What was that common ancestor?

I thought the bible clearly spoke of God embedding age to trick the scientists who would eventually come along. Wasn't that one of the early doctrines of primitive Christianity too? It couldn't possible be an ad hoc explanation invented out of thin air to dismiss scientific evidence could it.

Illuminaughty said:

I thought the bible clearly spoke of God embedding age to trick the scientists who would eventually come along. Wasn't that one of the early doctrines of primitive Christianity too? It couldn't possible be an ad hoc explanation invented out of thin air to dismiss scientific evidence could it.

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So you're familiar with Embedded Age?

Jamin4422 said:

Of course we do. Shall we start with Piltdown man, Nebraska man, Java man, Orce man or Neanderthal? Or perhaps Haenkel's forged Embryos or any of a number of fakes and frauds.

"In an attempt to further their careers and justify the claims that evolution is a legitimate theory, many scientists have fraudulently deceived the world by planting or reconstructing fossils which they would claim to be authentic finds. The most widely published evolution fraud was committed in China in 1999, and published in in the National Geographic" Evolution Fraud

"The Archaeoraptor hoax is an example of how science works."
http://www.skepdic.com/archaeoraptor.html

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Y'know, I knew you were going to raise these very issues. They've been adequately addressed individually, so I'm going to go for the central point - evolutionary biology is not dependent on any one of those. Not one.. For the occasional fraudulent bit of science to add up to anything like enough to dent the mountain of evolutionary biology evidence, you need to show that evolutionary biologists, biochemists, geneticists, palaeontologists, geologists, astronomers inter alia routinely and consistently fake their results to fit a bogus mainstream science model. Not occasionally. Routinely. Because their work routinely and consistently is consistent only with the mainstream - old earth, ancient life and common descent - scientific model, not with your religiously inspired claptrap.

Now, do you really want me to go into the routine and consistent dishonesty of the likes of Kent Hovind and Duane Gish? Because that's more telling. Creationism is maintained only by a combination of misinterpretation (like your Archaeoraptor quote), ad hoc explanations and blatant lies (like Gish's rubbish about bullfrog and chicken proteins). You have a cupboard full of skeletons and try to point out the odd dodgy bone in the mainstream cupboard.

cricket0206 said:

The last common ancestor was a female humanoid creature that lived in Africa some 200,000 years ago.

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I think you're confusing the most recent matrilinear ancestor (our mother's mother's mother's... mother), and first human radiation from Africa (thus our common ancestor lived among those humans just prior to the radiation). The former lived about 200,000 years ago, but the latter occurred about 125,000 years ago. Our most recent common ancestor probably lived just prior to that radiation.

Karl - Liberal Backslider said:

Creationism is maintained only by a combination of misinterpretation

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Yes, exactly, you and science misrepresent creationism. I am not asking for any special consideration. Just do not be two faced. Simply apply the same consideration to creationism that you apply to science. There is no room in science for double standards.

They say if you want respect then you have to show respect. If you trash people then do not be surprised if people turn around and trash you.

Jamin4422 said:

Yes, exactly, you and science misrepresent creationism. I am not asking for any special consideration. Just do not be two faced. Simply apply the same consideration to creationism that you apply to science. There is no room in science for double standards.

They say if you want respect then you have to show respect. If you trash people then do not be surprised if people turn around and trash you.

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Misrepresent you? Well, if you had a coherent picture to represent one way or another we might have a chance. But I challenge you to point to a place where you've been misrepresented - which is different to trashed. I call the crap in my bin trash, because it is trash - I'm not misrepresenting it; I'm calling it what it is. I give it exactly the same consideration as I do science - "show me the evidence". You've got none, none that you've not misrepresented, lied about, distorted or just plain made up. Why can't you just admit that you believe it because you think the Bible says so, and no evidence is going to shift you anyway?

You're right about one thing. I have zero respect for creationism, because it's dishonestly maintained nonsense, not to mention that it creates easy ammunition for Christianity's detractors. To quote the great Saint Frank of Zappa - "I'm going to tell you the way it is, and I'm not going to be kind or easy".

Creationism is to evolution as the stork theory is to human reproduction.

Jamin4422 said:

Yes, exactly, you and science misrepresent creationism. I am not asking for any special consideration. Just do not be two faced. Simply apply the same consideration to creationism that you apply to science. There is no room in science for double standards.

They say if you want respect then you have to show respect. If you trash people then do not be surprised if people turn around and trash you.

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I treated creationism exactly the same as I treated the theory of evolution. That is why I could conclude creationism is nonsense. More strongly, that is why I could conclude with certainty that the creationists at organizations like Answers in Genesis are liars. I do not respect liars.

The ancestor common to both apes and man. The most recent ancestor! If man is a branch and apes are a branch, then they must branch from a larger branch by the definition of a branch. If man branched 2 million years ago, what did he branch from? Do you have any fossil evidence of a common ancestor?

MarkT said:

The ancestor common to both apes and man. The most recent ancestor! If man is a branch and apes are a branch, then they must branch from a larger branch by the definition of a branch.

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Wrong.

If man branched 2 million years ago, what did he branch from? Do you have any fossil evidence of a common ancestor?

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Yes

Tomk80 said:

Wrong.


Yes

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If humans branched from apes, then what did apes branch from?

Apes branched from primates. One branch went off and became the monkeys (which have many branches within their group). The other branch went off and became the apes, which has gorillas branching off from chimps and humans.

MarkT said:

If humans branched from apes, then what did apes branch from?

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The Great Apes is taxonomically classified as the family Hominidae, and contains four genera: Pongo, Gorilla, Pan, and Homo. In other words, the 'great ape' branch has four branches: Orang-outangs are on the first branch, Gorillas on the second, chimps on the third, and humans on the fourth.

The 'great ape' branch, in turn, exists on the 'ape' branch (the superfamily Hominoidea), which in turn exists as a branch on the 'catarrhine primates' branch (parvorder Catarrhini), which in turn exists as a branch on the 'simian' branch (infraorder Simiiformes), etc.

So there was the original Simian, which split into a number of species, one being the Catarrhines. The Catarrhines split into a number of species, one being the Hominoids. The Hominoids split into a number of species, one being the Hominids. The Hominids split into a number of species, one being the Homos. The Homos split into a number of species, one being us, Homo sapiens.

Tiberius said:

Apes branched from primates. One branch went off and became the monkeys (which have many branches within their group). The other branch went off and became the apes, which has gorillas branching off from chimps and humans.

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To be fair, it's a bit more complicated than that, and depends on how you define "monkey". Apes and Old World monkeys have a more recent ancestor than the Old World Monkeys and New World monkeys, and if we're going to make the monkeys a monophyletic group (i.e. a clade) then it's going to have to start at the common ancestor of the OWMs and the NWMs, which is going itself to have to be a monkey, and therefore also of the apes, great and lesser. By that definition, we're monkeys.

OTOH, if you correct your statement to "became the Old World Monkeys", relegate "monkeys" to being a paraphyletic group including the OWMs and NWMs but not anything else, so OWMs and NWMs each become a seperate monophyletic clade, then you're fine and we're not monkeys.

It would be even more amusing to have this discussion in French, where singe covers apes and monkeys, however defined.

Good overview here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey

Yeah, the branching of the evolutionary tree is immensely complex, but I was trying to make it simple to provide the basics of it all.

Tiberius said:

Yeah, the branching of the evolutionary tree is immensely complex, but I was trying to make it simple to provide the basics of it all.

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It's not so much that the branching is complex, as that the branching doesn't really coincide clearly with common names of animals, rather than their scientific names

And even then it's a continuous thing. Life isn't neatly divided up into separate species, or we'd have one species giving birth to another.

I think it's hard for the human mind to grasp the concept of continuity, we separate things into discrete measurements all the time, without thinking about it, because it's way easier to handle.

Spooky thought, what if the mind is continuous and not discrete, whoa!
Not really so spooky.

Loudmouth said:

However, the common ancestor is not a single organism.

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Science is always right.

Unless it's wrong. But when wrong, they just claim they are "Now better informed" than when they were wrong.
But you don't remember them claiming they might be wrong untill they get "corrected".

Life began with a planetary mega-organism - life - 25 November 2011 - New Scientist

I wonder if loudmouth will say he was wrong?

good brother said:

But what was it? Do we have a species name? At least a genus? Do we have anything on this common ancestor? This is what I want to know. Thank you sir.

In Christ, GB

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LUCA is the name. It was found in really old birth records.

SkyWriting said:

Science is always right.

Unless it's wrong. But when wrong, they just claim they are "Now better informed" than when they were wrong.
But you don't remember them claiming they might be wrong untill they get "corrected".

Life began with a planetary mega-organism - life - 25 November 2011 - New Scientist

I wonder if loudmouth will say he was wrong?

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Because learning from your mistakes is much better than clinging to old beliefs after they have been shown to be wrong