Forester wrote:Rocket,
Sorry, but this time you blew it. I may not agree with Daybrown, but at least she takes the time to explain what her arguments are, and does not attack anyone personally. What you wrote was a personal insult, an entirely different thing, and totally unnecessary. It is the sign of a weak argument. I stand with Stan and RK Awl-O'Gist on this one.
First, if civility is so high on your list, Andy, you might start by spelling my name correctly.
Second, it wasn't a personal insult, but a personal analysis. An entirely different thing...
And an analysis many a forum member, male and female, will agree with.
There's lot's of open hostility towards males in whatshername's endless rambling prose. And I don't respond so well to open hostility.
Sorry if that hurts your feelings.
Are you saying that you actually intentionally mispelled your handle? Heh, I thought I was being polite by addressing you that way. Never mind.
You can try to weasel out of calling it a personal attack by calling it an "analysis" all you want, but it is what it is. You do not support your arguments by resorting to such weaknesses. Try addressing her posts point by point, if you feel so insulted by her POV.
Oh, and no hurt feelings here. More like a shake of the head and a shrug at poor behavior.
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the obvious about HNS breeding. As they were more and more isolated there would have been more inbreeding within the clans. In a small group that is not a recipe for long term success.
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
Minimalist wrote:I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the obvious about HNS breeding. As they were more and more isolated there would have been more inbreeding within the clans. In a small group that is not a recipe for long term success.
Ever looked at the locals in the really high-up Alpine villages where no roads go and access is by walking/climbing or cable-car only?
I did.
Those are small, isolated groups! And there's lot's of inbreeding plainly visible in the streets. And that inbreeding has been going on for hundreds, nay, thousands of years!
But they're still here...
Last edited by Rokcet Scientist on Mon Mar 13, 2006 5:52 am, edited 1 time in total.
Rokcet Scientist wrote: And there's lot's of inbreeding plainly visible in the streets.
Think the technical term is endogamy....
Well, with "lot's of inbreeding plainly visible in the streets" I didn't mean they were actually doing it in the streets! God forbid! Just that you could see they had been doin' it.... AAARGH... never mind.
Ever looked at the locals in the really high-up Alpine villages where no roads go and access is by walking/climbing or cable-car only?
I did.
Those are small, isolated groups! And there's lot's of inbreeding plainly visible in the streets. And that inbreeding has been going on for hundreds, nay, thousands of years!
But they're still here...
We have that problem in Texas and look what happened. One of them ended up in the White House.
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
Ever looked at the locals in the really high-up Alpine villages where no roads go and access is by walking/climbing or cable-car only?
I did.
Those are small, isolated groups! And there's lot's of inbreeding plainly visible in the streets. And that inbreeding has been going on for hundreds, nay, thousands of years!
But they're still here...
We have that problem in Texas and look what happened. One of them ended up in the White House.
Yeah, it's endemic (not 'endogamy' well... come to think of it, it is that too, of course; wow... genetics is a complicated science; fun, really!)
Inbreeding, which was even worse with the HNS, would have resulted in much more deviation from the HNS 'standard'. All the Neanderthal bones collected so far would fit in a single broom closet. I dunno if that's an adequate sample to define what a "Neanderthal" was.
Most estimates suggest that there were 100,000 HNS alive at any one time, which would have meant thousands of these small isolated inbred clans. Which, as Kauffman in "The Origins of Order" shows would lead to very rapid evolution, Which would have led to them advancing to civilization were it not for the frequent ice ages sweeping down and almost wiping them out time after time.
"Children of the Ice Age" by Sass talks of homind groups suddenly becoming islated when the ice age began because of their forest fringe habitat shrinking and then becoming isolated pockets. Then we have the Tuba eruption, wiping out all kinds of hominids, leaving only HNS, HSS, and the 'Hobbits'...
But if any one of the thousands of HNS groups manages to interbreed with any of the thousands of HSS groups, that's only a handful of individuals from which to start a new hybrid, with lots of dead ends from them failing to hybridize with the descendants of other groups with slightly different DNA.
From what we know of specialization, the most successful tribes would have the most genetic diversity, which means some HNS hunks strong enough to carry tons of meat killed by the HSS back to the cave. But that same diversity would have made it more risky for the females to give birth, if the pregnancy survives the higher miscarriage rate. So while the more obvious advantages of the HSS would not spread rapidly because of the reproduction problems.
Which reproduction problems seem evident in the relatively low populations that persisted all thru the ice ages. Consider the Mammoth hunters, who get so much press. At one point, they mostly lived in Mammoth bone longhouses along the Don, spread out about 100 miles apart. Say a couple dozen tribes, each of which was no more than 150 people, ie, just a few thousand at any one time in the business.
Unlike all the other continents, ice age Europe must have resulted in populations that plummeted to that small portion that could get by in Spain, Italy, & Greece. Which divided that small portion, and divided it differently every time the Ice came south. Too chaotically to trace the genome.
Any god watching me hasta be bored, and needs to get a life.
daybrown wrote:[...] were it not for the frequent ice ages sweeping down and almost wiping them out time after time.
• "The present ice age began 40 million years ago with the growth of an ice sheet in Antarctica, but intensified during the Pleistocene (starting around 3 million years ago) with the spread of ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere. [...] the last ice age ended about 10,000 years ago." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age)
• Neanderthals emerged 230,000 years ago – bang in the middle of the last ice age – and went extinct 41,000 years ago – 30,000 years before the end of the last ice age.
So Neanderthals never knew a world without an ice age!
The Greenland ice cores show dramatically wider climate swings during the "ice age", during which there were periods up to a few centuries in length, when the climate of Europe was as warm as it is now.
This fact has been used to explain the rise of agriculture, because before the end of the ice age, 10kya, any plants that began to be adapted to use by people were wiped out when the ice returned.
It was this *variability* that limited both megafauna and hominids; if the weather would stabilize, the megafauna would work out migration paths, just as caribou do now, between summer pastures and more moderate winter forage. But the Greenland ice cores show many dramatic shifts over the course of a century, sometimes with shifts happening in just a decade. Genetically, life cannot evolve that fast, and populations plummeted.
Any god watching me hasta be bored, and needs to get a life.
