Human evolution; early ancestor probable upright posture (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, September 22, 2019, 16:02 (1887 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: You are correct. Fossils are few. However on page 258 of my book, Atheist Delusion is Dr. Fuller's exposition of a transitional vertebrae of a hominid form from 21 million years ago in a monkey fossil. Again well before descending the trees.

How do you know it was “well before descending the trees”? Even monkeys descend from the trees! We have absolutely no way of knowing how long all these different apes and hominids spent up the trees and down on the ground!

Exactly. Chimps are constantly up and down for six million years and they are still chimps. There has to be driving force to create humans and the fossil changes point to preparatory, unnecessary at the time, early changes by the driving force, God.

DAVID: Again, the early evidence in time, although scattered, supports my approach not yours; I see preparatory changes, as the authors do, well ahead of the time to descend from the trees. You are still Darwinian in trying to find needs to drive evolution, while as Gould showed, all species arrive fully changed.

dhw: Yes indeed, I find it perfectly logical that organisms would change in response to need or to opportunity. Our classic example has always been the whale, and I find your theory that your God changed legs to flippers before the pre-whale entered the water almost laughable beside the theory that legs changed to flippers as a RESULT of the pre-whale entering the water (for whatever reason). The same applies to our various ancestors. I envisage them spending increasing amounts of time on the ground (for whatever reason), and their bodies adapting to cope with the different conditions.

Again that is no explanation when we see chimps unchanged!

dhw: What do you mean by “fully changed”? All species (in the narrow sense of variations) are fully changed in the sense that they are individual, functioning life forms. You have referred us to p. 258 of your excellent The Atheist Delusion and to Dr Filler’s findings. I quote:

p. 258: “He demonstrates changes in lateral processes that begin to allow for the development of completely upright posture over the the course of the next 20 million years of evolution.”

dhw: It took 20 million years for the “complete change” we are discussing! And it took umpteen different “species” of hominid and homo to get there! And so apparently your always-in-control God, whose one purpose was to specially design H. sapiens, either preprogrammed all these different changes 3.8 billion years ago, or kept fiddling and twiddling with hominid/homo anatomies for 20 million years in anticipation of each change in their environment! No wonder you have no idea why he would have chosen this method of “evolving” (= special designing) the only thing he wanted to evolve.

As usual 'I have no idea' why God chose to evolve, but there is much evidence of pre-planning, with slight unnecessary changes in advance of full changed new species . New species are fully changed, as Gould always claimed.

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Under “Evolution and humans: big brain birth canal”:

QUOTE: Preliminary work on the pelvis of the recently discovered 1.98 million-year-old hominin Australopithecus sediba found it to possess a unique combination of Homo and Australopithecus-like features.

dhw: All complete in themselves, but suggestive of convergent evolution as each “species” works out its own evolutionary course.

The 'homo' features are pre-planned preparations for a full new species. And of course re' my comment, you have no answer for birth canal changes to accommodate a bigger baby head, when it involves three individuals with their individual DNA's: father, mother and baby itself.