Why won’t creationists participate in open and honest debate?

[Tomk80]

I don't want to burst your bubble but you do know that Kit didn't really talk right? Cars can't talk, except in cheesy action series or Disney films like Herby goes Bannanas.

Is this you trying to be funny or is the point just flying over your head?

 

[Aron-Ra]

I don't want to burst your bubble but you do know that Kit didn't really talk right? Cars can't talk, except in cheesy action series or Disney films like Herby goes Bannanas.

I've been in a talking car. But it was a stupid one because it believed my door was really a jar.

 

[Aron-Ra]

We know that you get a large amount of divergance from canines, we know because we have been breeding dogs for so long. With primates the cranial capacity put us at three times the size of apes making this our most distinctive feature.

You mean 3x the size of other apes. Having the biggest brain doesn't remove us from that clan.

I would say that an ape does not exceed 800cc and the average between 400cc and 500cc. There is a cerbral rubicon that apes cannot cross, brain tissue is just too highly conserved.

So, according to you, Homo erectus is definitely human, but the gracile version of that, Homo floresiensis is definitely "just" an ape

because their brains were only half the size of Homo habilis. How do you justify this?

Meanwhile, Homo habilis is right at the cusp of human, and overlapping the range of erectines. So which is he?

 

[Edx]

We know that you get a large amount of divergance from canines, we know because we have been breeding dogs for so long. With primates the cranial capacity put us at three times the size of apes making this our most distinctive feature.

But having a big brain couldnt stop us being apes in the same way as a duck having a bill or being over 10 times the size as a finch stop an ostrige being a bird.

And a car would still be a car even if it had artificial intelligence as good as the fictional "Kit" in Knight Rider, is what Aron was trying to get you to understand. Im sure you got that, and I wonder why you have to be so obtuse about it.

 

[Lilandra]

Its pretty simple really. We do not teach people to think, we teach them to perform. Most students never develop the ability to conceptualize abstract concepts, or use deductive/inductive reasoning to peice together independant lines of thought.

My 12 year old students didn't even know that the US is a democracy. It took some work to have them realize the freedoms they take for granted.

I turned the class into Cuba for a week, took all their school supplies and refused to allow them to criticize the government.

 

[Aron-Ra]

It can get confusing when they get into the semanticial shell games.

Mark, you've whined about this many times, and you've never justified it. This is not semantics, and it certainly isn't a shell game no matter how you would like to make it one. At the same time, I know you've said we [evolutionists] don't define our central terms, and you've recently claimed there was no scientific definition of the word, "ape", but you were wrong on both counts, and you already knew that before you said it, because I had already shown you that definition and the consensus of scientific sources for it back when we had our debate two years ago.

Like you said then, words mean things, and the words, "Hominoid" and "ape" both mean "any tailless Catarrhine primates having a tendancy toward a bipedal gait, with oversized brains, and individually-distinctive fingerprints on arms with a shoulder arc capable of brachiation and complete rotation." Taxonomically, that definition would also refer specifically to descendants from one of these viewed as an evolutionary lineage, but as humans still match all of this definition today, that point is moot.

Austropithicus simply means southern ape, most of the apes that are considered our ancestors were found in southern Africa. The general term austropithecine is a common way of refering to them but don't expect anything that clear and concise in this forum. The hominids start somwhere about 5 million years ago and are thought to be apes with distinct human features, thus the prefix Homo 'same'.

No sir. We are the same. Two years ago, I explained to you in detail that "Hominid" is synonemous with "great ape", that it refers to "large" Hominoids [apes] with especially large, unusually intelligent brains capable of comprehending language, or of making and using simple tools; having relatively sparse fur, an inability to synthesize vitamin C, and a unique dentition which includes 32 teeth consisting of incisors, cuspids, bicuspids, canines, and molars, the latter of which have four roots, and come to five points interrupted by a Y-shaped crevasse." Again, I substantiated this definition with several references from scientific sources where you weren't able to cite anything more than antiquated layman's dictionaries.

Up until Homo habilis we are talking about a semi-bipedal 3 foot tall chimpanzee basically.

Again, no. Ardipithecus and all the Australopithecines including all the Paranthropines were all fully-erect and habitually bi-pedal. That's what "hominine" means. I've explained that to you before, but you demonstrate the same learning difficulty then as now.

That's why I finally posted this picture in my reply to you -as a hint.

This thing had a cranial capacity slightly bigger then a modern ape. From Homo habilis to the Homo erectus specimens the brain size literally doubles in a couple of hundred thousand years.

Wrong again. Comparing specimens of Homo habilis to Homo erectus, their cranial capacities overlapped so that some habilines had brains larger than some erectines. The gap you're so desperately pleading for simply does not exist, and its a little annoying to have you still reciting the same falsehoods years after you've taught all the correct meanings of these words.

 

[Aron-Ra]

That's why they like to play this semantical shell game, the fossils are obviously ape or human if you really look at them.

And ignore the definitions of either word.

Try this site, notice the differences between Homo habilis and Homo erectus.
http://www.mnh.si.edu/anthro/humanorigins/ha/a_tree.html

If you concentrate on finding differences, you can isolate any one man from all other men. There are differences between you and I too. But that doesn't mean we're not distantly-related.

Ask them to show you the chimpanzee's ancestors from southern Africa. They can't do that because everytime an ape skull turns up in Africa it's immediatly considered one of our ancestors.

As well as a chimp's ancestor too. That's why we can show things like Dryopithecines. Being ancestral to chimps doesn't mean it can't ancestral to humans too -if you go back far enough.

Same with the gorrila, check this guy out:

This guy has a cranial capacity of 410 cc, notice the sagittal crest (mohawk looking thing down the middle of the skull). This looks just like a gorrila to me:

One of the distinctions between a chimpanzees skull and a gorilla is the chimpanzee skull is smooth on top. You have you use some personal judgement when looking at these fossil skulls and don't get all wrapped up in their semantical head trips.

Once again, this is not semantics. Its just that your arguments are utterly meaningless, and here's why: Some dogs have a sagittal crest too,

and some don't have it at all.

Yet these are both members the same species!

 

[Aron-Ra]

OK, according to the heading, these are all the same species.

These below are all members of a single species too; Canus lupus familiaris

Most of these are from that same species too.

http://home.comcast.net/~aronra/skulls.JPG

And most of the ones that aren't Canus lupus familiaris are still very closely-related in the same family, and verifiably biologically-related. In fact, as this image shows, there is sometimes considerably more diversity within species than between them.

And here's the real kicker; we honestly can't tell for sure whether these are all from different species or just different versions of the same one!

 

[Edx]

If Mark is true to form, he will reply as he always does when posed with these pictures and arguments, he will simply say he doesnt care about other animals and hand wave it all away.

 

[MarkT]

Actually, not only does the Bible acknowledge that humans are animals, but it says that other animals besides us have souls too.

The Bible says we're created. That means we are creatures and the animals are also creatures. It doesn't say man is an animal. And the reference to the spirit is to the life of the creature. Life comes from God. The Bible doesn't say animals have souls.

 

[MarkT]

But not in the population. Evolution is the change of allele frequencies in a population.

Two different, successive audiences in a theatre would be two different populations.

Well you could say the population of the theatre changes. Local populations exist within larger populations. The population of the theatre is pretty small but I think you could still call it a population.

 

[mark kennedy]

You mean 3x the size of other apes. Having the biggest brain doesn't remove us from that clan.So, according to you, Homo erectus is definitely human, but the gracile version of that, Homo floresiensis is definitely "just" an ape
because their brains were only half the size of Homo habilis. How do you justify this?

The skulls will be discernable as human or ape even if the size does not seem consistant. The 'Hobbit' skull LB1 it turns out was just a microcephalic modern human.

Fig. 2. Comparison of LB1 and microcephalic skulls. (A) LB1 (1). (B) Left half-skull of a dentally adult male human microcephalic from India (15, 16) held in the collections of the Hunterian Museum, London (RCSHM/Osteo 95.1). The two skulls are drawn to the same scale and are similar in overall size and proportions and in features such as the receding forehead. (C) The left side of a human microcephalic endocast from the collections of the Field Museum, Chicago (accession no. A219680) derived from the skull of a 32-year-old woman from Lesotho who had the body size of a 12-year-old child (17). (D) An endocast from the Hunterian microcephalic specimen. Both (C) and (D) have relatively normal external appearance despite their very small size. Drawings by Jill Seagard​

Comment on "The Brain of LB1, Homo floresiensis" Science AAAS

Meanwhile, Homo habilis is right at the cusp of human, and overlapping the range of erectines. So which is he?

Australopithecus afarensis, Australopithecus africanus are apes that have not changed that much from prehistoric times. They are ape ancestors and don't belong in the human line at all.

Homo habilis are apes. Homo habilis has a cranial capacity of 510cc to just under 600cc Twiggy OH 24 and KNM ER 1813

Homo erectus are human beginning with Turkana Boy you are talking about specimans African and Asian with cranial capacities very close to modern humans. There have been extensive endocranial comparisons that do not distinguish Homo erectus, at least to my satisfaction, from anatomically modern humans.

 

[Tomk80]

Well you could say the population of the theatre changes. Local populations exist within larger populations. The population of the theatre is pretty small but I think you could still call it a population.

But it would be two different populations. That's the point. Evolution is a change in allele frequency over time in a population, not the change of populations.

 

[Edx]

The skulls will be discernable as human or ape even if the size does not seem consistant. .

Then you must define what ape and human are. So far you have refused to do that. So far these words in your posts are meaningless.

 

[Aron-Ra]

The skulls will be discernable as human or ape even if the size does not seem consistant. The 'Hobbit' skull LB1 it turns out was just a microcephalic modern human.

Fig. 2. Comparison of LB1 and microcephalic skulls. (A) LB1 (1). (B) Left half-skull of a dentally adult male human microcephalic from India (15, 16) held in the collections of the Hunterian Museum, London (RCSHM/Osteo 95.1). The two skulls are drawn to the same scale and are similar in overall size and proportions and in features such as the receding forehead. (C) The left side of a human microcephalic endocast from the collections of the Field Museum, Chicago (accession no. A219680) derived from the skull of a 32-year-old woman from Lesotho who had the body size of a 12-year-old child (17). (D) An endocast from the Hunterian microcephalic specimen. Both (C) and (D) have relatively normal external appearance despite their very small size. Drawings by Jill Seagard​

Comment on "The Brain of LB1, Homo floresiensis" Science AAAS

Now read the follow-up in the same publication which contests that on several points, and comments impolitely on the basis of the assertions made prior. Of course you can also read a summary of that on Talk.Origins:

Anatomist Maciej Henneberg has claimed that the skull is extremely similar to that of a microcephalic specimen from Crete, microcephaly being a disease that causes small brain sizes. However, Peter Brown and his team have considered and rejected this explanation:​

It's more difficult to rule out, I suppose, the analogy with abnormal modern humans, like pituitary dwarfs or microcephalic dwarfs, because there you can have small-bodied people who have small brain sizes as well. Very few of these people actually reach adulthood and they have a range of distinctive features, depending upon which particular syndrome they have, throughout the cranial vault and rest of the skeleton. None of these features are found in Liang Bua. It has a suite of clearly archaic traits which are replicated in a variety of early hominids and these archaic traits are not found in any abnormal humans which have ever been recorded. We now have the remains of 5 or 6 other individuals from the site, so it's not just one. There's a population of these things now and they all share the same features. (Peter Brown, in an interview with Scientific American)​

Australopithecus afarensis, Australopithecus africanus are apes that have not changed that much from prehistoric times. They are ape ancestors and don't belong in the human line at all.

Except that their anatomomy in many key aspects lies directly half-way between the proportions of chimpanzees and modern humans, and humans still adhere to the definition of "ape".

Homo habilis are apes. Homo habilis has a cranial capacity of 510cc to just under 600cc Twiggy OH 24 and KNM ER 1813

According to Minnesota State University, the average brain size is 80cc higher than your highest estimate, and the largest specimen to date is "about" 800cc, a mark which your own resource admits was only an arbitrary choice to determine humanity, and which has since been reduced by 200cc.

Homo erectus are human beginning with Turkana Boy you are talking about specimans African and Asian with cranial capacities very close to modern humans. There have been extensive endocranial comparisons that do not distinguish Homo erectus, at least to my satisfaction, from anatomically modern humans.

I would agree, except of course for the utter lack of any forehead, the profoundly jutting brow, and the fact that the brain size averages only 75% of that of modern humans. As I told you before, most creationists would never accept this as being a human skull! Most creationists would say that this was "just an ape".

Of course, if you accept this H. erectus as human,
then why wouldn't you accept this A. africanus as human too?

What would you accept? I've asked you this before, but you never gave me an answer.

 

[MarkT]

But it would be two different populations. That's the point. Evolution is a change in allele frequency over time in a population, not the change of populations.

Uh Well I think you're right in a way. Unless they lived in the theatre and breeding was going on, it wouldn't be a true population. But then they wouldn't be two populations either.

Local populations exist within regional populations. Natural selection chooses the animals best suited to the local environment so that those animals grow in number and you get a population of animals that look like they are specially adapted locally. So local populations always exhibit useful traits and deformities. So locally you get species. But animals are always moving around and looking for food and it wouldn't make sense to stay in any one place if they couldn't find anything to eat there.

Still they are birds, fish, etc. and they're always fighting over territory. One population might force another population to move out if it is bigger and more aggressive and if a predator moves in, you might get a drop in the total number of animals that live there.

As far as the frequency of alleles goes, yes, there would be a change over time whatever the size of the population. All it says to me is that the population would become more uniform in appearance. Local populations would have fixed traits and deformities unless they could cross breed with other species.

 

[Edx]

Local populations would have fixed traits and deformities unless they could cross breed with other species.

Uh, you cant crossbreed with another species.

 

[MarkT]

It wouldn't make sense for a local population, a species, to out do the larger population. Not if they're specialized by natural selection to one location.

 

[MarkT]

Yes it is. When you can substantiate your claim, you can demonstrate its accuracy, so that it is no longer a mere baseless assertion. You should try it sometime.

You can't. That's the issue. Speaking non categorically, you can't call man an animal. That is corrupting the meaning of the words 'animal' and 'man'. And with reference to the ones who say man is an animal, it is only categorically true if the story is true and only meaningful in telling the story. How meaningful is that? You have to decide. That's the issue we are debating. And even if you want to call man an animal, you have to be justified. I don't see how you are justified. If you're going to define man as an animal, then we have no words in common.

Even words like species are artificial, designed to fit the story. I wouldn't make any distinction between a species and a breed without sufficient justification. It looks like birds and insects and fish speciate more than mammals. I guess more variety is possible. But that doesn't mean we should automatically call some animals breeds and other animals species.

 

[Ondoher]

It wouldn't make sense for a local population, a species, to out do the larger population. Not if they're specialized by natural selection to one location.

Smaller populations are more adaptable, because it takes fewer generations for a beneficial trait to fix. As such, if a smaller population evolves some feature that makes it outcompete the larger population, it could easily push it out of existence.