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No, Human beings had just enough to survive for a while. And it wasn't suiting us all that good. Some 60-70 thousand years ago, homo sapiens were on the verge of extinction. It was around that time that abstract thought began to develop. Abstract thought saved us from extinction, without it we'd be extinct.
Is there a reason no other animal on the verge of extinction began to develop abstract thought? Surely humans are not the only creature ever to be on the verge of extinction.
Saganista,
The truth is that we, and by that I mean the human collective, scientifically still don't know the answer as to how our species, along with the rest of the animal kingdom, got here. Sorry, but scientifically speaking, I have no alternative because there is no alternative.
No, this is your personal and rather imprecisely stated claim. It is unrelated to the human collective, the bulk of which suffers from more than just your own misconceptions and misconstructions in this area. Evolution does not address the matter of the origins of life. When you plead that we don't know "how our species got here", you are being deliberately vague so as to conflate evolution with biogenesis. If you were truly a practicing research scientist of any standing, you would not depart so completely from the most basic standards of your disicipline.
As to the matters to which evolution actually does pertain, your position is merely a god-of-the-gaps derivative. You are handed 98% of the answer to your question, but will strike the pose of the denier until such time as someone is able to hand you the final 2%. This is an extraordinarily weak position.
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Originally Posted by ItalianAmericanInTexas
Modern Western society, like all human societies that came before it and exist alongside it, is wont to develop an origins theory of its own. Of course, we can no longer accept the mythopoetic accounts that previous human societies developed as a way to explain our biological existence. So, instead, we develop an origins theory dressed in the kind of scientific language that we've all grown to accept as authoritative. And, just like every human society which has come before, we too have developed a priestly caste of our own (i.e. scientists), one of whose purposes is to defend the orthodoxy surrounding our human origins, which accounts for the fact that almost every single prominent researching scientist defends modern evolutionary theory when asked.
Non sequitur. The goals and organizational structure of publishing houses that specialize in scientific literature on the one hand and children's fairy tales on the other are also remarkably similar. This does not suggest that chemistry texts will come to ascribe the outcomes of oxidation/reduction reactions to the effects of fairy godmothers and magic wands.
Further, the temptation toward superstitition, whether natural or not, is hardly unbounded. In any honest intellect, it is indeed viewed as a last and quite desperate resort. Rather than foresaking primitive poppycock as it is shown to be such, you seem to advise clinging to it, even as far more robust explanations are developed and quite clearly demonstrated.
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Originally Posted by ItalianAmericanInTexas
Honestly, I could go on and write more about the dizzying complexity of our cells, and how they are vastly more complicated than just about anything humans could ever imagine.
I would tend to doubt that your exposition would have been nearly so impressive or informative as you seem to think. You may wish to consider that complexity in a seemingly illogical abundance is the expected outcome of unguided systems, not those operated under the limiting hand of any unseen supervisor. Complexity -- such as the intricate branching of a tree or the patterns followed by water molecules in moving about a pot as it is brought to a boil -- is as well the outcome not of unimaginably complicated systems, but of remarkably simple systems that happen to be recursive upon themselves -- exactly the situation of evolution.
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Originally Posted by ItalianAmericanInTexas
But there would probably be no point in it, since you are so mindlessly to committed to our era's orthodoxy on such matters.
You again betray an absence of the very credentials that you have sought to claim.
Last edited by saganista; 01-18-2009 at 08:58 AM..
I don't believe the theory of evolution contradicts the biblical story of creation, if anything it adds to it. To me, evolution explains how God went about creating us. .
I agree with you.
Simplistic example but it's about like baking a cake. You don't say poof and the cake appears. You use ingredients.
I don't think it's either creation or evolution, I believe in God and I also think evolution explains how He created us.
At the same time you say humans are just another 1 of the millions of other species. The same people with that stance don't mind saying humans are able to destroy billions of years worth or work in 100 years. Technologically inferior or the controllers of the world...which is it?
By the way they pretty much attribute all of our biological differences with viruses, bacteria and natural disasters that took out natural predators allowing others to advance in a way that wouldn't have happened previously.
I'll be quite honest. I went to a Christian high school, so I was never "taught evolution". Now of course, I have enough sense to understand that the world was not created in 7 literal days. If we are assuming the Bible is true (and yes, I know that varies among us), then I believe it is more of a symbolic story regarding the development of our world.
But there has always been one thing about the concept of evolution that bothers me and maybe somebody can answer it. Is there any clear explanation for why humans are so much more intellectually advanced than every other of the millions of creatures here on earth? At that - why are we, in relative comparison to even our closest genetic ancestors, on such a stagaringly different level in intellegence, problem-solving, and social conscience? Was there an evolutionary "super-jump" or something when it came to humans? To me, it doesn't make sense.
And please spare me the clever jokes such as "You think we are that much smarter than monkeys? We elected (insert Bush or Obama here)". This is a serious question that I have.
Primarily, the advent of our knowledge in the spheres of microbiology and genetics in the second-half of the 20th century.
To which you allude without so much as naming any more implication upon evolution than what you feel is unfathomable complexity, failing even in attaching to that any actual or demonstrable significance. A recitation of history is not its explanation.
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Originally Posted by ItalianAmericanInTexas
I suppose that I could also write about how the event in our fossil record that we've come to call the "Cambrian Explosion" continues to embarrass evolutionary theorists.
You seem to rely a lot upon supposition. Based upon the record you have established here, I would suppose that you could not write at all about the Cambrian Explosion, and particularly not so as to establish it as an embarassment to "evolutionary theorists". What treatment would you have given to continental disintegration, to contemporaneous glaciation, or to increasing amospheric oxygen levels? Would discussion of the potential of hox gene mutations have been included? What weight would have been ascribed to recent pre-Cambrian fossil finds that suggesting a "pop" more than an "explosion"? Just wondering...
Evolutionary theory is anything but accurate, when it doesn't border on being vacuous.
It was appropriate for you to introduce the concept of vaccuousness, as all that followed it was. Complexity is the expected outcome of unguided systems. Even the popularized notion of "fitness" is dynamically operative, not some a priori standard that one can look up in an ISO manual. What might have been "something else" is not extant because when tried, it died, and all of history is little more than a formalization of various post hoc explanations by definition.
All of this is reminding me of the old saying that what lies beneath a tuxedo worn by a mannequin is a mannequin...
The fact of the matter is there are a lot of people who are well religious...really religious. For them it does not matter how much proof one has they have a mental forcefield which allows stuff that doesn't contradict their beliefs in and keeps stuff that does out. The fact of the matter is that when 31% (Harris poll #119 taken Nov. 29 2007) of Americans and 37% of born again Christians believe in Witches, (and we are probably not talking about the Neo-Pagan kind of witch here) not believing in evolution seems almost reasonable.
Genesis is the rock that the bible rests on.
If Evolution Theory is true ( and overwhelming evidence says that it is ) then the bible falls.
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