Re: Stone Age man wasn't so dumb , etc

From: Cliff Lundberg (cliff@noe.com)
Date: Tue Feb 15 2000 - 04:50:59 EST

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    Stephen E. Jones wrote:

    >In my modification of Pearce's theory, I interpret the "man" of Genesis 1 as
    >the species Homo sapiens extending back ~ 120 kya, and the physical
    >`ancestor' of the entire human race.

    Is it no longer believed that Genesis 1 & 2 are a combination of Genesis
    in the scripture of the priests of Moses and in that of the priests of Aaron?
    I thought that was widely accepted.

    >CL>Of course this is a point against man-from-chimp.
    >
    >Strangely enough, here I disagree with Cliff. I don't think any leading
    >evolutionist maintains that "man" came from a "chimp", but that both
    >"man" and "chimp" shared a common ancestor. This I provisionally accept
    >as probable on the evidence.

    I didn't mean that *I* am for man-from-chimp. I'm all for pushing
    divergences back in time and all against forcing known forms
    into phylogenetic sequences. I'd push 'em all back to the Cambrian
    if it weren't for the molecular evidence.

    >But again to be fair to the evolutionary biologists there has been
    >some speculation about "mechanisms explaining the Cambrian Explosion".
    >Stanley has speculated it was due to the emergence of predators:

    Some speculation, but none that the establishment has any use for.

    FTR, my own notion is that segmentation is the key to the Cambrian
    Explosion. The macroevolutionary mechanism forming the gross
    morphology of vertebrates and arthropods is simply siamese-twinning
    (aka parabiosis), a process through which trains of segments can be
    quickly generated, followed by mutations causing loss and distortion
    of segments--a process which was drastic at first but soon became
    more gradual and Darwinian.

    --Cliff Lundberg  ~  San Francisco  ~  cliff@noe.com



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