Human evolution: Skull 1470, it turns out, has a multiple personality disorder
| August 9, 2012 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design, News |
With respect to the skull in this story, “Two possible new homo species unearthed from time of homo erectus?”, it has been kicking around a lot and we were reminded this afternoon of what Jonathan Wells had to say about it in Icons of Evolution (2000), by a reader who says, “Yes, indeed. Skull 1470 has long been notorious for its ability to assume different shapes depending on how it is reconstructed.”
One famous fossil skull, discovered in 1972 in northern Kenya, changed its appearance dramatically depending on how the upper jaw was connected to the rest of the cranium. Roger Lewin recounts an occasion when paleoanthropologists Alan Walker, Michael Day, and Richard Leakey were studying the two sections of ³skull 1470.² According to Lewin, Walker said: ³You could hold the [upper jaw] forward, and give it a long face, or you could tuck it in, making the face short…. How you held it really depended on your preconceptions. It was very interesting watching what people did with it.² Lewin reports that Leakey recalled the incident, too: ³Yes. If you held it one way, it looked like one thing; if you held it another, it looked like something else.² [1]
Just recently, National Geographic magazine commissioned four artists to reconstruct a female figure from casts of seven fossil bones thought to be from the same species as skull 1470. One artist drew a creature whose forehead is missing and whose jaws look vaguely like those of a beaked dinosaur. Another artist drew a rather good-looking modern African-American woman with unusually long arms. A third drew a somewhat scrawny female with arms like a gorilla and a face like a Hollywood werewolf. And a fourth drew a figure covered with body hair and climbing a tree, with beady eyes that
glare out from under a heavy, gorilla-like brow. [2]
NOTES
[1] On the variable appearance of skull 1470, see Roger Lewin, Bones of ontention, Second Edition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), p 160; see also Ian Tattersall, The Fossil Trail: How We Know What We Think We Know About Human Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p.133.
[2] The drawings of Homo habilis by four different artists are in “Behind the Scenes,” National Geographic 197 (March, 2000): 140. The drawings are actually on an unnumbered page, buried among the advertisements at the end of the issue; the page number cited here was obtained by extrapolating from the last numbered page.
The thing is, why are they so desperate? Why does it matter so much? Is it just the summer and the need for hot weather stories or something?
14 Responses to Human evolution: Skull 1470, it turns out, has a multiple personality disorder
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There is also this study:
somewhat related notes:
Sternberg further notes here:
and indeed we find ‘to our surprise’ that Sternberg is correct in his observation:
which is not really that surprising when we consider the definition of a what gene actually is has changed dramatically:
and:
Yet a 80% difference in proteins, though it flows naturally from ID based reasoning, is extremely problematic for Darwinists to explain (as if the 1% hypothetical genetic difference was not problematic enough):
Further notes:
further note:
Here is a entire video by Dr. Carter on the ‘multi-dimensional’ genome:
@Bibliography77
The 80% protein difference–how are they calculating that? If a protein of 400aa length is different by 1-2 aa’s, but still has the same function and structure, is it considered different?
Also, it looks like the post about 1470 from yesterday, “Dewitt’s Reconstruction of Skull 1470″ has been removed?
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....kull-1470/
Well Joe Coder, here is the pdf of the article:
where in the second paragraph of the introduction they tell us how they conducted their research. Please note that they assumed ‘non-coding DNA to be ‘non-functional’, i.e. junk.
As well, on page 217 and 218 they show, and discuss, the 100%, 99%, 98% and less than 98% distribution of differences, as well as they briefly discuss some limited aspects of their study that need to be further studied and extended.
Of note, many times when I have shown this study to Darwinists it seems as if it is almost a knee jerk reaction on their part to state that many of the differences in the proteins in chimps and apes are only a few amino acids, yet, as Dr. Gauger has pointed out in the citation I listed previously, a ‘few’ amino acids difference is certainly no small problem to just brush aside as if it did not matter,,, not to mention the fact that there are now found to be over 1400 hundred novel ORFan genes in humans which simply can’t be brushed aside with a handwave as Darwinists seem all too willing to do with most evidence:
correction:
Of note, many times when I have shown this study to Darwinists it seems as if it is almost a knee jerk reaction on their part to state that many of the differences found between the proteins of chimps and humans
From the study:
> Only 25 (20%) of these proteins showed the identical amino acid sequence between humans and chimpanzees. In other words, the proportion of different proteins was 80%, in contrast to the 1–2% difference at the nucleotide level.
So yes, even one aa different in a string hundreds long will qualify the whole protein for being different, even though most of such substitutions will have no affect on protein structure, and nearly zero will change function.
I think this is a nearly meaningless benchmark and isn’t a good argument to use. Your argument about new proteins in humans is much better, especially compared to the observed evolution HIV and malaria in the last several decades, which have produced far less with a million times more mutation and selection events.
JoeCoder you state:
Well actually I think, even though this study certainly is lacking for the many questions it leaves unanswered, the study is still far stronger to use for a ID perspective than one might be inclined to think at first since, as I noted previously, even two coordinated mutations are shown to be extremely problematic for Darwinists to show the origination of:
Further notes:
The limits found on Darwinian processes is simply far more severe than anyone had at first imagined: here are a few more assorted notes along that line
As well, the ‘errors/mutations’ that are found to ‘naturally’ occur in protein sequences are found to be ‘designed errors’:
But you are right JoeCoder, that the paper, by itself, without the other evidence, is not nearly as strong as the ORFan argument.
JoeCoder, I hate to belabor this paper, but if you will also notice in the pdf on page 216 of paragraphs 2.1 & 2.2 that the sample set of proteins was severely biased towards the Darwinian presupposition so as to give the most favorable alignment they could get for proteins. This sentence in 2.2 is particularly telling as to the bias they introduced into the analysis:
As well the percent difference in protein domain-domain interactions (DDIs) is completely unaddressed as well (which is something, from a ‘regulatory point of view’ of ID, we should reasonably expect a fairly large difference in.) Thus Joe Coder, this study is, given all it biases towards getting a Darwinian conclusion for similar proteins, surprisingly friendly to ID in that, despite the bias, the differences were far larger than can be explained by Darwinian processes.
We’re on the same side here, and I already have most of the sources you link among the notes I use for my own arguments.
But the 80-20% still seems to me like saying the dead sea scrolls and masoretic text are only 20% similar, because 80% of the chapters have at least one letter different, and that’s a biased result because it doesn’t even include the many apocryphal works found among the dead sea scrolls.
The comparison is not fair in my view.
That being said I think it should be obvious that a new study needs to be done without the inherent bias as this one had. Maybe a less biased one has been done and I just could not find it in my brief search. Given the over 1400 ORFan sequences (6% of total) I have a feeling that the results will not be at all what Darwinists would have presupposed beforehand.
it feel better to have scientific discussion now.
bornagain77,
please continue for enlightenmet discussion of issue. my ink pen for notes is ready.
sergio