An entity capable of thinking rationally would not be human.
If we are, I’m not even sure what it’s about, or if we’re on the same topic.
OK, the point I’m arguing is this: While humans are special to other humans, in the grand scheme of things we’re not especially important in the unfolding of the universe.
This comes out of the mistaken notion that the purpose of evolution is to design the perfect creature, us.
Clear where I’m coming from?
And as if to shed a bit of light on this topic, look at what’s in the news:
S.African Fossils May Be Man’s Oldest Ancestors
By Toby Reynolds
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (Reuters) - A collection of South African humanoid fossils is far older than previously thought, and may represent the oldest direct link to humanity, researchers said Friday.
After analyzing specimens with a new dating method, researchers from Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand said they had shown that remains from the world’s richest hominid fossil site, the nearby Sterkfontein caves, were more than four million years old.
The new dates put the fossils on a par with specimens from the same Australopithecus group of species found in northern Kenya as humanity’s oldest direct ancestors, and make them almost a million years older than scientists previously thought.
“The new dating for these old specimens from South Africa shows that we have contenders to be the earliest members of the genus Australopithecus yet found in Africa,” said Professor Phillip Tobias, head of the university’s paleontology team.
“We are right down here where our ancestors were almost certainly living,” he said. “This has reasserted South Africa’s role in the direct ancestry of mankind.”
The announcement is sure to court controversy.
The age of hominid specimens dictates their standing in the evolutionary tree, and thus their credentials as ancestors of modern man’s own genus Homo, members of which are thought to have walked in Africa some 1.5 million years ago.
The Sterkfontein fossils, including the oldest known complete Australopithecus skeleton, had previously been dated between two and three million years old by other research teams. But Professor Tim Partridge, the study’s lead author, said the new dates were the best yet.
“There is going to be a lot of shouting going on, but I think that this will stick. I think these are very good dates.”
PAINSTAKING TECHNIQUE
The painstaking new technique, developed with the help of researchers at Purdue University, Indiana, in the United States, measures the amounts of nuclear isotopes of aluminum and beryllium in material surrounding the specimen.
The two decay at different rates from a known initial composition, allowing researchers to date a sample.
The work, published Friday in the American journal Science, puts the age of the Sterkfontein “little foot” skeleton at 4.17 million years old, and pegs that of new finds at the nearby Jacovec cavern at just over four million years.
Those dates compare with an age range of 3.9 to 4.2 million years for remains found near Kenya’s Lake Turkana, thought to be the oldest Australopithecus specimen yet found.
Researchers see hominids of the Australopithecus genus as direct human ancestors, part of the now-extinct link between apes and modern man that has been the subject of inquiry and controversy ever since Charles Darwin proposed his theory of evolution in the 19th century.
The new dates imply that the Kenyan and South African Australopithicines were contemporaries, separated only by distance. It is possible that the two were actually of the same species, although the Sterkfontein team has not yet proposed a full taxonomic classification for its finds.
Previous dating techniques used as ammunition in arguments over the age of the remains had relied upon more circumstantial evidence from the magnetic structure of nearby rock layers and the presence of other fossils of known age.
Partridge said he anticipated criticism of the results to focus on the complicated structure of the Sterkfontein caves from where samples were taken. But the new technique did not rely upon knowledge of the rock strata, he said, adding that it was robust and would withstand scrutiny.
So perhaps our ancestors/we are a bit older than previously thought. That means existing ideas have to be changed, but it’s not a challenge to the theory of evolution.
You’re right, that is crap. The number is closer to 8 million years, not “several billion years”. And I’d wager that there are, in reality, no biology texts which make the latter statement.
**
What brings you to this conclusion? And which aspects of evolution do you accept as true? There is more to it than natural selection and peppered moths, you know. What about genetic drift? Do you accept that? How about sexual selection? Heterochrony? Species selection? Punctuated equilibirum?
And what about concepts like speciation - do you accept that?
Realize also that the phylogenies produced are separate hypotheses from the mechanisms which drive evolution. Thus, denying that whales evolved from, say, hippo-like ancestors does not invalidate any partilcular evolutionary mechanism. Phylogenies are theories unto themselves which attempt to deduce evolutionary pathways (and can often lend insight, or offer tests, for specific mechanisms). They are attempts to ferret out (so to speak) the actual history of evolution, rather than the methods by which it occurs.
I’ve read that whales evolved from canine-type creatures as well. Saw it in a kids nature magazine many yeares ago. I don’t know if that’s a hypothesis that’s generally accepted in the present or not. What’s your objection to it, Dostromin? Do you have evidence to the contrary, or do you just not like the sound of it?
Please don’t project your own weaknesses onto the rest of us.
Or at least ask permission, first.
I’ve never met any people who were truly capable of thinking rationally (myself included).
Irrationality is such a basic and fundamental aspect of humanity that a being who wasn’t irrational would arguably not be human.
How is making this statement projecting my weaknesses onto all of you?
Let’s return to the OP now.
Per honeydewgrrl’s earlier admonition, however, note that “canine-type” does not mean “canine”. The Mesonychians (the group which was thought to be representative of the land-bound ancestors of cetaceans) were, more or less, dog-like in appearance (with some notable exceptions, such as the possession of hooves). But they were not dogs, nor were they even closely related to dogs.
The most current theory, however, is that cetaceans are most closely related to Artiodactyla (the group which includes all the “typical” cloven-hooved mammalian herbivores, like deer and antelope, as well as pigs and hippos).
The group containing both Cetacea and Artiodactyla is known (appropriately enough) as Cetartiodactyla, if anyone cares.
Are you projecting your posts to this board via telepathy from some cave in the Galapagos Islands? If not, I’ll assume you’re using a computer, which means at some point you met someone who knew how to assemble/maintain/use computers, so they could show you how to operate this magic box with the many buttons.
Saying humans are not capable of thinking rationally while using a computer, which represents human rational thought made solid is pretty damn ironic, if not stupid. Did you think your computer was wished into being? Grown from magic beans? Bestowed by God?
It’s true that no human (that I know of) can be rational all the time, but saying no human can be rational ever… well, that’s almost a breathtakingly ignorant thing to say, and something of an insult those of us who do think rationally most of the time. Good thing you’re surrounded by people who can think rationally and know how to grow food and operate power plants or you would have starved to death in the dark by now.
Thinking rationally part of the time, or thinking rationally about a few limited topics, does not a rational thinker make.
I never said no human being can ever be rational. Even the most reasonable individual can sustain rational thought processes for only a short time before they begin to lapse into shoddy thinking and instinctive reactions.
Bears can indeed walk upright on their hind legs… but they do so poorly, with great discomfort, and only for brief periods of time. Can we say that they’re bipedal?
Humans can indeed think rationally… but they do so poorly, with great discomfort, and only for brief periods of time. Can we say that they’re rational?
Well, let’s see… Hoover Dam’s construction started in 1931, was completed a few years later, and it’s been in service ever since. I don’t recall anyone at any point drifting off into “instinctive reactions.” The dam was built and is maintained by people who do so using logic and reason. Had it been slapped together by unreasoning people, it would have collapsed long ago. I challenge you to design any complex project on pure instinct and not have it fall apart. As a test, try assembling a model airplane without the instructions, by just gluing the pieces together randomly.
You’re using a extremely restrictive definition of the word “rational” in order to claim that humans aren’t rational. That’s preposterous and a sure sign of shoddy thinking, not to mention lousy debating.
Yes, they’re rational. And if thinking causes you discomfort, take some aspirin and leave the thinking to others.
I guess this is as good a place as any to toss this. I would like thoughts on this article: Deciphering Design in the Genetic Code
I’d like to state from the start that I don’t have a biology background and I am in no position to defend the article. If you are familiar with basic genetics you can skip down to the section called “The Genetic Code and Intelligent Design.” The gist of the article is that there are 64 possible codons and only 20 amino acids, so several amino acids have multiple codons associated with them. A mutation changes a codon, thus possibly changing the associated amino acid and causing problems. The article claims that our current genetic code (method of associating codons with amino acids) is near if not THE global optimum in minimizing these errors. It goes on to dispute the possibility of large scale evolution of the code, meaning the code started near the global optimum. The inference is that the code was the product of intelligent design. Please note the “sidebar” following the references which briefly discusses the existence of nonuniversal genetic codes.
Again, I am in no position to debate this, but would like to hear others’ ideas. Whether the product of intelligent design or evolution, I find the idea that the genetic code is near optimal for minimizing mutation errors fascinating.
Happy 50th.
The current genetic code is nowhere near optimal for minimizing errors.
It may well be near optimal for minimizing both errors and the amount of codons needed to make up the code. Codons need a minimum of three bases to represent all of the amino acids and the start/stop sequences.
I’d want to know more about the studies in question before drawing conclusions.
I believe in the concepts of evolution, and other concepts that run with evolution (like speciation and genetic drift and what not) but just not on the level that scientists do.
All of those the concepts of evolution (and genetic drift, speciation, others) do happen, but I think it is unreasonably farfetched to think that whales evolved from dog-like creatures. That’s crap, and the only “proof” lies in old fossles, a useless hip bone in modern whales, and vague ideas of genetics. Very vagues ideas. I think that scientists are playing a game of connect the dots and they have, in the bigger scheme of things, failed.
My gut reaction, without busting out the text books and calculators, is to say that any apparent “optimization” (even at a codon level) could be attributed to to the mechanism of Evolution, or an artifact of the physical environs constantly applying pressures to that mechanism, independant of an Intelligent Design.
Dostromin: Why is it unreasonably farfetched? It seems obvious that it is indeed possible – especially when you consider how large an effect very small changes can have on an organism.
Do you think it unreasonable that artificial selection pressure has produced so many different types of dogs?
Your trying to tell me that prehistoric dogs evolved into whales. That is why I find it farfetched.
Obvious? No. Possible? No. An organism simply would not change the way it is tought they way they would. Not even with the profusly large frame of time the scientists say the process takes.
Now, I have two rabbits at home. One is Dutch, the other is a holland lop. One is little and grey (although dutch come in a varity of solid colors) with a white collar, and straight ears. The other is slightly larger, white, and has long floppy ears. There had to have been some evolutionary forces at work to get the rabbits to change, but I do not think that rabbits evolved from an entirely unrelated organism (like dog-like animals and whales). Not even over a process of millions of years.
Call me crazy, but I don’t think evolution is anywhere near an exact science!
But dog-like animals and whales are related. They’re both mammals, they share the same biochemistry…
There is the difference.
You believe they are related.
And I believe they are not.
Many organisms have similar biochemestry. We are biochemically over 50% similar to a banana. Does that mean that people evolved from fruit? Or that fruit evolved from people?
So dog-like animals and whales are both mammals. Big deal, that doesn’t mean that one evolved from another, or that they both evolved from some common ancestor. Dophins are mammals, and so are bats, and the two have surprisingly similar skeletal structure. Does that mean they are related? No! Does that mean one evolved from another or from a common ancestor? No! It just means that the bones look the same and that they give birth to live young.
They are related. All mammals are related to each other, having evolved from the same proto-mammalian reptile which arose about 300 million years ago.