Now we talk of a “Neanderthal Renaissance”?

_{Denyse O'Leary

May 19, 2020

Human evolution, Intelligent Design}

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It’s amazing what the Neanderthals have learned in the fifty years yer news writer has heard anything about them:

In 1863, the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley claimed a striking similarity between Neanderthal brow ridges and the ‘lowering, threatening expression’ he perceived in the skulls of Aboriginal peoples – ignoring the clear difference in anatomical shape. The European intellectual elite were mostly blind to the possibility that Neanderthals were evidence of a common heritage for living people. Instead, they saw ‘scientific’ proof of the racist hierarchies that positioned non-Europeans as less evolved – although remaining puzzled that ‘savages’ nevertheless appeared to possess brains as big as those filling their own top hats. Up until the 1960s, scientists were still publishing theories of human evolution proposing that different races had budded off the human family tree sooner than others, with Caucasians the most recent arrivals, and therefore the least ‘primitive’…
These ideas have cast a long shadow over the study of Neanderthals.
Rebecca Wragg Sykes, “The Neanderthal renaissance” at Aeon (March 13, 2019 but recycled)

As noted earlier, in any Darwinian scheme, someone must be the subhuman. Otherwise, there is no beginning to human history. Who will get to play the subhuman next?

Sykes is the author of the forthcoming Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art (June 2020)

See also: Neanderthal Man: The long-lost relative turns up again, this time with documents

Comments

Seversky:
Evolution doesn’t require “sub-humans” just ancestral species.
Unfortunately for Seversky, within the framework of the reductive materialism that undergirds Darwinian evolution, there is simply no way to tell one species from another species, much less is there a way to demarcate humans from non-humans:
Darwin, Design & Thomas Aquinas - Logan Paul Gage Excerpt: The Essences of Species 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. 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.,,, https://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=23-06-037-f
You don’t have to take my word for it. Last year a Darwinist admitted that “The most important concept in all of biology, (i.e. species), is a complete mystery”
What is a species? The most important concept in all of biology is a complete mystery – July 16, 2019 Excerpt: Enough of species? This is only the tip of a deep and confusing iceberg. There is absolutely no agreement among biologists about how we should understand the species. One 2006 article on the subject listed 26 separate definitions of species, all with their advocates and detractors. Even this list is incomplete. The mystery surrounding species is well-known in biology, and commonly referred to as “the species problem”. Frustration with the idea of a species goes back at least as far as Darwin.,,, some contemporary biologists and philosophers of biology have,,, suggested that biology would be much better off if it didn’t think about life in terms of species at all.,,, https://theconversation.com/what-is-a-species-the-most-important-concept-in-all-of-biology-is-a-complete-mystery-119200
As should be needless to say, the inability for a supposedly scientific theory, a supposedly scientific theory that seeks to explain the “Origin of Species” in the first place, to clearly define what a species actually is is a clear indication that that supposedly scientific theory cannot possibly be the proper ‘scientific’ explanation for the “Origin of Species”. The reason why Darwinists will forever be stymied in their efforts to provide a rigid definition for the term 'species' is because the term species is an abstract property and/or definition of the immaterial mind that cannot possibly be reduced to any possible materialistic explanations. i.e. How much does the concept of species weigh? Does the concept ‘species’ weigh more in English or in Chinese? How long is the concept of species in millimeters? How fast does the concept go? Is the concept of species faster or slower than the speed of light? Is the concept of species positively or negatively charged? Or etc.. etc..?.. Darwinists ultimately seek to ‘scientifically’ explain everything in materialistic terms. i.e. Reductive materialism. And yet, if something is not composed of particles or does not have physical properties (e.g., length, mass, energy, momentum, orientation, position, etc), it is abstract, even ‘spiritual’. Numbers, mathematics, logic, truth, distance, time, beauty, ugliness, species, person, information, science, etc.. etc.. all fall into that category of being an abstract property of the immaterial mind. It is amazing how many things fall into that ‘abstract’ category even though most everyone, including atheists, (“atheists” also happens to be an abstract term itself), swear that they exist physically. Perhaps the most devastating place that the denial of the abstract realm is for Darwinists, scientifically speaking, is with abstract mathematics.
What Does It Mean to Say That Science & Religion Conflict? - M. Anthony Mills - April 16, 2018 Excerpt: Barr rightly observes that scientific atheists often unwittingly assume not just metaphysical naturalism but an even more controversial philosophical position: reductive materialism, which says all that exists is or is reducible to the material constituents postulated by our most fundamental physical theories. As Barr points out, this implies not only that God does not exist — because God is not material — but that you do not exist. For you are not a material constituent postulated by any of our most fundamental physical theories; at best, you are an aggregate of those constituents, arranged in a particular way. Not just you, but tables, chairs, countries, countrymen, symphonies, jokes, legal contracts, moral judgments, and acts of courage or cowardice — all of these must be fully explicable in terms of those more fundamental, material constituents. In fact, more problematic for the materialist than the non-existence of persons is the existence of mathematics. Why? Although a committed materialist might be perfectly willing to accept that you do not really exist, he will have a harder time accepting that numbers do not exist. The trouble is that numbers — along with other mathematical entities such as classes, sets, and functions — are indispensable for modern science. And yet — here’s the rub — these “abstract objects” are not material. Thus, one cannot take science as the only sure guide to reality and at the same time discount disbelief in all immaterial realities. https://www.realclearreligion.org/articles/2018/04/16/what_does_it_mean_to_say_that_science_and_religion_conflict.html
Mathematics is considered the backbone of all science, engineering, and technology, and yet, in irony of irony, the reductive materialism that undergirds Darwinian evolution denies the very reality of the one thing, i.e. mathematics, that it most needs in order to be considered scientific in the first place. In fact, besides mathematics, the term 'science' itself is an abstract term that cannot possibly be grounded within the reductive materialistic framework that provides the foundation for Darwinian evolution! Thus, not only is Darwinian evolution NOT science, it actually denies the reality of science. :)
2 Corinthians 10:5 Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;
bornagain77_{May 20, 2020
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LoL! seversky needs to learn how to use a dictionary and a textbook. Any alleged "ancestral species" to humans is sub-human. However there isn't any known mechanism that can take a non-human and eventually evolve a human.ET_{May 20, 2020
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Evolution doesn't require "sub-humans" just ancestral species.Seversky_{May 20, 2020
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As with so many of these unexamined assumptions, "the most recent is the least primitive" doesn't even pass the test of strict Darwinism. Nobody ever believed that random mutations always lead upward; they usually lead to failures and death. When a random mutation happens to help a species adapt, strict Darwinism doesn't claim the species is better; it's just more fitted for this particular niche at this particular time. Fitness may often require regression, as many parasites prove. "Latest is best" may work in some specific areas of TECHNICAL development, where the latest steam engine or latest computer is faster and more efficient than the previous; but even there, the previous version was satisfactory to the people who used it. The latest is simply a new adaptation to new expectations, which are often planted via advertising by the people who want to sell the new version.polistra_{May 19, 2020
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