Reflectorites
On Fri, 11 Feb 2000 17:04:42 -0800, Cliff Lundberg wrote:
[...]
>>SJ>Our ancestors should not have been doing these sophisticated
>>>things for another 40,000 years at least. ... At Blombos, we have
>>>African hunter-gatherers at 80,000 years ago doing many things
>>>associated with the Late Stone Age "cultural explosion" 40,000 to
>>>30,000 years ago - when Homo sapiens arrived in Europe for the
>>>first time. ... [More confirmation of the Biblical picture that man
>>>was originally advanced but fell away.]
CL>Stephen, could you elaborate on this?
On re-reading this, perhaps "confirmation" is too strong a word. A
more accurate word would be "evidence". Thus, I should have said:
"More evidence for the Biblical picture that man was originally
advanced but fell away."
CL>In the first place, I don't know
>that anyone ever deduced a 40-80K history of man from the bible.
First, I am not deducing a history of man from the Bible. My basic position
is that the Bible and nature, being both `books' with the same Author, will
eventually agree, when all the facts are known and all our layers of
misinterpretations are cleared away.l I therefore interpret the "history of
man" and "the Bible" harmonistically, holding each loose enough so that
I can ease them gently together without doing violence to either.
If the facts of paleoanthropology reveal that man has "a 40-80K history"
then I use that fact in my interpretation of the Bible. And if the Bible has a
general picture of man starting off advanced and falling away, then I look
for confirming evidence for that in the "history of man" revealed by
science.
Second, the Bible does not actually give a figure for the "history of man.
As Christian anthropologist E.K.V. Pearce in his `two Adam' theory, in the
original Hebrew, the "man" in Genesis 1 is not necessarily the individual
"Adam" in Genesis 2:
"The first two toledoths [i.e. "these are the generations of...] embodied in
Genesis used to be taken as two separate stories of creation, the second
starting in Genesis 2:4. Now that one can be regarded as a sequel to the
other, many of our difficulties concerning the Biblical origin of man can be
solved. This would mean that in Genesis 1, Old Stone Age man is
described, the Hebrew collective noun "adam" meaning mankind as a
whole; but in Gen. 2:4, the second toledoth commences. This second
toledoth makes the characteristic brief summary of the preceding toledoth,
and then speaks mainly about Eden. Here the noun becomes "The Adam"
or "the Man", with the article referring to an individual, and then becomes a
proper name 'Adam' . This man named Adam is the individual from whom
our Lord's descent is eventually traced. These themes will be developed in
the succeeding pages. We shall use the name Adam to refer to this
individual, a New Stone Age farmer of about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago."
(Pearce E.K.V., "Who Was Adam?", Paternoster: Exeter, Devon UK,
1969, p21)
In my modification of Pearce's theory, I interpret the "man" of Genesis 1 as
the species Homo sapiens extending back ~ 120 kya, and the physical
`ancestor' of the entire human race.
And I interpret "Adam" of Genesis 2 as an individual extending back only
about 15-20 kya, and the biological ancestor of only those members of the
human race from who Abraham and ultimately Jesus Christ came.
CL>But anyway, surely the fall was not a fall away from technology,
>but rather a loss of innocence.
Agreed that "loss of innocence" is probably the *primary* meaning of the
"fall" in Genesis 3. And I do not mean by "advanced" merely "technology",
but spiritual, intellectual, and physical.
In my `two-Adam' model, which seeks to integrate *all* the facts, both
Biblical and scientific, I interpret the "fall" in Genesis 3 as probably
symbolically recapitulating the entire previous "history of man".
CL>Of course this is a point against man-from-chimp.
Strangely enough, here I disagree with Cliff. I don't think any leading
evolutionist maintains that "man" came from a "chimp", but that both
"man" and "chimp" shared a common ancestor. This I provisionally accept
as probable on the evidence.
The current view is that this last common ancestor between man and chimp
existed ~7 mya. That means that up to 120 kya man and chimp have had a
total divergent history of ~ 6.9 myr * 2 = ~ 13.8 myr. Since evolution can
go either `up' or `down', humans could have progressed intellectually from
the proto-human/proto-chimp split and chimps regressed, in those ~ 13.8
myr. Therefore evolutionists would presumably maintain that this is enough
time for the `blind watchmaker' to craft the "advanced" humans of "40-
80K" years ago and the less-advanced chimps we see today.
But also, I believe there has also been intervention by an Intelligent
Designer since the proto-human/proto-chimp split (e.g. bipedality, large
brain, language, etc). So that humans shared a common ancestor with
chimps is not a point against my view that man was advanced "40-80K"
years ago.
[...]
>>SJ>new state of nuclear matter, a quark-gluon plasma, which CERN
>>>described as "the primordial soup in which quarks and gluons
>>>existed before they clumped together as the universe cooled down." .
>
>>[Interesting that they use the same "primordial soup" terms to describe the
>>origin of the universe as they do for the origin of life!]
CL>It's interesting that physicists get respect and credence for outlandish
>speculations, while biologists don't dare to speculate about mechanisms
>explaining the Cambrian Explosion.
Agreed. But again to be fair to the evolutionary biologists there has been
some speculation about "mechanisms explaining the Cambrian Explosion".
Stanley has speculated it was due to the emergence of predators:
Steven M. Stanley of Johns Hopkins University has recently argued that a
popular ecological theory-the "cropping principle" may provide such a
biological control (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
1S73). The great geologist Charles Lyell argued that a scientific hypothesis
is elegant and exciting insofar as it contradicts common sense. The
cropping principle is just such a counterintuitive notion. In considering the
causes of organic diversity, we might expect that the introduction of a
"cropper" (either a herbivore or a carnivore) would reduce the number of
species present in a given area: after all, if an animal is cropping food from
a previously virgin area, it ought to reduce diversity and remove completely
some of the rarer species." (Gould S.J., "Ever Since Darwin", 1991, p123)
And others have speculated that it was because of the invention of "set
aside" cells.
"But Eric Davidson and Andrew Cameron of the California Institute of
Technology in Pasadena and Kevin Peterson of the University of
California, Los Angeles, argue that, for the Cambrian explosion at least,
larval development is the key. Davidson studies the embryology of marine
invertebrates, many of which undergo "indirect" development. Most sea
urchins and bivalves, for example, develop first into "type 1" larvae which
are less than a millimetre long. These larvae consist of a few thousand cells,
none of which can divide more than about 12 times, except for a few "set-
aside" cells that play no role in larval development. The adults, which
usually look completely different from the larvae, develop from these set-
aside cells. Davidson and his colleagues argue that the first multicellular
organisms resembled type 1 larvae. These tiny, soft-bodied creatures would
have left few traces in the fossil record. They must have reproduced
without ever reaching the "adult" state and, like type 1 larvae, would have
contained cells that could divide only a fixed number of times. Why this
developmental constraint should have evolved is unclear, but Davidson and
his colleagues believe that animals were unable to break free from it until
set-aside cells evolved. These cells can divide many more times and can
also migrate around the body as an animal develops. So their appearance
would have allowed the evolution of the wide variety of adult body forms
seen during the Cambrian explosion." (Hecht J., "Evolution's big bang
explained", New Scientist, 2 December 1995, p66)
The point is that none of these explain why it was an "Explosion" that
happened relatively suddenly ~ 570 mya. According to my biology text,
eukaryotes existed from ~ 1.7 (and maybe even 1.2) bya:
"The oldest fossils that are definitely eukaryotic are about 1.7 billion years
old, but eukaryotic cells probably evolved several hundred million years
earlier." (Campbell N.A., Reece J.B. & Mitchell L.G., "Biology", 1999,
p492).
so why did it take them ~ 1.1 bya to evolve predators or set aside cells?
>>SJ>...They genetically engineered mouse cells to produce extra insulin,
>>>but the cells did not release the insulin until "told" to do so by a drug
>>>given orally.... "It will make gene therapy safer because you can shut it
>>>off and more effective because you can fine-tune the effects of the gene
>>>therapy,"
>
>>[This sounds *very* promising and might avoid ethical problems.]
SJ>This also avoids the problem of patients being virtually cured and no
>longer needing to buy drugs.
I have no problem with drugs which fine-tune the response of genetically
engineered cells in producing proteins. I think this `semi-automatic' method
is better than a `fully automatic' method which might be hard to regulate
and thus could get out of control.
Steve
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"When it is taught in a superficial way, evolution becomes just as much of a
fairy story as the creation myths of the Book of Genesis." (Wills C., "The
Wisdom of the Genes: New Pathways in Evolution", Basic Books: New
York NY, 1989, p10)
Stephen E. Jones | sejones@iinet.net.au | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
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