There Was No First Human (page 16)

cofty

It appears some people are determined to misunderstand, regardless of how much effort others make to explain things.

Snare & Racket's analogy of language is spot on....

The Dead Hand of Plato looms even larger than I imagined possible.

KateWild

It appears some people are determined to misunderstand-cofty

I see both sides of the debate and am not convinced either way. I understand about the process of evolution and accept it. I also accept that biologists cannot agree on how to identify a species. This is interesting, but does not mean I am determind to misunderstand. I am simply looking at all the facts.

Kate xx

Oubliette

S&R: There was not a first englishman, there was not a first english speaker

Here's some early English for y'all:

Ðaém eafera wæs æfter cenned geong in geardum þone god sende folce tó frófre.

Here's the translation to "modern English":

To him a heir was born, then young in the yards, God sent him to comfort the people

And, no, it's not about Jesus.

new hope and happiness

snake the written word also does not exist and the earth is as much square as round. So my point" There was no first Humun?" is a great question not a statement, in which many will respond from the heart.

cofty

But it isn't a question. It's so obvious it's practically a truism.

new hope and happiness

Cofty truism is a new word to me. Anyway i learnt to be weary of the phaze " truth". Thants one thing i can thank the W.T for.

cofty

You are right to be skeptical of anybody asking you to trust them.

That's the beauty of science - it offers objective evidence. Faith is not a virtue.

Oubliette

On rabbits, from the "Dead Hand of Plato" section of The Greatest Show on Earth:

If there is a 'standard rabbit', the accolade denotes no more than the centre of a bell shaped distribution of real, scurrying, leaping, variable bunnies. And the distribution shifts with time. As generations go by, there may gradually come a point, not clearly defined, when the norm of what we call rabbits will have departed so far as to deserve a different name. - [Emphasis added]

There is no permanent rabbitness, no essence of rabbit hanging in the sky, just populations of furry, long-eared, coprophagous, whisker-twitching individuals showing a statistical distribution of variation in size, shape, colour and proclivities. What used to be the longer-eared end of the old distribution may find itself the centre of a new distribution later in geological time. Given a sufficiently large number of generations, there may be no overlap between ancestral and descendent distributions: the longest ears among the ancestors may be shorter than the shortest ears among the descendants. All is fluid, as another Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, said; nothing fixed. After a hundred million years it may be hard to believe that the descendant animals ever had rabbits for ancestors. - The Greatest Show on Earth, p. 22-23

Yes, the idea of species is not clearly defined. This is one of the things that makes the notion of the OP intriguing, and also inarguably true.

It is an interesting point to ponder.

caliber

Faith is not a virtue ....cofty

Is this a blanket statement or with regards to scientific matters only ?

...in other words is not faith on some things a virtue ?

... How about belief that good will triumph or evil or that you can do anything you put your mind to .

This is taking a postive optimistic view which can change the world if enough are motivated by this thought

There Was No First Human

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