CDarwin

You can wait until it goes on YouTube.

Ah, ok. That makes sense.

Mhmm... yeah I know. I'm using the old gradistic classification and refering all bipeds to the Hominidae and all apes to Pongidae, thus "homid" as I'm using it refers specifically to human ancestors. I'm sorry if that threw you. The Homonoids (according the the old scheme) split between the Asian and African apes, then between the gorilla ancestors and the chimp/human ancestors, and then between the chimp and human ancestors, that last split occuring according to molecular evidence around 7 million years ago. I know. My question refers to the lineage that split off and "lead" to humans. Some early members, like the Australopithecines remained fairly "ape-like" in their cranial proportions elements of the post-crania, while developing whole new specializations in the form of their teeth for heavy chewing of vegetal matter in a forest edge environment. This lineage dissapears after entirely after 1 million years and is replaced by consitently more "human-like" species. It is almost is if there were a direction to this evolution. That seems strage to me. Is being like a human really the absolutely best way to survive as a terristrial ape, to the extent that hominids that more closely resembled the modern human condition would universally out compete those that did not?

I don't think reproductive strategy is necessarily the best explanation for our brain size. You're suggesting K-selectivity. Compared to the less brainy apes, however, humans are relatively r-selected. We breed much faster. An ape will have a child every 5-6 years. Humans can do it evey year. Owen Lovejoy actually uses that fact to construct his own "male provisioning" model for human evolution, which has its own problems, but the fact of relative human r-selectivity remains.

I don't think there is a good EP explanation for suicide. It's just a little quirk of our idiosyncratic, culturally mediated phyche's; a side-effect of a self-awareness evolved for other reasons. I'm not a huge fan of EP and sociobiology, though. They're reductionist.

When you look at the human fossil record it seems remarkably "progressive." Species further back in time are more like apes and they are "replaced" by species looking remarkably more and more like humans. That seems a problem to me. Why wouldn't some ape-like hominids continue into the "human period," like there are still proper apes around today? Even with environmental change, were there not forest edge environments remaining in Africa for them? Australopithecus and Paranthropus were long lived genera, wide spread, and by all indications well suited to their edge environment. So why was Australopithecus gone after 2 million years ago and Paranthropus after 1? The idea that it was because of competition with Homo doesn't hold water for me. The australopithecines were ecologically seperated from their Homo cousins. It's become something of a cliche, but the the australopithecines had much larger and more robust dentition, in line with a diet heavy in vegetable matter, where Homo was undoubtedly more omnivorous, even occassionally and with increasing frequency exploiting meat. The only substative ecological similarity between Homo erectus and Paranthropus that the two didn't share with every baboon and vervet monkey was that they were both bipedal. Did that really entail an ecological specialization so exclusive that one had to compete the other out?

Add Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind, by Don Johanson and Maitland Edey to my list. And old one but beautifully written and a nice introduction to the (pre-1980) history of paleoanthropology and the personalities involved.

That is a good question. I think it's probably because A) Gandhi maintained a much higher international profile while he was alive and B) He did more than free India, he promoted a fairly original and laudable style of political activism. I wouldn't say Jinnah is any less widely known than say, Nehru. They just weren't as original thinkers or as broadly influential.

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." Mr. Darwin "Show me your teeth, and I will tell you who you are." Georges Cuvier

True.

Now there have got to be more Buddhists in the world than that... Seems a little fishy to me. It's the dominant religion in Japan, Korea, Burma, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and (unofficially) China. That's got to amount to more than 5% of the world's population.

Those are some pretty dangerous statistics. Irreligious says nothing about belief in one or more deities, and most Buddhists are theists. Buddhism isn't focused on a deity as the redeemer, such as in Christianity, but Buddhist theology does incorporate deities as a possible receptacle for reincarnation from a good life, but inferior to the Buddhas who break the chain of Nirvana and transcend.

If humans aren't the most intelligent animals on earth, than the word intelligence as we use it has no meaning. As to the OP: I think you're neglecting two things. First, not all evolution is due to selection. Genetic drift is also a factor. Second, selection is going on in developed societies. An easy example would be selection for darker skin among white Australians. They're experiencing epidemic levels of skin cancer because the sun is so intense there and they don't have enough melanin to block it. Modern humans are in more-or-less a state of evolutionary stasis. We're in the "equilibrium" part of punctuated equilibrium, where mating is reasonably random and gene flow is taking place everywhere swamping out most mutations. That doesn't mean we're out of the loop, evolutionarily, though, or that we've stopped changing. It just means that evolution has slowed down.

I'll just demonstrate my point of how speculative this all is with Edicius's point, since he seems to possibly be responding to me. I said that at first, too, and it's true, but it's not really on the topic of this thread. Actually, as standard of living rises birth rates tend to fall. The UN estimates that earth's population will stabalize at 10 billion around at 2050 and then begin to fall. Of course, that too is speculative, but in general birth rates tend to fall as a society reaches a certain threshold of standard of living, and most all societies are experiencing drop-offs in birth rates today. Us killing each other is probably the only thing that could do us in, but how probable that will actually be at any point in the future is totally speculative. There is absolutely nothing to base that number on.

I wanted to rule the world. I'm not kidding at all. I organized an Imperialist Party in middle school and got people to join it and made an imperial state out of my toys that would conquer my friend's toys and what-not. I filled my room up with buildings for the capital and had all the armed forces and it was pretty sophisticated. Other than that, I find it sort of funny how full circle I've come. First I wanted to be paleontologist (what kid didn't?), and then a marine biologist, and then a archaeologist before I got into the whole politics/world domination thing. Now I want to be a paleoanthropologist, which is basically a paleontologist+an archaeologist who does biology. The marine bit's out, I suppose, but I never really understood what a marine biologist was anyway. I wanted to study platypuses.

Stromatolite* Stromatolites are interesting as the first colonial organisms, but I don't know that they represent much more than that in the way of transitional forms.

I don't think that's quite the paleontological standard for defining a new phyletic species. We are still changing genetically, and eventually if some observer ever looks back on the chain of human fossils leading from 200,000 years ago to that observer's present day, he'll feel the need to demarcate a line between the "humans" he sees then and the "humans" in the fossil record from now. Or there could be a bona fide speciation event some time in the future, especially if the population collapses and people are isolated again or as a result of space-colonization. Big maybe, there. And it always is. "We" wouldn't be making the distinction anyway. It would be some observer several million years in the future. Anything beyond that, including quite a bit of what has been said in this thread, in my ever so humble opinion, is just empty speculation, and not very likely speculation at that.

Nuclear engineering is.

God is dead... And we have killed Him.

I never noticed that before. Ok? Shut up.

I'm not so sure about that. Creationism commands the loyalty of quite a few more hundreds of millions of people than I'd like to think about at least.

Don't make me find you and hit you over the head with something. DNA doesn't tell you about an ancestor's biology, its environment or really anything at all specific about it. Molecular clocks can't even be calibrated without fossils. Don't be disregarding the essential importance of paleontology. How on earth do we tell what an "intentional design" looks like when we have no idea of the nature of the designer? You could say anything looks like "intentional design."

Are politics posts counting toward post count now?

Oh, I never made a post. I just voted in the thing. 17/m/CS... I mean USA. I'm sorry I get a little confused around here. You know, people do age. This whole pole is going to be invalid if people respond to it over a period of a year or more.

That's what I support. I thought the UK was doing that? I read that somewhere. The New Scientist I think. That would be like selling your body to science. I just worry about people taking the money and deciding "Hmm, I don't really want to give you my kidney after all" and unchecking the box. I'm also afraid of the effect that might have on donorship. I think the points people bring up about the poor are vaild, especially once the stigma of "selling your organs" attaches. This plan could definately reduce donorship. The middle and upper classes would start to think that donating organs is something poor people do because they have to. Poor souls.