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Evidence Found for Earliest Modern Humans
Hugh Pickens writes "Researchers at Arizona State University report that they have pushed back the date for the earliest modern humans to 164,000 years ago, far earlier than previously documented. Paleoanthropologists now say that genetic and fossil evidence suggests that modern human species — Homo sapiens — evolved in Africa between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago and in seeking the "perfect site" to explore for remains of the earliest populations, researchers analyzed ocean currents, climate data, geological formations and other data to pin down a location. "The world was in a glacial stage 125,000 to 195,000 years ago, and much of Africa was dry to mostly desert; in many areas food would have been difficult to acquire. The paleoenvironmental data indicate there are only five or six places in all of Africa where humans could have survived these harsh conditions," said Curtis Marean, a professor in ASU's School of Human Evolution and Social Change. Photos from the cave at Pinnacle Point in South Africa show where the team found ochre, bladelets and evidence of shellfish — findings that reveal the earliest dated evidence of modern humans."
Well hopefully the 160,000 year old cavemen lasted longer than ABC's Cavemen...
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My mom says there's a lot of black people in Africa!
I long ago read that the Homo Sapiens arised in an extremely harsh environment that created a strong selective pressure in favor of intelligence and advanced social interactions. But the article says that the researchers focussed on the area where the less evolved pre-humans could have survived easier.
Only if you followed the calculations of the Bishop of Ussher, who came up with that date. Many evangelicals who are not fundamentalists don't accept a young earth theory, and even among fundamentalists, there are many who believe in an old earth. Some of the debates on fundamentalist boards like Rapture Ready become heated.
I can respect their desire to conform to the Word of God, for they feel if the Creation story is an allegory, what else is an allegory? However, the physical evidence is there, and many of us belive God does not lie in either nature or in scripture. For us, the answer is "We don't have enough evidence yet to understand the whole picture." There really are no such things as paradoxes, merely incomplete models. We'll find out soon enough.
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Which can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optically_stimulated_luminescence
But, this brings up a good point. It was once believed that "God(s)" controlled our health, the weather, our creation, and everything else. With each scientific discovery, "God(s)" role gets smaller and smaller. Really, the "God(s)" job is getting easier and easier every year. The religous community keeps changing what their beliefs are, in order to not conflict with what is found to be true. This is why "God(s)" can't be disproved.....it is a moving target.
So far, the only act-of-god I have seen this year, is helping the Bears beat the Packers. Other than that, I see no proof left.
Well, I just received my copy of The Creationist Times and the reprinted article says "evolved in Africa between 100 and 200 years ago", well within the last 6000 years. So the article linked in the summary is obviously a misprint.
/. editors check anything anymore?
Sheesh, don't the
God's role has always been understood as sustaining the existence of Creation. That God ultimately controls health, weather, and so forth followed from that and still does, and there's no moving target here. I'd recommend reading an introduction the philosophy of religion before you try to assert things further about a field you evidently have no training in. Swinburne's Is There a God? (Oxford University Press, 1996) is probably the easiest to find, though the writer is a theist you may want to supplement it with Mackie or early Flew for the non-theist side.
The cave at Pinnacle Point was featured in a 2003 episode of Horizon titled The Day We Learned to Think .
The original poster's write-up misses the point. It's NOT news that both fossil and genetic evidence points to the development of anatomically modern humans in Africa somewhere in the 100,000 to 200,000 year range, with several important apparently anatomically modern human fossils at the older end of that range.
What is new in this article is the early date for the use of ochre dye, small "complex" tools, and shellfish in the diet which are all taken as evidence for modern-like human cultural behavior at 165,000 years ago.
To date, the most incontrovertible evidence for modern-like cultural behavior dates back to around 45,000 years ago, with some more ambiguous evidence (similar to that presented in the article in question) dating to around 100,000 years ago.
Yes, this is a mistake of modern religion -- attaching God to the so-far missing bits of science, and turning Him into a "God of the gaps". That's partially because they feel a need to make specific statements about God, like "He did this" or "He said that" or "this is what He wants".
Far better to let God dissolve, like sugar in water, invisible but still there. A sort of carrier signal for reality. But then I guess you wouldn't have much of a foundation for bashing gays.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Just a test to see if your faith is strong enough. You know, all the stuff those people find was placed there by God to test whether such things can sway you.
Though, to be honest, I'd rather think the Bible and all the scriptures are God's test of humanity. Whether we actually accept his idea of free will or whether we're just following some old books like sheep, no matter whether logic and reason tell us that something can't be quite right.
The problem with Gods is that by their very definition it is impossible for mortal man to understand their motivations. IIRC, there is also no part of the Bible telling you that the Bible is by default always correct by the letter and the word. Not to mention that clinging to the letter of a translated version to English is bollocks by the way it came into existance. Claiming that every word should be weighed in a text that's a translation of a translated translation is, to put it mildly, stupid.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I've seen two main arguments for where god fits in a modern, scientific understanding of the universe. The first is "Well, science is just wrong," and the second is much like what you're proposing.
My question is, if god is indistinguishable from natural events, why even assume it exists? It makes it seem like the difference between god existing and god not existing is just a warm fuzzy feeling. And if I want that I can go hold my newborn daughter.
(And please don't come back with that old "God is what you feel when you hold your newborn daughter" crap.)
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
This actually brings up one of my serious hangups with the currently accepted view of history. Forty thousand years is an incredibly long amount of time. Consider that the ancient civilization of Sumeria (Epic of Gilgamesh) is only dated at 3100 BC with the first evidence of civilization in Egypt also around that time. How much has happened in the last 5000 years? Consider that we even consider the Dark Ages as ancient history and that was only 1000 years ago. We know very little about the history of that time.
When you consider the advances that mankind has made in technology over the past 5000 years, it is astounding. It is even more astounding to think that for the preceding 35,000 years, there was virtually no technological advancement at all! Now we hear that the date may be pushed back even further, and my incredulity grows.
The picture gets even more murky when you consider population growth. Population only really stagnates in a primitive society based on limited resources. Even with the worst estimates of the extent of impact from the last ice age, there would be plenty of land mass available for very habitable land for man to expand into. If mankind had been reproducing for 35,000 to 200,000 years, would we not have many, many more people today? Something is just not adding up here.
I believe in de-evolution. God made the world perfect, man fell, and its been going downhill ever since!
Disclaimer: I'm not advocating anything here, just asking from the point of speculation...
The old accepted model of human development is that man in his modern form, homo sapiens sapiens, appeared 30k years ago with recorded history marking the rise of civilization some 6000 years ago. The theory is that humans lived in nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes until the end of the last ice age. With the warming of the climate, agriculture became possible and with it the surplus of food that allows for civilization.
Ok, that's the accepted model. But I've always wondered about the likelihood of human civilizations from before accepted recorded history. As I understand it, the science points against it because if there were such civilizations, we should see some proof of it. But what sort of proofs would civilization leave behind and how long would they last with the passage of time? Most human populations like along coastlines and we've seen historic records of cities lost to rising waters. There are many underwater archaeological sites being explored along the English Channel. And when one considers the destructive power of a 2 mile tall wall of ice rolling over a city, what would even be left for us to see? If there were a Hyperboria, a Lemuria, a Mu, what remnants should we expect to see of them, if any?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
What's not adding up is that you're not considering that until around 10,000 years ago, the Earth was in an ice age, which made survival much more tricky than it is today. Even the areas that weren't covered with ice were much drier at that time, making agriculture nearly impossible.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
I disagree with your premise:
"According to a 2007 Gallup poll, about 43% of Americans believe that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so." This is only slightly less than the 46% reported in a 2006 Gallup poll.[64] Only 14% believe that "human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process."
And if you think those polls are unreliable, then why is there been such a recent increase in school boards trying to push creationism into the public school curriculum?
You know these jokes are getting really tiring.
You know what's tiring? That in the year 2007, grown adults are still arguing whether an all-knowing (yet inconsistent) invisible man exists. They literally believe in an invisible man. And it's not a simple argument of "well, we had to have come from somewhere!". They believe in a very specific invisible man, with very specific rules of conduct, with one of those rules being that other (i.e.: "false") invisible men are forbidden to be considered by the human mind.
A jealous god - seriously, who comes up with this shit?
God's role has always been understood as sustaining the existence of Creation.
Understood by whom? By theologists or regular believers? Which timeframe covers "always"?
That God ultimately controls health, weather, and so forth followed from that and still does, and there's no moving target here.
There's a large spectrum of interpretations between "God ultimately controls X" and "God directly and personally controls X". If someone becomes ill or recovers, should they take it personally or not? A lot of people do and a lot of people don't. They most likely didn't read your books, but that doesn't change that they hold those interpretations.
The irony is that you're underlining what the OP is saying: the role of God is pushed back further and further, until it only covers the areas that are theoretically impossible to answer by science. It is commendable that you're already at the target endpoint, but a lot of people aren't there yet.
see a Text Widget
Nowadays, based on genetic evidence, neandertals are usually considered a separate species, Homo neanderthalensis, while we are the type species of our own species, that is H. sapiens sapiens. Cro-magnons are indeed modern humans. Sometimes they are/were considered to be a distinctive subspecies (H. sapiens cromagnon), but I'm not sure about the current status of that school of thought.
There was a 19th century minister who thought he'd found the way to reconcile Wilberforce and Huxley.
His reasoning went like this. When Adam was created, what kept him from immediately fainting away with hunger? Obviously his bloodstream and digestive tract contained food and its metabolites - remnants of meals he never ate. A human body isn't just a machine, it's an ongoing process. The muscles and skeleton are not just the products of inheritance, but of years of growth and exercise that in Adam's case never happened.
Therefore, to create a human, God had to create a body that perfectly bore the marks of a history it did not, in fact have. What if God made the entire world that way? If natural selection is a fundamental to the operation of the world as metabolism is fundamental to the operation of the body, then certainly the world would bear the signs of evolution in the same way Adam's body bore the signs of having had breakfast that morning (note also this argues for Adam having a belly button). There would be no point in arguing over whether human precursors disproved creation, because the logic of creation requires them to be there. There would be no point in arguing over whether those precursors ever, in fact, existed, beause there would be no empirical observation or theological argument that could sway the question one way or another.
The minister was thrilled. Surely people would live and let live, go back to the things they knew best and leave others to do what they do best, unmolested. Unfortunately, this shows that while he was a clever man, he didn't understand human nature very well.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Pffft. Swinburne is for community college drop-outs and pedophiles. You want a real treatise on the subject? Check out Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret." That book will knock your fucking socks off. Not wearing socks? Get some fucking socks, man; you want to catch a cold?
Evolutionists will continue to push back the date for the earliest modern humans (both anatomically and behaviorally).
Superyooser's Law of Evolutionary Dating of Humans: As scientific research continues, the probability of the date of "modern humans" equaling the date of the beginning of the Earth approaches one.
Then the only thing left to be corrected would be the time scale, but that knowledge would be accepted in the process of "approaching one."
Depends what you mean by "acts human".
TFA says;
Photos from the cave at Pinnacle Point in South Africa show where the team found ochre, bladelets and evidence of shellfish Ochre and bladelets imply tool creation and use, as well as decoration. The oysters suggest sophisticated seduction techniques which may be beyond many Slashdotters, even today."I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
While that may seem like the most logical explanation for parenthood on Slashdot, there are a few of us who are not, in fact, virgins.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
People who feel like bashing their newborn children to a rock instead of having a warm fuzzy feeling are unsuccessful in reproduction.
There is no God in this.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
The mystery your missing is called infant mortality. In the modern (first) world it's about 2% but in a pre-modern (no science based healthcare) it can be in the ~80% range. Add to that much shorter life spans, ~35 or so, and I think you'll find the answers to your questions.
>there is a difference between something that looks human, and something that acts human
Suddenly Paris & Britney et al make sense.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
You look at, say, modern wheat and thing, "sure, any idiot can see how useful it is". But it only became that after a long period of development from wild stock. Try to live off the wild stuff and you'll either switch to hunter-gatherer or starve.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
So, it appears God is in trouble. He is claiming to have invented Man 6000 years ago. (Al Gore made a speech earlier in which he claimed to have invented man and that certain parts of the Bible were based on his and Tipper's love affair.)
However, it now appears that there is prior art, far predating God's claims. While no suit has been filed, experts believe God would lose handily if the originator of the earlier design can be found. God did not return any calls when a message was left with his representatives, the Vatican Cathedral and Boys Ranch (Rome), Beth-Bagel Temple (NYC), LDS Church and Wife Emporium (Salt Lake City).
Noted patent and copyright critic, Richard Stallman, stated that this is exactly why copyright and patent laws are bad, "It is clear that God is in the same group as all other profit hungry capitalist swine, like Bill Gates and that smelly Steve Jobs. Really, man is just an idea, and believe me, I have a few ideas about a few men. Which is why I don't use Google because then most of you would know the sites I'm going to, and that would be embarrassing. But...Where was I? Oh, yeah, God is evil. I'm hearby demanding that the new discoveries be called GNU/Homos. Heh, heh, I said, 'Homo.' But, enough of that, if God thinks he can control me..." We were unable to contact Stallman after the line went dead.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Are you implying that the scientific method is just a thinly-veiled form of faith? As experiments are repeated and results are confirmed over time, the probability of a result that hasn't "happened so far" approaches zero. Is it mere faith that the Sun will rise again tomorrow? That just because that that's what has happened "so far", it's still possible that when I wake up tomorrow the Sun will be replaced by a giant penguin? If that's not what you're implying, then you need to reword your argument. If it is what you're implying, then you need to de-ass your head.
If people want to believe in God, fine. It would be fine if their belief didn't affect non-believers, but it does. Extensively. It directly influences their attitudes toward science, education, and law.
Its not "fine" to me that belief in god is a criteria for who can become President (and presumably other political offices).
I'd rather not have my members of congress legislating with the guidance of some moral compass pulled out of their favorite fairy tale. So no, it's not fucking "fine".
I am never ever going to be convinced of anything other than the ignorance of the average person when presented with poll results. Here is a relatively good example. In a recent geography poll of adults ages 18-24 (fresh out of school, that means many of them spend a large portion of their time learning) 1/3 could not find Louisiana on a map, nearly half could not find Mississippi, 6 in 10 could not find Iraq. You can't counter a statement of There is only a small few religions that take this stance with polls of average Americans. I wouldn't even except a poll of average members of a religion that take this stance. What the average American believes has nothing at all to do with what the religion believes much like the fact that the average American doesn't think Louisiana or Iraq are important enough to be able to point out on a map doesn't mean that our government doesn't think they are important.
> If God is indistinguishable from natural events why even assume it exists?
/.) responses I can think of that might go a little way toward answering this question.
There are two short-ish (b'cos its
1. If God is just the creator-sustainer then true, in day-to-day existence it would be indistinguishable to believe that or not believe that. However, if the creation had a purpose, then understanding that purpose might make living in and understanding our world easier.
However, whats to say that any specific religious group has properly understood that purpose? Especially if God is indistinguishable from nature - since there'd be no evidence of that purpose beyond what we could glean ourselves (though we might glean it a bit better by believing there was a purpose).
2. It may be that God sometimes acts. Specifically these acts might take the form of inspiring prophets who can, amidst their ravings (a natural consequence of being touched by God, I would assume) reveal something of the purpose of God.
Unfortunately, if this is indeed the case, it seems a lot of opportunists have noticed that there's no Turing test for prophethood and have taken it upon themselves to declare God's purpose as they see fit.
This is a good reason to be suspicious of any prophet/religion. But the existence of frauds does not per se deny the potential existence of the real thing. And if the real thing does exist, it may reveal more about the nature of the world than we can glean by observing from within (since various thinkers have shown that hard limits exist on what can be known of a system from within that system itself)
Sorry, that wasn't as short as I hoped. I hope it at least made sense
"And that solves the mystery of the missing ring" - Bender
What they actually believe is that a cosmic Jewish zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and drink his blood and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in all humans because a woman made from a rib was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree and thereby pissing off an invisible wizard
who lives in the sky. Makes perfect sense really.
No, God's pretty much holding his own...but since people are *human*, there's room for misinterpretations, misunderstandings and some people being downright rude in His name. And even more have taken up a personal vendetta to ensure the Word is mocked and discredited.
If you were to do an actual, in-depth study of the various "Bibles", you'd find only one that has consistent credibility. It's based on something like a million documents, about 5,000 covering just the New Testament alone. Sure, the autogrypha (originals) are gone...they were probably lost with those who *died*insisting*Christ's*existance*. (Who would die for a lie?) The multitude of documents, from different places on the globe have errors, sure- but the essence is always the same, even in the Dead Sea Scrolls which were 1,000 years before the copies we had before. Study of these documents, and cross-checking them gives us a scientific basis for credibility.
Some of the New Testament copies are from the early first century, and there's no translation-loss. There have been literally thousands of people checking and cross-checking these documents for centuries. Do you really believe so many people would dedicate their lives to quests for the truth, if it were all just made up?
And let's not forget that in Christ's time the Hebrews were in Roman Slavery...they couldn't POSSIBLY care less about Christ, yet their journalists reported the crucifixion and the resurrection. One of them was named Juvenile (which is probably where we get that word.)
It's been only recently that science has turned on religion; many of the names-we-know in the old days were men of God, trying to understand Him. They were paid with church money to advance. But these days it's hip to think this entire scene, as rare as it is in the universe, just *happened* to come out livable, just happened to get the myriad features right for us to live, and for so long on this planet. I'm sorry, I just don't have that kinda faith.
For centuries church detractors chided the Bible for talking about the Hittites, believing they never existed. Then a few decades ago someone turns over a shovel in the middle east and BAM! Hittite capital. See Wikipedia for details. Similarly detractors chided the Bible for "getting the Babylonian leaders wrong", yet science has turned up that the link in the chain had TWO leaders at one time, one in the battlefield, one in the government. And the Bible called _that_ one, too.
Other religions talked about the Earth on the back of a fish, which, when it jumps out of the water, the floods came. Still others discuss a long stream, covered in a ceiling of stars, but the Bible says it's suspended from nothing...and suggests it's north pole points to the center of the galaxy (in not so few words).
I'm here to ask you to believe something I'm just coming to terms with: The Bible has no errors. OH, I know...everyone has a favorite chestnut, but when you study them in context, you see they're not errors at all. But of course, you _have_to_ actually decide to look.
The Bible had the proportions for the first sea-going vessel; Noah's ark. (And, no, it *didn't* carry 16,000,000,000 species- the document's writing could be satisfied with the space of a rowboat.) It describes surgery as being 'OK' while men of the time thought it witchcraft. It has so many levels and such a delicate tapestry of prophecy and fulfillment so as to humble even Shakespeare. And when you mess with the code, trying to make it say something else, a wave of contradictions appear. It's an incredible book.
There are a *lot* of such surprises waiting for you in the Bible. There's a lot of fury and chaff coming from many churches, but if you want the actual, stated, only-using-the-Bible understanding of the Bible, that'd be Hank Hanegraff. http://equip.org./ He has all the answers, not from attitude, not from style, but from actual scientific proof: cross-checking the Bible's many source documents. His "Bible
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
"Paleoanthropologists now say that genetic and fossil evidence suggests that modern human species -- Homo sapiens -- evolved in Africa between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago...The world was in a glacial stage 125,000 to 195,000 years ago..."
This proves conclusively that modern humans are responsible for global warming. As soon as we developed, the Earth started warming up. We did not even need SUVs to cause global climate change.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
To all the atheists out there (and I don't know if the poster I'm replying to is an atheist or not): If we religious people are just sheep blindly following what we've been taught, I really think you have to forgive us. Because if there is no spiritual world, then "belief" and "knowledge" really must boil down to chemical reactions in animal brain tissue - which makes all of our reasoning very limited and potentially very error-prone. We are all then "just sheep". We are cells reacting to stimuli, and what we believe is not really belief and we don't have any choice anyway, so don't be angry about it. (Oh, that's right, you can't help being angry about it because that's just your cells reacting to your environment)
Now if you believe (as I do), that what I described above is contrary to your experience and your nature, then believing in a "soul" or some other agent of "free will" isn't a big leap. Think about it - if you really have free will, science can never address the mechanism by which you make choices. If your choices are predicable by formula, then I don't think you can call it free will. And why should we discount the possibility of such things existing? It seems to me to be circular reasoning to discount them: "We only believe in what science can prove, because if science can't prove it we can't know it exists". Science becomes the sole source of knowledge. It becomes God. Well, there's a big difference between "we can't know it exists" and "we know it can't exist"
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
Now if you believe (as I do), that what I described above is contrary to your experience and your nature, then believing in a "soul" or some other agent of "free will" isn't a big leap. Think about it - if you really have free will, science can never address the mechanism by which you make choices.
True, but your premise is wrong. Free will *is* an illusion. We *are* just cells reacting to stimuli. It's just that the decision tree is so complex that it's not easily understood.
We are cells reacting to stimuli, and what we believe is not really belief and we don't have any choice anyway, so don't be angry about it.
This is just silly. Free will is an illusion, but macroscopic choices are not. Telling me "not to be angry about it" is external stimuli, which I can balance with my internal desires of whether to be angry or not, combined with my motivations for being angry. Depending on how all the variables balance, I am angry or I am not angry. I made a choice based on all the competing factors. No actual free will involved, yet I have the illusion that I made a choice, because I'm not conscious of all the factors and the weighting.
"We only believe in what science can prove, because if science can't prove it we can't know it exists". Science becomes the sole source of knowledge. It becomes God.
I believe in what can be measured and observed. I can *speculate* about things that can't be measured and observed. Science is not a "source" of knowledge, it's a methodology for falsifying theories. The source of all knowledge is the world around us and attempting to fit theories to the facts.
God, on the other hand, is a theory of what underpins the universe. It came from the lack of explanation for the world around us. A tribal leader needed something to tell his flock about why the storms came, or why someone's child died, etc. It's a lot easier to point to the Sun God. It's a great explanation for things, because it explains everything -- except for one thing. God cannot tell us whether it doesn't exist or not.
For that, we have to use logic and experience. Our experience tells us that nearly everything that used to be chalked up to God can be explained using natural processes. Logic tells us that intelligence required mechanisms to host it. What are the mechanisms that allow God to think? Somehow, those mechanisms must have arisen either through a super-God, or through an evolutionary process. If it's a super God, then we can a "creation loop" of super-Gods, leading to a logical contradiction. If it's evolution, then it's a simpler explanation to simply eliminate God and apply evolution to humanity.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Always is an awfully long freakin time and that's bullshit anyways. The idea that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent is relatively recent one and developed from polytheistic religions comprised of decidedly non-omni beings. These developed from animistic beliefs that the world was actually a turtle swimming in the sea. No doubt this was just a cro-mag bedtime story originally, but their sapiens neighbors weren't smart enough to figure that out.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
164,000 years ought to be enough for anybody.
The "standing on the shoulders of giants" phrase comes to mind.
Humans did use their intelligence to try to live better, but each step had to solve certain problems before they could move on to the next step.
E.g., before you can have agriculture, you needed to have (A) the right conditions, which is why it evolved in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and (B) a calendar.
Being able to just flood a plot of land, or have it naturally flooded for you, is godsend at that point in time. For starters it allows you to live on far less "modern" plants, and with less work. To put things in perspective, even as late as European middle ages, you'd harvest 2 to 7 grains of grain for each grain planted. (By comparison, nowadays you'd get several hundred grains per grain planted.) Now move backward a bit more, and griculture evolved on really really shitty plants. So the fertility boost of irrigation may have been not just an extra, but actually _needed_ to be able to subsist on agriculture at all. You _had_ to have that to get agriculture "bootstrapped".
The type of soil is important too. A plough usable on northern european soil, for example, wasn't even invented until AD times. (That and the invention of the horseshoe by Germans was one of the factors that suddenly allowed them to challenge the Romans.) So having a bunch of earth turned into mud regularly may have been the _only_ way to start planting anything at all.
A calendar is also more important than it sounds, because the seasons go on whether you like it or not. If you don't start, say, harvesting at the right point of time, the next flood of the Nile comes and destroys your whole crop right there. So someone has to figure out how to count the days right, and/or how to build a stick in the ground and some markers that tell him when to start doing this or that.
That's just one example of a problem which looks trivial in retrospect, but it was the culmination of a whole chain on non-trivial discoveries.
To make things worse, now picture that:
A) You have a chicken-and-egg problem: before you have agriculture, the pressure is a heck of a lot lesser to figure out the calendar. You don't have a tech tree, like in Civilization games, to look ahead at and see "oh, now we have to work on inventing the calendar, or we'll never get agriculture in time."
As a hunter-gatherer, you just go hunting and gathering daily, and live off whatever you find. There's no use even trying to plan ahead, until you can actually store stuff for the winter, and that won't happen with berries and hunted meat. (Until you can cure meat somehow, there's no way to keep it around in a useful form anyway, so you have to go hunt your dinner daily regardless of whether you figured out the seasons or not. And to give you a timeline, AFAIK, it wasnt until the Roman empire that someone finally figured out how to, essentially, ferment meat and make a sausage out of it.)
B) You have small isolated populations, and everyone has to spend most of their day either hunting/gathering their dinner, so there aren't that many people to stay around and think up new stuff and experiment with new stuff.
For contrast sake: we all know how many great things the Greeks invented or thought up, but the thing is: the Greeks could afford to have as much as 1/3 of the population (the free males) sitting around playing philosopher in between wars. Because the other 2/3 of the population (the women and slaves) supported them. That was a _lot_ of manpower dedicated to figuring out how the world works in ancieng Greece.
And remember that as late as the ancient Egyptian Old Kingdom era, if you plotted a Gauss curve with the age at which people died, the peak would be in the 30's. (Plus a spike in the first 3 years of life.) In caveman times, I wouldn't be too surprised if it was even less. You just didn't have the time to learn a lot, think a lot about the world, make great discoveries, etc. You'd marry at 12, make a bunch of kids in a hurry, and die, and work the whole
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Bird got to fly.
Man got to sit and wonder. Why? Why? Why?
Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land.
Man got to tell himself - He understand.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Basically what you describe is pretty much what I see as free will. A human being, reacting to his environment, based on his capabilities, experiences and knowledges. Yes, knowledge and experience is some electrochemical process happening in the brain. Or something like that. Afaik, we don't know exactly how the brain works yet.
Maybe that really means that our will isn't so free as it seems, and that our future actions can be determined by examining our past. Though maybe the Heisenberg phenomenon kicks in on a macroscopic way and the system changes as soon as you start observing it. I guess someone will do some research about it sooner or later.
But I guess that's not even the point now. What this is about is the simple question whether God (provided he exists) really wants us to cling to a book and ignore everything that contradicts it, or whether he would rather want us to use the gift we have to grow beyond and above it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I know of no single book that would give a good overall picture. A good place to start is to do some reading online about how some credit Christianity with causing the Dark Ages (or contributing).
Recently, some religious folks have tried to prove the opposite, and that religion is still spurring scientific progress. Some are also now claiming proof that Christianity is what helped us out of the dark ages. Do some reading...I think you will find it entertaining.
Also, I find it interesting to tie in reading about the decision making process, how the brain works, and how our decisions are not as logical as we believe. The religious convictions seem to be something we have evolved into....especially when even the most die-hard anti-religious person is often seen praying when their fight-or-flight kicks in.
Insert Dawkins quote here: "There's an infinite number of things that we can't disprove. You might say that because science can explain just about everything but not quite, it's wrong to say therefore we don't need God. It is also, I suppose, wrong to say we don't need the Flying Spaghetti Monster, unicorns, Thor, Wotan, Jupiter, or fairies at the bottom of the garden. There's an infinite number of things that some people at one time or another have believed in, and an infinite number of things that nobody has believed in. If there's not the slightest reason to believe in any of those things, why bother? The onus is on somebody who says, I want to believe in God, Flying Spaghetti Monster, fairies, or whatever it is. It is not up to us to disprove it." (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/atheism.html)
This space up for sale.
My own signature makes me remember why I totally disagree with you.
In a closed system, you can make deterministic predictions about the behaviour of any part of the system as long as its own parts are deterministic, and they are for the most part unless they rely on quantum physics.
But we are not a closed system. We constantly react with the world and in fact, the continuous interaction with the world not only help us to have free will, but in fact is a fundamental part of the free will. In other words, take away the random interactions we have with the world around us and you take away our free will. It will in fact take away more than free will, as a significant part of the computations our brains can do and computers can't is because of this same random interactions with the world.
If we where as deterministic as you assume we are in case no soul exist, then it would be far easier to simulate us with computers than it actually is. And the difficulty of this simulation is not one of scale, simply adding raw computation power will never make some machine as smart as a human.
It is a difficulty of the very premises that people assume makes us smart. A significant part of our own intelligence comes from the outside and how we interact with it. Just isolate someone from any visual, auditive and tactile stimulus to see that he/she becomes insane in a very short time.
We are Turing O-Machines: We are Oracle machines as defined in the very same paper by Turing that started all the artificial intelligence theory. An Oracle Machine is just a machine that can complete some computations impossible to do by any normal Turing Machine using an Oracle that tells it the answer of the computation. The Oracle is out there. We use everything we perceive of the world as an Oracle for the purposes of this theory.
This argument mimics the very same technique that great genius use to achieve their discoveries. They get their inspiration from many many different ideas and perceptions from the world.
A computer (simple Turing machine equivalent) will never be able to do that (unless it reacts with its environment and thus became a O-Machine).
We are not deterministic and we will never be, no matter if there's a soul or not.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
"they feel if the Creation story is an allegory, what else is an allegory?"
Interesting argument, but a logical fallacy.
On this basis we should reject the "Good Samaritan" as a parable (i.e. a fictitious story): "If the 'Good Samaritan' is a parable, what else is a parable?"
The obvious reply is: "Whatever else has the characteristics of a parable."
The very early stories in the Bible have a few features in common with figurative stories - e.g. the story of the Garden of Eden has a talking snake (and explains how he begins to crawl); an idyllic garden; an infinite and invisible God who goes for walks in the garden and acts as though he cannot see Adam hiding behind a bush; one or two "magic" fruit trees that give you either all knowledge, or immortal life; a man called "Man" (="Adam" in Hebrew) and a woman called "Life" (="Eve" in Hebrew) - i.e. in the literary context, these characters are very plausible representatives of the whole human race, rather than actual historical people; etc. If you insist that the story "must" be historically accurate narrative, then you will dismiss all these literary characteristics. But if you start from the position of "I don't know beforehand what kind of genre ytis passage is", then the signs are all there.
In other words, the Bible is certainly a mixture of literary genres, and you have to work out what kind of genre any passage is by considering its literary qualities. Fundamentalists try to dictate what the genre is. They build a castle of faith based on their *fallible* claims about what a passage "must" means, and then call it *infallible* because "they are just believing what the Bible says". No they are not. They are believing a very fallible human interpretation of the Bible, and then calling *their interpretation* "the Word of God". This is self-delusion.
I am anarch of all I survey.