Why are there no human apes alive today?

Just because your great-grandmother isn't still alive, does that mean that you're not related to her?Congratulations. You've created your own PRATT.

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Your beliefs do not effect reality and evidently reality does not effect your beliefs.
-Theodoric

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Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
-Steven Colbert

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I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.
- John Stuart Mill

I thought that according to you there were no other species in the genus Homo.

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Your beliefs do not effect reality and evidently reality does not effect your beliefs.
-Theodoric

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Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
-Steven Colbert

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I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.
- John Stuart Mill

Okay. Care to visit the The Creationist Challenge - Can You Identify Kinds? thread and show us how to differentiate one kind from another? You were the inspiration for that thread, after all.

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Your beliefs do not effect reality and evidently reality does not effect your beliefs.
-Theodoric

​

Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
-Steven Colbert

​

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.
- John Stuart Mill

I thought that according to you there were no other species in the genus Homo.If you don't want to accept a taxonomic system, perhaps you shouldn't use the terminology.

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Your beliefs do not effect reality and evidently reality does not effect your beliefs.
-Theodoric

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Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
-Steven Colbert

​

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.
- John Stuart Mill

So apparently you read neither the posts you're replying to nor the items you're citing.Here's the entirety of the abstract of the paper you refer to:

quote:

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Young-earth creationism has undergone a shift in emphasis toward building of historical models that incorporate Biblical and scientific evidence and the acceptance of scientific conclusions that were formerly rejected. The RATE Group admitted that massive amounts of radioactive decay occurred during earth history but proposed a period of accelerated decay during Noah’s Flood to fit the resulting history into a young-earth timeframe. Finding a mechanism for the acceleration and dealing with the excessive heat and radiation it would generate posed major problems for the project. Catastrophic plate tectonics was proposed to explain continental movements in a short timeframe and serve as a trigger for Noah’s Flood, but other creationists rejected the idea citing hopeless chronological problems. Creationists have also sought to explain the order of the fossil record and the Ice Age in a young-earth timeframe. An examination of these efforts demonstrates the anti-scientific nature of using the Bible as a non-negotiable framework for earth history.

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To me that sounds like the authors are saying quite clearly that creationists have produced nothing substantial or even coherent in their efforts to imitate real science.

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Your beliefs do not effect reality and evidently reality does not effect your beliefs.
-Theodoric

​

Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
-Steven Colbert

​

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.
- John Stuart Mill

Do you actually read any of the items that you link to? (I'm not even going to dignify your methods by saying that you're citing them.)The article from Questia appears to be a 15 year-old study of mathematical data analysis. The one from Wikipedia appears to be about the complexities in establishing taxa using genetic as well as phylogenetic data. In both cases, the general idea is that maximum parsimony is not always the best fit for a data set.* That's quite a bit different from saying that parsimony reveals that taxonomic classification based on evolutionary principles is a fraud. Or something. When a post consists of just a bare link or two and a few lines of incoherent boasting, it's hard to tell exactly what your point is.A better working definition of the parsimony principle might be: all other things being equal, one should prefer the hypothesis that explains the most data while being contradicted by the least data.Saying "goddidt" doesn't do much for explaining data.*Since my ability to understand mathematics is minimal at best, someone should quickly speak up if I've misrepresented either of these papers.

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Your beliefs do not effect reality and evidently reality does not effect your beliefs.
-Theodoric

​

Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
-Steven Colbert

​

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.
- John Stuart Mill

No, those weren't suppositions; that was a list of demonstrable, undeniable similarities that exist between us and the other apes. Or do you want to deny that human beings have fingernails and opposable thumbs, and lack tails?Of course, it's impossible to deny that human beings are also different in some ways from the other apes. If we weren't we wouldn't be in our own genus, would we? We're the only animal on this planet, so far as I know, that builds outdoor barbeques, writes epic poetry in dactylic hexameter, and wears pants of our own free will. That makes us different, but it doesn't makes us better. You only think that algebra and sitcoms and Stonehenge make us better because you can do them. (As a species, anyway. I don't know whether or not you personally had a hand in building Stonehenge.) Not one of us human apes can photosynthesize, live in deep ocean thermal vents, or reproduce by cell division, and ALL of those traits have a greater survival value than reason does.To bring this around to the alleged topic of this thread, I don't think that it's surprising that no other of our Homo cousins have survived. What's surprising is that we've lasted this long.

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Your beliefs do not effect reality and evidently reality does not effect your beliefs.
-Theodoric

​

Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
-Steven Colbert

​

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.
- John Stuart Mill

I really do know how to use effect and affect correctly both as nouns and also as verbs. I assume that Theodoric does as well, and his error was just an oversight. However, in the interest of historical accuracy, I let the original stand.Gosh, this is so much nicer than trying to get some sense out of (or into) Mazzy./off-topicEdited by ZenMonkey, : No reason given.

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Your beliefs do not effect reality and evidently reality does not effect your beliefs.
-Theodoric

​

Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
-Steven Colbert

​

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.
- John Stuart Mill

That's nice. I again invite you over to the The Creationist Challenge - Can You Identify Kinds? thread and demonstrate the creationist method for distinguishing kinds.

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Your beliefs do not effect reality and evidently reality does not effect your beliefs.
-Theodoric

​

Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
-Steven Colbert

​

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.
- John Stuart Mill

Edited by ZenMonkey, : No reason given.Edited by AdminModulous, : picture hidden. use peek if you are curious

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Your beliefs do not effect reality and evidently reality does not effect your beliefs.
-Theodoric

​

Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
-Steven Colbert

​

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.
- John Stuart Mill

And you still haven't addressed my response to this observation: "So what?"I'll gladly agree that human beings show a type of intelligence and self-awareness that is at least quantitatively if not qualitatively different from that of other life forms on this particular planet. Big deal. We're intelligent when it comes to abstract thought and language use, but we only think abstract thought and language are the one and only measure of intelligence because good at them, at least as far as we can tell. Termites have every right to look down on us when it comes to cooperative behavior, giant nest-building, and all-over evolutionary success.I suspect that one of the reasons that creationists have such hatred of the fact of evolution is that it really does show that human beings are nothing special when it comes to the big picture. Cosmology does much the same thing, but they don't seem to get quite as worked up over that. Maybe that's because cosmology is harder to understand, or that our current knowledge of how the universe works is more tentative, or maybe it's just because "I'm a man, not a monkey!" is just an easier slogan to fall back on when you don't have the facts on your side.

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Your beliefs do not effect reality and evidently reality does not effect your beliefs.
-Theodoric

​

Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
-Steven Colbert

​

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.
- John Stuart Mill

Really? You think that this: looks more like this: than it does like this? Really?ABE: Just to be clear, skull number one is a Neanderthal, number two is a mountain gorilla, and number three is a modern human.Edited by ZenMonkey, : No reason given.

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Your beliefs do not effect reality and evidently reality does not effect your beliefs.
-Theodoric

​

Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
-Steven Colbert

​

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.
- John Stuart Mill

No, that question has been answered over and over again. And then some more after that. There is no reason why any species - human beings, wombats, crayfish - has to survive indefinitely. None. Our pre-human and proto-human ancestors lived on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years. The fact that one branch apparently out-competed the others for the same ecological niches is actually a more likely outcome than not. Think of how many non-human animals whose habitats we've destroyed, how many we've already driven into extinction. How much more likely is it that we'd exterminate any other hominid species who was compete with us for space? Your argument is just silly.By the way, I was just wondering - just how old do you think this planet is? It appears that you accept the dating of all the anthropologicall remains we've been discussing, but that hardly agrees with a belief in the truth of the creation story in Genesis. How long do you think that human beings have been on this planet? Is part of the reason that you don't believe that the intermediaries exist is that you believe that all life on this planet has only been here for some thousands of years, not billions?

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Your beliefs do not effect reality and evidently reality does not effect your beliefs.
-Theodoric

​

Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
-Steven Colbert

​

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.
- John Stuart Mill

I'm having some difficulty translating this post from your native Insaneolandia dialect into English. Your entire point appears to be that you - who admit to having no training whatever in any scientific discipline - know more about anatomy, anthropology, and paleontology than thousands of men and women with PhDs and decades of documented field research in those fields, who are all incompetent idiots, mental defectives, and liars. It's an interesting point, but it has nothing to do with the question I asked you in Message 635. Let's try again. I'm talking just about skulls here.Do you really believe that this Neanderthal skull: looks more like this gorilla skull: than this modern human skull? Feet have nothing to do with this. We're just talking about skulls. Do you really think that Neanderthals were non-human apes?I have to point out that none of these images was selected by some mysterious cabal who you refer to as "your researchers." I pulled each image pretty much at random from a simple Google image search. Each is perfectly typical of its type.

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Your beliefs do not effect reality and evidently reality does not effect your beliefs.
-Theodoric

​

Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
-Steven Colbert

​

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.
- John Stuart Mill

In fact, scientists have very good ideas of what the flesh looks like, as the entire field of forensic anthropology can attest.Take a look at this article about one facial facial reconstruction case. Starting with the badly damaged skull seen here: the team of artist and anthropologist was able to reconstruct this likeness, seen with a photo of the individual who was identifed by means of the sculpture (glasses found at the crime scene: If forensic anthropologists can create such a finely detailed reproduction of something so specific as one individual's face, that tends to support the idea that they can create pretty accurate likenesses of the forms of our pre-human ancestors.Edited by ZenMonkey, : Deleted an extraneous unnecessary redundancy.

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Your beliefs do not effect reality and evidently reality does not effect your beliefs.
-Theodoric

​

Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
-Steven Colbert

​

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.
- John Stuart Mill