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Politics : Should God be replaced? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cosmicforce who wrote (3169)	11/6/2000 4:33:04 PM
From: Solon	Respond to of 28931

I've always been curious about my residual tail...not that I ever get it.

To: cosmicforce who wrote (3169)	11/6/2000 4:46:56 PM
From: Solon	Respond to of 28931

If function leads structure in brain evolution, then why are modern-looking people with modern-size brains not acting modern for some 40,000 years (Klein, 1989)? One answer might be that the archaeological evidence for advanced behavior at deeper time ranges has not been found yet. Alternately, and in accord with our argument here, it is possible that early modern brains reached near-current dimensions for reasons unrelated to modern cognitive functions. Only later, after "extra" cortical volume had become exapted to the physical correlates of modern behavior, would the full panoply of familiar functions have appeared. We would therefore expect to find evidence for exactly such an anatomical/behavioral gap. The broad and tight correlations between mass increases all over the brain have implications for primates and every other mammalian order. In moving away from essentialism in our thinking about brain structure and function, we are alive to a wider range of causal scenarios, and perhaps to an understanding of brain evolution that goes deeper than a few millimeters of cortex. cogsci.soton.ac.uk

To: cosmicforce who wrote (3169)	11/7/2000 12:27:14 PM
From: Greg or e	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 28931

Good morning Cos Just a quick note before Work. "how literally do you take the Creationist Theory?" Well I do believe that God intentionally created all things ex nihilo and that there is a purpose and meaning to our existence. How He did that is open to differing interpretations, although I am highly doubtful that He used evolution in doing so. Fossils, as we all know have been planted there by Satan to fool gullible scientists. Relax I was just kidding. Actually as I said before I have collected rocks and fossils since I was a kid. I live about an hour and a half from the burgess shale And I definitely plan to do the tour, hopefully in the next year. There is the Tyrell museum an hour the other way in Drumheller. I have been there a few times but it is so philosophically heavy laden that it ceases to be enjoyable. No I have no trouble with fossils, only with the interpretation imposed on them. Ostensibly, I have little trust in the dating systems used and the incentive for fraud seems to be too great for many to resist. The case of the Chinese bird fossils are just the most recent example of the kind of hanky panky that is all too common for my liking. When you add to that the institutional and professional pressure for novelty and to make the next big find, I think you have the recipe for cooked results. You still, in my mind, have the problem posed by the sudden appearance of the fossils in the geologic record. Blue green algae fossils are along way from animal or insect life. "Do you think the remains of people that have morphological structures different from any living person are adequate "proof" of evolution?" Do you have such evidence? If we are them, then there is no difference between that and the fact that we have pygmies vs eight foot humans today. Aren't we changing the meaning of evolution almost in mid sentence here? How does non life become life? If that's what you mean by evolution then I don't think that's been shown to even be possible. If we are talking finch beaks as I said before changing beaks is easy once you have a finch. Gotta run. Have a good one. Greg