As a grandfather, I am well aware that the conventional wisdom is that I have outlived my usefulness as far as evolutionary theory goes. Once you have had offspring and raised them to an age where there are independent and capable to having offspring of their own, you have pretty much exhausted your biological usefulness. This leads to one speculation as to why our bodies, after a certain age, tend to fall apart. It is because there is no selection pressure to develop mechanisms keep it going.
But the fact remains that people do live longer than is strictly necessary for evolution to function and this article argues that older people can still serve an evolutionary purpose.
On an evolutionary timescale, Homo sapiens emerged only quite recently. Yet in that short time, we have evolved a particularly weird life history, with a much longer childhood and old age than other animals. In particular, we’re very different from our closest primate relatives. By at least age seven, chimpanzees provide as much food as they consume, and they rarely live past 50 – there’s no chimp equivalent of human menopause. Even in forager cultures, where growing up is accelerated, children aren’t self-sufficient until they’re at least 15. What’s more, even in communities without access to modern medicine, if you make it past childhood you might well live into your 70s. We live some 20 years longer than chimpanzees and, except for a few whale species, particularly orcas, we are the only mammals who systematically outlive our fertility.
The extended childhood is especially puzzling because, as parents know, children are expensive, and that was true long before college tuition and summer camp. Adults have always had to feed and protect the young, and early human brain development uses up a tremendous amount of energy – more than 60 per cent of four-year-olds’ calories go to the brain at rest, compared with around 20 per cent for adults. Humans also have babies every couple of years, much more frequently than chimps, so they stack up even more of those helpless, hungry-brained children.
Chimpanzee mothers do almost all the childrearing. But humans evolved exceptionally extended and varied sources of caregiving to deal with their costly babies, including fathers who take care of the kids, post-menopausal grandmothers, and ‘alloparents’ – other people who help to raise children. Prairie-vole dads, orca-whale grandmothers and rhesus-monkey alloparents also help to raise babies, but these kinds of care are rare among mammals. No other species except humans appears to have all three kinds of care.
…Childhood seems to be designed to enhance learning – so extending that period would be a good strategy for a species that needs to learn more.
…Like the research on the young capuchins, studies from my lab and others suggest that young humans are especially motivated to explore their environment – or, what we tend to call ‘getting into everything’. When babies play with things, they do it in ways that seem designed to give them the maximum amount of information about how those things work. Young animals, and especially human children, are also notably impulsive, random and risk-taking.
…To exercise these impressive early learning abilities, you need elders who can protect and nurture you. Curious children depend on caring adults. So, the other part of the life-history change was the evolution of more caregiving, especially including the caregiving that elders can provide.
…When young animals, including humans, detect that they are cared for, they take their time growing up, and invest in large brains and the learning that goes with them. Indications that care is in short supply might lead to a different ‘live fast, die young’ pattern of development, one that is less intelligent but requires less caregiving and is better adapted to a harsh environment.
…Just as the impulsiveness, curiosity and noise of children might contribute to exploration and compensate for their other inabilities, the older humans’ expertise, patience and storytelling skills might compensate for loss of speed and strength. Several studies suggest that we get happier or at least more content in our 50s, and stay that way as long as we remain healthy. Losing the single-minded drive of our middle years might contribute to this happiness, and actually make us better suited to the role of carers and teachers, guardians of tradition and bearers of wisdom.
It seems that all these life-history developments interacted to create the coevolutionary cascade that led to the remarkably swift emergence of Homo sapiens. A longer, smarter, more social childhood, as well as an extended old age, lets you develop more skilled adults. In turn, these adults can produce more calories and afford more care and cooperation, and so allow for an even longer, smarter and more social childhood in the next generation.
One always has to be a little careful about evolutionary explanations for things. If not backed up good evidence, they can come across as glib and superficial.
Still, it is good to feel that we older people may not be that useless after all.
There are lots of reasons to believe that senescence and death are deliberate genetic processes. Hutchinson-Gilford progeria seems to show that the throttles can malfunction so that a person can die of old age while still quite young.
The SF writer Larry Niven wrote a novel called Protector which imagined that humans are an alien species that was accidently marooned on Earth tens of thousands of years ago. This species had a second puberty that occurred around age 50 that turned the relatively stupid breeder stage into a super intelligent protector stage. Unfortunately for the marooned ones, this second puberty was triggered by a virus that lived in a yam-like tuber called tree of life, which they had no supply of. Thus, our elders didn’t fully achieve protector abilities, and we were left with the legend of Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit (which was harmful to people who ate it while too young).
If contrafactual fiction amuses you, so be it. We have the DNA and we know it ain’t so.
It seems to me that older people are an accidental side-effect of humans learning about bacteria. After Pasteur, life-spans jumped pretty sharply, but during the much longer period in which humans evolved, life-spans were 40yr or so. Thus we don’t need an evolutionary explanation for old people at all.
That 40yrs is a life expectancy average. It was brought down because of infant mortality rates, high rates of childbirth deaths, and childhood diseases which humans have mostly gotten past. There were still plenty of old people.
Having older people who are involved with young people and help them grow is one thing. But we also have a not insignificant number of stubborn old fools who want the world to stand still for them because they believe it would be more convenient for them.
I personally think if the situation were as rosy as depicted above, Greta Thunberg would have elicited a very different reaction. Instead we have Biden and most of the rest of the world treating oil like it’s the spice from Dune despite knowing with certainty that if we keep this up it’ll kill any of us who are left.
Re #5
Psalm 90:10
The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.
So even in Old Testament times, 70 years was considered a common age to die, and even 80 was not unheard of.
This article was not written by someone who is a biologist, but a psychologist/philosopher. It’s certainly prettier than the stuff that PZ makes fun of. She writes like a mom. Gosh, Hunter S Thompson meets Sandra Oh, just look at the titles of the other things she’s written for the Aeon. She’s cute. Maybe she’s correct? Oh, wait…
Some comedy and the fancifulness not necessarily aligned with science comes out when she talks about humans flourishing in space (No, we become quite debilitated. Any of us can pity the koala and the panda all we like but it’s starting to look like we’re stuck here.) and we move around a lot (No, for the vast majority of humanity’s history, most people did not move far).
@ Marcus
As ardipithecus @ 5 says that is average life expectancy. My impression is that if you made it to roughly 15 and had a decent standard of living you had a decent chance of making it into your sixties or seventies. A fair number of people hit 80 or 80+.
It was the infant mortality rate that makes for such a such a low average life span. It is not all that unusual to see a Wiki entry of “XX had 13 children, two of whom survived to adulthood”.
Under ideal circumstances, mice can live a few years and gestate multiple litters per year. It follows that their lifespan/reproduction-cycle ratio quite exceeds our own. And they don’t particularly look after their young from one gestation after the next gestation.
In short, can’t just look at humans for an explanation of something that happens even more in other species. Both humans and mice are mammals, so quite closely related.
@moarscienceplz #7: The bible can’t really be used to guess how old people got to be in ancient times. It casually asserts that some people lived to be hundreds of years old. Even if you trim the obvious outliers there’s no way to know how exaggerated the rest of the data is. Mostly what bible ages tell us is that the authors thought age proved something so they made sure the numbers they recorded proved that thing.
@11 lanir
Yeah, I was afraid of exactly your response, and I debated whether to address it immediately.
OK, the bible is a dog’s breakfast. I hope everyone who is a regular reader of FTB can agree on that. Some of it is crazy wacky mythology. Some of it is reasonably accurate (by the standards of the time) historicity. Some of it is rantings of mentally ill people who by the standards of the time were considered prophets. Some of it is wishes of oppressed people, couched in religious terms to avoid being tortured by the powers of the time (such as the Revelation).
All that being said, the author of Psalm 90 seems to be making a clear point to the common people of his time, i.e., you will only live a short time, so you should take care of your afterlife. I don’t see how anyone can dispute this conclusion. Given that, WHY would the author then assert that an expected human lifespan would be 70 or 80 years if almost no one actually lived that long? If people typically died in their 40s, what would it benefit the author’s argument to claim that lifespans were twice that? If they wanted to point out that only a very few people made it even to 70, why then include the ‘reason of strength’ to 80? They would be in effect saying, “Well, we all are probably going to kick of at 40, but the days of our years are 70 or 80”? That makes no sense at all. It would be like saying today, “Well, lots of us kick off in our 70s, but we should be living to 130 or 140.” That makes no sense in the context. Nobody to date has made it to 130, so why would anybody say that, especially when they are trying to make the point that life is short?
Nature is more varied than the quoted writer is aware. For one example, Acorn Woodpeckers (a species native to California, which can probably be seen around Prof. Singham’s home!) live and breed in extended family groups with multiple child caretakers[1], an example of a common pattern of “nest helpers”[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_woodpecker#Breeding
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helpers_at_the_nest
@11, moarscienceplz,
“Some of it is wishes of oppressed people, couched in religious terms to avoid being tortured by the powers of the time (such as the Revelation).”
I’ve heard this before. How did this work? What parts illustrate this supposed political shrewdness?
@moarscienceplz #11:
Depending on which translated version of the bible you’re using that verse can sound a lot more like an those are upper limits than normal values. I don’t think psalms in particular are overly concerned with accurately recording history. They’re poems of a sort and are more suited to conveying feelings. Think of them like song lyrics. But honestly I’m not a theologian and from conversations I had in college with people studying such things, picking sources and translating from hebrew is difficult even if it’s your field of study.
I’m not trying to be overly argumentative or mean about it. I just think there are reasons not to take the bible at face value when it talks about how old people are. And those reasons are at least as valid as anything you might suggest in favor of doing so. You can believe what you like, I’m just saying that it’s not going to be a universally compelling point.
@txpiper #14:
Can’t give you much more than pointers on what to look for but you probably want to look at the documentary hypothesis. That’s a theory that the bible is written by four groups of people that can be loosely identified by linguistic study. It supposes four groups of people writing the bible. The ones you’re probably looking for are those that write while the jewish people are in Babylon and attempting to secretly keep an independent culture and identity from those around them.
I have no comment on how accurate any of that is but if the examples you’re looking for exist I think that’s where you’d find them.
[OK — another thread derailing by txpiper]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Revelation#Eschatological
(markup adjusted for this site)
Umpteen versions of Christian interpretations (tens of thousands of Xian sects, of course), and only one can be right. At best.
In short, there is no such thing as the Christian interpretation, only a multitude of them — each one a Xian interpretation.
Bah.
John: What’s the name for “whatever theosophistry, logical contortions and rationalizations it takes to allow ourselves to pretend Revelation makes absolute perfect sense as part of the Inerrant Word of God?”
lanir,
“Depending on which translated version of the bible you’re using that verse can sound a lot more like an those are upper limits than normal values.”
I would say a mean average. The versions pretty much say the same thing. Psalm 90 is attributed to Moses, who died when he was 120 years old.
Long ages began to diminish after the flood, as shown here.
=
“the documentary hypothesis. That’s a theory that the bible is written by four groups…”
It just supposes that the ignorant, bronze-age goat herders were actually extremely shrewd conspirators. Old Testament messianic prophecies and New Testament fulfillments make liberal theologians uncomfortable. The groups idea is supposed to alleviate the pain.
txpiper, #19:
Attributed by whom and based on what?
You’re the one assuming it’s a product of the bronze age (or even earlier), which is precisely what’s at issue. So, this is just your own misconception being restated, not a coherent point that you’re making.
Some time around the Babylonian exile (give or take) would put it around the end of the iron age or some time after that:
As for being “extremely shrewd conspirators,” all that the writers of the Torah had to do was give their stories a mythological backdrop. Comparing it against other evidence from those time periods (and noticing how the texts contradict that evidence) is something that scholars today can do with relative ease, unlike ordinary readers back then.
When people need to rely on you to provide the whole story, because they’ve got little or no access to anything else, then you hold all the cards and need no sophistication whatsoever to come up with whatever zany and unhistorical thing that you want. But that’s not even important, if (like you) people have been indoctrinated into thinking they must accept whatever is written in their bullshit scriptures, despite being presented with abundant amounts of genuine evidence. In that case, such readers have decided to block off their own minds from accessing useful or factual information.
Raging Bee, the word is: txpiper.
(Truly an exemplar)
txpiper
I foresee that I will be eating pizza this evening. If I go to the pizza shop after work and buy a pizza can I proclaim that my prophecy was correct and I was seeing the future?
Or, even better, I hereby prophesy that a saviour will be born in a time of oppression, a saviour who will lead my people to freedom.
Then in 2000 years, during a time of oppression of my people, my old story will be read and a saviour will be proclaimed because my people are living in a time of oppression, thereby ‘proving’ that the prophecy was accurate.
The logic is bulletproof!
Meanwhile, I am not yet a grandparent. But I remember in the islands when I was a child the elders caring for us children and teaching us the old songs that held our ancient knowledge, while the able-bodied adults were out gathering food, a practice that had been followed for generations before the miracle of antibiotics arrived allowing them to apparently suddenly live to grandparent age. They even had ancient songs that instructed this same practice. Oh my word, they were prophesying the coming of antibiotics!
Old Testament messianic prophecies and New Testament fulfillments…
That’s pretty easy to explain: early Christians reworked their origin story after the fact to align with the OT prophecies. Seriously, people are known to change their folktales and origin stories from generation to generation. It’s not at all new or unusual.
“That’s pretty easy to explain: early Christians reworked their origin story after the fact to align with the OT prophecies.”
Are there manuscripts that show these revisions, or expose this conspiracy? How did the writers of the four accounts coordinate their stories?
txpiper:
Yes.
They’re called the New Testament. Written a generation or three after their subject allegedly got resurrected.
The original stuff is in the Old Testament.
They went by the stories and rumours about their god-man that were prevalent in their messianic milieu. Though only Matthew has the zombies.
There’s a shitload of scholarship on the subject. Point being, the New Testament and the New Covenant are a retcon of and appropriation of the Tanakh — which is why the OT deity is a tantrum-prone toddler and the NT deity is a vague mystical force in the sky, BTW.
Yes, of course txpiper demands proof.
How about this……
“This book is the word of god. It is inerrant”
How do you know?
“Because I have the book that someone told me is the word of god and god exists because I believe that god exists and have the book that is his word which is proof that he exists because if he did not exist the book that is his word would not exist, and that someone would never lie, or be as dumb as I”
I have probably got that logic all wrong, but hey, being the gomer here I am easily confused by such high-brow scientific concepts as ‘proof’ :-p
The usual tosh from txpiper. While some aspects of HGPS are reminiscent of normal aging, others (e.g. large head relative to the body, small face, recessed jaw, delayed dentition, unusual cerebrovascular anatomy) are not. The cause is a single autosomal dominant mutation, which causes an abnormal nuclear morphology and disorganised heterochromatin; this is not what causes normal aging. There is in fact no good evidence that senescence and death are “deliberate genetic processes”, whatever that is supposed to mean.
txpiper:
Kinda pointless to educate txpiper, but for the record, the Documentary Hypothesis arose because the text of the Pentateuch, when read carefully, does not look like the work of a single author (like the traditionally claimed Moses), but rather has duplications, inconsistencies, and odd variations, all of which together look like the work of at least four different scribal/priestly schools with different interests, theological and political agendas, and modes of expression, plus an additional redactor with his own interests and agenda who combined all of these works together with some editing. As already noted, these would not have been “ignorant, bronze-age goat herders”, but Iron-age priests and scribes.
The purported messianic prophecies are actually mostly not considered part of the Documentary Hypothesis, since the works that they were cherry-picked from are mostly from the Writings (which includes Daniel and Psalms) and Latter and Minor Prophets (which includes Isaiah), not the Torah or the Early Prophets.
New Testament cherry-picking, rather.
The contradictions in the OT cause you unalleviated pain?
The original question was about the book of Revelation, which, as a New Testament work, is not included under the Documentary Hypothesis.
txpiper:
They mostly didn’t coordinate? That’s why we have two birth narratives which could only have taken place ten years apart, and genealogies that don’t match, and important miracles only being mentioned by one writer (Luke sez: Jesus was witnessed to rise up into the sky! John sez: Jesus raised someone who was four days dead!), to name some of the major coordination failures.
“There is in fact no good evidence that senescence and death are “deliberate genetic processes”, whatever that is supposed to mean.”
.
Larry Moran doesn’t like the idea of death being selected for, either. But Nick Lane gives his reasons for thinking that it was:
“…it is equally plain that death is far from accidental, and it certainly evolved for the benefit of individuals (or rather, their selfish genes, in Richard Dawkins’s unforgettable phrase) soon after the dawn of life itself.”
https://nick-lane.net/chapters/life-ascending-chapter-10-death/
.
Lane is to me, a very likable personality. If you’ve ever watched him speak, he has a very smooth delivery. I think he is a star in the evolutionary community, clergy you could say. These ten steps to the first cells is just a list of necessary top-shelf miracles. He doesn’t mention mutations, and he doesn’t get tangled up in processes. But this kind of stuff is holy scripture for some people.
<snicker>
There are about as many biologists who are creationists (guess their religion!) as there are climate scientists who think anthropogenic climate change is not real.
(That’s a tiny, tiny proportion; fuck-all, really)
I don’t know how telomeres fit into ‘deliberate genetic processes’, but they get shorter as you get older due to the physical processes that regenerate living cells and tissues.
Aging isn’t subject to selection pressure, in the same way that having crappy eyesight in modern societies usually doesn’t result in you being eaten by predators as a juvenile, and thus removed from the gene pool.
“There are about as many biologists who are creationists (guess their religion!) as there are climate scientists who think anthropogenic climate change is not real.”
.
You’re probably right about that. Physicians, or civil/mechanical/process engineers can’t just write fairy tales. But the authors of this interesting paper appear to be authentic biologists. You will surely find Dr. Anderson quite annoying in this video.
a list of necessary top-shelf miracles
Step one in your citation involves geochemistry, which is not a miraculous process. It specifically details the process of serpentinization which is a fancy term for rocks becoming saturated with water and having chemical reactions.
“ Serpentinization is a processes whereby rock (usually ultramafic) is changed, with the addition of water into the crystal structure of the minerals found within the rock. A common example is the serpentinization of peridotite (or dunite) into serpentinite (the metamorphic equivalent).”
There is nothing miraculous involved.
Indeed.
About as many as geologists who don’t accept plate tectonics.
About as many geometers who think the Earth is flat.
About as many biologists who reject the germ theory of disease.
About as many doctors who don’t think smoking and lung cancer are linked.
Getting the picture?
In a shocking development, I will agree that Nick Lane is a worthy scientist and science writer, and I note that many (most?) of his papers are available online:
https://nick-lane.net/publications/
While I am confident that most, or more likely, all, are as far over txpiper’s head as the Kaibab limestone is above the Vishnu schist, there they are nonetheless.
“the Kaibab limestone is above the Vishnu schist”
.
And flat as a pool table, which apparently baffles actual geologists:
“The Kaibab Limestone, the uppermost layer of rock at Grand Canyon, was formed at the bottom of the ocean. Yet today, at the top of the Colorado Plateau, the Kaibab Limestone is found at elevations up to 9,000 feet. How did these sea floor rocks attain such high elevations?
Uplift of the Colorado Plateau was a key step in the eventual formation of Grand Canyon. The action of plate tectonics lifted the rocks high and flat, creating a plateau through which the Colorado River could cut down.
The way in which the uplift of the Colorado Plateau occurred is puzzling. With uplift, geologists generally expect to see deformation of rocks. The rocks that comprise the Rocky Mountains, for example, were dramatically crunched and deformed during their uplift. On the Colorado Plateau, the rocks weren’t altered significantly; they were instead lifted high and flat.
Just how and why uplift occurred this way is under investigation. While scientists don’t know exactly how the uplift of the Colorado Plateau occurred, a few hypotheses have been proposed. The two currently favored hypotheses call for something called shallow-angle subduction or continued uplift through isostacy.”
https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/nature/grca-geology.htm
@txpiper:
Which, of course, does not mean that it was laid down quickly, or that a global flood.
When you quoted — or quote-mined — the Britannica article on sediment, had you not read the rest of the article originally, or did you read it and knowingly lie about what it said?
… or that a global flood had anything to do with it, or ever even occurred at all.
Also: Do you acknowledge that a mudcrack sediment cannot occur rapidly, or do you not care that it cannot occur rapidly?
@txpiper:
Which of the following would you say most closely characterizes your position:
All of the radiometric data showing a 4.5 billion-year-old earth and the cosmological data showing a 13.8 billion-year-old universe and the geological data showing that there was no recent global flood and the biological data showing common descent over most of Earth’s history — all of the data that stands in direct contradiction to Genesis…
1) — is obviously false (even though creationists are mysteriously unable to demonstrate this falseness, and must resort to claims of miracles
2) — is subtly false (so creationists are having a very tough time figuring out how to demonstrate this falseness, and it’s just easier to resort to claims of miracles)
3) — is false because it is all an undetectable deception (so creationists simply cannot demonstrate this falseness, and can only resort to claims of miracles)
4) — something else?
Since that citation includes the part where geologists actually gave two possible processes that created an uplifted plateau its quite a stretch to describe them as baffled. Limestones of many ages are found in flat layers all over the planet, including on top of mountains, far away from the seabeds where the limestone forms.
The fact that it’s still as flat as it was during deposition despite eons of erosion doesn’t conflict with any natural process, it’s just a very large scale feature compared to other plateaus.
Owlmirror,
4) — something else
This is not about science or evidence. It is about struggling to be an intellectually satisfied atheist.
Original bio-material lasting for 180 million supposed years shows two things. The dating methods are wrong, and materialists will believe whatever is necessary.
Biological data only shows common descent from one form to another of the same or very similar form. Random mutations cannot change Pakicetus into baleen and toothed whales in a few million years. How can you stand believing that kind of nonsense when there are all kinds of “living fossils” that do not budge for tens, if not hundreds, of millions of supposed years? How do you account for that? Did they reach evolutionary perfection? Did the selection fairy decide to call it a day?
txpiper, the introduction to the article to which you linked, my emphasis:
“A living fossil is an extant taxon that cosmetically resembles related species known only from the fossil record. To be considered a living fossil, the fossil species must be old relative to the time of origin of the extant clade. Living fossils commonly are of species-poor lineages, but they need not be. While the body plan of a living fossil remains superficially similar, it is never the same species as the remote relatives it resembles, because genetic drift would inevitably change its chromosomal structure.”
You’d do better to actually peruse the articles you adduce, particularly their introduction, since they do not say what you think they say in whatever bit you quote mine.
This is not about science or evidence. It is about struggling to be an intellectually satisfied atheist.
You are a very poor liar. Atheists don’t take over multiple threads to whinge on obsessively about divine floods or all of science being a conspiracy against the bible.
One needs to possess an intellect to satisfy, rather than a need to lie for attention.
Tethys, txpiper is not a poor liar. They seem quite competent at it.
txpiper, Owlmirrors question to you was (emphasis mine),
to which your answer is.
So, if it is not about science OR evidence, please clarify for me who this ‘intellectually satisfied atheist’ is supposed to be? It is obviously not you, a self-proclaimed creationist who believes the biblical flood myth is an accurate historical record. Or are you trying to tell us how to be good atheists?
[meta]
tuatara, when txpiper responded thus to Owlmirror, the intended claim was that atheism (via its perceived proxies such evolutionary theory, geology, paleontology, dendrochronology and so forth) does not in fact use actual “science or evidence”, but rather are desperate confabulations and rationalisations for avoiding the irrefutable conclusion that the Abrahamic deity exists and poofed things into existence.
How that deity was itself poofed into existence is left unresolved.
(That projection again; for such as they, it is atheists who are religious and believe in fables, and it is theists who apprehend reality as it is and as it evinces their deity)
Aren’t piping engineers required to learn at least the basics of chemistry? Cation exchange ratios are pretty easy to understand.
It’s pointless to claim that a well known geochemical process that involves minerals, water, and time as outlined by Nick Lane is a miraculous chain of events. That same branch of geoscience is routinely employed to locate new sources of minerals and fossil fuel reservoirs. The mere existence of Hydrocarbons disproves biblical creation timelines.
Does txpiper truly imagine that all oil and mining corporations are in cahoots with this cabal of scientists? Of course, the poor grasp of evolutionary processes displayed by many tech bros and engineers is so common as to be a trope.
This is not about science or evidence. It is about struggling to be an intellectually satisfied atheist.
Do you even know what the phrase “intellectually satisfied atheist” means? Do you have a particular meaning in mind when you type those words, or is it just something you got from a script some other Christian huckster handed you to read from?
“Do you even know what the phrase “intellectually satisfied atheist” means?”
Gosh, I would think that it is about some kind of mental liberation. Is that close? Have you personally achieved this? I think Dawkins used the word fulfilled, but I think satisfied sounds more like an accomplishment.
.
“…is it just something you got from a script some other Christian huckster…”
There’s no shortage of those. But last days adherents have to expect that, at least in titular Christianity.
Do you bristle when you hear mention of hospitals with names like St. Luke’s, Methodist, Providence, etc.?
Heh.
Yes. cf. https://www.conservapedia.com/Essay:_Is_Richard_Dawkins_an_intellectually_fulfilled_atheist%3F
Heh. ‘those’ being other Christian hucksters.
(Good to see txpiper acknowledges their status within that dismal group)
I don’t think it’s possible for someone to understand intellectual satisfaction, let alone be intellectually satisfied, if you imagine DNA to be some sort of clairvoyant and precognitive superhero and also simultaneously being a deteriorating mindless zombie, shambling along from replication to replication.
@txpiper:
Do you consider the evidence of science to be a colossal fraud? That everyone working in the fields of nuclear physics, astrophysics, cosmology, geology, paleontology, and biology are all just deliberately faking everything?
Do you believe that petroleum is found by dowsing, not geology?
1) Why should I believe you about this, rather than the nuclear physicists whose work underlies radiometric dating, and the astrophysicists whose work underlies cosmological dating?
2) Is this seriously your only impediment to rejecting YEC? If soft material in bones did not exist; if Schweitzer and her colleagues and everyone else currently publishing on the topic had instead dug up bones that were hollow and empty, or permineralized, or whatever, and no one anywhere had heard of or mentioned bones with soft material in them, you would reject YEC and agree completely that the Earth was about 4.5 billion years old and the Universe was about 13.8 billion years old?
Or would you instead just reject the age of the Earth and of the Universe, but do so for no reason whatsoever besides intellectual perversity and religious fanaticism?
This is as good a place as any to re-ask some questions:
Re-asking: When you quoted — or quote-mined — the Britannica article on sediment, had you not read the rest of the article originally, or did you read it and knowingly lie about what it said?
Re-asking: Do you acknowledge that a mudcrack sediment cannot occur rapidly, or do you not care that it cannot occur rapidly?
Biological data shows common descent among all eukaryotes. I know creationists imagine otherwise, but they only do so out of intellectual perversity and religious fanaticism.
“…if you imagine DNA to be some sort of clairvoyant and precognitive superhero…”
.
What I said about DNA was this:
“Most creationists think, or should think, that the human genome began perfect, was modified to accommodate death, and is slowly deteriorating due to mutations.”
There is a lot to the ‘perfection’ part of that summary. I think that animals like troglobites and polar bears adequately illustrate that DNA is reactive.
But since you think that no intelligence is involved in the design, production or function of things like DNA, what stories do you tell yourself about replication, and the enzymes that make that happen? Is checking, excision and replacement just chemical reactions? And indulge me if I move the goal posts just a tad, but how did those enzymes and their coordinated roles evolve? Were there other, more primitive enzymes? If so, where did they go? Would they still work now, or were they just evolutionary scaffolding?
=
“Do you consider the evidence of science to be a colossal fraud? That everyone working in the fields of nuclear physics, astrophysics, cosmology, geology, paleontology, and biology are all just deliberately faking everything?”
It will apparently come as a surprise to you, but not everyone in those fields is a materialist. You might have missed the post where I mentioned this paper, and this video. Armitage and Anderson are not atheists. And neither is James Tour. He, and the work of his group at Rice University are the subject of this recent this story. You might find Dr. Tour’s credentials, patents and publications disorienting.
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“you quoted — or quote-mined — the Britannica article on sediment”
I linked to the article as a source for calculating how many cubic miles of sediment there are.
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“Do you acknowledge that a mudcrack sediment cannot occur rapidly”
There wasn’t much information concerning that photo.
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“Biological data shows common descent among all eukaryotes.”
The random mutations/natural selection paradigm is not proven and tested science. It is just the best story that can be told.
John Morales @47.
Thanks.
If I think about my comment @46 further, I was rather poorly (due to impatient astonishment and exasperation) alluding to the idea that simply reading the bible is enough to make one an intellectually satisfied atheist*, provisional of course upon the reader having some intellectual honesty to satisfy.
* at the very least to reject the abrahamic god.
Gosh, I would think that it is about some kind of mental liberation. Is that close?
You tell me — you’re the one using the phrase. Do you know what you’re talking about?
While I recognized the original phrase as being from Richard Dawkins, I didn’t remember the source at first (The Blind Watchmaker (1986)) .
Searching showed that being intellectually fulfilled/satisfied even made it into the Talk Origins index:
https://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA602_1.html
This stuff just gets rehashed forever, really.
I have read up on the latest finds of preserved organic tissues in dinosaur bones ranging in age from 195 million year to the 68 million year Tuesday in spring when molten death rained down from the sky.
https://www.history.com/.amp/news/scientists-find-soft-tissue-in-75-million-year-old-dinosaur-bones
Contrary to creationist claims, these remnants of cartilage aren’t soft pliable tissues. We have imprints of skin in the ash and mudstones that entombed the Tanis fauna. The ‘soft tissue’ contents of the various bones documented by researchers are red blood cells, the proteins and amino acids of tissues, and per-mineralized collagen. (Photo at link!).
The article also notes an interesting fact. Mammal red blood cells lack a nucleus. Earlier txpiper was going on about the somewhat relevant biology that involved ribosomes and the differences between prokaryotic life and eukaryotic life.
I wonder if the iron content of red blood cells is involved with their preservation? Iron oxides are highly resistant to erosion and chemical decay, especially in association with silicates.
.
“The bone marrow, preserved in three dimensions as an organic residue, retains the original texture and red and yellow color of hematopoietic and fatty marrow, respectively; moldic osteoclasts and vascular structures are also present.”
https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article-abstract/34/8/641/129601/High-fidelity-organic-preservation-of-bone-marrow?redirectedFrom=fulltext
==
““We came across the muscle tissue during our analysis of several hundred fossil samples taken from an ancient lake bed in Southern Spain. It was immediately identifiable by the sinewy texture visible under the microscope,” says Dr Patrick Orr from the UCD School of Geological Sciences, University College Dublin.
“After first sighting the material, we completed a series of highly detailed analyses to limit the possibility that it was simply an artefact of preservation or something unrelated to the biology of the animal.” says UCD geologist, Dr Maria McNamara, the lead author of the report.
”We noticed that there had been very little degradation since it was originally fossilised about 18 million years ago, making it the highest quality soft tissue preservation ever documented in the fossil record.”
According to the University College Dublin geologists, the muscle tissue is organically preserved in three dimensions, with circulatory vessels infilled with blood.”
https://phys.org/news/2009-11-ancient-muscle-tissue-million-year.html#:~:text=Ancient%20muscle%20tissue%20extracted%20from%2018%20million%20year,from%20an%2018%20million%20years%20old%20salamander%20fossil.
18 million years is much younger than the examples I mentioned and cited. I don’t need further physical evidence to accept that multiple paleontologists have examined fossils for evidence of soft tissue such a bone marrow and cartilage, etc…and found it in rare cases stretching all the way back to Devonian fossils.
Science is reality based, so despite occasions where the scientists find something they did not expect to be preserved, once the same phenomenon is documented by multiple paleontologists and by modern imaging and sampling methods the science will evolve to incorporate this new evidence.
What exactly do you think you are proving by further corroborating the preservation of soft tissues in fossils?
@Tethys:
You are not the first to so wonder . . .
A role for iron and oxygen chemistry in preserving soft tissues, cells and molecules from deep time
Mary H. Schweitzer, Wenxia Zheng, Timothy P. Cleland, Mark B. Goodwin, Elizabeth Boatman, Elizabeth Theil, Matthew A. Marcus and Sirine C. Fakra
22 January 2014
Abstract:
(bolding mine)
“from approximately 3 days to more than two years”
.
So, that means it can last for 65,000,000 years.
The Scanning Electron Microscopes used to see such minute details as
are pretty convincing evidence that the organic residue of tissue other than bones and teeth can fossilize. It might not be particularly rare, as very few specimens have been examined with the latest SEM equipment and imaging technology.
It’s not the original soft tissues, it is carbon stains, and chemical altered remains of proteins, blood cells and collagen.
The fact that those delicate Salamander marrow structures are preserved in 3D rather than as stains or organic residues; (an example of the exceeding rare fossil classification of ‘exquisite preservation’) is the most remarkable finding.
txpiper:
What is supposed to happen by 65,000,000 years, according to young earth creationism? Does that kind of stuff cease to exist entirely? Does God send it up to heaven? Would it be similar to what happens to bones after 65,000,000 years?
By the way, what do you have to say about old bones? Are they not a problem somehow? But how could that be? Did Genesis 1:1 merely fail to mention that those were already around before the purported beginning, despite its inerrancy?
If the whole world just isn’t that old yet, then what kind of evidence do you think you’re using to determine any of this? It can’t be consistent with any of the science that I know about….. Or is it only your own personal imperviousness regarding anything that undermines your views, since you’ve actually got nothing but stubborn ignorance?
More from the paper:
I’m pretty sure the “2 years” was how long they had been running the experiment before publishing. It would be interesting if there were a follow-up now, or some years down the line.
I was pretty sure that we had already brought up iron helping to preserve the material in the bones, and sure enough — more than a decade ago — there’s David Marjanović, trying to educate the uneducatable:
(That was before the above paper was published, of course)
And re-reading that thread shows that all the arguments have been rehashed, over and over and over. There’s poor Bretz, having his work hijacked by someone who has no understanding of it, or of any aspect of geology. Did txpiper remember anything of that conversation? Hah, no.
That’s the thread where he also proclaimed, so smugly, “I know, without the remotest shadow of a doubt, that I will live forever.” Given his clear mental deficit problems, perhaps a sign of mental decline or dementia, I am now sadly reminded of those who live forever in a state of ongoing decline.
This isn’t by Schweitzer, but if cites her work and builds on it. Note that this is not the paper itself (Fossilization transforms vertebrate hard tissue proteins into N-heterocyclic polymers), but a laypersons summary with less technical detail. The paper is linked to at the end.
Soft tissues survive in Mesozoic vertebrate remains through chemical transformation
Bolding mine
Owlmirror,
.
“David Marjanović”
.
I always liked him. I remember him saying that Marcus Ross was only a creationist because he was afraid of hurting his parents’ feelings, or something like that.
My post @54, answering some of your questions, got caught up in a software filter. Mano released it yesterday.
“That’s the thread where he also proclaimed, so smugly, “I know, without the remotest shadow of a doubt, that I will live forever.” ”
.
I had forgotten about that, but I’ve learned since then (in discussions about predestination, election, etc.) that some people find that very offensive.
I am not offended by people claiming they will live forever. I do wonder about your grasp on reality, or if you think you are a vampire.
Thanks for the links Owlmirror .
Many of my Ordovician fossils (particularly various types of echinoderms and shelled cephalopods) have iron pyrite or hematite in areas that were once occupied by organic tissues. Body fossils are uncommon, as most of the original will have undergone secondary mineral replacement due to repeated karst conditions. Some of my chert replacement fossils have enough iron in them that they are strongly magnetic, which is odd for a late Cambrian to Early Ordovician date.
I think delusive is a better description. With a dash of risible.
“I do wonder about your grasp on reality…”
.
Yes, but don’t lose sight of the fact that you are wondering with a brain that you believe is the result of random DNA replication failures.
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“In this study we provide evidence of nerve fragments, characterized by a double helical wrapping of collagen fibers, from a Triceratops condyle collected at the Hell Creek Formation, MT. Based on comparison with nerves from an avian model we conclude that these are fragments of nerves that once resided in vivo in Triceratops.”
Peripheral Nerves in Bone from Triceratops
I can’t be arsed to include any creationist bullshit in my reasoning, sorry!!!
Seriously, I decided at age 7 that the xtian god was a murderous psychopath, and anyone who took that stupid crap literally was to be strictly avoided.
The murder and rape endorsements are also in the Bible, but I guess we should just ignore the child sacrifice, and multiple episodes of mass slaughter of innocents.
Yeah, but don’t you forget those are called “mutations”, and that you think your puny god did not use it as a mechanism for the unfolding of complexity and function over the eons via the process elucidated by science.
That’s the less-puny god of the Old Earth Creationists, of course.
It follows you should think every single generation is more structurally degenerate than the previous, and that your brain functions far less well than that of the ancient Israelites, since the genome has been degraded generation by generation and there have been more than a few of those since.
Every child is lesser than its parent, and so on ad infinitum, is your view.
(Must be intellectually fulfilling for you)
I suppose the good side of that conceit is that, since disease-causing organisms are also being degraded generation by generation (and they of course reproduce fantastically-fast compared to, say, vertebrates), all such diseases must getting ever-more etiolated. 😉
Yes, but don’t lose sight of the fact that you are wondering with a brain that you believe is the result of random DNA replication failures.
And it’s still working a lot better than yours. Buh-bye.
I think three different people in Mano’s threads alone have specifically pointed out to txpippy that selection pressure is not random. The reshuffling of the genome during reproduction is where random chance comes into play.
Um, omnipotent, omniscient deity; it follows nothing is random.
Every possible outcome of every possible event for every possible time was known even before Creation was instantiated; that’s what omnipotence and omniscience means.
Which is why it’s so silly YECs are stuck with nineteenth century thinking.
Those religious people of yore who were instrumental in the development of science as we know it generally thought they were elucidating God’s Creation, and of course modern OECs still do.
Their intellectual heirs realised there’s even more impressiveness to their examination of Creation when their deity can use subtle mechanisms rather than having to ‘poof’ things into existence, as primitives imagine.
No need for those more sophisticated minds to abandon the findings of a shitload of scientific disciplines because they don’t accord to a figurative ancient text, they still get to keep their faith and accept geology and physics and biology and so forth, as the science that was established after the Enlightenment took root and flourished and those disciplines flourished.
(A bit like life on Earth, but that’s beyond such antiquated ideas)
Hell, one could say God moves this molecule here and that atom there, and those foolish scientists see randomness whereas there is unseen design.
(Really, there are so many ways to rationalise faith away without rejecting actual science!)
I just learned of the Windover Site in Florida. They have an entire cemetery worth of ancient burials into a peat bog that are carbon dated to over 7000 years old. It’s not an acid peat bog, so the bodies are skeletal remains rather than the intact remains typically found in Northern European bogs.
There are several individuals with brains within their well preserved skulls.
https://www.thehistorycenter.org/windover/
And with good reason! Oh and they can occur at more junctures than just cell replication by the way.
@txpiper:
… And what you also said, on July 4, 2022, was:
Do you seriously not remember that you typed that? Do you not recognize your own words?
What does that even mean? Most religious scientists are not YECs; many reject YEC explicitly and advocate a conventional understanding of Earth’s age, the universe’s age, biological common descent, and the complete lack of a recent global flood. But you would reject these Christians as believing something stupid, right? I mean, you don’t actually care what the science says; if it’s not YEC+flood, it cannot be true, right?
Once again, with some modifications:
Which of the following would you say most closely characterizes your position:
All of the radiometric data showing a 4.5 billion-year-old earth and the cosmological data showing a 13.8 billion-year-old universe and the geological data showing that there was no recent global flood and the biological data showing common descent over most of Earth’s history — all of the data that stands in direct contradiction to a blindly literal interpretation of Genesis, and which non-creationist Christians accept as correct findings . . .
1) — is obviously false (even though YECs are mysteriously unable to demonstrate this falseness, and must resort to claims of miracles)
2) — is subtly false (so YECs are having a very tough time figuring out how to demonstrate this falseness, and it’s just easier to resort to claims of miracles)
3) — is false because it is all an undetectable deception (so YECs simply cannot demonstrate this falseness, and can only resort to claims of miracles)
4) — something else that isn’t a fatuous non-sequitur?
You explicitly wrote, on July 14, 2022: “The article makes it clear that the flood was planet-wide. The amounts and distribution of sediments should dispel notions that there could not have been a flood (or that it was only a regional event).” (bolding mine)
Do you seriously not remember that you typed that? Do you not recognize your own words?
It is the best story because it has been repeatedly tested, and not disproved.
@txpiper:
When you declare yourself to be personally infallible, and then have your fallibility brought to your attention, it should make you question your self-assessment of personal infallibility. Feeling confident is not the same as being correct.
Or as someone once wrote:
Do you seriously not remember that you typed that? Do you not recognize your own words?
No, he doesn’t, unless it suits his prejudices to do so. txpooper doesn’t care about making a coherent argument on any topic, and is only here to spout random diversionary bulldada and divert attention away from all the real issues that he, his party, and his co-religionists are unwilling and unable to even discuss.
Owlmirror,
“Most religious scientists are not YECs; many reject YEC explicitly…”
.
Then I am in agreement with the minority. In my opinion, they have the better interpretation of the data; paleontological, biological and geological. Going with consensus, because it is the consensus, is a poor approach to discovering the truth.
Tell me about the majority view on how and why those enzymes formed, and why they do what they do. Do most scientists think they are smart? Are leukocytes smart?
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“[Mutations/Selection] the best story because it has been repeatedly tested, and not disproved.”
It has not. It is a surmisal, and nothing more. You believe it because there is nothing else for you to believe, not because it is tested. And certainly not because it can be applied.
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“When you declare yourself to be personally infallible…Feeling confident is not the same as being correct.”
Infallibility has nothing to do with it my destiny and security. I was chosen.
I remember well my experiences trading futures. Most people lose doing that. The majority.
But your opinion is born from faith in religion rather than anything relevant, such as an education in any of those fields.
Just a reminder: you believe all sciences that disagree with your religion are wrong on that basis alone. Tell me, how much testing went into God’s existence? Where can I read the data analysis?
Also, the word is just surmise.
Every vaccine is an application of evolutionary theory.
You think doing well at something risky means your claimed immortality is guaranteed. Amazing.
According to scripture, Jewish people are Gods chosen. Of course, since God had just slaughtered everyone but Noah and family that would logically mean that the planet was entirely repopulated by Gods chosen people, so it’s quite an odd claim for a biblical literalist to claim that there could be any other kind of people besides Gods chosen.
My link to Windover gives confusing information on its age. ‘More than 7000’ was the first result of C14 dating, but further work revealed that the earliest burials are over 9000 years old, and the cemetery pond was in use for 1000 years.
The fabric and wide range of bones/ tools/artifacts that are also found in the peat is equally fascinating. These people had a well developed society during the Ice age, which was unknown before the archeological excavation began in the 80s.
It’s 1000 years younger than the salamander marrow, and the bog was very good at preserving brains judging by the fact that 91 out of 168 individuals still had them.
It is a surmisal, and nothing more. You believe it because there is nothing else for you to believe, not because it is tested. And certainly not because it can be applied.
Obvious falsehood dismissed.
Yeah, not one word acknowledging that the idea of genome/random mutation/selection/iteration is a thriving field in computing, though I’ve adduced multiple instances.
Real life: the idea has been tested, it works, it’s in use.
Wilfully ignorant person: “hasn’t been tested, can’t work, <silence>”.
Heh. Kinda fun, really.
Reminder: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228909002_Automated_Antenna_Design_with_Evolutionary_Algorithms
In fact, YECs are seen as ideological naifs even by other Xians.
Certainly by scientifically-competent ones.
They themselves have no problem with their faith, because science does not contradict it for them.
E.g.: First edition 1994; revised version 2002:
https://www.asa3.org/ASA/resources/Wiens.html
(Our guest YEC has already been exposed to all this stuff. But obstinate recalcitrance is their thing. After some suitable amount of time, back will they come to spout exactly the same inanities, as if they had not already been refuted)
So, the only valid science is that which aims to prove the veracity of the scriptures, and all other scientific investigation is heretical blasphemy merely based upon your opinion of the supposition?
txpiper, you believe the scriptures because….? Not like enough people simply told you it is true (consensus) enough times to make you believe it is true (going with the consensus of fellow believers), the way that Pascal advised us to lie to ourselves until we believe the lie we tell ourselves (while opinions are on the table that is my opinion of the great wager from Pascal).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager#:~:text=Pascal's%20wager%20is%20a%20philosophical,either%20exists%20or%20does%20not.
But even he makes a false supposition in “You would like to attain faith, and do not know the way”. No I don’t because I can read the bible and can think for myself with my 20th and 21st century sensibilities. I need neither the faith nor therefore the path to it.
I can think of no worse torture than an eternity in the presence of xians.
Strictly rhetorically, does committing suicide in heaven earn a pass to the party in the basement?
There are some 1.8 million species now described, 80% of which are land living (avians included). Considering the fact that most of these species were unknown to noahs people, which of these 1.5 million land dwelleing species did noah and the 7 crew of the good ship ark load, in pairs and sevens, in a single day, into their one-windowed 300 x 50 cubit vssel? Or did they manage to load all 1.5 million pairs and sevens in the one day? Jeepers it must have been crowded.
And why are there no kangaroo fossils in the region where noah collected the then supposedly extant members of this species, or did noah make an epic journey theretofore unheard of to collect them before the flood, an epic journey not mentioned at all in the bible?
And by the way, saying god delivered them is simply not a good enough explanation.
If only a small subset of these species were in fact rescued how did the others come to be after the flood that killled all living land and air creatures? Did god ‘poof’ them into existence after the flood (and where is the evidence of this in the bible) or did they evolve from that degenerating perfect DNA that you are so fond of? If so that is evolution due to mutations of the genome.
Where is the proof that the flood story as written is true when such basic evidence that it is not true is so abundant?
Using the existence of the bible and mere belief that it is inerrant is not good enough, at least for gomers like me.
tuatara, the YECs have baraminology to account for the variety of life.
(Science!)