CDarwin

Perhaps I'm a bit biased being from Knoxville, but UT's pretty well-respected in that arena. It's a good "value school" anyway. Go big orange! Yaaaay.

I think jackson was lumping Homo ergaster in with H. erectus, and the oldest H. ergaster are about 1.8 mya. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/specimen.html I don't suppose it's a major point, but I don't believe there was a mini anything 100,000 years ago. That was just the last Ice Age, full force. It ended 12,000 years ago and there was the Younger Dryas after that, sort of a mini Ice Age. That's not the same thing, though.

At the end of the Pre-Cambrian there were already jellyfish swimming around, and probably the soft bodied ancestors of many of the phyla we first find hard-shelled in the Cambrian. And evolution doesn't really work by simply increasing scale over time... But I guess I see what you're trying to do. It's interesting to have a demonstration how much change can plausibly take place over the vast stretches of time evolution has had to work in.

This is the internet! Where men are men, women are men, and children are the FBI.

Yay, a primate question! Unfortunately it's a pretty unanswerable one. The length of a generation has varied ridiculously over the course of primate evolution. The earliest primates were probably like most primitive mammals with short lifespans and high turnover of generations. Think treeshrews, who live about 12 years and breed after the first 3 or so. Mouse lemurs are a living example in this extreme with a similar reproductive regime. On the other end of the scale, you have humans that live 80 years and reproduce after 30. I guess you could try and get a mean and then divide that by 100 million years, but I don't know how terribly useful that would be, and I doubt you could really find data on most of the primates in the fossil record. And just a correction of Quartile: Molecular clock says humans and chimpanzees diverged about 6 million years ago. Sahelanthropus tchadensis (if it does turn out to be a unique human ancestor), is about 8 million years old. So you end up with a more reasonable date of 10-6 million years separating humans from chimpanzees.

Hmm, but would be setting back Iran's nuclear program however many years that would buy be worth polarizing the Iranian people against the rest of the world? That is exactly what the hardliners in Iran that our the real threat to world security want.

I'm a Baptist... I know, I know... The actual theology of the Baptist church isn't that bad. It's really pretty liberal. The leadership is just screwy.

No so similar. We're talking about crossing a border through the peaks of the Hindu Kush that isn't marked or patrolled to chase down militants. That's a far cry from the Bush doctrine of forcibly spreading democracy to the Middle East through the overthrow of established governments.

Yes, that would be ideal.

The move is justifiable internationally. "Pakistan wasn't doing its part" is all you really need say. I see what you're saying, but what if the risks of Pakistan falling to Islamicism outweigh the PR damage in the Middle East? That's not trivial threat, and if Musharruf doesn't do anything about the foothold the Taleban is gaining in his country, might the US have to? I think we can all agree the best case scenario here is Musharruf keeping to his post-Red Mosque promise to go hard after militants, but what if that doesn't come to pass? We also haven't discussed the possibility of this being a discreet intervention. Would it be possible to send special forces into Pakistan without anyone knowing about it?

Ok, I don't think that's quite what Obama is saying. No one is talking about "taking out" Pakistan. As Sayonara pointed out that would be a pretty tricky maneuver, not to mention a pretty stupid one considering Pakistan's at least lukewarm affection for the US and their general attachment to secularism (much better than US-hating religious extremism).

You're assuming that US troops are going to be parachuting into Karachi or something. All we're talking about is moving forces into Waziristan to hunt down Taleban like Pakistan is supposed to have been doing in the first place. This isn't an invasion it's an incursion. The Pakistanis would be angry but I don't think they'd start launching nukes, at least under Musharruf. What they might do is get rid of Musharruf, and then it would become a wild card. On the other hand it might polarize support behind Musharruf while similtaneously cleaning up a mess for him in the Northwest. That could be very good for us. From where we're sitting it could really go both ways, and it would take some extremely careful analysis to figure out which direction is the most probable.

Uhm... I think that Pangloss and Sayonara may be overestimating how much the American people will really care. This isn't Cambodia or anything. Obama wouldn't even be "broadening the conflict", just taking the conflict where its needed to be for years. The problem is in destabilizing Pakistan.

My thread title refers to what I thought was a marvelous book by Chris Mooney. His premise is that for the past 40 years the modern conservative movement has been abusing scientific data to undercut regulation and advance the moral agendas of religious conservatives. I realize I might be opening a flood-gate here, but I was just wondering if anyone had any particular opinions on the book. Praise, criticisms?

Forget ethics for a minute even. Be a neocon. Would invading Pakistan to get Osama really be in our best interests strategically? That's why I say that any leader who makes that decision needs to think long and hard about it and completely disregard all this political "Get them terrists!" stuff.

No! Then that's the problem. They wouldn't have hunted food on the plains. No plains. No "hunting" either, for that matter, the teeth of Austrolopithecus weren't really suited for processing meat. They had big crenulated teeth for processing tough, gritty foods like tubers. More potatoes than meat. Really, other than being bipedal and eating tougher foods, there is really very little to separate Australopithecus and some modern chimpanzees or even baboons ecologically. If all you're saying is that Australopithecus did what modern chimpanzees do with banging sticks and throwing the occasional rock, then I agree that's a probable scenario. Its the extraordinary measures that I've taken issue with, as well as the notion that the earliest tools must have been weapons. I just don't see any support for that, especially since the earliest stone tools weren't weapons at all, but butchering implements.

But no scientist says "smoking causes cancer." The correlation that many people who smoke get lung cancer is combined with data on the physiological affects of smoke to create the theoretical statement "smoking contributes to kinds of cancer." Exceptions to that theory wouldn't be people not getting cancer when they smoke, no one said it was universal, they would be smoking not having any effect on the body that could contribute to cancer. That translates into the practical statement "don't smoke because unless you're lucky you'll get cancer." Now of course the language I used was extremely crude, but you get my point. There's no double standard. Statistical correlation is just another bit of data that goes into to theory. EDIT: I suppose in summary I can say "What Lucaspa said", since he seemed to have expressed what I was trying to say better already. As for the little philosophy of science debate that has erupted: I would have to agree that science is a process. It's not necessarily any single method, but it's the process of seeking and using the best methods for understanding the natural world. Facts are the input, what is being sought, and theories and models are the output. That's my take. I would also have to agree that "good science" isn't necessarily "correct science" in the ultimate sense. Due to our woefully incomplete understanding of the nature of the universe at any one point in time, I think you have to expect most of our own day's perfectly "good science" to end up being seen as at best incompletely correct in the future. This goes especially for reconstructions about the past in paleontology and arcaeology. Most of our "best guesses" about past cultures for example are probably completely inaccurate; that doesn't necessarily make them "bad science."

Here's the real article: http://blogs.usatoday.com/onpolitics/2007/08/obama-if-mushar.html That's an interesting issue regardless. It's hard to know what effect that might have on Pakistan. On the one hand it might do something that Musharraf needs to do (crack down on the Taleban and Al Queda), without the political repercussions for him, but on the other it might completely undermine a government that can't take much more undermining. It's certainly a decision any leader should think long and hard about if we want to continue to count on a reasonably stable, reasonably friendly Pakistan. EDIT: Hmm, it seems I was beat to the punch. Oh well, I've got a good American article .

All species have more or less "migratory" members. That's nothing specifically human. What makes the difference between two species as that in some species the naturally wander-lusting members wander off and die, and in others those same individuals are adaptable enough to found new populations. That's the story with humans. Macaques are like that too. We're just really adaptable so we can survive all sorts of climates, which allowed us to spread all over the world. Any species that could would, it's just common evolutionary sense. Any given environment can support only so many organisms; the left-overs are benefited if they can move away as opposed to starving.

Oh I was just citing my statement about models for bipedality based on display. That's hardly a new idea. Raymond Dart, the discover of Australopithecus africanus in 1924, called it the osteodontokeratic culture, and it's been long assumed the predecessor to the lithic culture of Homo habilis. See, now you've softened your position to that, which no one can argue with. You can't claim that was your original suggestion though, and that's what this debate has been about.

Until yesterday I had always thought that the answer from the palaeontological community was a resounding "yes." I had no idea that there was any decent. I just started reading Ernst Mayr's What Evolution Is, however, and lo and behold, he quite persuasively presented a quite different view. Mayr seems to feel that birds descended from thecodont reptiles of the late triassic, and evolved in parallel to the dinosaurs. He cites the similarity of the pelvises of birds and the bipedal dinosaurs as a remarkable instance of parallel evolution; similar environments acting on similar genetic potentials in related lineages similaraly. I'll summarize his argument by copying Box 3.3 on page 68, "Refutation of the Dinosaurian Origin of Birds" verbatim. "1. Age- The dinosaurs structurally most similar to birds are very recent (80-110 million years ago), whereas Arcaeopteryx is a great deal older (145 million year old) and no birdlike dinosaurs are known from lower Jurassic or Triassic that could qualify as ancestors of birds. 2. The three digits of the hand of the dinosaurs are 1,2,3, those of a bird are 2,3,4. It is quite impossible to derive the avian digits from those of dinosaurs. 3. Teeth- Theropods have recurved, flattened, serrated teeth, quite different from the simple peglike teeth of Arcaeopteryx and other early birds. 4. The pectoral girdle and anterior extremities of the late theropod dinosaurs are much too small and weak to lift and incipient bird from the ground. No factors are known that could have caused a sudden drastic growth of the anterior extremities. 5. The leading aerodynamic experts of bird flight claim that an origin of flight from the ground up is a near impossibility." I believe his book predated the discovery of the "feathered dinosaurs", and this would have to be seen as another case of parallel evolution, but the argument is still persuasive. I don't really know a great deal about our avian friends, so I'm not entirely sure what to make of the whole thing. Any responses?

It's been a while since I've been on this site, I've just skimmed the last page or so, but I think I can respond to this last post as a summary of Skeptic's position. I believe Lucaspa wanted citations on my assertion that the Paranthropus and stone tools had been found in association; I'm really not sure that that's the case any more. I was sure I'd heard that somewhere, but the fact that I can't seem to find anything that states that explicitly leads me to think that my memory may have been faulty... I don't know. Anyway But it wasn't the first 'plains ape'! Nothing of the kind. It was an 'edge species' like the modern macaques, baboons, vervet monkeys, and even chimpanzees in some populations. It lived on the border between denser forest and more open scrub-land (the 'forest margin'). No plains at all. Just like for all these other species, there would always have been a tree to run up. Archaeologyinfo.com article on afarensis Also see Fleagle's Primate Adaptation and Evolution and Hart and Sussman's Man the Hunted (that's where the term 'edge species' comes from) I think there are also problems with your assertion that Australopithecus were any more vulnerable than chimpanzees so as to require such extraordinary tactical abilities. If anything, being upright gives a defensive advantage. It makes you look big and intimidating, and frees the arms, not just for wielding spears and clubs, but for simply banging and throwing things in the same way a chimpanzee might. There are actually models for the origin of bipedalism based on its advantage in display. See the wikipedia article (if you can find the sentence), or more substantively Fleagle's book (I know I cite it a lot, but its a good book).

Not really. Australopithecus would have lived in a partially wooded 'edge' environment between plain and forest. It would always have a tree to retreat to, and retained limb proportions and curved fingers needed to be proficient in the trees. There's quite a bit of work out there on how arboreal Australopithecus really was, but I think most would agree it could and would have sought refuge in trees. Furthermore, primates don't always flee when attacked, they are often known to gang up on predators and beat them back. It depends on the situation. A big male baboon can do some damage to a lion. The social structure of terrestrial primates reflects this anti-predator strategy, actually. There is always a male around to throw to the lions so to speak. Patas monkeys take this to an extreme degree. The males are almost twice the size of females and adapted to rapid running (they're the fastest of all primates). The male will serve as a decoy if the troop is attacked. Male Australopithecus are also considerably larger than the females. This could easily be seen as an adaptation to a social structure where big males are expected to fight off predators, at least long enough to let the reproductively more valuable females escape. Hmm... I seem to have forgotten about that. My apologizes. A correction of your correction, however, they were Galagos not monkeys, it's a kind of prosimian. Chimps do hunt monkeys, but they do it the old fashion way by spearing them in the back of the neck with their canines.

Paranthropus are found at the same sites as Homo habilis and ergaster at Turkana and Swartkraans. The tools are all over the place. The Wikipedia article talks about that a bit. So does Don Johanson's From Lucy to Language in it's article on OH 5, Australopithcus boisei. I could probably find some more things, but I'm not necessarily questioning the assumption. I'm just saying it is an assumption. Indeed, but not remarkably. About 50-100 cubic centimeters. Of course, you have to take into account scaling, Paranthropus was much heavier, but also remember that direct links between mean brain volume and intelligence still remain allusive. Neanderthals had a brain 200 cc larger on average than that of modern humans. That doesn't mean much. All tool use by modern chimpanzees is in preparing plant material, and most tools used by traditional human cultures are for the same purpose. The link between tool use and meat eating has been much exaggerated in the popular imagination. It probably didn't happen like 2001: A Space Odyssey. I think Man the Hunted goes into that pretty well. The Hunting Apes may too. Actually, only the smaller females were. Males were about 1.5 metres. That's good then, because Smilodon didn't live in Africa. Again, I have to point to all the other primates. Why don't they need weapons beyond the occasional unmodified stick and stone?

Uhm... if being in large groups doesn't help with predation unless you're wielding pikes, why do herders do it? Or monkeys? Or chimpanzees? Walking with Cavemen certainly got a number of things wrong, for one thing it had Australopithecus living in the African plains, but I don't think that omitting primitive anti-cavalry tactics was one of them. We're not even talking about pointed sticks. However big or important the leap from wood to stone was, it is the only one we can evaluate from an archaeological standpoint. As for assigning stone tools only to Homo, realize that Australopithecus (Paranthropus) robustus and boisei are both found in association with both Homo species and stone tools. It is simply assumption that attributes the tools to Homo and not to the robust Australopithicines. We really can't know.