CDarwin

Aw, they're all in Middle Tennessee. They seem not to be in really 'hick' places, as you would think. That's interesting. Oh, wait, there's one in Arkansas. (whoever here is from Arkansas). Oh, wow, the guy who runs the one in Tennessee has a real persecution complex. "Recently, there are those who have claimed to have "discovered" Mount Sinai. The truth is that they discovered it exactly where Ron Wyatt did several years before they got there. Major "Christian" television networks have aired programs produced by their own production associates. Each time they do, we here at the Museum receive numerous telephone calls from angry people who recognize that the truth is not being presented..." http://www.wyattmuseum.com/mount-sinai-10.htm I like the picture too.

I really love the illustrations too. The magazine almost worth buying for those. But that's off topic.

A fair assessment. I.e. indoctrinating students so he doesn't have to deal with the old buzzards. Or sometimes we're polygamous when times are good. Take the Tiv of southern Nigeria for example. In that culture how many wives a man has is a mark of his wealth. And each wife is expected to have her own hut for her and her children within the husband's compound (which is itself owned by the patrilineal family unit). Interesting system. If you read any of Chinua Achebe's novels the Ibo live a lot like that. But Paralith is a female who is the product of a particular culture. You can't expect her to speak for all females of all times and all places. But chimps do retain tools already. Sometimes they'll carry specific sticks around for miles. They'll do so in the mouths or often just in one hand, and they seem to get around alright. I'll go ahead and post that "Man the Dancer" now. Donna Hart and Robert Sussman are referring to "Man the Hugnter," the idea of human evolution popular around the middle of the twentieth century (and still influential today) centering on male hunting as the prime mover of human evolution: p. 30, Man the Hunted

But the selective pressure for better tool use is there among chimps already. Yet there has been no pressure for bipedality from it, there has been no pressure for particularly weighty brains because of it, and there has been no pressure to develop more dexterous hands. Why? You've also skirted my point about the timing of events. Why did bipedality proceed enlarged brains by 5 million years if they both had the same driver? There's a satirization of umbrella theories offered in Man the Hunted called "Man the Dancer." I'll elaborate when I get back. When gibbons walk on the ground they do so bipedally on their hind limbs. But like I said, you're right that only humans are upright like humans. I'm not arguing. I would argue that bipedality is "designed to free the arms and hands for tool use" because there's no evidence for that. Titi monkeys do it (more consitently that humans). Gibbons, as I said. There are other examples from the prosimians. It appears widespread, but the majority of cultures practice simultaneous polygamy in some circumstances and almost all the ones that don't practice serial polygamy. That's not the same as monogamy. Every chimp female wants to be in a group too. Every gorilla female wants to be in a troop with a male. I don't think it's a terribly important issue which species is more "unique," but consider tarsiers. They leap on hindlegs twice as long as their forelegs and longer than their bodies. They have eyes larger than their brains and heads that can rotate like an owl's. They are the only primates to subsist entirely on animal matter. They are the smallest primates taken as a group. They posses a fused tibia and fibula. They have a partially enclosed eye socket and dry nose like a monkey but the tiny brain and primitive body of a prosimian. And they have a bony canal surrounding their auditory meatus like an Old World Monkey even though they can't be uniquely related to them. Weird, weird little animals. I'll get to ecoli when I get back from moving rocks. Bleh.

Haha, that's what I was thinking. I just didn't want to confess to illegal activity on a public forums...

Actually, by today's standards Darwin probably was a racist. But of course so was Abraham Lincoln. He was an abolitionist and he actually learned taxadermy from a black naturalist. That's about as non-racist as you can get in the 19th Century.

That's an older idea, actually. Darwin first proposed it in The Descent of Man, before there was an extensive fossil record. The problems are A) Why not chimps? and B) How do you explain the big distances in time between events? The earliest humans didn't have particularly large brains. In fact it was Homo erectus before brain size began to expand independant of increase in body size. They also didn't have fingers totally well adapted to manipulation. Personally, if I might comment, I tend to think of the major events of hominid evolution as having happened for seperate reasons in different ecological contexts. Bipedality was perhpas a slightly more efficient form of locomotion that knuckle-walking in the forest edge environment that early humans colonized, for example. Stone tools were advantageous to exploit food resources there like ungulate carcasses and tubers that wouldn't be as important or available to arboreal apes in the deep forest. As for explanations for human intelligence, I tend to prefer social theories like Bingham's to technological ones. I would submit that what makes humans 'special' is less our advanced reasoning skills than our advaced communication skills. Stone tools weren't made in a day. They required complex social units passing information from generation to generation and from population to population. Human brains are fine-tuend for intelligent communication with other brains. Culture may not be uniquely human, but it is by far our greatest weapon. Eh... gibbons form serial monogamous pair bonds, which is the type that most "monogamous" humans tend to form as well (divorce and remarraige). The majority of human cultures are actually polygynous (usually only for those who can afford more than one wife). So I don't know if you can really say much about monogamy being a uniquely human trait. Different theorists had made way too much out of what is basically a cultural practice (and a pretty rare one at that). Humans are certainly different. You can't get around that. But we're not necessarily more different than many other species.

But would you respect a belief in naturally endowed human rights (the basis of American government)? Where does that come from other than, for lack of a better term, faith?

I don't think so. The Canal Exclusion Zone was legally U.S. territory until 1976 when it fell under joint control, if I'm not terribly mistaken.

I wouldn't give them money. I might watch it when it gets posted on YouTube. I read only one theater is showing it on Manhattan. Meanwhile, there are probably 20 in Knoxville. I might be insulted but I suppose its just economics.

The notion that mammals were ecologically insignificant little scurriers beneath the feet of the dinosaurs has received some shocks in recent years. It appears that the Mesozoic mammals had diversified into beaver-like forms (Castorocauda) and even species that ate dinosaurs (Repenomamus).

Interesting. It's an umbrella theory, though, and those have the problem of explaining why the major characters of human uniqueness (bipedality, enlarged brains, speech) appeared at such widely spaced times. There's also always the "why not chimpanzees" problem. This is what Craig Stanford's theories run into a lot. Chimps throw too; why wouldn't improved throwing ability translate into better ability to control cheaters and thus be selected for in them as well? But I'm just going off a paragraph in a Wikipedia article. I'll try scouring the databases.

I would just like to point out the case of the Scottish armchair tactician John Clerk of Eldin. He was an enlightenment gentlemen who, for one, illustrated the geological works of James Hutton. He is also quite famous for his works on naval tactics which, though heavily disregarded, presaged and influenced Nelson's victorious plan at Trafalgar. Now that said, I agree with you. I'm more than inclined to trust General Petraeus's judgment in these matters as he's the military expert and I'm only mediocre at Command and Conquer.

Yes, yes it has. That's been abundantly pointed out, but you just move the goal-posts and demand "modern" theoretical opponents. Well, in the sense that "modern" = "supported by the latest evidence," you're quite correct. There are no "modern" theoretical alternatives to common descent involving natural selection (which is the meat of Darwin's theory and what I'm taking to be what you mean by "Darwin-type bio-evolutionary theory"). But that's not common descent's fault.

The local softball news show (Live at Five, I'm sure you have similar) did a story of them fairly recently. From that I thought it was reasonably close, but its apparently in way up there northern Kentucky. Almost Ohio.

"Microevolution" is really just another word for evolution. It's the process evolution takes, gradually and by mixing up the allele frequencies in populations. "Macroevoltion" is a term applied retrospectively to any evolutionary event yielding a new lineage. In the purest sense this is simply speciation, but the word is also used to refer to the origin of larger groups like phyla. If course, the origin of any larger group begins with speciation.

The majority of variability in sexually reproducing populations comes from recombination, not mutation. I don't know that that's the case here, though. I think they did just mean that they stayed the same species. After all no two individuals are ever actually "genetically identical." That wouldn't be "macro-evolutionary," then, though.

Mm, I used both "higher" and "complex" in the OP. They're both reasonably subjective terms. I'm just talking about plants/animals/similar. But why did complex life only evolved on earth when it did after the specified time period because of specific environmental changes that were going on at the time. Would the conditions wrought by these changes exist in the frequency that environments necessary for the origin of life itself might? Look, for another example, at the enormous range of habitats that microbial life has conquered. You can go from salt lakes to hydrothermal vents. Complex life inhabits only the most verdant and hospitable corners of the most verdant and hospitable world yet observed.

But would that competition lead inexorably to "higher" life? For the first billion years or so of life on Earth, evolution never saw fit to originate anything but microbes.

Oh, sure. http://www.archaeologyinfo.com/species.htm Good ol' Archaeology Info would do the trick. I've never heard any comparisons of the two genera's throwing capacity. Personally, I find it more surprising that the robusts didn't last longer than they did. They were well adapted to a life in the forest edge, and there continued to be forest edges even after they went extinct. My best guess would be competition with baboons did them in.

But it overlapped the Australopithecines by a good bit. Homo stretched from around 2.5 mya to now, while the robust Australopithicines continued until about 1.2 mya.

I already did. Plants and animals or their like.

6 mya is a little old. More like 4. The known hominid genera preceding that were Ardipithecus, Orrorin, and Sahelanthropus. And of course the transfer from Australopithecines to Homo wasn't instantaneous. If I might pile pedantry on pedantry.

I wouldn't say there is anything particularly 'recent' about it. This is a society enforcing its cultural norms. It's a process as old as dirt. In the West we seem to like to think of ourselves as past 'irrational' traditionalism but it's as endemic in our culture as it is anywhere. What most makes this an issue is that it bumps up against another cherished Western value, individualism and individual sovereignty.

Maybe we should just switch to "homonoids."