Evolution is Unscientific

[Aupmanyav]

That is a religious question.

That also is a question of science.

 

[Aupmanyav]

What we cannot know is how it really was.

That is a categorical statement. What makes you say so?
Obviously, Tanakh, Bible, Quran and Kitab-i-Aqdas.

 

[muhammad_isa]

I have just one question. Why there is anything at all?

..and what do you expect to achieve with such a question?

It is clear that there IS "anything at all" .. we are aware of that.
The why is hidden from us .. we are effectively imprisoned in our physical bodies .. for now.
You have confidence in mankind and his science (observations), while I have confidence in God.
eg. God's perfect (Holy) justice

 

[RJM]

That is a categorical statement. What makes you say so?
Obviously, Tanakh, Bible, Quran and Kitab-i-Aqdas.

You omit direct experience of the divine assistance? The books are just maps?

 

[Aupmanyav]

The why is hidden from us .. we are effectively imprisoned in our physical bodies .. for now.
You have confidence in mankind and his science (observations), while I have confidence in God.

Yeah, as if there is a life-after. We have our different beliefs.

 

[Aupmanyav]

You omit direct experience of the divine assistance? The books are just maps?

Never encountered any. One may believe happenings to be divine assistance (like escaping Covid-19 when billions could not).

 

[juantoo3]

That also is a question of science.

I disagree. Science asks "how?" Religion asks "why?"

 

[juantoo3]

I have just one question. Why there is anything at all? That includes existence of God. After things begin to exist, then only there is nature.

G!d is Love.

He would like His Love reciprocated. He would like His creation to adore Him in gratitude.

Humans have been given the choice to do so...or not. It is called Free Will.

May sound hokey, but when one goes trudging through the bullrushes, that is what is found.

You asked.

 

[juantoo3]

Matter, light, energy, everything

Light is energy.

 

[Aupmanyav]

I disagree. Science asks "how?" Religion asks "why?"

Science asks many questions, not just how. It asks who, why, when, what conditions, etc., and does not rest till all is known.

 

[Aupmanyav]

G!d is Love.
He would like His Love reciprocated. He would like His creation to adore Him in gratitude.
Humans have been given the choice to do so...or not. It is called Free Will.

Love is a most abused word, reminds me of the story of 'Little Red Riding Hood'.
Why does God need people's love? What gratitude. Some 300 have died because of heat in India. And then would come the rain and floods.
You think we should be grateful for HIV, Ebola, Covid and volcanoes?
Free will again is hokey. Circumstances make us act that way.
I am a strong atheist, juantoo. These words have no value for me.

 

[talib-al-kalim]

That is a categorical statement. What makes you say so?
Obviously, Tanakh, Bible, Quran and Kitab-i-Aqdas.

referring to my statement,

What we can know if we don't close our eyes is that the world was not really created in 6 days as the creation myths say.
What we cannot know is how it really was.

I consider the creation narratives as myths, i.e. a story with a message, not a report on what happened. We can know this from the scientific evaluation of all observations in biology, chemistry, astronomy and physics. But with all our science, we are not able to know how it really was.

 

[talib-al-kalim]

Love is a most abused word, reminds me of the story of 'Little Red Riding Hood'.
Why does God need people's love? What gratitude. Some 300 have died because of heat in India. And then would come the rain and floods.
You think we should be grateful for HIV, Ebola, Covid and volcanoes?
Free will again is hokey. Circumstances make us act that way.
I am a strong atheist, juantoo. These words have no value for me.

God does not need love. We need to love to be in harmony with the all around us.

God does not need gratitude. We need to be grateful for and respectful to all around us, because there's plenty, in particular if we all know what we really need.

There's rain and sunshine. Sometimes, there is too little or too much of it. We should do what we can do with our knowledge to avoid the climate to change, and to prevent damage. The laws of nature are as they are.

Our will and our attitude has an impact if we act.

 

[juantoo3]

Love is a most abused word, reminds me of the story of 'Little Red Riding Hood'.
Why does God need people's love? What gratitude. Some 300 have died because of heat in India. And then would come the rain and floods.
You think we should be grateful for HIV, Ebola, Covid and volcanoes?
Free will again is hokey. Circumstances make us act that way.
I am a strong atheist, juantoo. These words have no value for me.

As I knew they would. Words can only point to the actions, behaviors and experiences.

Doesn't change what is.

Are you deceitful to your neighbor? Do you steal from your brother? Do you murder your father? Are you sexually inappropriate with your sister?

I want to believe you would not do such things. Whether you acknowledge G!d or not is irrelevant if you treat your fellow humans respectfully and protect your charges against those who would behave inappropriately.

What is love? Some say it is chemicals in the brain, and that is sufficient to prove love exists.

I've shown here in the past 3 separate, unrelated studies that show the exact same chemicals in the exact same places in the brain when people reverently pray and worship G!d. Funny, chemicals in the brain prove love exists, but the same chemicals in the same places of the brain still are not enough to prove G!d exists. That's science for you.

 

[juantoo3]

Science asks many questions, not just how. It asks who, why, when, what conditions, etc., and does not rest till all is known.

Evidence, please? One simple example will suffice.

Maybe I can help a little: who is the sky blue?, why is the sky blue?, what is the sky blue?, which is the sky blue?, when is the sky blue?

How is the sky blue? Light refracting through the atmosphere. The other questions are meaningless to science.

 

[muhammad_isa]

Why does God need people's love? What gratitude. Some 300 have died because of heat in India. And then would come the rain and floods..

I'm sure there are plenty of things that you should be thankful for..
..or perhaps you are 'suffering' from an excess of wealth?

 

[Faithfulservant]

Speaking of Love. How is it that my husband and I can have the exact same thoughts at the exact same time. Or we develop sympathy pains for each other.. or we take on each other's moods. Love is more than a feeling it's chemical it's a supernatural blending of each others energies. How many times when I was a young mother with small children and I just instinctively knew when they were in danger. It's more than a feeling.

I've been reading through this thread and in my searching out the truth from the lies I learned about micro and macro evolution.

Macroevolution refers to larger changes over a much longer time scale. Macroevolution can result in speciation or the emergence of new species. Microevolution results in smaller, but still noticeable, changes that do not result in the divergence of a new species. Microevolutionary changes occur within a population.

I have yet to have anyone prove to me a proof of macroevolution. Although with all the man made experiments messing with DNA and cross species manipulation.. nothing would surprise me.

 

[juantoo3]

I don't want to lose this, for reference....fascinating.

The Middle and Late Pleistocene is arguably the most interesting period in human evolution. This broad period witnessed the evolution of our own lineage, as well as that of our sister taxon, the Neanderthals, and related Denisovans. It is exceptionally rich in both fossil and archaeological remains, and uniquely benefits from insights gained through molecular approaches, such as paleogenetics and paleoproteomics, that are currently not widely applicable in earlier contexts. This wealth of information paints a highly complex picture, often described as ‘the Muddle in the Middle,’ defying the common adage that ‘more evidence is needed’ to resolve it. Here we review competing phylogenetic scenarios and the historical and theoretical developments that shaped our approaches to the fossil record, as well as some of the many remaining open questions associated with this period. We propose that advancing our understanding of this critical time requires more than the addition of data and will necessitate a major shift in our conceptual and theoretical framework.
Keywords: Homo heidelbergensis, Neanderthals, Modern human origins, Speciation, Hybridization


The Middle to Late Pleistocene is highly relevant for the study of human origins. This is the period when the ancestral lineage of living humans developed, thought to have first emerged as early as ca. 300 ka in Africa from both fossil (Hublin et al., 2017) and genetic (Schlebusch et al., 2017; Lipson et al., 2020) evidence. It also witnessed the evolution of the Neanderthals, an iconic Pleistocene Eurasian species. Their trajectory is relatively well documented through a comparatively abundant record comprising partial fossil skeletons seemingly preserved through intentional burial, as well as a wealth of associated archaeological remains and, more recently, paleogenetic information and even complete genomes. The convergence of the Neanderthal and modern human lineages and its aftermath, starting at ca. 60 ka with the major dispersal of modern humans out of Africa and concluding with the extinction of Neanderthals ca. 39 ka, is also relatively well understood—even if the primary driving forces behind it (e.g., demographic, environmental, cultural, cognitive) are still intensely debated.
Beyond these areas of broad agreement lie more murky domains. Most importantly, it is unclear how many taxa or lineages are represented by the observed variation, how they were related to each other, and how the intensifying climatic oscillations of this period affected their diversification. While African Homo erectus, sometimes recognized as a different taxon, Homo ergaster, is commonly considered to have given rise to the precursors of both the Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis lineages (e.g., Hublin, 2009; Bergström et al., 2021), Asian H. erectus is thought to have persisted until the late Pleistocene (Rizal et al., 2020), possibly giving rise to the small-bodied insular taxa identified in Flores, Indonesia (Brown et al., 2004), and, more recently, in Luzon, the Philippines (Détroit et al., 2019). The recently discovered small-brained Homo naledi in southern Africa, a possible descendant of African H. erectus, was revealed to date surprisingly late at ca. 300 ka (Berger et al., 2015; Robbins et al., 2021), greatly expanding the range of human variation that was contemporaneous, and possibly sympatric, with the earliest representatives of the H. sapiens lineage. The Middle to Late Pleistocene fossil record of Asia has long been recognized as complex, and the relationships of these fossils to either the H. neanderthalensis or the H. sapiens lineages is under intense discussion. The identification of a genetic lineage closely related to Neanderthals, dubbed the ‘Denisovans’ (Krause et al., 2010; Reich et al., 2010), has only recently been linked to fossil remains preserving more complete morphology (Xiahe, Tibetan plateau of China: Chen et al., 2019). Without informative anatomy preserved, it has not been possible to assign these mysterious hominins to taxon (but see Derevianko, 2011; Anagnostou et al., 2015; Zubova et al., 2017; Agadjanian and Shunkov, 2018). However, several candidates may represent this genetic form, including the recently described Homo longi (Ji et al., 2021; Ni et al., 2021) and other recent fossil finds from China (e.g., Xuchang: Li et al., 2017; Hualongdong: Wu et al., 2019, 2021), in addition to well-studied specimens, such as e.g., the Narmada cranium, India (Sonakia, 1985, 2007; Sankhyan, 2007; Athreya, 2011; Kennedy, 2014), or the Maba or Jinniushan fossils from China (Woo and Peng, 1959; Wu, 1988; 2017; Wu and Bruner 2016).

These developments highlight the diversity, co-existence, and likely sympatry of several hominin lineages in the Middle to Late Pleistocene, while at the same time underlining multiple instances of genetic exchange among at least some of them, toppling the assumption that (complete) reproductive isolation is a prerequisite for evolutionary distinctiveness, and challenging previous models of modern human origins based on either regional continuity or complete replacement (e.g., Holliday, 2003; Holliday et al., 2014; Smith et al., 2017). They have also prompted a re-examination of the role of hybridization in human evolution, a process that occurs at greater rates than previously appreciated even among commonly accepted extant mammalian species (e.g., Mallet, 2001; Holliday, 2003; Ackermann et al., 2019; Harvati and Ackermann, 2022). Recent work has found, for example, that more than 10% of all primate species engage in cross-species hybridization (Zinner et al., 2011), an observation that is difficult to reconcile with the provisos of the BSC. Furthermore, a survey of 146 hybrid crosses among eutherian mammals found that reproductive isolation tends to correlate with time of divergence, with interfertility among lineages dropping after 2 Ma of separate evolution (Holliday et al., 2014)—a much greater timeframe than current estimates of 500–700 ka for the divergence of modern humans from the Neanderthal and Denisovan lineages, or from other archaic lineages ca. 1 Ma (Bergström et al., 2021). Indeed, speciation itself is increasingly recognized as a process of continuous differentiation rather than an event, with morphological distinctiveness not necessarily coinciding with (complete) reproductive isolation, and with natural selection, rather than geographic isolation, as a potential driving factor (Mallet, 2001; Wu, 2001; Yoder, 2014; van Holstein and Foley, 2022). Such an understanding of speciation, emphasizing selection in addition to, or instead of, geographic isolation and decoupled from barriers to reproduction, might be the key to disentangling the Middle to Late Pleistocene human fossil record going forward.

Given the relatively recent diversification and interfertility of the Middle to Late Pleistocene human lineages, combined with their morphological distinctiveness maintained over time (at least in the case of H. neanderthalensis and H. sapiens), the concepts of ‘allotaxa’ (morphologically distinct but reproductively compatible taxa; Jolly, 2001), ‘syngamea’ (stable, cohesive species which maintain their identity across significant amounts of time even though they hybridize; Lotsy, 1925; Holliday, 2003) or ‘evolutionary lineages’ sensu Stringer (2016; distinct evolutionary units maintaining their identity through time despite low levels of introgression), rather than the BSC or the PSC, may be the most appropriate concepts to grapple with the diversity of the Middle to Late Pleistocene hominins. The application of these concepts eliminates the conflict between the criteria of interfertility vs. morphological/genetic differences and therefore also the debate, for example, of the species status of Neanderthals, who can be recognized as a distinct allotaxon or lineage. Such concepts, linked with a new understanding of speciation, would recognize the evolutionary significance of phenotypic distinctiveness maintained through time, established through a variety of evolutionary processes not necessarily requiring allopatry, including population structure, genetic drift, and natural selection; while accepting a degree of genetic permeability and lateral gene transfer as a potentially important element of lineage evolution (see, e.g., the adaptive nature of high-altitude relevant alleles contributed to modern humans by Denisovans; Huerta-Sánchez et al., 2014).

Following these developments, current understanding of the origin of modern humans has shifted from previous models based on regional continuity (‘Multiregional Hypothesis’; e.g., Wolpoff et al., 1994) or replacement (strict ‘Out of Africa’ model; Stringer and Andrews, 1988). While the principal ancestry of modern humans is recognized to lie in Africa based on both genetic and fossil evidence, a small component of the genetic ancestry of all non-Africans is now understood to have originated from Neanderthals (ca. 2–3%; Prüfer et al., 2021) and, in some populations, also from Denisovans, who are discussed further below (up to 4% in Australian and New Guinean groups and up to 6% in some indigenous populations from the Philippines; Reich et al., 2010; Larena et al., 2021). Therefore models closer to the ‘replacement with hybridization’ (Bräuer, 1984) or ‘assimilation’ (Smith et al., 2005, 2017) scenarios are better suited to current knowledge (e.g., Aiello, 1993; Stringer, 2014). The timing of modern human origins has also been pushed back from between 200–100 ka to >300 ka, based on fossil (see below) but also genetic data, with deep modern human lineages coalescing around this time (e.g., Schlebusch et al., 2017; Bergström et al., 2020; Lipson et al., 2020).

<emphasis mine, -juan>


aPaleoanthropology, Institute for Archaeological Sciences and Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment, Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, Rümelinstrasse 19-23, Tübingen 72070, Germany
bDFG Centre for Advanced Studies ‘Words, Bones, Genes, Tools: Tracking Linguistic, Cultural and Biological Trajectories of the Human Past’, Rümelinstrasse 19-23, Tübingen 72070, Germany
cDepartment of Anthropology, University of Kentucky, 211 Lafferty Hall, Lexington, KY 40506, USA
dWilliam S. Webb Museum of Anthropology, University of Kentucky, 1020 Export St, Lexington, KY 40504, USA
Katerina Harvati: ed.negnibeut-inu.ufi@itavrah.aniretak
∗Corresponding author. ed.negnibeut-inu.ufi@itavrah.aniretak

NIH link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9703123/




Humanity in an animal state.

 

[juantoo3]

Speaking of Love. How is it that my husband and I can have the exact same thoughts at the exact same time. Or we develop sympathy pains for each other.. or we take on each other's moods. Love is more than a feeling it's chemical it's a supernatural blending of each others energies. How many times when I was a young mother with small children and I just instinctively knew when they were in danger. It's more than a feeling.

I've been reading through this thread and in my searching out the truth from the lies I learned about micro and macro evolution.

Macroevolution refers to larger changes over a much longer time scale. Macroevolution can result in speciation or the emergence of new species. Microevolution results in smaller, but still noticeable, changes that do not result in the divergence of a new species. Microevolutionary changes occur within a population.

I have yet to have anyone prove to me a proof of macroevolution. Although with all the man made experiments messing with DNA and cross species manipulation.. nothing would surprise me.

I've said similar to Vaj among others when they put up fruit flies as evidence. Can they still mate with the parent stock? Why, yes they can! Then they are not a different species. Using cosmetic differences to denote species leads to the Holocaust.

"Man" was experimenting with DNA from way back, Neandertal was mated out of existence. Humans have domesticated dogs and cats and all manner of cattle, playing with the DNA of those animals all the while. "White" skin is a genetic mutation, one shared with a common aquarium zebrafish...I reported that here back around 2005 or so, it is a common genetic mutation among animals, particularly in snowy climate regions. AIDS, the dreaded killer disease, is a genetic mutation of SIDS...Simian Immune Deficiency Syndrome. 'Nuf said.

I've been quickly shouted down for even mentioning the fact, but it remains we are closer genetically to Bonobos than we are to Neandertal. Unless that issue has been resolved, though I doubt it much matters.

What door did the human animal pass through on the way to consciousness?

When did the human animal become cognizant of "self?" Would it matter?

Humans had fire and tools right around 250K, and if the dates for Naledi hold we were burying our dead, ceremonially, 300Kyo.

 

[Faithfulservant]

What door did the human animal pass through on the way to consciousness?

Or morality. Animals don't have a sense of right and wrong.. just instincts or learned behavior and those things can be bred out of them. Why did man have such a branching away of all the other species? Enough to dominate and subsequently destroy each other and the earth itself. Animals don't seek to destroy their environment for purpose need of greed and selfishness...

When did the human animal become cognizant of "self?" Would it matter?

Hmm "self"ishness.