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| Archimedes Plutonium... |
 Posted: Tue Nov 03, 2009 10:47 pm |
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Shame on NOVA for using the current Global Warming issue to pander off
as advertisement not a credible theory of human evolution. The idea of
Global Warming
as causing the increase in brain size from protohumans
of Homo habilis is the selling of science, not the doing
of science.
--- quoting in parts with many snips ---
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/beta/evolution/becoming-human-part-1.html
Becoming Human – Hour 1
PBS Airdate: November 3, 2009
(snipped)
NARRATOR: Never before had a child's skeleton been found, so ancient
and so complete. Her bones would fit in a shoebox, but they speak
volumes about her life.
For example, to find out how old she was when she died, Zeray looked
at her teeth. But not the baby teeth visible in her jaw: the adult
teeth growing inside the bone, as seen in a CT scan. From that, we
know Selam died at age 3.
Like Lucy, she testifies to a crucial step in our evolution.
Unlike apes, these creatures walked upright. As the first fossil Don
Johanson found clearly revealed.
(snipped)
BRIAN RICHMOND (The George Washington University): Bipedalism is such
an unusual trait. There's no other mammal that habitually walks on two
legs like we do.
NARRATOR: Because it's unique, it's hard to figure out why it
happened. There are a lot of theories.
(snipped)
DANIEL LIEBERMAN (Harvard University): And I think the most compelling
idea, the most compelling hypothesis is that it saved us energy.
(snipped)
NARRATOR: Dan Lieberman is an expert on bipedalism. He believes that
walking on two legs evolved because it saved energy.
When you compare the energy consumption of humans to chimps, there's
no contest. A chimp is an energy glutton.
(snipped)
MARK STONEKING: And the dates one almost always gets are around five
to seven million years ago for when humans and chimpanzees last shared
a common ancestor.
(snipped)
MICHEL BRUNET: We decided to go to Africa, but the west, the west of
the Great Rift.
(snipped)
NARRATOR: Michel was looking in a place where the few animal fossils
he turned up were all around six million years old.
..
..
(snipped)
..
Then, on their 26th expedition, in 2001, they found a smashed,
misshapen skull, around 6,000,000 years old. They called it
Sahelanthropus tchadensis. There were no bones apart from the skull.
..
..
(snipped)
It's how the skull connects to the spine that provides the vital clue,
and Michel could infer that from the shape of Toumaï's skull.
If Toumaï's skull is set on the neck of an ape that walks on all
fours, his eyes point downward. That can't be right. Set on the
upright spine of a biped, his eyes point straight ahead.
For Michel, this proved Toumaï walked upright.
(snipped)
NARRATOR: But walking upright may not have automatically led to big
brains at all.
From Toumaï to Selam, both bipeds, brains stayed small. And they
weren't the only ones. Over millions of years there was a profusion of
upright walkers with complicated names and chimp-sized brains, like
Orrorin tugenensis,...
(snipped)
For almost half a million years the fossil record is virtually
silent. But in this blank period, something is happening. In two-and-a-
half-million-year-old layers, scientists begin to find something new.
We might be tempted to call them rocks, but someone was shaping them.
They are the first stone tools.
BRIAN RICHMOND: The way we know this is a tool instead of just a
broken rock is that it's broken in a very particular way, breaking a
flake off this way, that way, this way, back and forth. So there is a
method behind how this rock was broken in order to make it into a
tool, and it's not a random method.
NARRATOR: It's considered unlikely they were made by
Australopithecus, Lucy's kind.
BRIAN RICHMOND: Australopithecus was around for a couple of million
years and did not make stone tools.
NARRATOR: But if not Lucy's kind, then who? The gap in the fossil
record makes it difficult to say, but that's not surprising. Tools
preserve easily, bones, much less so.
Finally, the skulls of a new creature begin to turn up. Is this the
toolmaker?
The skulls are different from what came before. They represent the
dawn of a new era, beginning around 2,000,000 years ago. This is our
era, the era of the genus Homo, humans. The mysterious toolmaker, Homo
habilis is the first of these new creatures.
(snipped)
NARRATOR: The first fossil to be called Homo habilis included 21 bones
of the hand and was nicknamed "handy man."
BRIAN RICHMOND: This little bone is the bone at the end of the thumb.
And that little bone in Homo habilis, like in humans, is very broad.
And the broad bone reflects having a broad pad on the thumb, with a
lot of surface area for fine, precision grip.
(snipped)
BRIAN RICHMOND: What we see in the evolution of Homo habilis is an
expansion in the brain size compared to Australopithecus. So here is
the skull of Australopithecus, and it has no forehead, it just has a
straight slope behind the orbits. Whereas here, in Homo habilis, you
see a sloping, elevated forehead. And in Australopithecus the area
behind the orbits is pinched in, also reflecting a small frontal
region.
In contrast, in Homo habilis, we see an expansion of that area behind
the orbits that points to an expansion in the cognitive capabilities
of higher functions, of higher reasoning functions of the brain.
NARRATOR: It was an expansion equivalent to a doubling of brain
volume.
..
..
..
(snipped)
Gone is the projecting snout of an ape. In Homo habilis the face of
humanity is emerging. This poses a great enigma: why, after millions
of years of flat-lining did brain size and mental capacity suddenly
take off? Two million years ago, what jump-started human evolution?
Scientists all over Africa looked for clues.
(snipped)
This observation led him to an amazing new idea, rapid change as a
catalyst for our evolution.
RICK POTTS:And I began to think that, well, maybe it's not the
particular environment of a savannah that was important, but the
tendency of the environment to change.
NARRATOR: Could it be that the need to survive violent swings of
climate made our ancestors more adaptable?
--- end quoting parts of NOVA's program on
the "Becoming Human" ---
Now I want to address every one of the lines that I
quoted above in separate posts.
I thank NOVA for doing this show since it provides a
Logical framework for me to show that the Stonethrowing theory is the
true theory and not the
Rick Potts "global warming" advertisement ad.
I was rather annoyed and piqued that Orrorin was
not the primary subject of the 6 million year old
biped rather than the Brunet's Sahelanthropus tchadensis. I say this
because Orrorin had far
more fossils uncovered.
And the trouble, the big trouble with the above NOVA
is a problem that a science such as Anthropology would easy run into.
Most sciences have few practitioners that are really good in Logical
thought
and logical conclusions. Such as the theory that
bipedalism saves energy. And where a science
such as anthropology should amass the fossils and
data and then leave the theory making to the scientists
of physics or mathematics who have superior logical
deductions.
A case example is that when geologists were tinkering
around with theories for the dinosaur extinction that you
have a physicist-- Alvarez come in and with superior logic point to a
meteor bolide. Not that the meteor is the full answer to the dinosaur
extinction but played a
significant role since the dinosaurs were going extinct
long before the bolide struck.
But the point I want to make is that most sciences other than say
physics, chemistry, mathematics usually have practitioners very weak
in Logical deduction and that these "softer sciences" should stick
mostly with the gathering of data and then leave the
final "theory making" to the more logical scientists.
This post is already too long and want to respond to each of the items
quoted above.
P.S. I do not think I am breaking any copyright laws by
quoting the above since it is already on a public website. But if NOVA
has some problems with my above quoting, please say so.
Archimedes Plutonium
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies |
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