For Jack and David Operbeck
Jack wrote:
>>>I dont see anything in there that suggests that Ross thinks that all homo sapiens today are not human. I agree he claims that hominids, before anatomically distinct modern homo sapiens appeared are less than human. And I agree with you that one could argue that they are human, using Ross's own criteria (religious artifacts, burials etc.)<<<
I stand corrected. I misunderstood what you were writing and I was wrong. He does believe that all living H. sapiens are fully human.
>>>I expected them to say the same thing about h. floresiensis. They consider them less than human. Which leads me to another line of evidence against the RTB model. Does anyone know what the earliest date evidence for h floresiensis is? According to the RTB model, God rested after he created man, and no species should be created after Man, so according to RTB no new species after 100k years ago or so. If H floresiensis appeared after this date it would disprove their model.<<<
95 kyr is the oldest H. floresiensis. BTW, thousands of species only have a record in the Holocene and are not found in the fossil record at all. Indeed, only 3% of living animals are found as fossils at all. One could say that the earliest evidence of their existence is after God rested.
****
DAvid Operbeck wrote:
>>>As I understand it, multiverse theory doesn't necessarily require an infinte set of universes, just a possible set (though in some permutations an infinite set is proposed); and other related theories, like M-theory, could allow for additional dimensions not in an infinite set. So, I'm not sure a wacky theory involving quantum physics would have to be so wacky that every theory about Noah would have to be true. Or that it would have to involve me hitting a grand slam for the Yankees in the seventh game of the world series, bottom of the 9th, down three runs to the Red Sox -- fun as that would be. <<<
There are only 10^118 different ways that the number of protons in our universe could be arranged. If one has the multiverse of Hugh Everett or of Tegmark, one would have that many possible arrangements and somewhere in that vast space there would be a universe for every possiblity. String theory allows for 10^500 universes (Geoff Brumfiel, "Outrageous Fortune," Nature, 439(2006), p. 10-11)
But most of them have different laws of physics. I would say you are not correct in your assessment of these universes as only 'possible'. Modern physics is considering them as real (I don't think they are any more real than leprechauns because like leprechauns, we can't observe them.
In another note David wrote:
>>>>As I understand it, the problem for RTB's model arising from Templeton's work would be that, although the genetic evidence still supports the recent (~100,000 years) emergence of "humans" as RTB define them (home sapiens sapiens) from a smal population migrating out of a Africa, it also suggests those modern humans interbred with indigenous populations of hominids that had migrated out of Africa in two earlier waves ~1.5MYA and ~750,000 years ago. Such interbreeding would suggest the indigenous populations were "human" as well, and thus human-kind is too ancient to trace back to a single Adam and Eve less than 150,000 years ago. <<<
You then, don't understand Templeton's work. He is saying that the chances of the human genome appearing in the last 100,000 years is 1 chance in 10^17. Now, 10^17 is the number of seconds the universe has existed and that means that you have the same chance with having mankind appear in the last 100 kyr as you do of randomly selecting, from all the seconds the universe has existed, the one special second at which the KT meteor impacted the earth. I wouldn't bet on your being able to do that.
DAvid further wrote:
>>>But Ross/Rana seem to suggest, as I had earlier on the list, that God may have used existing genetic material from earlier hominids when He formed Adam out of the "dust of the Earth." If God did this, then our genome would reflect the history of those earlier hominids, including those two earlier waves of African migration. The "replacement" theory could then still possibly be correct. Obviously, this wouldn't survive Occam's Razor, but neither would just about any theory that seeks actual historical events in Gen. 1 and 2. <<<<
Why would God use pre-existing broken genes (the pseudogenes) to design man?
Received on Fri Mar 3 09:21:00 2006