Human and Ape Inquiry, II

SLP

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Actually, more of an Ape and Ape inquiry.

In another thread, a creationist asked:

"Do we even have the actual remains of a last supposed common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees"

This was intended to be a game-winner, I am sure, but it just made me think -

Do CREATIONISTS have the remains of the supposed last common ancestor of the Ape-Kind and modern apes?

According to the creationist version of reality, this supposed Intra-Kind split would have taken place fewer than 4500 years ago. If the creationist version of reality had any merit, it should be EASY for, say, the owners of Hobby Lobby to have paid for the remains of at least a fake original Ape-Kind by now, seeing as how they shelled out millions for fake Dead Sea scrolls in their zeal to prop up bible lore in their bible museum.
In fact, if the bible stories of the flood had merit, we should see ALL SORTS of ancestral remains for all extant Kinds littering the landscape of the middle east, at least.
Ape-Kind ancestor, Giraffe-Kind ancestor, Elephant-Kind ancestor, Bat-Kind ancestor, etc. - and remains of at least some of the incipient modern offspring of these Kinds, as well.

Where are THEY?

By all scientific, reality-based estimates, the population of the LCA of chimps and humans would have lived somewhere between ~7 and ~4 million years ago. Creationists expect us to have, right now, in our possession, the "remains" (as if there was just one of them...) of this ancestor - that would have had to survive millions of years of geological and biological processes and to have then been found, whereas creationists do not even pretend to know about the existence of the Kind-ancestors of modern creatures!

We DO, however, have fossils of more chimp-like creatures and more human-like creatures from appropriate times, and of course, we have DNA data.


What do creationists have, in terms of evidence for post-flood intra-Kind speciation, besides incredulity and doctrine?


 

nonaeroterraqueous

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What do creationists have, in terms of evidence for post-flood intra-Kind speciation, besides incredulity and doctrine?

The Cambrian Explosion happened far enough back in your timeline and incorporated a vast enough selection of living organisms to satisfy the need to know how things were. We might argue that it was the Great Flood and not nearly so far back, but the evidence suffices in a general sense. Whether or not we can find a Cambrian ape doesn't particularly bother me, but the fact of the apparent explosion in diversity, followed by a relative lack of evolution afterward paints a clear enough picture, one more suggestive of sudden creation rather than gradual evolution.

The fact of there not being a common ancestor between apes and humans is an important one. Merely doing a genetic comparison is insufficient. Counting genes looks good to the general public, but it lacks context, and it ignores the vast problem of switching to one karyotype to another, which currently stands as an insurmountable problem for evolutionists of the Darwinian type. The fact is that there is not common ancestor, neither in fossil history, nor in genetic theory, because that genetic model, at least at the chromosomal level is (to current understanding) patently impossible.
 
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FrumiousBandersnatch

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Whether or not we can find a Cambrian ape doesn't particularly bother me, but the fact of the apparent explosion in diversity, followed by a relative lack of evolution afterward paints a clear enough picture, one more suggestive of sudden creation rather than gradual evolution.
That's really not much of an argument. There were plenty of creatures around before the Cambrian explosion - were they created too? If so, the Cambrian explosion is no more indicative of creation than the earlier creatures; if not, then presumably they evolved - which makes the creatures of the Cambrian equally likely to have evolved.

But there are a couple of other considerations - one is that the Cambrian explosion shows the proliferation of hard-carapaced, armoured creatures, suggesting a predator-prey 'arms race', and armoured creatures are far more easily preserved as fossils. The pre-Cambrian (Ediacaran) creatures were soft-bodied and didn't fossilise well.

The other is that it is now being discovered that the Cambrian explosion is now being understood as just one of many waves of evolution.

A bunch of bangs:

“It’s very difficult to pick out a discrete Cambrian explosion,” says Wood. “It’s more fruitful to think of it in terms of a very long narrative of change that started before, and continued long afterwards.”
...
“I think it’s a valuable reframing of the story,” says Phoebe Cohen, a paleontologist at Williams College. “The more we look at the Cambrian explosion, the less explosion-y it looks.”
...
“You have people working on the Ediacaran and people working on the Cambrian, and they don’t really come together,” says Wood. But at a recent conference in the U.K, “a lot of us realized that those boundaries had started to become blurred.”


New fossils, she says, showed that some Cambrian-defining traits were actually pioneered in the Ediacaran.
 
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SLP

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The fact of there not being a common ancestor between apes and humans is an important one.
And as this ancestor would have lived millions of years ago, why do you think that?
As the ark-tale would have left lots of human corpses - along with the corpses of these earlier "kinds" - where are they? That was supposed to have happened only a few thousand years ago. Why the double standard?
Merely doing a genetic comparison is insufficient.
Says you.
People that understand the science find it satisfactory - why should your opinion matter?
Counting genes looks good to the general public, but it lacks context, and it ignores the vast problem of switching to one karyotype to another, which currently stands as an insurmountable problem for evolutionists of the Darwinian type.
'Counting genes' looks like a strawman to those in the know.

Switching one karyotype to another - are you cool with all horses being of the same kind? If so, you'd best get explaining how it is that Equus caballus (2N=64) and Equus przewalskii
(2N=66).
The fact is that there is not common ancestor, neither in fossil history, nor in genetic theory, because that genetic model, at least at the chromosomal level is (to current understanding) patently impossible.

Thanks for your baseless input.
 
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driewerf

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I am a creationist, but not one of the "Kinds" kind.
I do not believe in that type of micro-evolution.
Could you explain a little bit more about what you believe or don't believe, related to evolution, micro-evolution, kinds and species?
Many thanks.
 
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Dave-W

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Could you explain a little bit more about what you believe or don't believe, related to evolution, micro-evolution, kinds and species?
Many thanks.
What I believe is that the term “kinds” in the Bible is roughly the equivalent of species in our modern thinking. IOW if there are 7 species of Tigers, then 7 pairs of tigers went into the ark. If there are 4 distinct species of zebras, then a pair of each went into the ark. If there are 4 or 5 thousand distinct species of frogs, then a pair of each went into the ark. No evolution to go from some parent animal and break down into the various species we see today.
 
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FrumiousBandersnatch

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What I believe is that the term “kinds” in the Bible is roughly the equivalent of species in our modern thinking. IOW if there are 7 species of Tigers, then 7 pairs of tigers went into the ark. If there are 4 distinct species of zebras, then a pair of each went into the ark. If there are 4 or 5 thousand distinct species of frogs, then a pair of each went into the ark. No evolution to go from some parent animal and break down into the various species we see today.
The ark wouldn't have been big enough; over 1.7 million species of animals and plants have been described to date (not including domesticated animals and single-celled creatures), with estimates of over 8.7 million in total. Around 18,000 new species of animals & plants are discovered every year.
 
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Dave-W

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The ark wouldn't have been big enough;
There is a story in the Hebrew prophets where a widow and her son had only enough flour and oil to make one meal. But the prophet told her to get a LOT of vessels and her little Cruze held enough oil to fill the entire house with filled jars of oil. God can and does expand the inside of something to make it hold how ever much is needed.
 
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FrumiousBandersnatch

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There is a story in the Hebrew prophets where a widow and her son had only enough flour and oil to make one meal. But the prophet told her to get a LOT of vessels and her little Cruze held enough oil to fill the entire house with filled jars of oil. God can and does expand the inside of something to make it hold how ever much is needed.
Ah, OK. I must have missed the part where the story says the ark was a TARDIS.

Of course, if miracles were necessary to make it work at all, one wonders why God didn't just skip the flood and simply kill off whatever had gone wrong with his perfect creation... :rolleyes:
 
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Dave-W

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SLP

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Counting genes looks good to the general public, but it lacks context, and it ignores the vast problem of switching to one karyotype to another, which currently stands as an insurmountable problem for evolutionists of the Darwinian type. The fact is that there is not common ancestor, neither in fossil history, nor in genetic theory, because that genetic model, at least at the chromosomal level is (to current understanding) patently impossible.
Switching one karyotype to another - are you cool with all horses being of the same kind? If so, you'd best get explaining how it is that Equus caballus (2N=64) and Equus przewalskii
(2N=66) exist.

You're not one of those post-and-runner creationists, are you?
 
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Speedwell

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LOL!!!

God always wants a divine - human partnership.
But oh, so many miracles are required, none of them ever mentioned in the Bible, all to preserve the literal inerrancy of an ancient story, a story for which there is no good theological reason to believe was intended to be literal and inerrant to begin with. It's a slippery slope leading to Last Thursdayism. Why not just go there and be done with it?
 
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SLP

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There is a story in the Hebrew prophets where a widow and her son had only enough flour and oil to make one meal. But the prophet told her to get a LOT of vessels and her little Cruze held enough oil to fill the entire house with filled jars of oil. God can and does expand the inside of something to make it hold how ever much is needed.
Aren't such stories more likely to be some sort of metaphor, or something?

If God has this power to alter the internal volume of a container while making its external volume remain the same, or top make more oil as needed from nothing via magic, it should really makes a rational person wonder why this same powerful being would need to 'hide' and slaughter His own creations and play tricks and allow slavery and all that jazz.

Seems illogical (and immoral).
 
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SLP

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Switching one karyotype to another - are you cool with all horses being of the same kind? If so, you'd best get explaining how it is that Equus caballus (2N=64) and Equus przewalskii
(2N=66) exist.

You're not one of those post-and-runner creationists, are you?

@nonaeroterraqueous - Are you going to finish up the discussion, or have you conceded?
 
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