "what ifs" without any thought to what the consequences of those "what ifs" might be.
Scientists see the change from Home erectus to modern man taking place over some two million years. Creationists generally balk at the idea that evolution can produce new kinds in two million years--or at all--but now are proposing that such change can occur in a couple of thousand years.
But that's not the best example of creation "science!"
Creationists Lubenow and Woodmorappe write that Homo ergaster, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, and Homo neanderthalensis can best be understood as racial variants of modern man--all descended from Adam and Eve, and most likely arising after the separation of people groups after Babel.
If this was the case, the change from modern man, i.e., Adam and Eve, to these four species of fossil man took place since the Babel incident, which is usually placed after the global flood and in the range of 4,000 to 5,300 years ago. The change from modern man to Homo ergaster would require a rate of evolution on the order of several hundred times faster than scientists posit for the change from Homo ergaster to modern man! This is in spite of the fact that most creationists deny evolution occurs on this scale at all; now they have not only proposed such a change themselves, but see it several hundreds of times faster and in reverse!
And they wonder that we call them anti-science, eh?

Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 16 by bluegenes, posted 06-01-2009 7:35 PM bluegenes has not replied

Replies to this message:
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Coyote
Member (Idle past 2133 days)
Posts: 6117
Joined: 01-12-2008


Message 31 of 49 (510792)
06-03-2009 1:38 PM


Race
Not that its on topic, but...
Race is a shorthand that developed when Europeans began world travel. They described the peoples they met largely in physical terms, and equated that to all sorts of other characteristics such as cultural and mental development.
When anthropologists started studying this they were largely limited to physical traits at first, but with the discovery of genetics and DNA and the like they quickly went beyond that level. It was found that pretty much all of the traits that were both observed and genetic existed in clines, and that these clines overlapped a great deal. This made the concept of race extremely complicated to scientists who studied those traits, and it didn't take long before the concept of race was found to be inadequate to describe what was going on.
But laymen continue to see those observed traits and insist that they can see races. In doing so, they are missing out on a lot of things that scientists discovered and dealt with decades ago.

Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Coyote
Member (Idle past 2133 days)
Posts: 6117
Joined: 01-12-2008


Message 33 of 49 (510805)
06-03-2009 3:22 PM
Reply to: Message 32 by TheWhale
06-03-2009 2:20 PM


Re: Most anthropologists recognize that race is a social concept,
To my way of thinking genetics did not reveal anything unexpected in this regard.
You are wrong.
Genetics reveals different data than the classical (visible) traits.
For example, fingerprint patterns show a different distribution than do classical traits. So do blood types. So do dozens of other traits. Physical form has more to do with geography and environmental conditions than anything else, while genetics has more to do with patterns of descent.
There are at least three Pygmy- or Negrito-type groups around the world. These groups share many physical traits but are quite different genetically.

Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 32 by TheWhale, posted 06-03-2009 2:20 PM TheWhale has not replied

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