Hush! don't you know Science has all the answers?? Even if they hastily jump to conclusions now only to discover their errors later, this is still the missing link.
IT'S NOT THE DAMN MISSING LINK!!! THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS THE MISSING LINK!!! WE'RE NOT THE "CHILDREN" OF MONKEYS, WE'RE COUSINS!!! Damn, you really don't know anything, do you? I mean, that's some pretty aggressive ignorance there.
dave, I think your truth juice is a bit heavy on the caffeine these days. Not everyone's out to fool you.
Its entirely possible I missed the funny - I'm stuck in my office editing a giant Indenture; hard to see it sometimes..................
OK, I don't really get what this post or either of the next two are trying to tell me, but Mt. Mike is a Bible inerrantist. I don't know if he goes so far as to believe the Earth is ~6000 years old. But he literally believes in the flood and he does not believe in evolution. So here we have a great, great, uncle of ours, which evolved to a much smaller size because they were on an island, and he's trying to blow it off as not what it is.
I had thought MtMike was joking. Budagiri and you think differently. Now, back to Commitment Fee Premiums........sigh........
This is basically what I suspected. If you hadn't got up in his face about his mischaracterization of this new fossil and the scientific discussion of it, I probably would have. Hence my "I'm with SD on this one" comment. That's all I meant. edit: I was reading grant proposal budgets. BUDGETS! Makes squabbling about squabbling about evolution seem like nirvana.
Thank God I'm about to go home.......but then tomorrow morning I have to deal with Brazilians...........ugh.
On cable news they were asking if this could be the missing link! You should put that in your media thread. We all know that the media is trying to hide the fact that this is really a member of the Bush family.
That's my point. We DON'T know YET what it is. Hence my comments on Piltdown and Nebraska man and many others that were frauds or where people have rushed to conclusions. Let's let the dust settle and see what it is then? Furthermore, how many of them are there? A few? That could be anything. I know lots of familes where all of them are short. Take that back 12,000 years, and it could have been short people/creature just through genetics and breeding. Look at the pygmies. There's some short people there. Probably 1000 years from now people will dig up the remains of a pygmie (or Richie Williams and his offspring) and go AHA! look at this race of people. Why would it being on an island make it a smaller size? Kinda like Fish in a 10 gallon aquarium? Is that why most people in Japan are shorter than most Americans? And how is this an uncle? I would say this is just as likely to be some sort of ape which may be extinct (once again, we don't know for sure what it is right now-- one article is all we're going off of.) And the articles touches on that point-- "They suggest that Flores Man doesn't belong in the genus Homo at all, even if it was a recent contemporary. But they are unsure how to classify the species." "There is no biological reason to call it Homo. We have to rethink what it is." So we know it's not human and that they were short. Hardly anything for people to get excited over as it relates to the supporting of the theory of evolution.
Your last sentence is the most telling, since it betrays your basic misunderstanding of what’s going on. What the article gives us is the scientific process at work, and this process involves active and informed questioning of the data at hand and the preliminary hypotheses being used to explain that data. This doesn’t mean the data is problematic or the hypothesis is absurd. On the contrary, this is absolutely normal and emblematic not only of the core strength of the scientific process but of evolutionary theory in general and evolutionary explanations of human history in particular. What you’re doing here is comparable to someone noting that Boeing’s new passenger jet is still in developmental stages and attempting use that as evidence that planes can’t fly. Some specifics: First, note that the term “hominid” refers to any and all organisms living and extinct that are part of the human family tree after it diverged from that of the other apes approximately 5-6 million years ago. I have not seen anybody question that this find is a hominid. The finders have hypothesized that this fossil represents a derivation of Homo erectus that survived in isolation from other hominid populations until made extinct by (probably) some catastrophe. The fact that others are saying it doesn’t belong in the genus Homo does not mean it’s not a hominid, it implies they’re wondering if this is an offshoot of a more archaic hominid genus, such as Australopithecus to grab the easiest example, which would be really fascinating if that proves to be the case (since it would call for a major reconsideration of models of when hominids left Africa), but it does not affect the basic argument that humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor. Nobody’s saying it’s an ape because it’s features clearly make it some kind of hominid. The big question is which one.
I was doing research for superdave. You know who superdave is, right? He is that guy who can never say he was wrong. Geez, what am I allowed to watch, dad? Do you really believe that you are the only person who can actually think for himself in this forum? If you must know, I watch cable news for the commercials. Mean people suck.
Then they're idiots. This is one of those fields of inquiry I find really fascinating, sorta like Lastort has a WW II thing. I loooooved The Neanderthal Enigma. I enjoyed the Clan of the Cave Bear series. I just get off on this stuff. The most fundamental misunderstanding is this quest for the missing link between apes and humans. Frankly, I can't believe a person educated even to the level of a cablenews dolt got this wrong. A long, long, long time ago, it was commonly thought that we were descended from apes, thus the quest. But we're not. We're no more descended from apes than Jeb is descended from George II. But Mike is bringing the missing link up as a red herring. He doesn't believe in evolution. Here we have a clear case of a species evolving. In the midst of all the merriment on page 1, I pointed out that this species represents a truly important find, for "real scientists" but especially for yutzes like me that have to argue with yutzes like Mike.
Well then I guess we should define evolution. I was only being partially tounge-in-cheek with the last sentence of my previous post. Why couldn't have there been people who were just genetically short. A limited gene pool, isolated on an island. Why is this representative of a whole new species and not just people who had genetic presuppositions to shortness? 12,000 years is an eternity in genetics. My grandpa was 5'7", I'm 6'1" that's 6 inches in 2 generations. To me, that's not evolution. That's the process of genetics, or micro-evolution. I have no problem with micro-evolution. People become taller, wider, etc., the marmot has a wierd gene and throws a yellow-bellied marmot instead of a regular bellied marmot. That's microevolution, and this chick in indonesia may be an example of that. That's fine. My point is that let's just wait and see exactly what this is. This is their prelimanary hypothesis. It may turn out to be different. It may turn out to be a human with a bone disease, or a type of ape we never knew existed. It's too soon to say that this is a species evolving. Conclusions have been jumped to in the past many times and have been proven wrong later. More research is needed before we know what it is. That's all I'm saying.
Futhermore, where did we evolve from then if not from apes. I didn't realize that was the latest theory...
So I guess the moral of the story is, if Survivor went to 10,000 episodes, all the contestants would be hermaphroditic midgets?
NPR Science Friday on Talk of the Nation is going to have a conversation on monkeys using their minds to control things. It is related to this story as reported here: http://www.forbes.com/lifestyle/health/feeds/hscout/2004/10/26/hscout522001.html
Evolution is defined as changes in the gene frequency of a population across generations. The increase in the height of the Japanese people since WWII that you referred to earlier is not evolution, since it was caused by changes in nutrition rather than changes in the gene pool. Differences in height between specific individuals, even fathers and sons, can be attributable to genetics (maybe the mother was taller, eg) or nutrition or some other developmental factor, but not evolution because evolution is a populational phenomenon, not an individual one. Again, nobody is jumping to conclusions. They have looked at the evidence and forwarded a hypothesis. Now they are showing the evidence and hypothesis to other experts in the field and those experts are testing their own hypothetical explanations against the known evidence. This is exactly how science is supposed to work. That said, it's highly unlikely that these fossils belonged to an ape (assuming you mean chimps, gorillas, gibbons, or orangutans and their ancestors when you say ape) or a Homo sapiens with a bone disease, since bone disease is easily detected nowadays and these are the remains of a bipedal animal. Hominids are the only ape family that shows this kind of bipedality.
I personally think, for no real reason, that evolution doesn't take millions of years. Here is an example. http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_783597.html?menu=news.scienceanddiscovery.genetics But hey, I also think Cancer is part of evolution.