Very nice. I note that at least one creationist
has placed the flood boundary at the start of the Phanerozoic. However, that’s Glenn Morton, and he’s an ex-creationist.
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I remember when the finding of H. naledi was first announced and the creationists responses were trickling out. The possible responses were “fully human”, “fully ape” or “something else.” And darned if they didn’t cover all three.
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Glenn Morton is an ex-YEC. He’s still a creationist.
I hope you’re not trying to force another discussion of what “creationist” means. On this site, I hope it’s generally used as a synonym for “anti-evolutionist”. At least that’s what I meant by it.
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this is because we are dealing with fossils. if these creatures were alive today i thing that it was easy to recognize what kind of creature it was. as we see today- its very easy to say if a creature is monkey or human.
Here is a video of the reconstruction of what H. naledi looked like.
Please demonstrate, according to Creation Science, how this is determined not to be a transitional form between humans and other apes, and whether it is classfied as fully ape, fully human, or something else entirely.
TIA.
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Those aren’t mutually exclusive. We are all both.
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Ook!!
So I have a question for the human evolution scientists (@glipsnort and others) about the current state of “human”. I’ve seen in several science news sites where they reference Neanderthals or Denisovans as other species then “anatomically modern humans”. But if we know that those populations interbred with modern humans, doesn’t that mean they are a subspecies and together we are a single species?
I’m a bit confused because on one hand, it seems like science says that modern humans are pretty distinguishable from Neanderthals and other archaic humans both physiologically and especially culturally (language, civilization, etc.). And yet, we find that they were able to interbreed enough that a decent percentage of our DNA comes from them. To me the differences make it sound like different species altogether, but the interbreeding sounds like same species.
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No. Reproductive isolation between different species doesn’t have to be absolute as long as there is some barrier that prevents merging of the two populations. That can be as simple as moderate selection against hybrid individuals. To pick an example, occasional hybrids occur between species throughout the family Anatidae, but we still count ducks as many species, not one.
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OK, that helps. So even though Neanderthals and modern humans could interbreed, they seemed to have stayed generally separate populations (geographically, culturally, or whatever) and so rather than Neanderthals and modern humans merging as a single population, we see Neanderthals die out and humans having a remnant of their genetic information from the small amount of interbreeding. So they are separate species that had some gene flow at some point(s). Is that close?
you know what im talking about. im not talking about the biological classification. the difference between human and monkey is quite clear.
Yes. Of course, this is still not universally agreed, because the difference between one species and two species is fuzzy, as it must be if speciation happens and is not instantaneous. How much interbreeding shows two populations to be a single species? How much interbreeding was there between neandertals and modern humans? Neither question can be answered easily.
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I’m not sure you know; that’s the problem. We can distinguish humans in the present from all other extant species, certainly. But this relies on there being a considerable gap between humans and other species, one created by extinction of intermediate groups. Consider the current controversies over how many species of gorilla or chimpanzee there are. We are spared that controversy because neandertals, denisovans, and so on, are extinct.
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You’re ignoring the question I asked. How do Creation Scientists classify H. naledi? How have they determined that it cannot be a transitional species between humans and other apes?
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Yes, I remember hearing “rickets”… A neanderthal is just a modern man with rickets…
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i dont think that we can, since as i said- its very hard sometimes to tell the difference since we are dealing with fossils. if these species were alive today i think that it was a different story.
if neandertals were alive today. are you saying that it was hard to tell if they are humans?
Depends. What’s your definition of “human”?
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