I’am pretty sure that they are some open minded people here that may be interested to read this interesting thesis, if only to be able to criticize it better.
Well that was a nice copy-paste, Gil. “It’s a mix of bones” is of course a hilarious, but quite old creationist coping mechanism. Other creationists disagree and think they’re fully ape, and still others that they’re fully human. That kind of disagreement even among creationists is itself a piece of evidence that the fossils are genuinely transitional, which is why creationists must arbitrarily decide whether to classify it as fully one or the other.
Meanwhile, try to find the “kind” barrier separating these by insisting there’s too much change between them to have evolved over a period of 5-7 million years:
While maintaining these belong to the same kind and evolved in less than 6000:
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Is there some reason this interesting thesis cannot be published in a journal? I have little interest in purchasing and reading a book from two unqualified individuals which have not been subject to any level of peer review, even what passes for creationist peer review.
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So you’re telling me they are incompetent? Got it.
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One of the major papers on that was done by two excellent researchers in my department in Seattle, Josh Akey and his student Ben Vernot. (Josh is now at Princeton University and Ben is a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig).
Note that it does not mean that we are all mostly Neaderthal. Each of us of European or Asian ancestry carries maybe 2% of our DNA sequence of Neanderthal origin, but it varies as to which part.
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As can be seen from the above quote, you weren’t asking anything, you were pronouncing judgment.
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So, in other words, there is no actual data set behind the figure. One must also doubt whether either of the authors is competent enough in hominid paleontology to be able to construct any sort of data set for analysis. And you don’t seem competent enough to be able to tell whether they’ve even tried.
Only a committed creationist would be interested in a book that claims to show what we know from vast quantities of data (notably the molecular data you and they consistently ignore) that primates are related by common descent.
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Why? As a virologist, I know that Sanford can’t be counted on to know the difference between mutations and rearrangements, nor between strains and subtypes, in influenza virus. Why would I think he’d do any better with bones?
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Oh really??
We have a human pelvis on the far left and a chimp pelvis on the far right. The two pelvises in the middle are Australopithecus and Ardipithecus. Are you seriously telling me that the two in the middle look more like the chimp pelvis than the human pelvis?
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Models can be too complex, to the point where they start to conform to random noise (or the statistician’s bias!) more than any signal in the data. That’s all I meant to say.
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Yes. Throw more explanatory variables at a statistical model, and you’ll get a better fit, even if those variables are irrelevant. Throw enough variables, even if all are irrelevant, and you can get a perfect fit.
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The figure is an alternative model based of the same data that many paleo-experts have unsuccessfully tried to force into an ape-to-man framework. What’s matter with this? Doesn’t their approach reminiscent to Darwin’s one with his « I think »?
https://images.app.goo.gl/58tSmKBCQhYmmhFb8
I am not a committed creationist so you’re wrong here.
Are you saying that the fossil record allows for a convincing hypothesis for the origin of man, that there is a clear fossil trail supporting an ape-to-man progression?
I’m pretty certain that real experts are aware that man is an ape, so there would be no need for any “ape-to-man framework.”
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Darwin’s tree there was a purely hypothetical illustration of his idea of branching descent. It didn’t even represent any real taxa or data. I agree that their approach seems similar, though perhaps not in the way you intended. So can we now agree that Rupe & Sanford’s figure similarly had nothing to do with data?
The evidence of your many posts here suggests otherwise.
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No. They have the same data as everyone else.
They simply interpret them differently than most paleo-experts.
Evidence is sometimes misleading
This is just you avoiding the subject. What data? How interpreted to create the figure? In real science, there would be a description, in the caption, of the analysis used. The fact that you can’t seem to find that description anywhere tells me what I need to know.
Yes. We might as well ignore evidence entirely and just go with whatever fits most comfortably with our religious beliefs.
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As you can see below, your self-confidence is unfounded.
« No doubt about it, Australopithecines are like apes, and Homo group are like humans »
Leslie Aiello, Paleanthropologist of the University College London.
Quote mining and an article meant for laypeople does not say anything about the taxonomic awareness of the real experts.
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