What do Aussies believe re: Evolution?

white_goodman said:

I wouldnt be surprised if there was, in particular reference to humans, some form of intelligent design, not a God but maby some form of superior beings...

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pixel said:

to all intents and purposes, these "superior beings" might then well enough be labelled with the four-letter term "G-O-D-S".
And there lies my problem: If these gods are supposed to be so vastly superior, why couldn't they make a better fist of it? Their oh so "intelligently designed" organisms - culminating in humans as self-confessed "crowning glory of creation" - are anything but:
We breed at rates this planet cannot sustain.
We destroy the planet and all the organisms it contains by poisoning the environment.
We invent thousands of local "gods", to whom we attribute a mix of properties and commandments that are as conflicting and irrational as our own selfish nature.

IMHO, that's a crazy way to run a Universe. But of course I can be wrong and there are indeed a myriad of "superior beings", each of whom design their own Universe - in some weird kind of competition along the lines of "The Multiverse's Got Talent"
(Read R.A. Heinlein "Job - a comedy of Justice")

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trainspotter said:

The missing link? If not WHY oh WHY did a "GOD" or superior being create this?

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trainspotter said:

The missing link? If not WHY oh WHY did a "GOD" or superior being create this?

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drsmith said:

Something has to be first.

Plus if two similar species were evolving towards intelligence at the same time, one may out compete the other. Consider Neanderthal Man for example.

Even amongst our own species we have historically done a fairly good job of killing each other based on differences in race and religion.

Perhaps there are no truely intelligent species on the planet as yet.

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Put aside everything you thought you knew about being human - about how we got here and what it all means. After five years of rigorous scientific research, Danny Vendramini has developed a theory of human origins that is stunning in its simplicity, yet breathtaking in its scope and importance.

Them and Us: how Neanderthal predation created modern humans begins with a radical reassessment of Neanderthal behavioural ecology. He cites new archaeological and genetic evidence to show they weren't docile omnivores, but savage, cannibalistic carnivores - top flight predators of the stone age.

Neanderthal Predation (NP) theory reveals that Neanderthals were 'apex' predators - who resided at the top of the food chain, and everything else - including humans - was their prey.

NP theory is one of those groundbreaking ideas that revolutionizes scientific thinking. It represents a quantum leap in our understanding of human origins.

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motorway said:

Interesting take on Human Evolution

http://www.themandus.org/



Motorway

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So_Cynical said:

Makes perfect sense.

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Conceptualizing Cancer Cells as Ancient 'Toolkit'

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"Competition and natural selection among disjoined cells within a tissue compartment, such as might occur in the breast's terminal ductal lobular unit, for example, are the engine of cancer," Garland said. "The DINOMIT model provides new avenues for preventing and improving the success of cancer treatment."

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Why evolution is going nowhere fast

Slow and steady wins the evolutionary race? Not a bit of it: it's a sprint – one in which the runners might change direction at any minute

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Put it all together and the picture of evolution that is emerging is radically different to the way most people envisage the process. As Kinnison puts it, the popular view of evolution is upside down.

People think evolutionary changes are imperceptible in the short term but add up to big changes over millions of years. In fact, the opposite is true. It now appears that organisms evolve very rapidly in response to any changes in their environment, but in the longer term most evolutionary changes cancel each other out.

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motorway said:

Interesting take on Human Evolution

http://www.themandus.org/

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spooly74 said:

Not a lot behind this.

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/forums/viewthread/10601/P22/

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First, there is virtually no evidence of sexual intercourse between H. sapiens and Neandertals in the palaeoanthropological and genetic record.

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Researchers sequencing Neandertal DNA have concluded that between 1 and 4 percent of the DNA of people today who live outside Africa came from Neandertals, the result of interbreeding between Neandertals and early modern humans.

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Some experts suspect that the estimate for the amount of Neandertal DNA people carry today could rise with further studies””if a Neandertal from the Middle East were sequenced, for instance.

In addition, says paleoanthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin, the current study might be obscuring a contribution of Neandertal genes to the African gene pool, because the team specifically looked to explain genetic diversity in non-Africans compared with Africans. He and his colleagues are currently working on a way to assess that possibility.

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WHEN the first modern humans left Africa they were ill-equipped to cope with unfamiliar diseases. But by interbreeding with the local hominins, it seems they picked up genes that protected them and helped them eventually spread across the planet.

The publication of the Neanderthal genome last year offered proof that Homo sapiens bred with Neanderthals after leaving Africa. There is also evidence that suggests they enjoyed intimate relations with other hominins including the Denisovans, a species identified last year from a Siberian fossil.

But what wasn't known is whether the interbreeding made any difference to their evolution. To find out Peter Parham of Stanford University in California took a closer look at the genes they picked up along the way.

He focused on human leukocyte antigens (HLAs), a family of about 200 genes that is essential to our immune system. It also contains some of the most variable human genes: hundreds of versions - or alleles - exist of each gene in the population, allowing our bodies to react to a huge number of disease-causing agents and adapt to new ones.

The humans that left Africa probably carried only a limited number of HLA alleles as they likely travelled in small groups. Worse, their HLAs would have been adapted to African diseases.

When Parham compared the HLA genes of people from different regions of the world with the Neanderthal and Denisovan HLAs, he found evidence that non-African humans picked up new alleles from the hominins they interbred with.

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motorway said:

from your link

This does not appear to be true.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=neandertal-genome-study-r

Motorway

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That Neandertals contributed genes to Homo sapiens is quite certain now. I have a paper in the referee pipeline where I suggest this interbreeding probably happened in the frontier zone of west and central Asia where the initial expansion of early Homo sapiens was stopped 50-80 thousand years ago when it reached the parts of Eurasia where Neandertals were present.
There is actually very little evidence (or let me rephrase that: very little uncontested evidence) that Neandertals and Homo sapiens really cohabitated any given area in Eurasia for some time. To me (and this is part of the paper I have in submission), it is becoming more and more clear that H. sapiens only entered Europe for example after Neandertals disappeared there. Not only are there confirmed hiatuses between the last Neandertals and first moderns in several areas of Europe, but there is not a single uncontested (!) case of interstratification: and the strongly contested ones that have been proposed in the past, concern a handful of sites in a small area only. In fact, H. sapiens entry in Europe is conspicuously late compared to their entry in southern Asia and Oceania. The reason is probably, that Neandertals and H. sapiens were so close behaviourally and cognitively, that they could not outcompete each other (quite contrary to some persistent popular ideas, the ones which many professional archaeologists have grown increasingly uncomfortable with over the past decade or so!). This means that interbreeding could occur only on the frontier where their respective biogeographies touched: west and central Asia. And I don’t think you have to think in terms of “rape” at all when it comes to interbreeding. That’s just negative stereotype pitching Neandertals as primitive brutes again. No: I think some H. sapiens girls fancied some Neandertal hunks quite well.

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Glen48 said:

DNA is like DIP switch's it all depends which one's are on or off makes all turn out differently.
Embryo chicken can be x rayed and you can see teeth and a tail starting to form . Birds evolved from a certain small Dinosaur whoch had feathers to control their body temp.
Dinosaurs had a wish bone, their arms evolved into wings over the years.

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trainspotter said:

The missing link? If not WHY oh WHY did a "GOD" or superior being create this?

View attachment 43381

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