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Re: Homo erectus: racial variants of Homo sapiens?
popelish (popelish@cfw.com)
Fri, 10 Jan 1997 03:03:48 +0000
A Pagano wrote:
... all snipped but a single point...
> If it can
> be shown that Homo erectus lived at the same time as modern man, Homo
> erectus may be no more than racial variants of Homo sapiens. That is
> what
> creationists such as Duane Gish ("Evolution: The Fossils Still Say No!",
> Master Books, 1995) have been saying for decades.
How does the fact that Homo erectus lived concurrent with Homo sapiens
for some period of time have to do with the possibility that they shared
a common ancestor? Obviously, the longstanding group of sapiens were
not decended from the erectus individuals that were coexisting. That
does not disprove that ancestors of the group erectus (and little
different geniticly) were not also ancestors of the group sapiens that
passed through a period of modification and separation? Evolution does
not imply a simgle path for life, like a train going by on a track. It
produces a tangled blur of a family tree with lots of fuzz and ocasional
reclosed loops. Try graphing the family tree of someone who marries
their grandfather and has kids. a few generations later, many
relationships will be hard to describe. Life is not a simple as some
would like to believe.
John Popelish
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