RE: [asa] The Bible does not require a Neolithic Adam!

>>I had kidney stones once. In a sense, I gave birth to those stones. And
it was extraordinarily painful. It was beyond pain.
 
And I have witness from a woman or two, who have both passed kidney stones
and given birth, and, at least in their words, the experience was
comparable.
 
On a slightly more serious note. Do you think that we have reached the end
of our evolution? Is it not possible, short of routine caesarian sections,
that human brain capacity has reached its limits?<<<
 
I have heard kidney stones claimed to be similar to birth pain, by women.
Since I have never had any I couldn't say if they were worse than my leg.
 
To answer the last question, no, I don't think we have stopped evolving.
Every mutation each subsequent generation gets means they are a bit
different from us. Most of human evolution has taken place in the skull,
not in the post-cranial bones. Homo erectus was very much like us from the
neck down. But since I don't view the shape of our skulls as a defining
criterion for humanity, I have no problem with humanity continuing to change
and look different than we do today, yet still they would be human.
 
 

glenn
They're Here: The Pathway Papers
Foundation, Fall, and Flood
Adam, Apes and Anthropology

http://home.entouch.net/dmd/dmd.htm
  

-----Original Message-----
From: jack syme [mailto:drsyme@cablespeed.com]
Sent: Sunday, October 22, 2006 7:44 PM
To: Glenn Morton; donperrett@theology-perspectives.net; 'ASA Discussions'
Subject: Re: [asa] The Bible does not require a Neolithic Adam!

Concerning pain in child birth. The argument I thought I was making is that
pain in childbirth is due to the ratio of the neonatal head circumference
to that of the birth canal. This is one sentence out of my new pamphlet,
Who was Adam. The page number is still to be determined when I finish
formatting it.

 
". The human birth canal is 13 centimeters at its longest dimension and 10
centimeters at the smallest. By comparison the baby's head is 10
centimeters at the longest dimension and the shoulders 12 cm." Glenn R.
Morton, Who was Adam?, Pathway Papers, 5 (Spring: DMD Publishers, 2006),
page to be determined.
 
That is a tight fit. Similar proportions among fossil men go back to about
2.5 million years.
 
Anyone who has seen animals give birth, know that they are not entirely
comfortable. Watching the contractions during the birth of a cow, or even a
cat, the animal is experiencing discomfort. However, it is nothing like
what we humans experience. Everytime I tell a group of women that I once
broke my leg in 4 places and my foot was at my kneecap, and tell them how
horendously painful it was, they always say, it can't match childbirth. And
the few women who have broken their leg like that agree. Since I will never
experience pain in childbirth, I can't quite be an expert on it.
 
Thus, this is to say, I do agree with you that in and of itself, pain in
childbirth could be said to be psychologically increased. But when one
realizes that the anatomical features of the human birth which cause the
pain we see today, existed two and a half million years ago, why would I
need to resort to psychology or subjective feelings to say that pain
increased? I have the anatomical data which shows that it was a problem back
then.
 

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Received on Sun Oct 22 21:59:35 2006