Exposing The Great American Fossil Hoax

[BillyBob]

For 100 years scientists have made judgements based on the appearance/shape of people skulls. I gave you two links that say race -- ie..pysiological traits -- is not linked to genes --

And I gave you links which showed the contrary.

that all our DNA is 99.9% the same.

So?

Thus, Science has no basis for comparing and contrasting skulls and making evolutionary assumptions.

Sure they do.

There is no family tree.

Sure there is.

There is no hominid tree.

Sure there is.

There is no way to show/prove that any one group is ancestral to another.

Sure there is, go read the info at the links I provided.

There is no way to line up a set of skulls and claim "evolution."

Sure there is.

[supersport]

And I gave you links which showed the contrary.

So?

Sure they do.
Sure there is.
Sure there is.
Sure there is, go read the info at the links I provided.
Sure there is.

Why do you even bother coming on this forum? Have you ever noticed that contribute nothing but a 3rd grade mentality? You never explain yourself, you just come on here and foam at the mouth.

The reality is, Science KNOWS it needs variation to be random. If variation is not random...ie..directed by the environment, then there is no way to make evolutionary assumptions on fossils. There is no way to line up a bunch of fossils and proclaim "evolution" because if the environment directs evolution, then traits are linked to the environment, not to ancestry.

[casaba]

Sorry supersport, this is just to inform you that I will not be attempting to discuss any topic with you on Tweb. Your complete lack of reading ability and selective quote taking are moronic at best.

I would encourage all other posters here to take a look in on Natural Science 301 and see how many similarly themed idiotic threads have been started by supersport. Save your time, and increase the traffic to other worthwhile threads. Maybe supersport will take to time to learn some reading skills.

[supersport]

Sorry supersport, this is just to inform you that I will not be attempting to discuss any topic with you on Tweb. Your complete lack of reading ability and selective quote taking are moronic at best.

I would encourage all other posters here to take a look in on Natural Science 301 and see how many similarly themed idiotic threads have been started by supersport. Save your time, and increase the traffic to other worthwhile threads. Maybe supersport will take to time to learn some reading skills.

fine with me. Bye.

http://www.accessmylibrary.com/comsi...d=0286-6387354

"researchers no longer believe that races are distinct biological categories created by differences in the genes that people inherit from their parents."

http://academic.udayton.edu/race/01race/race.htm

There are no genetic characteristics possessed by all Blacks but not by non- Blacks; similarly, there is no gene or cluster of genes common to all Whites but not to non-Whites. One's race is not determined by a single gene or gene cluster, as is, for example, sickle cell anemia. Nor are races marked by important differences in gene frequencies, the rates of appearance of certain gene types. The data compiled by various scientists demonstrates, contrary to popular opinion, that intra-group differences exceed inter-group differences. That is, greater genetic variation exists within the populations typically labeled Black and White than between these populations. This finding refutes the supposition that racial divisions reflect fundamental genetic differences.


Along the way, various minds tried to fashion practical human typologies along the following physical axes: skin color, hair texture, facial angle, jaw size, cranial capacity, brain mass, frontal lobe mass, brain surface fissures and convolutions, and even body lice. As one scholar notes, "[t]he nineteenth century was a period of exhaustive and--as it turned out--futile search for criteria to define and describe race differences.". . . Attempts to define racial categories by physical attributes ultimately failed. By 1871, some leading intellectuals had recognized that even using the word "race" "was virtually a confession of ignorance or evil intent." The genetic studies of the last few decades have only added more nails to the coffin of biological race. Evidence shows that those features usually coded to race, for example, stature, skin color, hair texture, and facial structure, do not correlate strongly with genetic variation

you little intellectual lightweights are simply outmatched by the truth.

[Viktor Scott]

Hey Super - out of curiosity, how many boards to you spam each day? I have seen several of your new thread posts at a couple of different boards. What do you think it accomplishes, especially when readers can see how often you abandon posts when they don't go your way?

[TheGreenMan]

from the OP

"If you ask what percentage of your genes is reflected in your external appearance, the basis by which we talk about race, the answer seems to be in the range of 0.01 percent," said Dr. Harold Freeman, the chief executive, president and director of surgery at North General Hospital in New York City, who has studied the issue of biology and race. "This is a very, very minimal reflection of your genetic makeup."

I haven't gotten any answers yet.....if outward appearance including skull size and shape, nose size, bone density, etc are not a reflection of your genetic makeup, then why do scientists make evoluitonary assumptions based on the shape of one's skull when they dig it up out of the ground???? How could they ever make evolutionary assumptions about any fossil if such traits can be modified by environment?

O.K. some misconceptions here:
1. You mis-understand the quote from the OP. It is saying that 0.01 % of your genes control to some extent what you look like. You seem to think that what you look like is “not a reflection of your genetic makeup”. That is WRONG. As the quote directly above it CLEARLY states.

2. Scientists make “evolutionary[sic] assumptions” based on skull/bone shapes when species show phenotypic plasticity (not the same as what you give) because bones are different enough. There are arguments now and then if something should be its own species, genera, family, etc. but when the differences are large enough it is a new species.

"You don't make a new species by mutating the species" Gould

This quote, and to a lesser degree the one above it, is taken so out of context as to be useless. I tried to look for more of the quote but all I found were creation sites using the same quote as you + a few sentences now and then.
So sorry, I can’t comment.

congratulations. What makes you think this is a transitional species considering the recent links I gave you that say traits in humans have no biological or genetic basis?

No matter how scientists today scrutinize a person's genes, they can't determine with certainty whether an individual is from one "racial" group or another. Differences of culture and society distinguish one group from another, but these distinctions are not rooted in biology.

Your two links that I read both were form around the mid 1990s. It has been 10 years since the mid 1990s. A huge amount of genetic work has been completed since then. I would suggest reading some newer material.

Actually, as has been posted, you can determine“whether an individual is from one "racial" group or another”. In fact one of Tiggys’ posts had a link to this. Since you don’t seem to like to go and read links I reproduced it here:

http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Leroi/

One of the minor pleasures of this discovery is a new kind of genealogy. Today it is easy to find out where your ancestors came from—or even when they came, as with so many of us, from several different places. If you want to know what fraction of your genes are African, European or East Asian, all it takes is a mouth swab, a postage stamp and $400—though prices will certainly fall.

© source where applicable

Not as cheap as testing your own dinosaur bone for 14C but not bad.

The reality is, Science KNOWS it needs variation to be random. If variation is not random...ie..directed by the environment, then there is no way to make evolutionary assumptions on fossils. There is no way to line up a bunch of fossils and proclaim "evolution" because if the environment directs evolution, then traits are linked to the environment, not to ancestry.

If it all needs to be completely random then why have scientists ‘included’ selection?

Even if evolution were completely directed by the environment why couldn’t scientists “line up the fossils”?

[BillyBob]

Why do you even bother coming on this forum?

Primarily to mock idiots like you.

Have you ever noticed that contribute nothing but a 3rd grade mentality?

I'm trying to relate to you at a level you'll understand.

You never explain yourself, you just come on here and foam at the mouth.

That's a lie. I have dismantled your entire dopey premise about genetics with remarks, rebuttals and links. At that point you have two choices, acknowledge that you are wrong or ignore those posts and links and falsely accuse other posters of not contributing anything. I guess we know we one you chose.

The reality is,

The reality is that you're an idiot.

Science KNOWS it needs variation to be random. If variation is not random...ie..directed by the environment, then there is no way to make evolutionary assumptions on fossils. There is no way to line up a bunch of fossils and proclaim "evolution" because if the environment directs evolution, then traits are linked to the environment, not to ancestry.

I have already proven you wrong, now I'll just mock you.

Supermoron

[BillyBob]

fine with me. Bye.

http://www.accessmylibrary.com/comsi...d=0286-6387354

"researchers no longer believe that races are distinct biological categories created by differences in the genes that people inherit from their parents."

http://academic.udayton.edu/race/01race/race.htm

There are no genetic characteristics possessed by all Blacks but not by non- Blacks; similarly, there is no gene or cluster of genes common to all Whites but not to non-Whites. One's race is not determined by a single gene or gene cluster, as is, for example, sickle cell anemia. Nor are races marked by important differences in gene frequencies, the rates of appearance of certain gene types. The data compiled by various scientists demonstrates, contrary to popular opinion, that intra-group differences exceed inter-group differences. That is, greater genetic variation exists within the populations typically labeled Black and White than between these populations. This finding refutes the supposition that racial divisions reflect fundamental genetic differences.


Along the way, various minds tried to fashion practical human typologies along the following physical axes: skin color, hair texture, facial angle, jaw size, cranial capacity, brain mass, frontal lobe mass, brain surface fissures and convolutions, and even body lice. As one scholar notes, "[t]he nineteenth century was a period of exhaustive and--as it turned out--futile search for criteria to define and describe race differences.". . . Attempts to define racial categories by physical attributes ultimately failed. By 1871, some leading intellectuals had recognized that even using the word "race" "was virtually a confession of ignorance or evil intent." The genetic studies of the last few decades have only added more nails to the coffin of biological race. Evidence shows that those features usually coded to race, for example, stature, skin color, hair texture, and facial structure, do not correlate strongly with genetic variation

you little intellectual lightweights are simply outmatched by the truth.

Here you go, moron. More proof that you are wrong:

A Family Tree in Every Gene

By Armand Marie Leroi*

Published: March 14, 2005, The New York Times, p. A23.

London — Shortly after last year's tsunami devastated the lands on the Indian Ocean, The Times of India ran an article with this headline: "Tsunami May Have Rendered Threatened Tribes Extinct." The tribes in question were the Onge, Jarawa, Great Andamanese and Sentinelese—all living on the Andaman Islands—and they numbered some 400 people in all. The article, noting that several of the archipelago's islands were low-lying, in the direct path of the wave, and that casualties were expected to be high, said, "Some beads may have just gone missing from the Emerald Necklace of India."

The metaphor is as colorful as it is well intentioned. But what exactly does it mean? After all, in a catastrophe that cost more than 150,000 lives, why should the survival of a few hundred tribal people have any special claim on our attention? There are several possible answers to this question. The people of the Andamans have a unique way of life. True, their material culture does not extend beyond a few simple tools, and their visual art is confined to a few geometrical motifs, but they are hunter-gatherers and so a rarity in the modern world. Linguists, too, find them interesting since they collectively speak three languages seemingly unrelated to any others. But The Times of India took a slightly different tack. These tribes are special, it said, because they are of "Negrito racial stocks" that are "remnants of the oldest human populations of Asia and Australia."

It's an old-fashioned, even Victorian, sentiment. Who speaks of "racial stocks" anymore? After all, to do so would be to speak of something that many scientists and scholars say does not exist. If modern anthropologists mention the concept of race, it is invariably only to warn against and dismiss it. Likewise many geneticists. "Race is social concept, not a scientific one," according to Dr. Craig Venter—and he should know, since he was first to sequence the human genome. The idea that human races are only social constructs has been the consensus for at least 30 years.

But now, perhaps, that is about to change. Last fall, the prestigious journal Nature Genetics devoted a large supplement to the question of whether human races exist and, if so, what they mean. The journal did this in part because various American health agencies are making race an important part of their policies to best protect the public—often over the protests of scientists. In the supplement, some two dozen geneticists offered their views. Beneath the jargon, cautious phrases and academic courtesies, one thing was clear: the consensus about social constructs was unraveling. Some even argued that, looked at the right way, genetic data show that races clearly do exist.

The dominance of the social construct theory can be traced to a 1972 article by Dr. Richard Lewontin, a Harvard geneticist, who wrote that most human genetic variation can be found within any given "race." If one looked at genes rather than faces, he claimed, the difference between an African and a European would be scarcely greater than the difference between any two Europeans. A few years later he wrote that the continued popularity of race as an idea was an "indication of the power of socioeconomically based ideology over the supposed objectivity of knowledge." Most scientists are thoughtful, liberal-minded and socially aware people. It was just what they wanted to hear.

Three decades later, it seems that Dr. Lewontin's facts were correct, and have been abundantly confirmed by ever better techniques of detecting genetic variety. His reasoning, however, was wrong. His error was an elementary one, but such was the appeal of his argument that it was only a couple of years ago that a Cambridge University statistician, A. W. F. Edwards, put his finger on it.

The error is easily illustrated. If one were asked to judge the ancestry of 100 New Yorkers, one could look at the color of their skin. That would do much to single out the Europeans, but little to distinguish the Senegalese from the Solomon Islanders. The same is true for any other feature of our bodies. The shapes of our eyes, noses and skulls; the color of our eyes and our hair; the heaviness, height and hairiness of our bodies are all, individually, poor guides to ancestry.

But this is not true when the features are taken together. Certain skin colors tend to go with certain kinds of eyes, noses, skulls and bodies. When we glance at a stranger's face we use those associations to infer what continent, or even what country, he or his ancestors came from—and we usually get it right. To put it more abstractly, human physical variation is correlated; and correlations contain information.

Genetic variants that aren't written on our faces, but that can be detected only in the genome, show similar correlations. It is these correlations that Dr. Lewontin seems to have ignored. In essence, he looked at one gene at a time and failed to see races. But if many—a few hundred—variable genes are considered simultaneously, then it is very easy to do so. Indeed, a 2002 study by scientists at the University of Southern California and Stanford showed that if a sample of people from around the world are sorted by computer into five groups on the basis of genetic similarity, the groups that emerge are native to Europe, East Asia, Africa, America and Australasia—more or less the major races of traditional anthropology.

One of the minor pleasures of this discovery is a new kind of genealogy. Today it is easy to find out where your ancestors came from—or even when they came, as with so many of us, from several different places. If you want to know what fraction of your genes are African, European or East Asian, all it takes is a mouth swab, a postage stamp and $400—though prices will certainly fall.

Yet there is nothing very fundamental about the concept of the major continental races; they're just the easiest way to divide things up. Study enough genes in enough people and one could sort the world's population into 10, 100, perhaps 1,000 groups, each located somewhere on the map. This has not yet been done with any precision, but it will be. Soon it may be possible to identify your ancestors not merely as African or European, but Ibo or Yoruba, perhaps even Celt or Castilian, or all of the above.

The identification of racial origins is not a search for purity. The human species is irredeemably promiscuous. We have always seduced or coerced our neighbors even when they have a foreign look about them and we don't understand a word. If Hispanics, for example, are composed of a recent and evolving blend of European, American Indian and African genes, then the Uighurs of Central Asia can be seen as a 3,000-year-old mix of West European and East Asian genes. Even homogenous groups like native Swedes bear the genetic imprint of successive nameless migrations.

Some critics believe that these ambiguities render the very notion of race worthless. I disagree. The physical topography of our world cannot be accurately described in words. To navigate it, you need a map with elevations, contour lines and reference grids. But it is hard to talk in numbers, and so we give the world's more prominent features—the mountain ranges and plateaus and plains—names. We do so despite the inherent ambiguity of words. The Pennines of northern England are about one-tenth as high and long as the Himalayas, yet both are intelligibly described as mountain ranges.

So, too, it is with the genetic topography of our species. The billion or so of the world's people of largely European descent have a set of genetic variants in common that are collectively rare in everyone else; they are a race. At a smaller scale, three million Basques do as well; so they are a race as well. Race is merely a shorthand that enables us to speak sensibly, though with no great precision, about genetic rather than cultural or political differences.

But it is a shorthand that seems to be needed. One of the more painful spectacles of modern science is that of human geneticists piously disavowing the existence of races even as they investigate the genetic relationships between "ethnic groups." Given the problematic, even vicious, history of the word "race," the use of euphemisms is understandable. But it hardly aids understanding, for the term "ethnic group" conflates all the possible ways in which people differ from each other.

Indeed, the recognition that races are real should have several benefits. To begin with, it would remove the disjunction in which the government and public alike defiantly embrace categories that many, perhaps most, scholars and scientists say do not exist.

Second, the recognition of race may improve medical care. Different races are prone to different diseases. The risk that an African-American man will be afflicted with hypertensive heart disease or prostate cancer is nearly three times greater than that for a European-American man. On the other hand, the former's risk of multiple sclerosis is only half as great. Such differences could be due to socioeconomic factors. Even so, geneticists have started searching for racial differences in the frequencies of genetic variants that cause diseases. They seem to be finding them.

Race can also affect treatment. African-Americans respond poorly to some of the main drugs used to treat heart conditions—notably beta blockers and angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors. Pharmaceutical corporations are paying attention. Many new drugs now come labeled with warnings that they may not work in some ethnic or racial groups. Here, as so often, the mere prospect of litigation has concentrated minds.

Such differences are, of course, just differences in average. Everyone agrees that race is a crude way of predicting who gets some disease or responds to some treatment. Ideally, we would all have our genomes sequenced before swallowing so much as an aspirin. Yet until that is technically feasible, we can expect racial classifications to play an increasing part in health care.

The argument for the importance of race, however, does not rest purely on utilitarian grounds. There is also an aesthetic factor. We are a physically variable species. Yet for all the triumphs of modern genetics, we know next to nothing about what makes us so. We do not know why some people have prominent rather than flat noses, round rather than pointed skulls, wide rather than narrow faces, straight rather than curly hair. We do not know what makes blue eyes blue.

One way to find out would be to study people of mixed race ancestry. In part, this is because racial differences in looks are the most striking that we see. But there is also a more subtle technical reason. When geneticists map genes, they rely on the fact that they can follow our ancestors' chromosomes as they get passed from one generation to the next, dividing and mixing in unpredictable combinations. That, it turns out, is much easier to do in people whose ancestors came from very different places.

The technique is called admixture mapping. Developed to find the genes responsible for racial differences in inherited disease, it is only just moving from theory to application. But through it, we may be able to write the genetic recipe for the fair hair of a Norwegian, the black-verging-on-purple skin of a Solomon Islander, the flat face of an Inuit, and the curved eyelid of a Han Chinese. We shall no longer gawp ignorantly at the gallery; we shall be able to name the painters.

There is a final reason race matters. It gives us reason—if there were not reason enough already—to value and protect some of the world's most obscure and marginalized people. When The Times of India article referred to the Andaman Islanders as being of ancient Negrito racial stock, the terminology was correct. Negrito is the name given by anthropologists to a people who once lived throughout Southeast Asia. They are very small, very dark, and have peppercorn hair. They look like African pygmies who have wandered away from Congo's jungles to take up life on a tropical isle. But they are not.

The latest genetic data suggest that the Negritos are descended from the first modern humans to have invaded Asia, some 100,000 years ago. In time they were overrun or absorbed by waves of Neolithic agriculturalists, and later nearly wiped out by British, Spanish and Indian colonialists. Now they are confined to the Malay Peninsula, a few islands in the Philippines and the Andamans.

Happily, most of the Andamans' Negritos seem to have survived December's tsunami. The fate of one tribe, the Sentinelese, remains uncertain, but an Indian coast guard helicopter sent to check up on them came under bow and arrow attack, which is heartening. Even so, Negrito populations, wherever they are, are so small, isolated and impoverished that it seems certain that they will eventually disappear.

Yet even after they have gone, the genetic variants that defined the Negritos will remain, albeit scattered, in the people who inhabit the littoral of the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea. They will remain visible in the unusually dark skin of some Indonesians, the unusually curly hair of some Sri Lankans, the unusually slight frames of some Filipinos. But the unique combination of genes that makes the Negritos so distinctive, and that took tens of thousands of years to evolve, will have disappeared. A human race will have gone extinct, and the human species will be the poorer for it.

© 2005 The New York Times Company

[Dr.GH]

congratulations. What makes you think this is a transitional species considering the recent links I gave you that say traits in humans have no biological or genetic basis?

No matter how scientists today scrutinize a person's genes, they can't determine with certainty whether an individual is from one "racial" group or another. Differences of culture and society distinguish one group from another, but these distinctions are not rooted in biology.

Sporty McClueless has obsessed over variation found within single species then demands that evolution is false because single species are not multiple species.

This is pathetic.

(PS. Regarding the friend with breast cancer:

You have not provided much clinical information, however you can encourage your friend that medical practice informed by modern biology has greatly improved the breast cancer survival rates. Medical research on stem cells has been especially important, leading to two breakthrough drugs used to maintain blood cell counts during chemothearapy.

But, all anti-science fundamentalists such as Sporty should not be hypocrites and refuse medical treatment in favor of animal sacrifice, burning incense and prayer. Of course they will then rapidly die. My wife has survived 2 rounds with breast cancer, and our best wishes go to Sporty's unfortunate friend).

[supersport]

What do you guys think of this......


It's no longer 99%...or 98%....or 96%...it's:

94%

Human-Chimp Gene Gap Widens from Tally of Duplicate Genes

There's a bigger genetic jump between humans and chimps than previously believed



http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?cha...A795436FEF8039

Not only that, but it seems we have a new "emerging view" of mammalian evolution.


"The paper supports the emerging view that change in gene copy number, via gene duplication or loss, is one of the key mechanisms driving mammalian evolution," says genomics researcher James Sikela of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center"

not only that...check out their explanation:

Based on that figure, experts proposed that humans and chimps have essentially the same genes, but differed in when and where the genes turn on and off.

So, please tell me.....what or how do the genes get turned On/Off thereby morphing chimp-like creatures into humans?

[aniso]

What do you guys think of this......


It's no longer 99%...or 98%....or 96%...it's:

94%

The point being? If you actually read the article maybe it would makse some sense to you. But I doubt it.


(snip)

not only that...check out their explanation:

Based on that figure, experts proposed that humans and chimps have essentially the same genes, but differed in when and where the genes turn on and off.

So, please tell me.....what or how do the genes get turned On/Off thereby morphing chimp-like creatures into humans?

That's funny. This is what I read...

"The group estimated that humans have acquired 689 new gene duplicates and lost 86 since diverging from our common ancestor with chimps six million years ago. Similarly, they reckoned that chimps have lost 729 gene copies that humans still have. "

[supersport]

The point being? If you actually read the article maybe it would makse some sense to you. But I doubt it.


(snip)


That's funny. This is what I read...

"The group estimated that humans have acquired 689 new gene duplicates and lost 86 since diverging from our common ancestor with chimps six million years ago. Similarly, they reckoned that chimps have lost 729 gene copies that humans still have. "

hey genius...simply pointing out the differences -- like scientists really know what they are -- does not explain how or why. I could point out differnce just by looking at our physiologies. That explains nothing. Science has obviously tricked you into believing they can tell you more about who or what you are than what you can see in the mirror. You've been fooled: they can't.

Tell me...do you think the reason chimps are different than humans is because of mutations?....or is it gene expression....?

[wattsr1]

I do not believe in an old age earth.....I believe the continents moved after the flood.

[snip]

Out of curiosity SuperSport, why do you believe this? Surely it is not because it “is the only explanation for how humans could exist all at the same time in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas at or about the time as the earliest Neanderthals.”

Moving continents is only one of several explanations.

So why do you believe this particular one?



Regards, Roland

[supersport]

Out of curiosity SuperSport, why do you believe this? Surely it is not because it “is the only explanation for how humans could exist all at the same time in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas at or about the time as the earliest Neanderthals.”

Moving continents is only one of several explanations.

So why do you believe this particular one?



Regards, Roland

Well....to me it seems to be the only logical explanation. There are some things I have serious questions about when it comes to the beginning of the world and how life populated the earth, so I mostly just have to live on faith the Word in the Bible is true. The reality is nobody really knows how it happened. Regarding the flood and the movements of the continents, I've read some of what Walt Brown has had to say and it just makes sense. To me, the only realistic way humans -- not to mention other animals -- could spread out across the globe so quickly after the flood is if the land masses were together.

[BillyBob]

What do you guys think of this......


It's no longer 99%...or 98%....or 96%...it's:

94%

That doesn't change my point. You [erroneously] claim that genetics have nothing do do with appearance and physical traits. You offered the fact that human genes are 99.9% similar from person to person, to which I reminded you that .1% still left 3 million chemical pairs in which variation can occur, a huge number.

Then I pointed out that an animal with a high percentage of similar genes is very different than humans, thereby bolstering my position that only a small percentage of genome differentiation can lead to a very different animal.

I also proved that race can be determined by comparing DNA which is contrary to another of your erroneous claims and you failed to respond.

And that was after you claimed that dog breeds cannot be determined by analyzing DNA and I proved you wrong on that assertion, as well, only to be greeted with more silence on your part.

You have been proven flat out wrong yet you continue to cling to your dopey assertions. Do you think if you keep claiming them they will somehow magically become fact?

Oh wait, you're a creationist, of course you believe in magic.....