Hi Dick, clearly you didn't read my post that talked about H. floresiensis the other day.
You wrote:
>>Are there any flaws in your theory? H’mmm, let me think … Well, your flood happened millions of years before there was any single living human being on the face of the earth!
Well, lets see, the line leading to man diverged from the apes around 6.3 million years ago. The Mediterranean flood was 5.5 million years ago. If at that time, should God have taken that ape and inserted that spirit (which so many beleive happened) then this scenario is still possible. Ok, they were small brained fellows. And this raises an interesting question. So many have written and said that God took an ape and inserted the image of God, but they NEVER seem to let it actually be an ape. They always want it to be a Homo sapiens sapiens into which God inserted the spirit. This is because so many want the insertion to be within the past 50,000 years. But let me ask:
Where in the Bible does it tell us what Adam looked like?
Where in the Bible does it say that the image of God is reserved for those who look like us?
The evidence of religion going back many hundreds of thousand of years ago is something that you ignore and which fits my view better than yours see http://home.entouch.net/dmd/religion.htm
Now, what are small brained guys capable of doing? I post this again from the other day.
"'There's a young student at this university," says Lorber, 'who
has an IQ of 126, has gained a first-class honors degree in
mathematics, and is socially completely normal. And yet the boy
has virtually no brain.' The student's physician at the university
noticed that the youth had a slightly larger than normal head, and
so referred him to Lorber, simply out of interest. 'When we did a
brain scan on him,' Lorber recalls, 'we saw that instead of the
normal 4.5-centimeter thickness of brain tissue between the
ventricles and the cortical surface, there was just a thin layer
of mantle measuring a millimeter or so. His cranium is filled
mainly with cerebrospinal fluid." ~Roger Lewin, "Is Your Brain
Really Necessary," Science, Dec. 12,1980, p. 1232.
Now, goodness, a small brained fellow is capable of doing math and excelling at it. What size is his brain?
"Thus he points out, 'I can't say whether the mathematics student
has a brain weighing 50 grams or 150 grams, but it's clear that
it is nowhere near the normal 1.5 kilograms, and much of the
brain he does have is in the more primitive deep structures that
are relatively spared in hydrocephalus.'" ~ Roger Lewin, "Is your
Brain Really Necessary?" Science, 210(1980):1232-1234, p. 1233,
cited by Philip Lieberman, The Biology and Evolution of Language,
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 31-32
Well, this kid makes H. floresiensis look absolutely brainly. H. floresiensis has a brain size of around 380 g and manufactured stone tools (see Adam Brumm, et al, “Early Stone Technology on Flores and Its Immplications for Homo floresiensis,” Nature, 441(2006), p. 624)
. That math student, leading a normal life, driving a car etc has between 13-40% of the brain of an H. floresiensis and H. floresiensis has a brain about that of the australopithecines. So, while you denigrate the piths, and their abilities, you ignore the fact that we seem to have a modern example of a small brained but brainy guy who was capable of handling fire, making stone tools, hunting pygmy elephants. Hunting with spears requires lots of intelligence. If he could do it, then so could the piths that you seem so incredulous about.
I will head this objection off at the pass. Some have tried to say that H. floresiensis is nothing more than a microencephalic. But the problem with that is that there must have been a whole village of them (unlikely) and secondly, in that same issue of Nature is an article on two views of H. floresiensis. The first view argues that he is a microencephalic. They publish a picture of a skull of a microencephalic. The skull almost looks like that of a dog it is so elongaged and distorted. Next to it is the opposite position taken by Dean Falk. She publishes the picture of the skull of floresiensis and notes that the two don't even look similar. See (Michael Hopkins, “Is the Flores Hobbit a Deformed Homo sapiens?” Nature, 441(2006):p. 559) Tell me the skulls look alike! It is utterly laughable to claim that they are both afflicted with the same disease.
The other reason to reject the concept that H. floresiensis are microencephalics is that modern microencephalics are not normall 1 meter tall, which is about the size of the australopithecines you denigrate.
I mentioned hunting. Here is what a research programme says about hunting:
In the picture emerging from this research sophisticated knowledge of animal behaviours as a prerequisite for hunting success seems to loom large. According to Kaplan et al. 2000 (p.170-172), hunting “is the most learning-intensive foraging strategy practiced by humans (…). Unlike most animals, which either sit and wait to ambush prey or use stealth and pursuit techniques, human hunters use a wealth of information to make context-specific decisions, both during the search phase of hunting and after prey is encountered. Specifically, information on ecology, seasonality, current weather, expected animal behaviour and fresh animal signs are all integrated to form multivariate mental modules of encounter probabilities that guide the search and are continually updated as conditions change.” http://www.archeologie.leidenuniv.nl/index.php3?m=46&c=116
And here we have a bunch of guys with brains smaller than an Australopith doing the most learning intensive foraging strategy, and you say that there couldn't be complex activity by the piths.
Thus, Dick, your claim that there isn't anyone capable of handling the events in the flood 5.5 million years ago, might very well be wrong. Your objection is based upon a lack of knowledge of anthropology or a bias. Brain size is not important; brain organization is. HEre is another look at why brain-size is not that important (my bolding):
"Well over 500 CT scans were performed on patients, some of
whom were over 20 years of age. These included some who already
occupied responsible positions in life, including senior nurses,
university graduates and members of executive councils. Many
were never suspected of having hydrocephalus, although looking
back on their past history this diagnosis could have been made
much earlier. They obviously had slow progressive hydrocephalus
which did not detectably interfere with their life style. By the
time they had a CT scan, some had such enormously dilated
ventricles there was hardly any brain left above the level of the
tentorium. They retained the midbrain cerebellum and pons but
what was virtually missing was the part of the brain we attribute
to superior intelligence ; the centres for the fine control of
movements and the appreciation of visual and auditory stimuli.
"The systematic CT scan study showed there were many older
children and adults who had grossly dilated ventricles with very
thin residual brain and yet did not suffer from physical defects
and had normal intelligence. Some were outstandingly intelligent
with IQs well above the 'bright normal' range. I can only
presume hydrocephalus with only moderately raised intracranial
pressure can slowly progress over many years to reach eventually
extreme degrees without ever causing symptoms. It is possible
that specific functions of the brain, such as the motor cortex,
may be relocated elsewhere from early infancy onwards or that we
do not need such a large quantity of brain and only need to use a
very small part of it under normal circumstances." ~ John Lorber,
"Is your Brain really Necessary?", Nursing Mirror, April 30,
1981, p. 20
Shoot Dick, you don't even need most of the brain you don't use! ;-)
And, where did you get that unscriptural idea that Adam must look like us?
Dick wrote:
>Your flood can't get an ark above sea level let alone to any mountains. Your flood is no where near >Ararat
Don't need to. The Bible says the mountains (PLURAL) of Ararat. The present mountain, with which you have fallen in love, didn't get its name until the 11th century or so. Prior to that the prefered landing site was in Aarmenia and was not Agri Dagh.
"Only toward the eleventh and twefth centiries did the focus begin to shift toward the huge volcanic cone Agri Dagh, the modern Mount Ararat in easternmost Turkey, as the final resting place. Vincent of Beauvais (c. 1184-1264) located his Mount Ararat in ARmenia in the vicinity of the Araxes River and assumed that that was the mountain ascended by St. Jacob. After tha, several late medieval travelers including Friar William of Rubruck (thirteenth century), Odoric (c. 1286-1331), Marco Polo (1234-1324), Friar Jordanus (fourteeth century), and Sir John Mandeville (d. 1372) took it for granted that Agri Dagh was the biblical mountain and recounted local traditions linking the deluge and the mountain." Davis Young, The Biblical Flood, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,1995), p. 34
So, I would say that one doesn't have to stay with that johnny-come-lately mountain. :-)
As to getting something above sea level, what does this mean? Where does the Bible say that? Besides, from the perspective of the ark at the bottom of the desciccated Mediterranean, the surrounding continental platforms would have been 10,000-15,000 feet tall and would have looked like mountains to them.
A look at any topo map of Turkey shows that the mountain chain along southern Turkey does continue to the coast near Adana. So, if the ark landed somewhere there, one could legitimately claim they landed on the mountains (Plural) of Ararat.
Dick, who is way behind the times in anthropology, wrote:
>>>How good were Australopithicines at building massive water-tight vessels? How would you explain Australopitihcines raising crops and livestock 5 million years before actual humans thought of it? Did Australopitihcines play stringed musical instruments and make tools out of bronze and iron? Show us some evidence of that dear friend. Then criticize us for a Mesopotamian flood for which you have seen an abundance of historical evidence in addition to layers of water-laid clay deposits found in the central Mesopotamian cities by archaeologists.<<<<
Well, Dick, do you have any idea when the first documented ocean crossing took place in a water-tight vessel of some sort? No, I bet you don't. The ancestors of H. floresiensis (whose shoulder is more similar to that of H. erectus than it is to ours--remember he is the small brained fellow who used tools) had to have crossed 8 bodies of water to get to Flores, even at times of low sea level. This occurred 750 kyr ago. I mentioned the shoulder above so that you could understand that H. floresiensis is the diminutive descendant of H. erectines. Those who have tried crossing these straights in primitive boats attest to the difficulty of not being washed northward out to sea. It took skill and a lot of hard work to make the crossing, even for modern people.
I would also like to point out that mankind has been crossing bodies of water for over 3 million years. Chimps can't swim and because of that major rivers stop their migrations (William C.
McGrew, "The Nature of Culture: Prospects and Pitfalls of Cultural
Primatology," in Frans B. M. de Waal, editor, Tree of Origin: What
Primate Behavior Can Tell Us About Human Social Evolution, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 248)
The australopithecines were able to spread throughout Africa more than 3 million years ago. And H. erectus was able to fill the old world by about 1 million years ago. Somehow, they were crossing big rivers. But, of course, Dick, you aren't looking for this kind of data.
Dick wrote:
>>>Do you really forget everything you don’t like, or am I reading a replay of the same conversation we had over ten years ago?<<<
Yeah Dick, it is sad how you haven't learned a thing in the past 10 years. Is there any medicine available for your condition?
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Sat Jun 10 2006 - 18:43:58 EDT