Pin!
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Casey Wednesday,
October 9, 2013 3:10 PM: Regarding Homo
habilis, it is very much like the ape-like
australopithecines, and not a transitional form between australopithecines and
humans. I address this at:
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/08/a_big_bang_theo063141.html
Scott
5/22/14: From the above link…
“… found that habilis
is different from Homo in terms of body size, body shape, mode of
locomotion, jaws and teeth, developmental patterns, and brain size, and should
be reclassified within Australopithecus.”
“An analysis
in Nature of the ear canals of habilis
similarly found that its skull is most similar to baboons…”
“They
concluded: ‘It is difficult to accept an evolutionary sequence in which Homo
habilis, with less human-like locomotor
adaptations, is intermediate between Australopithecus afaren[s]is
... and fully bipedal Homo erectus’"”
… Oh really…
Quick, the
skull in the middle… does it look more like the top
row or the bottom row? Go ahead. Click on the links and look at these skulls up
close. Look at the enlarged pics. Study the links.
Then hit the <back> button to come back to this page.
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By just using
the built-in heuristics that are already wired into your brain, you should do
better than the clowns at the Discovery Institute. (See Cherry Picking
to see discussion of Casey’s misuse of quotations.)
Here’s how I
see it. Homo Habilis (HH) is clearly
not a Baboon. That claim is false on its face. Unlike the Baboon, HH has a
forehead. That one was easy.
The next one
is harder, but you can do it. Look at the enlarged pics.
HH has got a bigger brain case and smaller indentation behind the eye ridges
for jaw muscles than Astralopithecus.
HH has a
smaller brain case and possibly slightly larger indentation for jaw muscles
than Homo erectus. He’s similar, but he’s different. And he’s clearly not
human. He doesn’t belong in the top row. He doesn’t belong in the bottom row.
So what is he?
Make your
own decision. You have enough information to do so. But I say…
He is transitional!
In my mind,
the referee in the black and white stripped shirt
just whacked the mat with his hand. Match over. Pin!! Triumphalism… ringing the bells. I’m sorry. I just pinned the guy to the
mat. I’m not worrying about keeping my circumspect scholarly demeanor. I’m
jumping like a wild man with glee!!
If anyone
can still think the ID theorists of the Discovery Institute to be anything but
whacko… after this… well that person just needs to get some glasses.
So I could
say,
You know how this wrestling match goes. Go home.
Read Dawkin’s TGSOE and you can have a joyful time not
having to read whacko material like what the DI web site just subjected us to.
You can really get a good handle on evolution and on the weaknesses of ID.
But, some
of us want to see the whole wrestling match just because we want to see a good
match… or we want to see somebody get slaughtered. So feel free to hang around
and enjoy. I’m just getting started. :^)
Besides,
this book is less about evolution and ID than it is, really, about arriving at
truth. And it’s about the mind of an individual who believes in ID and why such
a person believes that way. This might be a better source for that than most.
The hand has
already slapped the mat. I’m not going to respond to the following link as of
this writing.
Casey Wednesday,
October 9, 2013 3:10 PM:
http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/1446
So habilis in fact too young to be ancestral to Homo.
The evidence regarding habilis is so spotty that it’s pretty much
impossible to claim with any confidence that habilis
“evolved from other apes”. So I don’t know on what basis you’re making that
claim. Habilis is ape-like, but for all you know, it might be another ape
species that was independently and separately designed from other apes, and
didn’t “evolve from other apes.”
Scott
5/26/14: Ok, there’s a hole in my argument here. I have not addressed Casey’s
idea that Homo Habilis (HH) was
independently “designed”. “Scotty, beam us to the planet!” Yes, I admit that
some deity or some near-deity (that is some sufficiently advanced alien species
that the DI will not discuss) may have “beamed” our dear HH down. And I cannot
prove that that did not happen. However, I examine this question in detail
because it is a central feature of ID. See Engineering and Design and Designing Deities
for this part of the discussion.
But if Casey
wants to claim HH was beamed down, he has to show us a space ship, a rocket
motor, an alien fossil (not an old ape), or even an alien computer chip. But he
cannot make such an outrageous claim with no evidence
at all… unless he is honest with us and calls it religion. At this point, no
such claim can be remotely considered within the domain of science… Pin!!
Thanks.
Casey
Scott
5/21/14: Casey’s argument and evidence was an outrageous denial of easily
obtained evidence and is full of misleading quotations.
This would
placate the typical church-goer. When I went to church, I backed off when they
gave me patronizing arguments because I wanted to have a place in the social
hierarchy of the church. ‘no longer… See Quest For the Unbroken Chain for more on
this.
Elsewhere, I
could swear Luskin claims Homo habilis is identical to human in
this discussion. But I don’t know where this total flip-flop is as of this
writing.
See Homo habilis
for Bryan Hunt’s similarly strange ideas on the species.
Next: Examples
of Transitional Forms Prev: Transitional Forms TOC