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Ape-Human Split Moved Back By Millions Of Years
E++99 writes in to let us know about a development in paleo-anthropology. It seems that up until now, scientific consensus has placed the divergence of man from the ape line five to six million years ago (based on "genetic distances"). But newly discovered fossils in Ethiopia place the divergence at least twice as far back, and perhaps as long ago as 20 million years. They also largely put to rest any doubts that man and modern apes both emerged from Africa. From the article: "The trail in the hunt for physical evidence of our human ancestors goes cold some six or seven million years ago... Beyond that... fossils of early humans from the Miocene period, 23 to five million years ago, disappear. Fossils of early apes especially during the critical period of 14 to eight million years ago were virtually non-existent — until now... [T]he new fossils, dubbed 'Chororapithecus abyssinicus' by the team of Japanese and Ethiopian paleo-anthropologists who found them, place the early ancestors of the modern day gorilla 10 to 10.5 million years in the past, suggesting that the human-ape split occurred before that."
that this comes right after the story entitled "Attack of the Evil Monkeys From Hell".
in 5... 4... 3...
don't laugh too much... there's people out their who really think this way.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
... and Duke Nukem still isn't out.
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
Hmm, the immediate implications here seem to be mostly for our relationship with orangutans and chimps, and less so for our chimp relatedness. If true, this gives us a lower bound on the number of years since the divergence between the human/chimp line and the gorilla line, but we still don't know when we diverged from chimps.
I expect they will adjust the molecular clocks to reflect the new knowledge and make a new guess. But the lesson of this whole discovery is that the current models for molecular clocks seem to be a bit lacking.
breeders?
I used to carry a bottle of whiskey for snake bite. And two snakes. -Nefarious Wheel
Last I checked, "apes" were actually paraphyletic—that is, humans and chimpanzees actually forma a clade, and gorillas split off some time earlier (and orangutans before that, and gibbons even before that). So it should really say that the split between gorillas and Hominini (chimps and humans) was earlier than previously thought. The discovery gives no information at all about when humans and chimpanzees split.
an ape-like creature making crude and pointless toys out of dinobones and his own waste, hurling them at chimp-like creatures with crinkled hands regardless of how they behaved the previous year. These so-called "toys" were buried as witches, and defecated upon, and hurled at predators when wakened by the searing grunts of children. It wasn't a holly jolly Christmas that year. For many were killed.
By looking at people, I would have thought it would have moved forward. ;-)
Also I am wondering if we are realy a different species or that we just want to be. e.g. there are differnt kinds of sharks that we call sharks, yet we make a difference between apes and humans.
Just being curious.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
My chimp and I are still happily married.
That's your fuck up right there. You mix faith and science in the same context. No wonder you don't get it.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
How could apes and humans have been merged millions of years ago when everybody knows the universe is only six thousand years old!
"Towards the end of our research period we came across some fossil teeth that MAY be identified as coming from the after the split between gorilla and human ancestors.
Not only that, they MAY be earlier than the previously proposed date for the gorilla an human split."
===========
The fossil teeth demonstrate that the last common ancestor of the gorilla and human was "out of Africa" (although this has been disputed), it is not a point of real controversy.
This whole article reeks of conditionals, and restatements of non-controversial theories (e.g. " There is broad agreement that chimpanzees were the last of the great apes to split from the evolutionary line leading to man, after gorillas and, even earlier, orangutans"), and there is nothing but speculation and weasel wording in the entire article.
This is just grant-milking, and possibly -- though I hope not -- nationalism and nonsense of the worst kind. NOTHING reported in the linked article is substantive in any sense, and is not worthy of comment or rebuttal unless and until some real theorems are posited.
Non-news. Pass it by.
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
Creationist research says some of these abominations may be nearly four thousand years old.
It depends where the money is. Science isn't a hobby to a professional scientist, it's employment.
Read the Book of Enoch - Dead Sea Scrolls & Sumerian texts, they tell the same story. The whole Christian theology is a corruption of the official records. Roman Emporer Constantine was so fed up with the 200 odd Christian religious factions fighting it out in the Roman Empire that he called a group of their leaders together in around 300AD (The Councils of Nicea). They were told to come up with a 'standard' belief. As no record of Jesus exists until he was 30 years old, they invented the virgin birth, King Herod, and all of the other twaddle. They even copied existing documents such as the Egyptian Book of The Dead, and paraphrased all existing religious scripts from around the globe in doing so. The stories in the Bible are not originals at all, identical ones exist in scores of ancient texts, right down to the 'miracles' and names. At this point the Roman Catholic Church was formed..and bingo, you have a Control Group that has made millions out of the fiction ever since. It's why there are such close ties between governments and the Roman Catholic church. The Book of Enoch is not in the Bible, and not without good reason. The Sumerian tablets tell the same story, as do most other ancient civilizations. We are descended from sky gods. That is why no one will ever find the missing link, there isn't one. We were created by cross breeding with visitors. It's all documented. According to Babylonian documents, the Anunnaki were the children of Anu and Ki, brother and sister gods, themselves the children of Anshar and Kishar (Skypivot and Earthpivot, the Celestial poles). Anshar and Kishar were the children of Lahm and Lahmu ("the muddy ones"), names given to the gatekeepers of the Abzu temple at Eridu, the site at which the Creation was thought to have occurred. The head of the Anunnaki council was the Great Anu, (rather than being just a sky god, Anu in Sumerian actually means "sky"), of Uruk and the other members were his offspring. His place was taken by Enlil, (En=lord, lil=wind,air), who at some time was thought to have separated heaven and earth. This resulted in an ongoing dispute between Enlil of Nippur and his half brother Enki of Eridu regarding the legitimacy of Enlil's assumption of leadership. Enki, (En=lord, Ki=Earth), in addition to being the God of fresh water, was also God of wisdom and magic, regarded by some as an alchemist. When the Igigi went on strike and refused to continue to work maintaining the universe, on the Shappatu (Hebrew. shabbat, Eng. sabbath) Enki created humankind to assume responsibility for the tasks the Gods no longer performed. The Anunnaki were the High Council of the Gods, and Anu's companions. They were distributed through the Earth and the Underworld. The best known of them were Asaru, Asarualim, Asarualimnunna, Asaruludu, En-Ki (Ea for the Akkadians), Namru, Namtillaku and Tutu. These civilzations were thousands of years old, they could not have invented this stuff, it has to be real. The Church will do anything it can to prevent people accepting it as the truth as they will lose their power base, influence and wealth if they do so, and along with them go world governments. Best bet for simple explanation is 'Zeitgeist The Full Movie - Latest Edition' on Google Video.
They belong together. You 'know' things as fact because you believe implicitly what a scientist tells you, since he(she) is a scientist, what he says is true. You will believe it until the day they say something different is true, which you will then believe something different implicitly. You will do this without any loss of faith in said fallible human for leading you to believe what turned out to be false.
May this quote forever be remembered.
Life is not for the lazy.
You don't seem to understand how it works.
1. _Nothing_ is sacrosanct and beyond questioning in science. "Consensus" just means the stuff we already have plenty of data to confirm, but noone's stopping you from finding new data that shows the limits or shortcomings of it.
2. You are, however expected to present the data and logical train of thought from data to conclusion, if you want to question anything. And more specifically,
2.A. any hypothesis, if it's going to make it to "theory", is supposed to explain the data we already have.
2.B. if we're to replace an existing theory with a more complicated one, well, Occam's Razor still applies. We don't do complexity for complexity sake. You're supposed to show exactly what wasn't adequately explained by the old theory, but follows naturally and reproducibly from yours.
To pick an example out of the hat, take general relativity:
1. Yes, even something as accepted as newtonian gravity could be questioned, but
2. It had to show the data and maths that people can examine and decide for themselves. Among other things, as I was saying: (A) It still had to match the measured data. E.g., applying general relativity to an apple, still had to match the measured time to fall. And (B) it had to be useful on at least one case where newtonian gravity doesn't produce the measured results. E.g., light deflection near a massive star.
Anyway, I'm surprised at the number of people who don't understand one of the two. We have no shortage of nutcases who either:
1. treat science as some fucked-up religion. (I'd give more examples, but you only have to look at the wave of retards postings stuff along the lines of "nooo, don't try to think about it! You're not worthy enough to question these guys!" each time a science or tech story comes up and someone dares ask "well, then how did they solve well known problem X?")
2. think that "questioning" or "investigation" means making up bullshit, supported by nothing more than handwaving, generous application of logical fallacies, plus a lot of wishful thinking.
In a nutshell, noone's stopping you from questioning any theory you wish. Take your pick, really. You may not necessarily get a grant, but noone's stopping you. Who knows? You might even be right. But show us the hard, reproducible data you base that on. If you don't, well, then you qualify as a crackpot. We're still not stopping you, but we might do mean things like point and laugh.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Piltdown man
A tooth of a pig drawn into an apeman!
A lie and a fake 5 years by 1927.
Nebraska man
A lie and a fake for 40 years.
By then everyone in the world thought they were from apes.
How did it take 40 years for the scientific community to find it was a clumsy fake?
Javaman (homo erectus)
Discovered by Dr Dubois and he himself declared in 1938 that it was just a monkey (gibbon).
He had found human skulls in the same stratum did not tell anyone for 30 years!
A lie and a fake. He eventually renounced the javaman as a fraud himself.
Peking man
Dr. black discovered it, a tooth and some ashes.
Soon after human remains were found mixed with animal remains. The animal remains were the food of the humans.
Hey but they wanted an apeman! so they grabbed bits of both and made Peking Man!
1972
Richard Leaky
Found a skull that supposedly blew evolution out of the water by 2.5 million years. The only thing left was
Ramapithecus. Just some fragments of jaw bones and some teeth. The same size and shape as a babboon in Ethiopia.
It never has been found and it never will be found a creature that is more than brute and less than human.
Also there is such little evidence for apemen that the amount would not be accepted in any other field of science.
And there's plenty more scientific evidence for the non-existenance of evolution!
(I know this is not what you like to hear, so just score me nothing as usual. Thanks)
Religion and faith are exactly the oppersite of this. You just put your belief in something because you choose to (which is ok).Science starts out with a question and then a solution, religion just jumps straight to the solution hoping they are correct.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I read the headline the way someone might read "Human progress on X moved back by Y number of years". For a minute I feared that either monkeys had evolved or humans had devolved by several million years, with the latter seeming more likely.
Them dirty evolutionistors were wrong again!
Dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago at the KT boundary.
Prior to that time the mammal line had already split much more than we previously gave it credit for, a lot of the main groups were developed. This article is a fairly worthless crock. Basically some teeth were found that looked vaguely gorilla like and dated back 10 million years. So we know that there was some ape-like creature with a gorilla-like diet 10 million years ago. However, saying that this is the Ape-Human split is as stupid as saying it's the Human-Mammal split. Humans are apes. We are clearly within the same grouping of gorillas, orangutans, and chimps. There's no real grouping of animals which includes those yet excludes humans. This find perhaps sets back the date of chimp-gorilla split but not "human-ape". That's just stupid. Chimp-human is a split which dates back about 4-6 million years. Gorilla-chimp goes back 8 million years, though perhaps 10 if this isn't just some offshoot.
Finally, 10 million years is about 2/17th of 85 million years. Basically your math is off, and you're using old information, and to top it off this article is totally stupid. It's 10 million year old gorilla-like teeth. It actually has almost nothing to do with human evolution, though if you studied gorilla evolution you might care. Though, it's even weak evidence that it's actually a gorilla just that it had a diet like that of a gorilla.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
This sounds like another story about long ago and far away...
I'm getting pretty fed up with you religious types posting here. I'm
getting especially tired of your abuse of science to make your religion
seem reasonable.
While your blind faith in the face of the facts is impressive, it does
not help further the discussion. Your unwillingness to tolerate any
decent (as seen in the quick burying of any opposing post as flamebate
etc.) is keeping any reasoned discussion on the topic nearly impossible
to achieve.
It's obvious that you have learned your catechism well as you will spit
it back any time your comfort level drops. How about dealing with the
facts and having a mature discussion?
So you devotees of the government funded church of naturalism, try to
think for yourselves long enough to see that you are being fed religion
in place of science. If you want to have a scientific discussion, you
should leave the religion back in your church (or school as the case may
be).
Let's look at some facts:
FACT: Darwinian evolution is NOT proved by the fossil record. In fact,
quite the opposite. The reason for the theory of punctuated equilibrium
is because Darwinian gradualism (yep, the one taught in your holy books)
can't be supported by the evidence.
FACT: Natural selection and every observed mutation (including
beneficial mutations) result in either less genetic information
or at best no new information, not more. Government behavior not
withstanding, no matter how long you give it, removing information will
not produce more information.
FACT: Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny was discredited shortly after
Haeckel fudged his drawings in the 1800s and unleashed this fraud on the
earth. Yet last time I check, most of the texts used in the government
churches still teach this as truth.
So who is it that is imposing which religion in the schools?
Any theory is subject to revision based on new evidence. Nobody's trying to "PROVE evolution". Common descent is the best explanation for the dual-nested hierarchy that we see; a theory is simply the best explanation.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
As someone else pointed out, the KT boundary was 65 Mya, not 85. Also, early mammals of that era are usually described as "shrew-like" (also nocturnal, which is why we all have different color vision systems than reptiles), so probably even smaller than that.
The line that would eventually give rise to the mammals split from the reptile lineage before the emergency of the dinosaurs (the number cited is 324 Mya); look up "synapsid" for more information. It was actually the dominant type of land fauna until the greatest mass extinction in history at the end of the Permian (250 Mya), which was followed by the emergence of the dinosaurs. There were large synapsids in the early years of the Mesozoic, but the branch that would give rise to the mammals--the cynodonts--emerged about 220 Mya. There's a rather exhaustive description over at Wikipedia; also see talkorigins.
On a more relevant note, consider the whales. It appears now that whales are more closely related to hippos than hippos are to cows. (Again, see Wikipedia for a good summary.) This was mightily confusing, because we generally take phenotypic change as an indicator of distance between species. The important thing to remember here is that species change due to pressures put on them. Rapid pressures brought on by migration into a new environment (like the sea, for example) will cause a greater rate of phenotype change than would exist if the environment remained constant--consider the shark for this latter case.
Also, as another commenter has pointed out, the mammalian lineages had already split at that point; divergence points for some groups of mammals are after the KT boundary, but many are before it. However, it appears that even though the groups were separate, they all looked pretty much alike until they migrated into the niches vacated by the dinosaurs and diverged widely.
And lastly, your math isn't quite right. 7 million years (the divergence point for the chimp and human lineages, notwithstanding a very poorly written article) is more like a tenth of the time it took to get from (many kinds of!) shrew-like mammals to a similar level of mammalian diversity to what we see today.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
As an evolutionist let me be the first to tell you to quit your petulant whining, you wannabe martyr.
Also, these aren't attacks on religious people (pro tip: really good whiners use the phrase "people of faith" for maximum martyrdom); they're attacks on taking Bronze Age myths seriously, which is a ridiculous thing to do--it deserves ridicule, and damn skippy we're going to serve it up.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I think Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is relevant here.
It's rude to criticize someone's beliefs. But when they stick those beliefs into the public sphere, they're subject to just as much mockery and derision as anything else is. The moral, one would think, is to keep religion the hell out of politics, but some people just can't grasp that.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
http://www.coderoshi.com/
The good news is that, because whining about isolated moderations is not behavior that will help you reproduce, eventually you will die out and thicker skin will evolve.
Normally, I'd assume the same. But if you'll hit the "Parent" link on the message you were answering to, you'll see that it was an answer to someone who didn't seem to have it quite figured out, one way or another.
Plus, you only need to look around in almost any topic to notice that "a large number" doesn't mean "all". As I was saying, for point 1 alone, you just need to read almost any science- or tech-breakthrough (or the occasional PR job disguised as such) to run into the mandatory "noooo, these guys are smarter than you, you're not worthy to question them" (or some variant thereof) crapflooders these days. So there you go, proof that not everyone quite gets the scientific method.
I dunno, really... "A large number" are probably smart guys indeed, but the whole looks bleaker by the year, to be honest. At some point Slashdot seems to have started attracting large numbers of astroturfers, PR hacks and con-artists peddling their latest attempt at redefining reality or science, religious self-appointed missionaries, paranoid nutcases on a jihad against medicine/science/whatever, has-beens and never-weres, PHBs looking for some screwed-up idea of street cred among nerds, and bored trolls who are here only because that's what their corporate firewall allows. Not all, mind you, probably not even a majority, but enough to make me wonder.
Can't hurt if someone figured out how to hammer into their heads how science actually works, you know. It probably won't be me, but, eh...
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Didn't humans actually come from the water?
But there are plenty of people who claim to have objective morality, much as you do, and they're all very convinced and very conflicting. At most one of them can be right; chances are you're not. In fact, what you slap the label "objective" on is nothing more than tradition, revelation and authority--not very good ways of knowing anything at all.
In short, nobody's morality is objective. Claiming that yours is just makes you more dangerous, as you'll probably do all kinds of freaky shit in its name--and if you won't, someone will do it on your behalf.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
/ it cannot be help that this is going so far off the topic. It's just too damn funny.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
"suggesting". That's the key word here folks. Still no definitive evidence as to when the DNA took that split. I'm still voting for magic.
Keep in mind that DNA determines mainly cellular structure and everything since viruses has a cellular structure. So the basic mechanisms of cellular function are going to remain relatively constant across billions of years.
I think what's he's managed to garble so badly is that the common picture of Neanderthal as a bent over creature swinging its arms and scraping the ground with them derives from the fossil of a *Neanderthal* that had arthritis.
What a maroon!
SIX thousand years ago. Ussher placed the creation at 4004 BC. These characters can't even get your pseudoscience right!
You crackpots. The world has only been around for 6,000 years.
The appendix is a useful organ which may or may not have a vestigial origin. However, I agree that a tail bone is evidence which supports the theory which humans evolved from a form that once had tails. Humans evolving into their present form has doesn't imply that the form they have been and/or are still evolving into is not the image of God. I've never heard of the tail bone having a "negative purpose" in humans.
The real image of God is the human soul, and I believe the evolution of the natural form of humans and animals follows the evolution of the spiritual form. Further, that the corruption of the human spiritual form has lead to corruptions of the human natural form. For example, the eustachian tube in Homo sapiens is very problematic, and the middle ear in general. It could be argued that neither are necessary. However in Neanderthals, this wasn't the case. The eustachian tube was much larger, wouldn't have been prone to blockages or infection, and its perpetually being open, together with the Neanderthals' large nasal cavities and nostrils would have played an important part in their hearing ability -- an aspect of that sense which we have almost entirely lost. (You can do a simple experiment using ear plugs to show that, when yawning, we can still hear through our nose and mouth, even alter the tone of the sound by changing the shape of our mouth -- a built-in equalizer. [Bats use this ability extensively, which is why they have "nose leaves" to act as directional third ears])
Occam's razor only suggests that explanation to those for whom the body of evidence lacks any information about the spiritual realities of mankind. For you, I agree it's a reasonable conclusion. For those of us who have the spiritual evidence, that evidence eliminates the possibility of correctness of that explanation. That strongest of that evidence is the direct experience of God. Like other direct experience, like the direct experience of the truth of the laws of logic, such experience is far stronger and more significant than any sensory evidence can be. That does not mean that our understanding is magically correct, or that our theories are infallible. They are clearly not. But we do know that any theory which excludes God's direct intention from the origin of man is necessarily wrong.
To be fair, it could be argued that neodarwinism doesn't necessarily do this. I think that neodarwinism as an explanation for macroevolution fails on strictly logical grounds, the quantification of those grounds being the goal of ID. I would summarize the failure by the fact that a system following a gradient toward a local minima, even if the shape of that gradient is changing due to environmental changes, simply does not branch out into increasingly complex solutions. It is just contrary to how the mathematics of such a system would have to work.
Because of my understanding of the relationship between the spiritual world and the natural world (something today, but possibly not forever, considered outside the possible realm of "science"), I believe that the spiritual evolution in all life forms, specifically the inherent tendency of all life forms to the form of the Origin of life, i.e. God, is the driving force behind the macro-evolution of their natural forms. However, I fully expect that one day we will discover additional natural mechanisms by which DNA mutates, not randomly, but towards specific goals, dictated by who-knows-what physical process. While it won't convince any materialist of a spiritual cause of evolution, I greatly look forward to that day, as it will hopefully provide a more nuanced view
Whining? Or calling out? Moderation on slashdot, like everything on slashdot, is insignificant. The "debate" or rather conversation over the fact of evolution and it's percieved impingment on religion. The reason soviets had breadlines and americans didn't owes a lot to their rejection of evolutionary biology. That's a pretty real economic consequence for rejecting reason for emotional convience. It's one thing for a person to choose their own doom, it's quite another for them to choose it for others. Which is what Creationists are fundementally all out. Failure, ignorance, and poverty.
Apathy tends to evolve (currently short lived) evangelist school boards.
Judging by a couple politicians I've met, I'd say that the split hasn't yet occurred for some. Maybe they were hiding when it took place; can't say for sure.
"birds shit and pee out the same tube they use for sex."
Well homosexuals use the same 2 tubes that they shit and pee out of for sex. What's the difference? Taste?
I read TFA and MOFA (many other fine articles) on this subject, and they all stink to some degree, though most not so much as this one, which I could barely even keep straight. The formula is simple: what did they find, what did they observe, what are the working conclusions, and what assumptions does this challenge. Not one of the articles I found explains how the ape diet differs from the common ape ancestor. More roughage. More roughage than what? I guess they don't know, since they haven't discovered those teeth yet, but nevertheless, the consensus is firm, and unspoken to the unwashed reader.
And somehow, if you find eight teeth in Ethiopia, it instantly proves that no other segment of the ancestor lineage drifted into Eurasia on a small vacation for any length of time. If I spot in Spokane an RV with a Massachusetts license plate heading west on the I90, then instantly I conclude "they be taking the direct route to Seattle". Not possible they visited Florida. No chance. But apparently, you can fill in the gap from 25 Ma to 10 Ma just like that on the basis of eight teeth.
I'll come back in a year or two when the dust settles and the reporting improves.
The untold & hidden HISTORY (not mythology) of Peoples of Sumeria tells us exaclty how man was created!
Here is a movie about this:
http://www.1anunnaki.com/
Here is all the theory:
http://www.sitchin.com/
Here is the Museum:
http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/
Paleoanthropologists can be very subjective over the interpretation of teeth (qua the controversy over the interpretation of the "Peking Man" Homo erectus teeth". Here the don't even have any bones let alone a full specimen they only have a few teeth. I personally place more reliance on the objective scientific methods of the molecular geneticists than than the subjective guess work of the paleontologists. I still think that a recent split in the hominid and ape lines about six million years ago is the most probable scenario. There is not the slightest evidence for hominids before that date but but there is plenty of evidence for hominids younger than five million years old.
Dude. He's obviously talking 'bout moses. Who wrote the books.
Mod this UP!
You Americans idiotic Slashdot moderators are really religious fanatics which cannot accept the TRUTH!
We see that small-scale mutations fall into certain classes. (There are also larger-scale mutations, such as gene duplications, but we'll leave that aside for now.) The genome can be visualized as a set of very long strings (chromosomes) made from a four-letter alphabet. (I'll use an 'XYZ' alphabet because I don't want to give the impression that I'm writing out actual genes.) A point mutation, for example, changes 'XYZ' to 'XZZ'. An insertion changes, for instance, 'XYZ' to 'XYYZ'. A deletion changes, for instance, 'XYZ' to 'XZ', and so forth.
Based on definitions set forth in information theory, point changes have no effect on the quantity of information in the genome, insertions add information, and deletions remove it. Do you understand?You've seriously seen school textbooks which teach that embryonic development recapitulates the evolutionary history of the organism in question? Bear in mind that describing common features in embryos which become different structures in adults is quite different from recapitulation theory. I'd like to see an example, if you can provide it.
Also, that's "altar". "Backed only by faith"? Perhaps 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution would be a good place to start; if you don't want to click over there, the existence of the dual-nested hierarchy (which predicts the absence of chimaeras) is very strong evidence for common descent. What part of the theory do you see as being "backed only by faith"?
One isn't "branded as a heretic" for disagreeing. Poor scholarship and gross ignorance will get one branded a charlatan if one keeps at it for long enough. Attempting to do an end run around the scientific process and trying to sell conclusions directly to the public (as the cold fusion guys did, for example) is at the very least impolite, if not outright offensive.
A persistent refusal to back up wild claims peppered with insults generally won't be met with hugs and kisses. Creationists are no different from the infinite-free-energy crowd or any other set of cranks who waste scientists' time; the claims of persecution are pretty much the same ones. The difference is that creationists have a much better lobby,
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Seeing all these articles and arguments thru the years made me think. Sorry for my lack of terminology.
1. Are we trying to complete the evolution "map" so to speak? 1 map being from dino to lizards, another one from dino to birds, etc.
2. Disregarding the ape-human thing, are there ANY maps that had been completed? Thereby PROVING that evolution works at least FOR that particular family?
3. A deeper question is, what is the resolution needed for a "map" to be deemed completed? We find ape A and ape E. Next year we find ape B, C, and D. Do we need a B.5, C.5, or D.75 the year after in order to prove that yes evolution works?
4. If question 3 cannot be answered, how in the hell would we know that yes humans came from apes when we finally have a half ape, half human subject? Is he C.5 or C.78? Then do we need C.65? A tad bit more ape and we're happy?
This is frigging nuts. I just don't know when it stops. Help me out here please.
Great, just when I finally convince a bible thumper that while carbon 12 dating is flawed in precision, meaning you can't run a test and find out a rock is 400,000.058563 years old to be precise, the values is in relativity. We can clearly tell that one thing is about twice as old as another thing. Based on that and using it to compare items we know the precise ages of, we can then say that if a glass artifact we know to be from 1400bc is 1/10th the age of another item, then we know the other item is approximately 34,000 years old.
So now he'll come back and say "Well, how far off did you say it really is?". Of course, when I've used the earlier logic to prove that dinosaurs are millions of years old, he told me that's only because God made it that way on purpose and it's not our job to question that.
Crap, now I'll have to listen for a month about how I was wrong again. I'm not sure if I can take that much more of the thumpers, they're driving me nuts.
BTW... Isn't it about time for a proper organized atheist religion? We can even have lobby groups that focus on trying to get the governments to try and make people think for themselves!
If you think human beings evolved from monkeys, you need to have a little chat with The Librarian (and watch out for donkey carts.)
... if it had done as little for you as it did for Christians.
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
Thanks--I had been wondering about how chromosome counts could change since I was in high school, and looking back, I'm really quite disappointed that my biology teacher didn't at least point me in the right direction when I asked. It's not so much that we had bad biology classes, but evolution was covered rather quickly; there was a unit on Punnett squares and Mendelian inheritance (I'm the blue-eyed child of two brown-eyed parents, which makes me a nifty example), and then there was a drawing of a phylogenetic tree, and then we were dissecting earthworms. It was all a bit of a blur.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Religion doesn't need to be proven to those with an open mind. Life was created to fill in any ecological niche. Bacteria change almost before our eyes (as do viruses, though some say viruses aren't "alive"). Even multiple species can fill the same niche, as long as there is room for them. What we can only speculate on is whether there is another driver for faith in unproven ideas, perhaps a diabolical one. I think the real reason for studying the creation of man or any other species is to fill in the curiosity gaps.
With the Gonzales monkey business, I thought they were never split - just disguised with a suit and glasses.
In other words, what they are really afraid of is radical nihilism. This is more than just a blow to the ego. It's a question of whether it can be meaningfully said that such a thing as the ego exists.
Exactly. But it is important to remember that *radical nihilism* is entirely a projection, a reaction formation. It does not follow from the premises, it is merely the most fearful and debilitating possibility.
Consider that existentialism does not preclude the question of morality or ethical behavior. In many respects, it reifies these issues and constitutes them on a firm, immediate footing, absent onto-theological appeals. Many people are understandably uncomfortable with the idea that they are personally responsible for figuring out what is right and wrong. Most folks desire shared limits; desire the conceptual shorthand the Imago Dei offers, and the vast rubric of codes and norms erected (pun intended) in His name, or conditioned by His possibility.
If God is dead, everything is permitted. --Sarte
If God is dead, nothing is permitted. --Lacan
In other words, any act must be justified for oneself and others without reference to an ontos, telos or theos. We are already outside the Law. We don't need permission, we need courage. We are struggling with the manifold symptoms of our collective historical experience.
The question of the existence of a discrete human being as the basic unit of ethical discourse is an excellent one, but does not implicate the question of ego. Whether the accretion of ideas that represent *me* is an accurate representation of a unitary mind affiliated to a discrete physical being is entirely beside the question of ego. Ego happens the moment this accretion of ideas finds itself confronted by an other. Ego exists in differential relation to other, similar, egos.
Enjoy your symptom!
illegitimii non ingravare
Wait -- I thought when there was scientific "consensus", continuing to do more research, investigation, and to continue question the prevailing assumptions was unnecessary and sign of an unhealthy "denialist"
Well there's the problem! And with that mistaken thought cleared up, hopefully any other science issues will start falling into place for you.
Someone who has studied physics (at minimum SOLID independent study of physics but prefrerably someone with a legitimate degree in the field) doing an experiment to test Relativity... or even to test some basic point of Chemistry... and submitting that work to legitimate scientific peer review... GOOD. Great! Fantastic even! Lots of scientists are testing and retesting relativity and evolution and everything else all the time.
Someone with no education in physics and who doesn't know the difference between a pound and a kilogram, someone who goes on a scientifically illiterate rant "proving" that Relativity wrong because his watch doesn't slow down when he drives in reverse... and who posts his nonsense on the internet or runs some political lobbying campaign about it... that person gets insulted and riduculed mercillessly.
Anyone with half a brain knows not to run around making wild claims about a subject they know nothing about.... knows not to run around saying all the experts in a field are wrong and stupid... when he hasn't studied the subject and doesn't understand the subject.
I know about as much about car engine repair as I know about the space shuttle. I don't know next to squat about farming. My knowledge of quantum-chromo-dynamics isn't worth the paper it's not written on. There are a thousand areas where I am completely ignorant. If I go on some rant in one of those areas making horribly flawed arguments and claiming the actual experts in the field are all wrong, well then I expect and deserve to get my ass verbally handed to me.
If you haven't studied quantum mechanics, if you don't understand the details of quantum mechanics, if you have a high school level education in physics supplemented by a Hollywood TV/Movie presentation of quantum mechanics, you know not to run off at the mouth making silly nonsensical claims that quantum mechanics is wrong and all the physicists are wrong and stupid, right? You wouldn't blame us for insulting you and laughing at you if you did that, right?
Well why would it be any different in any other field? Why would it be any different in.... for example... biology?
If someone's grasp of biology consists of a (likely politically crippled) high school level education in bio supplemented by a Hollywood TV/Movie presentation of evolution supplemented by a handful of largely-not-understood arguments from a junk anti-evolution website and they go on a rant that evolution is wrong and all the biologists are wrong and stupid (or claims that all biologists are in some evil Atheist conspiracy or something)... and they "prove" evolution is wrong by saying it violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics... well that's just plain wrong and scientifically illiterate. I mean, that 2nd law of thermodynamics argument is *SO* badly wrong that even AnswersInGenesis website has a page declaring it wrong! Well, that person is going to get ridiculed.
Anything in science is open to two sorts of questions:
(1) Admitting you don't know about something and having a genuine interest in learning... "Why do they say X? That seems wrong to me because Y".
(2) Actually being an expert in the subject, and challenging consensus with productive debate with other experts in the subject.
Engaging in a public relations campaign or in politics as a means to challenge genuine expert consensus... NO. That is bullshit. That is "denialist". If you think Relativity is wrong, or you think evolution is wrong, or you think cigarettes don't cause lung cancer, or you think humans aren't causing global warming, then it is not legitimate to spend millions on a public relations c
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Also, if a textbook states that a theory is "proven fact", then it's poorly written. Science isn't in the business of providing absolute proof. Gene duplication is well-known; gene duplication plus point mutations (also well-known) equals new genes. Both have been observed. I pointed to these things in the last post I made, and I'm pointing to them again now. What are you not getting? Why is recapitulation theory effective "as a religious tools"? Why is it more effective (at what, exactly?) than modern results in evo-devo? And when are you going to actually provide an example of these textbooks you keep invoking? Textbooks are frequently not terribly good, but I think science texts are bad for the same reason that math texts are bad, and in the same way--they're written by committee, and the whole process is a damned racket designed to make the whole mess teacher-proof.
But if you're trying to show that science textbooks are part of a massive conspiracy to cover up something (what, exactly?), you're going to have to do better than waving your hands. Specific examples, please--start with the "real obvious stuff". Again, examples, please. If someone has good results that the establishment is covering up, I certainly want to hear about it.
Also, that's anthropogenic, meaning human-caused; anthropomorphic means human-shaped, like Bugs Bunny.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Yeah, I'm the him you thanked for the great link--that should have read "you're welcome" rather than "thanks". Egg on me.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
And I assure you, no one in this thread is losing sleep over the idea that creationists won't take them seriously. Ah, the "I was kidding" defense, always a good fallback position when you're shown to be talking nonsense.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Point mutations do not add or remove anything. A point mutation changes one base pair in the genome. For instance, an 'A' becomes a 'G'. The reason that duplication is important is that while the point mutations may change the functionality of the second copy of the gene, the original functionality remains intact in the first copy.
Appeals to "information" are popular among the intelligent design crowd, but they're not terribly relevant. A large heap of random noise is a lot of "information", but it's not terribly useful. The gene duplication event adds information, but the point mutations keep it constant--yet it's the point mutations following the duplication that create the new functionality in question. A hoax? Wait, you have evidence that recapitulation theory was the result of a conspiracy rather than scientists just plain getting it wrong and ignoring evidence that wasn't what they expected to find? Could you present this evidence? And you'll be showing me a textbook that states that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny when, exactly? A link to a description or review of a textbook would be fine. Pat Michaels who can't tell degrees from radians? Somehow I'm not impressed by his scholarship. He also appears to have a fat sinecure at the Cato Institute, and receives plenty of cheese from ExxonMobil and their subsidiaries. He also appears to be a research professor at the University of Virginia.
You cited "people who have lost their job for doing good science simple because it did not agree with the prevailing opinions". Pat Michaels either fudged his numbers or is too incompetent to do them right--not very good science--and did not, it seems, lose his job. So, again. Please cite someone who's done good science which disagreed with the prevailing opinions on climate and lost their job for their troubles.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The "irreducible complexity" idea, right. They've yet to actually find something that's irreducibly complex; in the meantime, the argument goes that as (random person) can't explain how x developed, then it must have been a wizard. This argument is actually made by some people; if you're not making it, then kindly ignore this part.
No, they didn't. There aren't "logical operations" involved in the process at all; the operations in question were all simple, slight changes in phenotype which could be made gradually. (I don't know what you're referring to as "increasing rewards.)
The only "breadcrumb trail" involved is a selection for better-functioning eyes. Here, I'll reiterate the point for you.
The eye is a complex organ. To show that the fish eye (our eyes are variants of that basic type) could have arisen from simpler organs, we show a path consisting or arbitrarily small steps which go from a light-sensitive patch to the fluid-filled "camera eye" that we use. Each step consists of a kind of variation which is observed as part of the variety of any given species (a body part is slightly longer, or slightly curvier, or thicker, or thinner), and in each step, the variation slightly improves the quality of vision. Furthermore, we can look at existing animals and see various stages of the proposed path in nature (for example, the nautilus has a pinhole-camera type of eye, with no lens), which provides evidence that not only is the path a possible one, it may in fact be the path that the ancestral eye took to get to where it is now in humans.
While morphogenesis is a fascinating and darned complex topic, the only thing that needs to be understood here is that a change in genotype causes (through an arbitrarily complex system of feedback loops, agonists and antagonists) a change in phenotype. This has been known since the genome was discovered in the first place. While it's certainly an important question as to how DNA influences morphology (and there's some really nifty work involving Hox genes which explains a good part of it), it's not in question that it does.
To take a page straight from The Extended Phenotype, if a change in a beaver's genome makes the beaver more likely to build a better dam, then we can legitimately say that the gene is "for" dam-building, even if we know absolutely nothing about how it works--we know only that it does.
Cla
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Yeah, so why not try to defend their position. If it's a reasonable position, why should that be hard to do? Are these "commenters" so mentally incompetent that they can only resort to mocking?
Ah, one of the central mythologies of atheism: Religious people essentially inherit their religion, and those who don't... well, it's best to pretend they don't exist.
No, actually, there are not. That's my point. There is virtually nothing on the subject except childishness. I'm writing to advocate for reasoned discourse, as well as for a modicum of civility.
Are you serious? I say that these people "seem to be capable of thinking about nothing else," and you believe yourself to have "shown that I was talking nonsense," by pointing out that they do at times think of other things? Really? Maybe English is your second language, in which case you might want to read up on usage and rhetorical style most common to the language. You might find idiom, figure of speech, metaphor, and hyperbole of interest.
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
If you want to discuss the merits, go to another thread. Maybe the one I linked, maybe another one. If you're just here to complain, by all means, stay here. But at least be honest about it.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Where on earth do you get these ideas?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
No, most mutations are neutral, not harmful. Harmful mutations are selected against; beneficial mutations are selected for; that's what selection means.
I just outlined mechanisms for random mutations, pointing out that some destroy and some create. Are you paying attention or just repeating yourself?
No, this isn't gradualism. Mutations occur at roughly the same rate whether or not a species is undergoing change (you can breed fast-mutating strains, but that's not the point); the difference is that where in a species at equilibrium any change away from that equilibrium will decrease its fitness, in a species in flux (say, during a migration event), this will not hold true, and the species will change.
I can't find my source for this, and I do apologize--I'm still looking, and I'll post it when I get it--but the average rates of phenotypic change over the long term seen in the fossil record are far, far slower than those seen in the short term when a population migrates into a new region, or when it's subjected to some new strongly selective pressure.
Yes; that's a darned shame. Of course, there are plenty of fossil transitions above the species level. Luckily we can see what you term "intermediate species" in the wild today in the form of ring species; these cover a span of space rather than time, but the idea is the same--a continuum of organisms reaching from one form that's certainly in one species to a form that's certainly in another.
You're not paying attention. The mutation rate stays largely constant, and whether or not a mutation is beneficial depends on the environment. In a new environment, more novel mutations will be beneficial, but that's a function of the environment, not a function of the way the species works.
The guy who had a feud with Haeckel and called him a fraud? What about him? All I found was a quote in which Haeckel defends his drawings as being diagrammatic rather than strictly representational, and as being a fair representation of the features depicted. Where's the fraud?
And when are you going to find me one of those textbooks which describes the biogenetic law as fact?
I won't accept the word of some guy on Slashdot because I have no way of verifying it. (I'm seven feet tall and can shoot blue hadoken from my furious fists!) I'm not asking you to take "the internet" as a source, and I ask--again!--what you're disputing. The guy receives significant compensation from ExxonMobil and the Cato Institute, and did not lose his job for being "a heretic".
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
There is a good explanation of what transitional forms are on Wikipedia; there's a very, very long list of the fossils outlining various transitions here. The set of links to measured rates of phenotypic change (an average of 0.6 darwins in the fossil record; up to 100,000 darwins in an experimental setting) is collected here. I look forward to seeing your evidence that Haeckel's drawings made it into textbooks. How we got to discussing Haeckel's motivations is beyond me, but I'm more interested in your original assertion that recapitulation theory is being taught in textbooks as some kind of dogmatic truth. And yet you can't point to a single one, despite having spent so much time looking at them. I've been out of high school for some years now, and I don't have children attending. Schools in my area could be teaching phlogiston theory, for all I know. You're the one claiming some kind of knowledge, and you're the one that keeps weaseling out of providing any sort of actual evidence. Could you give me the titles and primary authors of your childrens' textbooks?
Do it. You've been dancing around backing up your outrageous claims for this entire thread. Jonathan Wells has made his bones claiming that textbooks teach Haeckel's theory; he's wrong. Either back up your claim with evidence or retract it. Who are you responding to? I pointed out that Pat Michaels is doing rather well for himself, and he certainly hasn't lost his job for his views on climate. I didn't say anything about how his reliance on industry funds might affect his research. You must be replying to a different commenter of the same name. In the meantime, either back up or retract your assertion.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Well, that's just about as vague as possible. You claim that recapitulation theory is everywhere, but can't come up with an example. Use the internet. Go ahead. I'll wait. Or, heck, as it's now the weekend, ask her to borrow the book and copy out the portion of the text that you think supports recapitulation.
I'm not sure what you're asking me for. Here's how we got here:
The theory of evolution predicts that organisms of one sort give rise, through successive modifications, to clearly different organisms. There is therefore a prediction that organisms with characteristics which are sort of like one and sort of like the other will be found. I point out that numerous such organisms appear in the fossil record... and your response is that they might be unrelated. How does that have any relevance to the original prediction, and how is that possibility more likely?
Quite right. Just because things fall down today, it doesn't mean they didn't fall up yesterday. Of course, it seems a bit more likely that they fell down as well yesterday, and getting back to the point, the mechanisms which cause mutation aren't a new thing. The observed rates of mutation in organisms today lead to various kinds of phenotypic change over time--the same kind of phenotypic change we've seen in the past. It seems reasonable to infer that mutation rates work similarly when we can't see them to when we can, and the "molecular clock" based on mutation rates syncs up rather well with the fossil record. What's your explanation for why this is all wrong?
No, it's not. You haven't been paying attention. Here, I'll reiterate.
Natural selection acts on variation which has already been introduced into the gene pool through random mutation. The question of when a new species emerges is generally answered by seeing whether or not an individual from one population is reproductively isolated from another. If they aren't alive at the same time, this experiment can't be done, but you can unequivocally state that two living organisms belong to different species. Speciation doesn't occur unless the population is split for some reason, and the populations diverge due to selection or drift or a combination of the two.
Where do you see "magical pony" in that?
When did I say that things were mutating without visibile change unless "natural selection comes by and changes them"? How did you get that out of what I said? Where did I distinguish between "non visible changes" and "visible ones"? Visible to who? What are you even talking about?
Most mutations are neutral, which means that natural selection doesn't act on them. Some changes increase fitness (which is a function of both the organism and its environment); some decrease it. These are the mutations on which natural selection operates. According to the theory of punctuated equilibrium, in a population which in equilibrium--no new predators, no new prey, nothing changing--it will find a local maximum of the fitness function and stay there;
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Which is why I listed a few ways in which you could back up your claim, by, for instance, referring to some bit of information that we could both access... which you've refused to do.
But you don't have any data points. I'm not asking you for icing; I'm asking you to provide a cake in the first place. I have a sneaking suspicion that if you look at what the textbooks actually say, they state that common features in embryology reflect a common ancestry, not that the embryo passes through its entire evolutionary history as it grows.
Of course the prediction could be falsified. We could fail to observe the rates of phenotypic change required for evolution in experiments, but we don't. We could find rates of change in the fossil record that far exceed the rates we can produce in the lab; we don't.
I just threw a heap of evidence at you, and you're claiming that this is nothing but faith, without bothering to explain what part of the chain of evidence doesn't hold up in your estimation.
The fossil record doesn't support gradualism. Gradualism hasn't been part of evolutionary theory for many years now. Why are you harping on the idea that it is?
The rate of mutation is relatively constant. Whether or not those mutations are selected changes based on the environment; if the environment is static, the population won't change. If the environment is changing, the population will select new genes which, in a static environment, wouldn't have conferred an advantage over the genes that were there in the first place.
The same number of mutations happen whether or not a species is undergoing change; the difference is in whether or not the change is selected. Whether or not a change is beneficial depends on the environment that the organism inhabits. Is there something about this that I'm not stating clearly?
This sounds like you're talking about an increase in information. I wrote about that six posts ago; was there something I didn't cover then?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I also conveniently explained why--as I've said at least twice before, I have the sneaking suspicion that you've confused evo-devo for recapitulation theory. I'm not interested in just taking your word for things.
What was your google search? I assume you're talking about this edit, yes? The one where the statement was removed because no one could provide evidence to back it up?
Be still, my heart--after all this excuse-making, you're presenting actual evidence? The evidence doesn't actually say what you claim it does, but it's way better than just complaining that I won't take your word for it.
But at least we have a list... a list which points out places where Haeckel's drawings or similar ones are used, not a list of textbooks which state recapitulation theory. In fact, none of them do. Textbooks I and II in that list state that "the biogenic law is not literally true", but rather, "the embryonic stages of a particular vertebrate often reflect the embryonic stages of that vertebrate's ancestors", which is true. (The biogenic law would state that earlier stages of a later organism uniformly repeated the later stages of an earlier organism, which is false.) Textbook III states that in many cases organisms reflect the state of their ancestors during development (bones that will later fuse initially are separate, for instance), but that it's "certainly not an infallible guide to phylogenetic history". Textbooks IV through X don't even discuss the theory.
I can understand how the statements "embryonic organisms frequently resemble their ancestors' embryonic forms" and "organisms relive their evolutionary history through their morphogenesis" might seem similar. Here's a good summary of the differences, if you're still confused about the concept.
Well, yes; that's why we have falsifiability and Occam's Razor.
Yes, the fossil record doesn't support gradualism; that's why it's a discarded theory. Punctuated equilibrium fits the evidence better. What exactly requires faith here? The theory makes plenty of falsifiable predictions, some of which I've outlined above, the results of which turned out to support the theory.
No, my view is not basically gradualism. I keep trying to explain what punctuated equilibrium is, and you keep saying that it's the same as gradualism. In gradualism, phenotypic change takes place at a uniform rate; in punctuated equilibrium, it happens quickly over relatively short periods. Do you see the difference? How is my view "basically gradualism"?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
But that doesn't make any sense. We have instances where one species evolved into another, but we can still see the intermediates because they're still around due to an odd semi-isolation of the population's habitat; they're called ring species. (I mentioned ring species previously.) If you ignore the intermediates, the endpoints of ring species look, both genetically and macroscopically, like a pair of closely related species. In the instances where we can see the intermediates, they turn out to be closely related. When we use the same genetic techniques that tell us how closely individuals of the same species are related, they tell us that the descendants of this common ancestor are more closely related than individuals of more distant species.
And as I said previously (and you never followed up on): There exist fossils which show characteristics intermediate between those in two well-defined groups; this is what being a "transitional form" means. Yes, these forms are "other species"; organisms are categorized into species. What are you trying to get at?
Explain how the theory of punctuated equilibrium would have "easily explained" it if high rates of phenotypic change were never observed in the wild, or if they could not be produced in the lab, or if rates of phenotypic change appeared in the fossil record which exceeded what could be produced in the lab.
Gradualism refers to a constant rate in the change of form. I'm writing about a relatively constant rate in the change of genes; selection acts on the population to keep the form (and the genes responsible for it) in equilibrium because differing forms are less fit for a population in equilibrium. (Note that neutral mutations accumulate at a relatively constant rate, as they're not subject to the selective pressure.)
What would raising rabbits teach me, out of curiosity?
"Phenotypic" isn't a kind of mutation. An organism's genotype is the content of its genes; this is what mutation acts on. An organism's phenotype is the product of the combination of those genes and the environment. It's possible to change the former without changing the latter--as I pointed out previously, most mutations are neutral.
As I said before, he's still listed as representing Virginia, and he's still employed by the same University that he was at previously. (The state never
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Actually, the books were written, or at least radically edited, by Josiah about the year 621 BC. http://neros.lordbalto.com/ChapterSeven.htm.