How about decent of humans from other “humans”? i.e. Neanderthals, Denisovians, and whatever else they are finding according to @Patrick’s recent link. I think the “what’s a human?” question is getting so muddied genetically that it may be an interesting way to talk to people about evolution without getting too “crazy”.
Yup. This is a key point. The science of origins unsettled our intuition of how we define “human.”
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Nah, Creation Science easily deals with that. They’re all just humans. Or, uh, are they apes? Well, whatever, the Creation Scientists all know which is which.
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Great table. Reference?
And there is also the ol’ creationist trope which explained such fossils with: “The so-called Homo ____ species was actually nothing but a Homo sapiens with a bad case of arthritis/gout/microcephaly/etc.”
That was the old standby formula I remember from “creation science” speakers back in the 1960’s.
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So that table goes to Homo erectus, anybody know of something similar for the closer relatives like Neanderthals, Denisovians, or Homo heidelbergensis? It could be interesting if the YECs got it sort of right, in that they took a broader definition of “human” out of necessity, but it could turn out to be more true than people thought in terms of interbreeding, etc.
The scientific community has a broader definition of human to include all of the Genus Homo, perhaps even to Australopithecus and Ardipithecus.
It’s from this http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/compare.html
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The scientific community has no definition of “human”.
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Question about this table. When the age of the fossils is given as “<4500 years post-Noahic flood population”, doesn’t that just mean “earlier than the present”?
I think it just means it’s supposed to be from some population that lived after Noah’s flood in ~6000 year YEC chronology. So, younger than the flood.
A bold assessment indeed. Creationist dating is a powerful method for determining the ages of fossils.
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Compressing the entire geological record into 6000 years, IIRC the entire age of the dinosaurs lasted a few minutes back in the 1970s.
Yes, that is what is meant. The “truth” is that all human fossils are post-Flood and thus are descendants of Noah’s family. So for each fossil they feel compelled to put them into one of two baskets “human” or “fully ape” the latter being a descendant of the pair of archeobarimin (ark ancestor) apes. Most YECs now believe that chimps, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans are the same “kind” and therefore have a common ancestor and those other “human-like” fossils that are NOT humans are just variations of the “ape kind.”
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Thanks @Joel_Duff, excellent talk at the ASA, by the way. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
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Thank you. I wish I had had more time at ASA to talk to so many great people. I was just in-and-out that morning.
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The correspondence of the Flood to the geologic column is another thing creationists can’t seem to agree on. Some of them put its end at the K/T boundary, some have put it at the end of the Paleozoic, and others put it as recently as the start of the Pleistocene.
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Yes, but some of us survived until today. (We are classified as threatened but not extinct.)
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Hey! I identify with that!