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China's Earliest Modern Human Found
The remains of one of the earliest modern humans to inhabit eastern Asia have been unearthed in China. The find could shed light on how our ancestors colonized the East. Researchers found 34 bone fragments belonging to a single individual at the Tianyuan Cave, near Beijing.
AIUI (I'm not an evolutionary biologist, although my girlfriend is) the environmental pressures which gave rise to homo sapiens in Africa also occurred among simian populations elsewhere, so that human-like characteristics arose independently among multiple populations (h. neanderthalis in Europe, for example). Through interbreeding and competition, there's now a single species, h. sapiens sapiens. Although some of the characteristics of our species are apparently or allegedly tracable to interbreeding events, for instance I've heard that red/ginger hair among Europeans can be linked to Neanderthalis genes.
No, he is not a philosopher of religion. In the last twenty years, he has tried to present himself as one, but the academy, both theist or non-theist, is getting a little worried about him. Anthony Flew, instead of joining with Dawkins in any way, went the entirely opposite direction.
Theist philosophers of religion propose arguments, and their non-theist colleagues, though they critically examine them, nonetheless believe that the whole enterprise has value.
Theist philosophers don't necessarily work from any existing world religion, so "myths" don't often come into play here.
Please get some training in the field before you try to dispute its work. K thx bye.
Just recently I ran across this at statscan: Page 7-9 of pdf. There is an interesting table on "Religiosity", part of it compared religiosity to parental religion Look at the low religiosity category. If both parent have the same religion (more consistent message) only 32% have low religiosity, if both parents just have different religions (less consistent message) low religiosity jumps to %50. If neither parent is religious, it jumps to %85. This has always made sense, but this is pretty clear statistical evidence that it is more a learned trait.
? catno=11-008-XIE2006001
http://www.statcan.ca/cgi-bin/downpub/listpub.cgi
Religion of parents (vs outcome Lo Med Hi religiosity )
Both parents same religion 32 34 33
Parents from different religions 50 28 22
Neither parent religious 85 6 10
I like to think I was just born very skeptical and would have been a non believer no matter what circumstance I was born into, but it may just be that neither of my parents was religious and I was left to form my own ideas without being indoctrinated. Naturally many people will buck the trend but I think the correlation is clear.
Religion is just the brains legacy OS many people got stuck with.