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Re: evolution and facts
Read, Dwight ANTHRO (Read@ANTHRO.SSCNET.UCLA.EDU)
Tue, 5 Mar 1996 23:34:00 PST
Jackechs responds:
So ... if you do not share in the belief that early hominids are our
ancestors, what happens to your facts?
At 01:55 PM 03/05/96 PST, Read, Dwight ANTHRO wrote:
>(1) Evolution used to refer to the fact that hominid ancestors, say about
>100,000 BP are not the same, morphologically, as folks today in certain
>aspects. Thus at time A hominids have, one set of characteristics and at time
>B, their genetic descendants have different characteristics. The change from
>A to B is evolution.
Well, it is hardly useful for discussion purposes with regard to what is
meant by the pharse "the fact of evolution" to begin with a position that
says our species has never changed; i.e., if you start with the
claim that all of our ancestors share the same alleles and the same frequency
distribution of alleles as is true today, then it is pointless to talk about
what the statement "the fact of evolution" might mean in the context of
ourselves as a way to clarify the meaning the phrase. If you don't like
using a 100,000 year time depth, change it to, say 2,000 years and rather
than referring to easily noticed morphological changes, the phrase can
refer to changes in allele frequencies in the species Homo sapiens. Or, if
you prefer, the discussion could be made into a conditional.
D. Read
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