Hi Glenn:
>>>Does anyone else see your response as a smokescreen, or is it only me? <<<<
GRM: No, Dick I am sure that everyone here sees my reply as you do, except me that is. Few here want a concordistic account. And many give lipservice to evolution, but then have Adam and the flood within the YEC time limit of 6000 years.
>>>>Are you such a good con man that this kind of non-response actually fools people? Are you really that good? I talk about the lack of human beings at the time of your flood and you talk about brain size.<<<<
GRM: Define human--someone that that looks like you and I? Someone with a modern forehead? It is hard to know what you mean by the term, human, when you won't define it.
>>>> I mention building a massive ark capable of holding animals and you counter that early man could across rivers. I said your hypothetical “ark” couldn’t rise above sea level and you jump to some argument about Mount Ararat, Agri Dagh, which I have never named as a possible landing site, in fact have argued against. See how you are. You obfuscate.<<<
Glenn O. Morton is my name (O for Obfuscator)
>>>Let me state the problem a little differently. If someone said Leaf Erickson was the first to fly a plane across the Atlantic, we could note that Vikings aren’t contemporaneous with airplanes. The Flintstones cartoon mixes dinosaurs with Homo sapiens which we know isn’t possible as bidedal mammals such as ourselves are separated by roughly 60 million years from dinosaurs. Are you with me so far?
GRM:Following this line of reasoning, your infilling of the Mediterranean Sea occurred at 5.5 million years ago. It must have taken longer than one year to do it, and at a time when our species had not yet evolved. <<<<
GRM: No, if the dam collapse was deep enough (and there is evidence from paleontology that it had to be at least 3000 feet deep) it might have only taken a year to fill the Med. Secondly, I now see your definition of human--someone that looks like us. Do you have prejudicial feelings towards H. erectus or A. afarensis?
>>> There were no “men” to sin. Only apes lived at that time in geological history. <<<
GRM:That is interesting that you should say that. I think recognizing art is a human thing--seeing a face in a naturally carved stone is a human thing--not an ape thing. Apes don't keep items like that, yet an Australopithecus saw a rock which had a face on it and he carried it several miles back to his rockshelter. When was this? More than 3 million years ago. It is called the Makapansgat pebble.
GRM: The first manufactured artwork is a 1.6 million year old phonolite pebble into which a face was pecked. Mary Leakey discusses it in her reports on the Olduvai Gorge excavations.
GRM:Now, clearly this is not evidence of sin, but it is evidence of human-like behavior. And another human-like behavior--only mankind makes stone tools and they were in existence as long ago as 2.6 million years. Why do you call them apes? No animals chips stone except mankind. I think my point is that you are a sapienist.
>>>Even if a split between what has since become human from what eventually became chimpanzees did occur at 6 million years ago, the line which became human were still apes long after the split. No biological “humanoids” occur in the fossil record earlier than 2.2 million years ago. This puts a massive split of over 3 million years between your “flood” to the advent of our genus R20;Homo.R21; I would like to hear your argument as to how “sin” spread from non-humans to humans.<<<
GRM:Two responses. Are you at all aware of the imperfections of the fossil record? Go look at the gaps between the first and second occurrence of fossil animals. http://home.entouch.net/dmd/gaps.htm. Some fossil animals lived on earth for millions of years and during that interval didn't leave a single fossil for us to find. Yet we know they were here on earth during the interim. Secondly, your view is weak because it claims that humans are a very late creature, but the archaeological evidence says that human behavior goes way back. It is our behavior, not our looks that makes us human.
>>>Australopithecus ramidus 5 to 4 million years BC
Australopithecus afarensis 4 to 2.7 million years BC
Australopithecus africanus 3.0 to 2.0 million years BC
Australopithecus robustus 2.2 to 1.0 million years BC
Homo habilis 2.2 to 1.6 million years BC
Homo erectus 2 to 0.4 million years BC
Homo sapiens- 400,000 to 200,000 years BC
HS neandertalensis 200,000 to 30,000 years BC
Homo sapiens sapiens 130,000 years BC to present<<<
GRM: You seem not to understand that most of this is a relatively smooth transitional sequence. There is no major break between anyone from erectus on. Even those supposedly modern humans at 160 kyr (not 130) were quite similar to the creatures we called archaic homosapiens. The earliest of them were quite similar to the erectines. Homo habilis had a fully human birth pattern. We know that from the ratio of the birth canal to the adult head size. Like us, they tripled their brain size AFTER birth. Apes double after birth. The importance of this is that extended maternal care was needed for the infant compared with the Chimps. THat is one of the things which makes us human. But, habilis was not very different from the Australopithecines (although they didn't seem to have the head size tripling after birth). And there are some anthropologists who beleive that they could speak.
There is a really good case for speech in H. habilis:
"Some physical anthropologists, among them anatomist Philip
Tobias of the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa,
believe that Homo habilis was capable of articulate speech, on
the grounds that Broca's area is developed in early Homo's brain,
but not in that of Australopithecus." ~ Brian M.
Fagan, The Journey From Eden, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990),
p. 87
Course, you get to ignore this again just like the last time I talked about this.
Another expert:
" But what concerns us here is the surface structure of the
cerebral cortex. During the summer of 1982, Simon Kasinga and I
cast the braincase of the oldest skull representing Homo habilis.
And guess what. Unlike any of the australopithecine endocasts,
this one (from specimen KNM-ER 1470) appeared to be humanlike in
the revealing convolutions of its left frontal lobe. As Phillip
Tobias first suggested, Homo habilis appears to have had a
Broca's speech area in its brain and, as such, was probably
capable of some form of rudimentary humanlike language." ~ Dean
Falk, Braindance,(New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1992), p. 50
GRM: So, you are saying that these guys were apes. What were they doing with the equipment for speech? BTW, this is as you say, over 2 million years ago. This and some gaps in the record takes me back to my time frame. Statistically speaking, the origin of a taxonomic group is around 1/3 older than the earliest fossil found. in the case of H. habilis that would say they probably originated around 3 million years ago. But recall that this is a statistical value. Sometimes it is longer and sometimes it is shorter. But it is very unlikely that the first specimen is the first habilis who was ever on earth.
>>>You complain about lack of evidence of flood deposits far enough North on the upper Tigris, although I don’t know of any digging to confirm this, and yet you have no problem with the absence of evidence of any elements of civilization among our brachiating forebears. Your finding of simple bone flutes, which by no stretch can be construed as “harps” (Gen. 4:21), still gives you a gap of 5 million years from any type of civilized society which Genesis describes! You don’t see that as a problem?<<<<
GRM: Wooden flutes? Won't survive even 100 kyr. Wont survive even a millennium unless on the bottom of the sea. I was in Tibet last month and saw nomads there, the first time I have actually been face to face with nomads. I can assure you, looking at their material possessions, that very little evidence of their existence at that spot will exist in 100 years. What do you expect? Statues of D. Fischer signed by the artist?
GRM:As to you not knowing any digging, why not simply look at a geologic map. Try the Geological Map of the Arab World, map 4 Ar Riyad, published by the Arab Organisation for MIneral Resources Rabat Morocco, 1987. That has the results (in map form) of all the 'digging' as you call it.
>>>If you read the description in Genesis of the conversations Adam and Eve had with God, and these conversations occurred over 5 million years ago, you must presume that God had decided to make eternal life available for non-humans, that non-humans were capable of conversations with God, and that they had all the elements of civilization, heretofore undiscovered, that archaeologists concur arose in greater Mesopotamia, the fertile crescent – datable to no earlier than 10,000 years ago.<<<
GRM:See, you and I disagree on what makes us human. You are under the misapprehension that looks is what makes us human. I beleive it was behavior which makes a human. I know some pretty ugly people who behave as humans do (including you???). I just documented that one of those 'non-humans' had a well developed Broca's area which is involved in speech. And as I said, some anthropologists believe that Broca's area got bigger BECAUSE of speech. And that would mean that earlier non-sapiens would have had some form of language.
GRM:I would also suggest you re-read Planning Ahead, my article on what it takes for a person to know what sin is. These non-humans as you call the, had the pre-requiste for knowing what sin is about. http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1999/PSCF9-99Morton2.html
>>>Here is my suggestion. Why don’t you shift your totally impossible timeline to the infilling of Lake Van, roughly 10,000 years ago? Here is an entire rationale for that.
http://www.accuracyingenesis.com/flood.html<<<
GRM:First off, the guy doesn't know didly about physics. An ice comet hitting the earth will turn all the ice to scalding steam. Secondly Lake Van is an interesting idea, but something that late doesn't account for the unity of the human race which the Bible teaches and your theory ignores. It couldn't have killed everyone.. Lake Van is so small, and the land always in sight, why not just walk out of the area? Why float around on a boat in a lake for a year with a bunch of pigs and goats, when you can see the shore?
>>>At least there you wouldn’t have the incredible timing problem you have now. At least you would have some semblance of being right and you have others with you in the same boat, so to speak.<<<<
GRM: Without a doubt, people don't like the timing of my views, but then, I don't like the timing genetics gives for the human race. Our genes would require 5.2 million years to gather the mutations we observe in the human race. Anyone who wants to have the biological descent from Adam, simply has to move back that far. There is no way around it. So, it seems, the choice is to have Adam very early to account for genetics (http://home.entouch.net/dmd/hegene.htm ) or we say Adam is father to only a portion of humanity.
>>>The only motive I can see for your tilting at windmills is that you are trying to line Adam up with the man/ape split and shoehorn something into the flood slot demanded by Genesis. I applaud your perseverance, even in the absence of any sensible coherence. <<<
GRM: I guess I like the facts to actually fit a theory rather than do that accommodation thing and declare that something is true even if the facts contradict it. I must freely confess that things would be much easier if I would tell people what they want to hear.
>>> At least it should be apparent (to nearly everyone but you and Hugh Ross) that Adam cannot be aligned with the man/ape split using the commonly-accepted anthropological date as I have argued for twenty years. Placing Adam in the flow of mankind, rather than at the apex, puts Bible, science and history all together. <<<
GRM: Actually doing what you do violates the laws of physics, but, hey, what is a violation of physics when one gets to see the Library of Congress on a daily basis?
>>> That should count for something. And Eridu in southern Mesopotamia fits all the historical evidence for a Garden of Eden.<<<
GRM: Counting is not what is correct. When you count up the forces requried for 8 people to pole a huge boat up a river against the flood and compare it with the energy output available, you find that you can't do it..
>>>>Now to your questions:
Where in the Bible does it tell us what Adam looked like?
Where does it say that sin emanated from non-human ancestors?<<<
GRM: That isn't an answer. Please answer the question.
>>>>Where in the Bible does it say that the image of God is reserved for those who look like us?
Well, it does imply that the “image” is for humans.<<<
GRM: What is a human? by your definition, looks is everything.
>>>>Now, what are small brained guys capable of doing?
By “guys” you mean human guys do you not?
>>>>I would also like to point out that mankind has been crossing bodies of water for over 3 million years.
I must be behind in my anthropology as you suggest. What eminent anthropologist extends “mankind” beyond 3 million years? Let me remind you that the “pith” in Australopithicus means “ape.”<<<<
GRM: Well, Dick, here is a quote from Niles Eldredge:
"Mankind was up and walking close to 4 million years ago, and quite possibly a good bit earlier than that." ~ Niles Eldredge and Ian Tattersall, The Myths of Human
Evolution, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 7
The great taxonomist Ernst Mayr also beleived that:
"Though Mayr had not examined any of the fossils himself, he
ventured to suggest a sweeping revision: everything from the
earliest ape-man to the latest modern man ought to be included in
the genus Homo--possibly even within Homo sapiens. Pat
Shipman, The Evolution of Racism, (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1994), p. 185
I bolded part of that so your tired old eyes could see it.
"The dawn of humankind occurred 5 to 7 million years
ago, when the ancestors of apes and humans went their
separate evolutionary ways. But the fossil record of this
split is scarce.Claire Ainsworth, "Ancient Ethiopian
Shakes the Evolutionary Tree," New Scientist, July 14, 2001,
All of these people use humankind/mankind to describe creatures older than 3 million years.
Let's all say together now, 'MANKIND'.