: And all this is true of humans...
See response to Forrest, I obviously wasn't clear enough about other species needing to be taught complex symbolic language... my bad.
: I think you're thinking of the Sapiens Sapiens subspecies
: here. I was wrong too, though; the current estimated
: age of the species is 3 to 400 millennia. Regardless,
: it's obvious that we spent an awful lot of time just
: sitting around banging rocks together when we *could*
: have been building supercomputers and then banging
: them together.
No gdi! :) The Cahn and Wilson paper, a seminal paper regarding the use of genetic data to "coalesce" an origin date, is consistent with its own philosophy that modern humans and neanderthals are different species. This is one school of thought. The other, mostly composed of paleontologists, sees neanderthals and modern humans as members of the same species, with a much older date of origin. I'm absolutely positive that the consensus is a species origin of 200 tya at the *latest*. Bleh, not important. Also, just because a paper is 10 years old, doesn't mean it isn't cited with regularity. Though honestly, I just wanted to pass on to you an extreme limit for the species origin. I think the paper's crap because it doesn't account for population-level phenomena like bottlenecks. :)
: And although I love UC Berkeley, I have to say that
: estimates of genetic change are rarely as reliable as
: bones dug out of the ground. Particularly estimates
: made over a decade ago. :-) Completely modern skeletal
: remains have been dated as definitely more than
: 100,000 years old. There's little that molecular
: analysis can do to advance that date, and indeed most
: geneticists aren't trying to. The bulk of the research
: into dating common ancestors of various human
: populations has little relevance to determining the
: age of our subspecies. Both "Eve" and the
: more recently-posited male common ancestor of all
: humanity are believed to have lived well over 150,000
: ya.
The so-called "Mitochondrial Eve" is
: Thing is, unfortunately, that there hasn't *been* any
: biological evolution in the last 2000 years-aside from
: an increase in average height and a few other things,
: mainly due to improved health and diet.
That isn't biological evolution. There's no doubt whatsoever that we've evolved over the last 2000 years. What species doesn't? It's just that our evolution has generated something you can't see -- an incredible amount of genetic variation. That's the result of increased population size and medicines keeping crappy genes in the population.
: This is
: exactly my point. What produced our sudden cultural
: explosion? Nothing that we know about. Luck, maybe. A
: few people with good ideas who happened to be able to
: communicate them to others before they died, maybe.
: What we do know is that we didn't suddenly become
: "special." The humans who spent tens of
: thousands of years without writing or metalworking or
: agriculture--and who are still doing it, in some parts
: of the world--weren't any different than us.
In some very deep sense, the processes leading to our species' technological boom were based on random events, but to only reference random events is to miss a big part of the developing picture, in the same sense that inspecting a Seurat pontilist painting at 2" would lead to little else than the impression that Seurat really liked dots. ;) Certain conditions made comprehensive social development possible in Europe, certain parts of Africa, Asia, and also in Meso-America.
Europe is special, yes it is, absolutely. But it isn't the *only* cradle of civilization. The egyptians started something, but floundered. The Mayans started something, and floundered. The dynasties in Asia, similarly, experienced periods of great expansion and great collapses. The most promising lasting civilization prior to the modern era, actually, was the Incas IMHO. If it hadn't been for those three horses and five guns, great things might have happened. ;)
Oops. Back to point. Ultimately, it is environment that dictated the initial stages of selective evolution and made it possible for cultural evolution to speed up in Europe. And that, in and of itself, is not random. One depends on the other.
: So why assume that apes' lack of cultural progress makes
: *them* different?
Well it does. :) I know you're saying something else here, though. :)
: The questions left to
: explore concern how good gorillas can be at talking,
: not whether they talk.
And I love the question, and the fact that people are spending time trying to answer it. I just question, as any good skeptic would, the meaning of such studies' findings.
: And those who want very much to believe in their place at
: the Top of the Evolutionary Ladder ::pokes David with
: hunting knife, several times: have a tendency to keep
: raising the bar defining "sentience," or
: "self-awareness," changing the rules of the
: game every time it looks like a nonhuman creature is
: winning.
I think if you'll go back and read my posts, you'll find that I'm only questioning *you*, not agreeing with those who argue differently than you. ::launches SCUD at SD, misses, hits the Campanile::
: First tool use was considered a good measure of
: intelligence--but then it was discovered that even
: birds use tools occasionally. Then it was upped to
: tool use which is learned and passed from individual
: to individual--but chimpanzees teach one another to
: make termite brushes. Then they decided that you have
: to be able to *make* tools, not just use existing
: objects to be considered intelligent--but as it turned
: out, termite brushes required quite a bit of skill and
: time to construct. Last I heard, people were arguing
: that you had to be able to make tools for making other
: tools...
I think the discussion has matured a great deal more than that. When naturalists were making the tool argument, a German guy postulated that the three human "races" each evolved from a different great ape. (Whites from chimps, blacks from gorillas, and asians from orangtuans.) I'd like to think we've come a long way since then. The argument is more subtle now -- it has to do with intellectual capacity. Which is right on, IMO, since that is something that comes in shades, rather than tool use which is a stupid absolute.
: A similar progression has occurred with language. When it
: was discovered that even dogs could learn the
: "meanings" of verbs and nouns so that they
: could obey commands never heard before, linguists
: argued that the ability to understand syntax was the
: new important thing. Unfortunately, U of H researchers
: have found that dolphins are quite good at
: this--distinguishing "bring the ball to the
: stick" from "bring the stick to the
: ball."
Dolphins continue to astound me, too. What's more impressive about that report was that the dolphins, in many instances, didn't need more than one try to get it right.
: So now, people argue that you can't be
: considered intelligent unless you already *possess* a
: complex language. Come 2020, I'm sure the developments
: of the Rubik's Cube and the knock-knock joke will be
: considered the threshold points for self-awareness.
: :-)
Geez! ::studies up on knock-knock jokes::
: Humans are special. So are coatimundis, cuttlefish and
: centipedes. Every species has unique attributes; ours
: just don't happen to be the ones we'd like.
Absolutely, every species is unique and special in aesthetic terms as well as in biological ones.
I think our species owns a diversity of attributes, some extremely positive, some extremely negative, some neither. We also seem to own the ability to make judgement decisions about our own attributes, which must be a requisite for overcoming what we do that's wrong. How long it takes us to figure *that* out, however, I have no idea. :(
-David
