How Neanderthals got the role of The Subhumans

And yet there are Canadians in MLB. ET

ET

And they would be inferior baseball players, too. ????

So are Canadians. Does that make them sub-human? :) Remember where Denyse hails from before you answer. Brother Brian

Of related note, the entire concept of species can find no grounding within the Darwinian worldview. The entire idea of there being distinct classes of species, much like the concept of personhood, is a abstract, immaterial, concept that simply cannot be grounded within the Darwinian worldview:

Darwin, Design & Thomas Aquinas The Mythical Conflict Between Thomism & Intelligent Design by Logan Paul Gage Excerpt: First, the problem of essences. G. K. Chesterton once quipped that “evolution . . . does not especially deny the existence of God; what it does deny is the existence of man.” It might appear shocking, but in this one remark the ever-perspicacious Chesterton summarized a serious conflict between classical Christian philosophy and Darwinism. In Aristotelian and Thomistic thought, each particular organism belongs to a certain universal class of things. Each individual shares a particular nature—or essence—and acts according to its nature. Squirrels act squirrelly and cats catty. We know with certainty that a squirrel is a squirrel because a crucial feature of human reason is its ability to abstract the universal nature from our sense experience of particular organisms. Think about it: How is it that we are able to recognize different organisms as belonging to the same group? The Aristotelian provides a good answer: It is because species really exist—not as an abstraction in the sky, but they exist nonetheless. We recognize the squirrel’s form, which it shares with other members of its species, even though the particular matter of each squirrel differs. So each organism, each unified whole, consists of a material and immaterial part (form).,,, One way to see this form-matter dichotomy is as Aristotle’s solution to the ancient tension between change and permanence debated so vigorously in the pre-Socratic era. Heraclitus argued that reality is change. Everything constantly changes—like fire, which never stays the same from moment to moment. Philosophers like Parmenides (and Zeno of “Zeno’s paradoxes” fame) argued exactly the opposite; there is no change. Despite appearances, reality is permanent. How else could we have knowledge? If reality constantly changes, how can we know it? What is to be known? Aristotle solved this dilemma by postulating that while matter is constantly in flux—even now some somatic cells are leaving my body while others arrive—an organism’s form is stable. It is a fixed reality, and for this reason is a steady object of our knowledge. Organisms have an essence that can be grasped intellectually. Denial of True Species Enter Darwinism. Recall that Darwin sought to explain the origin of “species.” Yet as he pondered his theory, he realized that it destroyed species as a reality altogether. For Darwinism suggests that any matter can potentially morph into any other arrangement of matter without the aid of an organizing principle. He thought cells were like simple blobs of Jell-O, easily re-arrangeable. For Darwin, there is no immaterial, immutable form. In The Origin of Species he writes: “I look at the term species as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience, to a set of individuals closely resembling each other, and that it does not essentially differ from the term variety, which is given to less distinct and more fluctuating forms. The term variety, again, in comparison with mere individual differences, is also applied arbitrarily, for convenience’s sake.” Statements like this should make card-carrying Thomists shudder.,,, The first conflict between Darwinism and Thomism, then, is the denial of true species or essences. For the Thomist, this denial is a grave error, because the essence of the individual (the species in the Aristotelian sense) is the true object of our knowledge. As philosopher Benjamin Wiker observes in Moral Darwinism, Darwin reduced species to “mere epiphenomena of matter in motion.” What we call a “dog,” in other words, is really just an arbitrary snapshot of the way things look at present. If we take the Darwinian view, Wiker suggests, there is no species “dog” but only a collection of individuals, connected in a long chain of changing shapes, which happen to resemble each other today but will not tomorrow. What About Man? Now we see Chesterton’s point. Man, the universal, does not really exist. According to the late Stanley Jaki, Chesterton detested Darwinism because “it abolishes forms and all that goes with them, including that deepest kind of ontological form which is the immortal human soul.” And if one does not believe in universals, there can be, by extension, no human nature—only a collection of somewhat similar individuals.,,, Implications for Bioethics This is not a mere abstract point. This dilemma is playing itself out in contemporary debates in bioethics. With whom are bioethicists like Leon Kass (neo-Aristotelian and former chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics) sparring today if not with thoroughgoing Darwinians like Princeton’s Peter Singer, who denies that humans, qua humans, have intrinsic dignity? Singer even calls those who prefer humans to other animals “speciesist,” which in his warped vocabulary is akin to racism.,,, If one must choose between saving an intelligent, fully developed pig or a Down syndrome baby, Singer thinks we should opt for the pig.,,, https://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=23-06-037-f

Bottom line, Atheists don't even have a coherent basis for saying any organism is truly a species much less do they have a coherent basis for how we might classify species. bornagain77

Darwinists MUST produce a SERIES of intermediate species, each progressively more human, starting from either chimps or gorillas that leads to homo sapiens. If they CANNOT produce such a series, then there is NO DARWINIAN EXPLANATION for the existence of homo sapiens. I would also note that there ain't no Darwinian explanation for bats or whales, but for public relations purposes, if the Darwinists can't identify ANY intermediate species between monkeys and men, then the SIGNIFICANCE of the rest of The Theory of Evolution falls to the level of debating the ancestry of tree frogs or something. That is, even if Life on Earth really did BEGIN as pond scum, Michael Behe posits at least FOUR (4) shifts in the complexity of life on Earth and explains that NONE of these leaps can be explained by gradual modification. That is, BANG!, suddenly we have BIRDS (whose DNA is significantly more complicated than lizards). The existence of dinos with feathers does NOT imply that the new complexity evolved from earlier animals with feathers that walked on 2 legs. So, this is a "put up or shut up" kinda thing: SHOW ME some "evolution" or admit Darwin simply GUESSED wrong. vmahuna

Exactly how is the atheist who has rejected God to derive any objective value or meaning for human life or for any other life, or for non-life for that matter? For us to even be able to assign value and meaning presupposes the existence of value and meaning. Atheists deny value and meaning exist altogether.

"The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” - Richard Dawkins "Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning." CS Lewis – Mere Christianity The Absurdity of Life without God - William Lane Craig Excerpt: Meaning of Life First, the area of meaning. We saw that without God, life has no meaning. Yet (atheistic) philosophers continue to live as though life does have meaning. For example, Sartre argued that one may create meaning for his life by freely choosing to follow a certain course of action. Sartre himself chose Marxism. Now this is utterly inconsistent. It is inconsistent to say life is objectively absurd and then to say one may create meaning for his life. If life is really absurd, then man is trapped in the lower story. To try to create meaning in life represents a leap to the upper story. But Sartre has no basis for this leap. Without God, there can be no objective meaning in life. Sartre's program is actually an exercise in self-delusion. Sartre is really saying, "Let's pretend the universe has meaning." And this is just fooling ourselves. The point is this: if God does not exist, then life is objectively meaningless; but man cannot live consistently and happily knowing that life is meaningless; so in order to be happy he pretends life has meaning. But this is, of course, entirely inconsistent—for without God, man and the universe are without any real significance. https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/popular-writings/existence-nature-of-god/the-absurdity-of-life-without-god/ Atheistic Materialism vs Meaning, Value, and Purpose in Our Lives - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqUxBSbFhog “If Christianity is true then each one of us is here for a reason. And life does not end at the grave. And God is the absolute standard of goodness. He knows you. He loves you. And He intentionally created you. So your life does have objective meaning, value and purpose. That means you can live a life that is both happy and consistent.” Is There Meaning to Life? - Dr Craig videos (animated video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKGnXgH_CzE

Verse:

Genesis 1:26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

bornagain77

OK, perhaps Denyse is using the term to mean "not technologically advanced"- because they don't have any coherent language and don't walk upright. And they would be inferior baseball players, too. ;) ET

ET, I think you and News must have different understandings of the word "subhuman". See here. daveS

"That’s completely immaterial" DaveS, It's comeletely relevant. It's an unproven assumption that Carl (for some reason) needs hold as true. Poor Carl. Andrew asauber

DaveS:

Carl would be mystified why, for example, gray wolves or chimpanzees should be considered to be “subhuman”.

Because they don't have a say. :D :D :D Chimps and humans are alleged to share a common ancestor. And it is a given that said ancestor was by far much more chimp-like than human. Also, I would tell Carl that "sub" does not mean inferior. ET

The logical consequence of denying that we are made in the image of God: i.e. denying human exceptionalism,

A Professor Who Argues for Infanticide Excerpt: Singer often claims that his views have been misquoted, so I am quoting directly from his books. From "Practical Ethics": "Human babies are not born self-aware, or capable of grasping that they exist over time. They are not persons." But animals are self-aware, and therefore, "the life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee." https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1999/09/11/a-professor-who-argues-for-infanticide/

bornagain77

asauber,

Can you explain why Carl believes that humans arose through unguided evolution?

That's completely immaterial, but let's say he took some university classes in bio and found the evidence for Darwinism to be compelling. daveS

ET,

well everything I said pertains to the differences between humans and non-humans.

True, more or less, but you're talking about distinguishing between humans and non-humans. The question is how to distinguish between humans and sub-humans. Why should those lifeforms which are categorized as non-human by your scheme be considered as sub-human? That would imply a ranking, so that non-humans are "inferior" in some way to humans. Carl would be mystified why, for example, gray wolves or chimpanzees should be considered to be "subhuman". daveS

Can you explain why Carl must accept those criteria as part of a definition of “subhuman”? DaveS, Can you explain why Carl believes that humans arose through unguided evolution? Andrew asauber

DaveS:

Can you explain why Carl must accept those criteria as part of a definition of “subhuman”?

Humans are not knuckle-walkers. Humans can form a language. Humans do not have opposable big toes- we do not have grasping feet. Humans have the whites of the eyes- well everything I said pertains to the differences between humans and non-humans. Language ability separates us from our alleged closest ancestors. ET

ET, Can you explain why Carl must accept those criteria as part of a definition of "subhuman"? I don't see why. Carl simply believes that humans arose through unguided evolution. It's unclear why he should think that language ability, for instance, should be used to classify lifeforms as either subhuman or not. daveS

DaveS:

Can you give me an operational definition of “subhuman” that Carl must subscribe to?

Knuckle-walker would be a start. Unable to form a language. Opposable big toes- ie feet for grasping. No whites of the eyes. Head not quite on the right place of the spine. Brain size. The inability to blush. Tool use- all for starters. And the inability to throw or hit a curveball. :) ET

ET, Let's say Carl believes that humans arose through unguided evolution (which I believe is what we mean by "Darwinist"). Can you give me an operational definition of "subhuman" that Carl must subscribe to? daveS

DaveS:

I don’t think one can even express the concept of “subhuman” in a mere Darwinian scheme of human origins.

Probably because it didn't happen. But in any Darwinian scheme there definitely had to be subhumans.

Not without positing some sort of ordering among lifeforms that goes beyond the hypothesis that humans arose through unguided evolution.

It's called "classification" ET

per the patently false claim at post 1:

"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla" - Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1874, p. 178 What Your Biology Teacher Didn’t Tell You About Charles Darwin - Phil Moore / April 19, 2017 Excerpt: ,,, the British thinker who justified genocide.,,, The full title of his seminal 1859 book was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. He followed up more explicitly in The Descent of Man, where he spelled out his racial theory: "The Western nations of Europe . . . now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors [that they] stand at the summit of civilization. . . . The civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races through the world." - C. Darwin,,, Christian reformers had spent decades in the early 19th century teaching Britain to view non-European races as their equals before God. In a matter of years, Darwin swept not only God off the table, but also the value of people of every race with him. Enabling Genocide Victorian Britain was too willing to accept Darwinian evolution as its gospel of overseas expansion. Darwin is still celebrated on the back of the British £10 note for his discovery of many new species on his visit to Australia; what’s been forgotten, though, is his contemptible attitude—due to his beliefs about natural selection—toward the Aborigines he found there. When The Melbourne Review used Darwin’s teachings to justify the genocide of indigenous Australians in 1876, he didn’t try and stop them. When the Australian newspaper argued that “the inexorable law of natural selection [justifies] exterminating the inferior Australian and Maori races”—that “the world is better for it” since failure to do so would be “promoting the non-survival of the fittest, protecting the propagation of the imprudent, the diseased, the defective, and the criminal”—it was Christian missionaries who raised an outcry on behalf of this forgotten genocide. Darwin simply commented, “I do not know of a more striking instance of the comparative rate of increase of a civilized over a savage race.”,,, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/what-your-biology-teacher-didnt-tell-you-about-charles-darwin Neanderthals were stereotyped as savages for a century — all because of one French scientist – Sep 20, 2016 Excerpt: Ever since that scientific description was published in 1911, we humans have told the story of Neanderthals in a way that makes us look good: We were smarter, less savage, better equipped to inherit the Earth than the Neanderthal.,,, The dominant narrative about Neanderthals is based on the work of a French paleoanthropologist, Marcellin Boule. Boule is one of the premier paleoanthropologists at the beginning of the 20th century.,,, ,,, all the different characteristics he could have emphasized, he emphasized the primitive. His conclusion is that this Neanderthal is going to walk with a kind of hunched posture. He’s going to have really divergent big toes, which is considered a more primitive characteristic. We look at it today and say, “Geez, that was really biased.”,,, Later, in the middle to second half of the 20th century, scientists and anthropologists begin to go back and look at Boule’s original material. They’re starting to reexamine Neanderthals and look at their culture and look at their sophisticated tool use.,,, We now say, “Oh, look, they have culture. They bury their dead. They can start fires. We’re interbreeding. They’re more human than we first thought.” There was a great publication a couple of months ago that points out Neanderthals carried fire starters. That’s fascinating, right? I think that what happens is we keep saying they’re more like us. It’s a very additive thing. We keep adding all these characteristics. They’re not so different from us,,, http://www.vox.com/2016/9/20/12968814/neanderthals-savages-stereotype-boule Review of “Contested Bones” (Part 3 – Chapter 3 “Homo neanderthalensis”) 2-10-2018 by Paul Giem – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2OOt2qFdu4&list=PLHDSWJBW3DNU_twNBjopIqyFOwo_bTkXm&index=3 Review of "Contested Bones" (Part 1 - Prologue and Chapter 1 "Power of the Paradigm") – video https://youtu.be/e6ZOKj-YaHA?t=757 12:37 minute Quote: "In 1965, natural history painter Rudolph Zallinger created the most famous icon of evolution - the "March of Progress." The illustration was a foldout in the Time-Life Nature Library book, "Early Man".2 It portrays a series of alleged ape-like ancestors that become progressively more human as they march across the page. Interestingly, the figure's caption cautioned readers that the artistic representations were based upon "fragmentary fossil evidence.",,, The book freely confesses: "Although protoapes and apes were quadrupedal, all are shown here standing for the purpose of comparison.",,, the transitional forms existed primarily in the artist's mind.,, most people ignored the fine print." 16:43 minute Quote: "The power of the (ape to man) graphic has been strongly reinforced by sporadic headlines proclaiming important new fossil evidence,,, Very few people are aware that virtually every "ape-man" bone has been contested by experts in the field." “We have all seen the canonical parade of apes, each one becoming more human. We know that, as a depiction of evolution, this line-up is tosh (i.e. nonsense). Yet we cling to it. Ideas of what human evolution ought to have been like still colour our debates.” Henry Gee, editor of Nature (478, 6 October 2011, page 34, doi:10.1038/478034a), Contested Bones: Is There Any Solid Fossil Evidence for Ape-to-Man Evolution? - Dr. John Sanford and Chris Rupe Excerpt: We have spent four years carefully examining the scientific literature on this subject. We have discovered that within this field (paleoanthropology), virtually all the famous hominin types have either been discredited or are still being hotly contested. Within this field, not one of the hominin types have been definitively established as being in the lineage from ape to man. This includes the famous fossils that have been nicknamed Lucy, Ardi, Sediba, Habilis, Naledi, Hobbit, Erectus, and Neaderthal. Well-respected people in the field openly admit that their field is in a state of disarray. It is very clear that the general public has been deceived regarding the credibility and significance of the reputed hominin fossils. We will show that the actual fossil evidence is actually most consistent with the following three points. 1) The hominin bones reveal only two basic types; ape bones (Ardi and Lucy), and human bones (Naledi, Hobbit, Erectus, and Neaderthal). 2) The ape bones and the human bones have been repeatedly found together in the same strata – therefore both lived at the same basic timeframe (the humans were apparently hunting and eating the apes). 3) Because the hominin bones were often found in mixed bone beds (with bones of many animal species in the same site), numerous hominin types represent chimeras (mixtures) of ape and human bones (i.e., Sediba, Habilis). We will also present evidence that the anomalous hominin bones that are of the human (Homo) type most likely represent isolated human populations that experienced severe inbreeding and subsequent genetic degeneration. This best explains why these Homo bones display aberrant morphologies, reduced body size, and reduced brain volume. We conclude that the hominin bones do not reveal a continuous upward progression from ape to man, but rather reveal a clear separation between the human type and the ape type. The best evidence for any type of intermediate “ape-men” derived from bones collected from mixed bone beds (containing bones of both apes and men), which led to the assembly of chimeric skeletons. Therefore, the hominin fossils do not prove human evolution at all.,,, We suggest that the field of paleoanthropology has been seriously distorted by a very strong ideological agenda and by very ambitious personalities. https://ses.edu/contested-bones-is-there-any-solid-fossil-evidence-for-ape-to-man-evolution/ Fraudulent 98.5% Chimp Human DNA similarity comparisons, according to a Darwinist, “needs to be treated like nuclear waste: bury it safely and forget about it for a million years”,,, The Rise and Fall of DNA Hybridization – Jonathan Marks - 2011 Excerpt: the technique of DNA hybridization had devolved into being doubly “tricky” – but more significantly, the outstanding charge of data falsification was there in black-and-white in the leading science journal in America. It seemed as though nothing more needed to be said for the “wheels of justice” to begin turning. Yet they didn’t. In 1993, I was asked by The Journal of Human Evolution to review Jared Diamond’s book, The Third Chimpanzee. Noting that the book’s “hook” was based on the Sibley-Ahlquist work, which Diamond was still touting uncritically, I said: Perhaps you recall Sibley and Ahlquist. In a nutshell, their results were: (1) chimp-gorilla DNA hybrids were more thermally stable than chimp-human hybrids; (2) the differences were insignificant; and (3) reciprocity was very poor when human DNA was used as a tracer. Unfortunately, the conclusions they reported were: (1) chimp-human was more thermally stable than chimp-gorilla; (2) differences were significant; and (3) reciprocity was near-perfect. And they got from point A to point B by (1) switching experimental controls; (2) making inconsistent adjustments for variation in DNA length, which was apparently not even measured; (3) moving correlated points into a regression line; and (4) not letting anyone know. The rationale for (4) should be obvious; and if (1), (2) and (3) are science, I'm the Princess of Wales. This work needs to be treated like nuclear waste: bury it safely and forget about it for a million years.31 31Marks, J. (1993) Review of The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond. Journal of Human Evolution, 24:69-73. http://webpages.uncc.edu/~jmarks/dnahyb/Sibley%20revisited.pdf New Chimp Genome Confirms Creationist Research BY JEFFREY P. TOMKINS, PH.D. * | FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2018 Excerpt: The first time they constructed a chimp genome and compared it to humans, they claimed 98.5% DNA similarity based on cherry-picked regions that were highly similar to human. However, an extensive DNA comparison study I published in 2016 revealed two major flaws in their construction of the chimp genome.1 First, many chimp DNA data sets were likely contaminated with human DNA, especially those produced in the first half of the chimpanzee genome project from 2002 to 2005. Second, the chimpanzee genome was deliberately constructed to be more human-like than it really is.2 Scientists assembled the small snippets of chimp DNA onto the human genome, using it as a scaffold or reference. It’s much like putting together a jigsaw puzzle by looking at the picture on the box as a guide. Since many chimpanzee data sets likely suffered from human DNA contamination, the level of humanness was amplified. I studied the 2005–2010 data sets that showed less human DNA data contamination and found they were only 85% similar to human at best.1 Just this year, scientists published a new version of the chimpanzee genome.3 This new version incorporated an advanced type of DNA sequencing technology that produces much longer snippets of DNA sequence than earlier technologies. It also involved better protocols that greatly reduce human DNA contamination. And most importantly, the authors report that the DNA sequences have been assembled without using the human genome as a scaffold. They also acknowledged the flawed nature of previous versions of the chimp genome: The higher-quality human genome assemblies have often been used to guide the final stages of nonhuman genome projects, including the order and orientation of sequence contigs and, perhaps more importantly, the annotation of genes. This bias has effectively “humanized” other ape genome assemblies.3 This confirms what many creationists have been pointing out for years. Curiously, the authors of the new chimp genome paper said very little about the overall DNA similarity between humans and chimpanzees. However, the University of London’s specialist in evolutionary genomics, Dr. Richard Buggs, evaluated the results of an analysis that compared this new chimp version to the human genome and discovered some shocking anti-evolutionary findings. Dr. Buggs reported on his website that “the percentage of nucleotides in the human genome that had one-to-one exact matches in the chimpanzee genome was 84.38%” and “4.06% had no alignment to the chimp assembly.”?4 Assuming the chimpanzee and human genomes are about the same size, this translates to an overall similarity of only about 80%! This outcome is way outside the nearly identical level of 98 to 99% similarity required for human evolution to seem plausible. http://www.icr.org/article/new-chimp-genome-confirms-creationist-research

bornagain77

See, in a Darwinian scheme of human origins, somebody has got to be the subhuman.

I don't think one can even express the concept of "subhuman" in a mere Darwinian scheme of human origins. Not without positing some sort of ordering among lifeforms that goes beyond the hypothesis that humans arose through unguided evolution. daveS