Convoluted human evolution: Tattersall's take (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, February 16, 2016, 16:04 (3204 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: My favorite paleoanthropologist's take on the confusion in human fossil ancestry:-http://inference-review.com/article/the-genus-homo
QUOTE: "If we can adopt a more realistic notion of what our genus Homo is, we will at the same time open the way not only to a better understanding of the process that produced us, but also to a more accurate perspective about the kind of creature we happen to be."-David's comment: Just a smattering of a great essay, from the bony standpoint, not from the DNA studies. The bush is still a bush.-Thank you for this very interesting essay, which provides a neat paleoanthropological parallel to Steinhardt's emphasis on how little cosmologists actually know about the universe. The quote I have reproduced above from your post is the conclusion, but I think it is also worth quoting the passage that leads to it: 
“Chance and contingency loom large in this process, which is radically different from the slow, steady slog from primitiveness to perfection envisaged by Mayr. And this is important, for Mayr's gradualist model implies that we have somehow been closely molded by nature to be a particular kind of organism. It implies that many of our features and behaviors have been programmed into us by eons of natural selection, thereby relieving us of some degree of responsibility for how we interact with each other and with the world. If we can adopt…etc.”-I don't know what Tattersall's religious beliefs are, but the role of chance and contingency, the apparently haphazard coming and going of different groups, the dismissal of the idea that we have been “closely molded” or “programmed” (here by nature and/or natural selection, but molding and programming are essential to your own theistic, anthropocentric view of evolution) seem to me to suggest anything but the purposeful creation of homo sapiens which is so close to your heart. And I would say the article on hobbits confirms this impression, despite your comment:-QUOTE: "For while the scientists could not exclude the possibility that the "hobbit" was a scaled-down version of Homo erectus, which arrived on the neighbouring island of Java some million years ago, nor could they be sure that H. floresiensis was not a species in its own right."-David's comment: Until this is settled, they look a lot like us, and therefore will remain Homo. With all the branches of Hominins at the start, it looks like convergence, with humans a definite purpose of the process.-I agree that it looks like convergence - different varieties evolving at the same time, often under different conditions - each of them with the “definite purpose” of surviving and/or improving. Homo sapiens has proved to be the most successful. That is how natural selection works: success = survival. All existing species of organisms have been successful so far (though many are sadly disappearing), but that does not mean that every successful one has been deliberately selected by your God while all the unsuccessful ones have been/are being created and then discarded by your God. If he exists, he set the wheels in motion, but then either he runs the whole show (as suggested by your insistence that even the weaverbird couldn't design its own nest), or the whole show runs itself. The history of evolution, with its higgledy-piggledy comings and goings of all species and varieties, including hobbits and hominins and humans, suggests to me that it's the latter.