Jim wrote:
>A few responses to Glenn's post:
>
>JB << When you're dealing with 1.7 million year old bones, well, you
>have a bit more trouble. Not only dealing with assumption #1, but
>assuming that the pattern (#2, above) operates today in exactly the same
>way.
>
>GM <<It is a disease because no other erectus skeletons show this
> feature.
>
>It is the nature of the disease that is at issue, and the ability of
>forensics to reach conclusions 1.7 million years after the fact--in
>contrast to your courtroom analogy. .
>
I would bet that you could do the same thing to an animal today (if PETA
would allow it--here kitty, kitty...) feeding them a lot of vitamin A and
seeing the same effect on them. Physiological systems are not that much
different from species to species. Chimps are subject to polio like us,
and the erectus looks like us from the neck down. The only real
difference of consequence is the head. If one could poison us with
vitamin A I bet you could poison a chimp with it. If a chimp; then an
erectus.
>JB <<This is your field, so I believe you. But how much detail can we
> REALLY know about the world 1.7 million years ago? How much certainty is
>there?
>
>GM << Quite a bit. There is pollen data, animal burrowing information,
>sedimenary fabrics to consider, diagenetic features, and volcanic ash
>flow information. There is palaeomagnetism as well as percentages of
> various fossil animals which occur in characteristic patterns. Rippled
>or unrippled sediments tells you a lot about the speed of the water.
>Feces left by animal life is also informative telling you what the
>animals ate.
>
>This is all interesting, but those details don't seem germane to our
> poor erectus girl. These general data can't tell us about the actual
> conditions she was facing, her proximity to water and food, the
>availability of shelter, etc. This is how it appears to this amateur.
>Ready for your lecture, professor.
>
The evironment does allow you to know that she was on a savannah, which
all of east Africa was at that time. This means that she could be seen
from a long distance off. If her "apelike compassionate" friends ran off
from her like McGregor's friends did for him (remember we are applying
apelike compassion) her being near a water hole would not help her
survive.
><<I saw a film of a bunch of people in Bosnia who had been beaten quite
>severely. They were then put in a pile, semi conscious and in great pain.
>Gasoline was thrown on them. Those who were conscious did make feeble
> efforts to get away from the pile but they didn't get very far before it
>was lit. They died. I would say that their pain won; much to their
detriment.>>
>
>In logic, we call this the emotive fallacy. IOW, this is done to arouse
>feeling, not deal in substance. Besides, it is off the mark
> nonetheless. Their pain didn't "win." It was the fire of their
>tormentors. Nobody lit 1808 on fire, as far as we know.
>
Wait a minute, you are changing the subject. you wrote:
>While this doesn't directly answer my point,I still have trouble assuming
>that when pain and survival are weighed against each other, pain wins.
>And of course the assumption about the extent of the disease is still a
>major one.
>
To me this implies that you are saying that 1808 would get up and
successfully defend herself in spite of the pain. I don't think that is
always reasonable.
As to this emotive stuff, how do you propose that I address painful
situations in which survival is at stake without using emotive situations?
You are criticising me for responding to your point in the only way it
can be done.
><< The thought just crossed my mind. Does this postmortem bone growth
> mean that the bones of road kill re-knit themselves as the carcass lays
on the side of the highway?>>
>
>I'll stop and check next time I drive to Arizona. However, your authors
>weren't talking about normal ossification (as you are here), wherein
>bones form first as cartilage. I believe this is called endochondral
> ossification. Your authors said that it was blood clots which
>"ossified," or hardened. This is not normal bone "growth," but rather
>bone by default.
>
You really should go get the book. It is only 23 dollars and worth every
penny. You are taking their word clot from the only quotation you have
seen.
Of course this is not normal bone growth. It wouldn't be a disease if it
were normal. If it were normal you would have a half inch of woven bone
around your skeleton also. What happens is :
"The excess of vitamin A they had eaten... caused the periosteum, the
tough fibrous tissue that encases each bone to rip free from the bone with
each pull of the muscle (The muscles are anchored to the bone through the
periosteum). Between the periosteum and the bone, torn-apart blood
vessels spilled their contents, forcing further separation of the tissues.
In the case of 1808, the blood formed huge clots, which ossified-turned to
woven bone--before she died."Walker and Shipman, The Wisdom of the Bones_,
p. 164
Now, Jim, if you would do a little research you could find out what the
Encyclopedia Britannica says:
"The essential bone forming cell is the osteoblast. It can give rise to
bone even if transplanted to tissue in which bone formation does not
normally occur. If a portion of the whole thickness of the periosteum
(the fibrous tissue that surrounds bone) is transplanted, it forms bony
tissue. It can thus be employed for reconstruction of bone following
disease or injury." "Skeletal System" Ency. Brit. 1982, 16, p. 827
>Can blood clots harden after death, Glenn? A live body normally BREAKS
>DOWN clots via plasma proteins (plasmins). A dead body doesn't produce
> plasmins. So we would EXPECT ossification after death if there was
>massive clotting, sort of like fossilization on a small scale. And it
>would of course take TIME for the process to occur. Time is just what a
>stiff has plenty of.
>
What is happening is that hypervitaminosis A causes an involuntary
transplantation of periosteum from next to the bone to some distance away.
The periosteum then produces bone growth where the blood clot used to be
which re-connects the periosteum to the bone. Only this new bone is woven
bone. Woven bone is NOT fossilized blood clots.
>You seem determined to avoid this point, for some odd reason. Let's try
> it this way: the writers assume 1808 NEEDED a helper, because she WAS
> alone, but ALONE she could not survive. So she wasn't ALONE for long,
she got a helper, which made her ALONE plus 1.
>
>That is their argument.
No. They assumed that she could not be alone because she lived. They
assumed that no one sick could live long if they were alone. Her living
for a while is evidence that she had help.
>
>Now, why do they ASSUME she was ALONE (and therefore in need of a
> helper so she wouldn't be ALONE) in the first place? Why do they assume
>she was not part of a herd? They make a couple of leaps so their theory
>will, ahem, hold water, e.g., no self-respecting herd would locate near
>a water source (only the most important single survival necessity)
>because too many mean things come there to party. So, we can rule out
>1808 being by water, because she would have to be ALONE there, and eaten
>by animals there, and so she was not there......and so it goes.
>
This is a strange argument.
glenn
Foundation,Fall and Flood
http://members.gnn.com/GRMorton/dmd.htm