Comments on: The Human Condition? Here’s Ardi!

By: Donald Johnson

Donald Johnson — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 04:37:30 +0000

I recall the incident of learning that one of my newest friends was a creationist a while ago. It didn’t fully occur to me that people truly believe against the evolutionary process we have experienced and are currently experiencing. Artie will be one of many discoveries we will come across that slowly builds our knowledge of our evolutionary past. Yes, there are small pot holes where and there such as naming our lack of current evidence the “missing link”, but that entirely explores beyond the point.

So much of our science points to this beautiful process of evolving into smarter and more capable beings. I just find that incredible and beautiful. We evolved our speech so we could better communicate our ideas. Our brains grew larger and our thoughts more abstract and robust to make way for creating things such as tools and other survival instruments.

The missing link mentality is used against evolution to point to the fact that we don’t have everything yet, therefore we must me wrong, right? Absolutely not. Its completely alright to say we don’t know everything yet, because exploring and discovering is the exciting part of the process. We don’t know but continuing on we will know. Discoveries of our evolutionary origins are something I welcome whole heartedly.

By: Ji young Kang

Ji young Kang — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 12:45:25 +0000

Never even heard about human ancestor like founding before Lucy! Fascinating subject! Still one of the top debated topics in all fields of study is human evolution and creationism. Anybody with any college degree most likely heard about or talk about Darwin’s natural selection and how we evolve till today. Where did it start and what triggered mutations? It is very interesting topic with answers in our hands. Homo sapiens possess extraordinary adaptive skills and we can easily notice it everywhere, anytime. Like Nina mentioned in this article, I think that we should be more focus on conditions of our specie’s history rather than physical founding to generate new hypothesis. All world known research founding by world known scholars in psychology and philosophy and even anthropology has one thing in common. We are extremely adaptive to our environment and society. We need to focus more on this original hypothesis and try to fit in the puzzle with historical founding just as basic scientific method taught us to do. I really like her expression in this article when she said “Those are the eyes of a hunter, at least potentially, perhaps part-time if not full-time—opportunistic, like chimps”. Like Nina stated, we can’t look for the ‘missing link’ to map out our evolution. Is time to move on and give up on drawing map of evolution and rather focus on how our conditions and environment change affected our ancestor one step at a time.

By: hilary (phil 108)

hilary (phil 108) — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 17:45:05 +0000

This is very interesting. Now, we have found another early human beside Lucy, Ardi, a female is about the same size and weight as a modern chimpanzee, but looked very different – many components (such as its hand) are more primitive than that of a chimpanzee. If Ardi shows that we are not apes, it means we are non-aggressive creature, but she is not a vegetarian. And like before we thought that humans are kill apes; therefore, we are aggressive by nature. Ardi or Lucy, who will show us the truth? We never know because there are still have a lot of things we haven’t found out yet. However, it is very interesting when we can find out that we know how please our mates to have a sexual advantage. And some people think that early human began walking because of sex. Moreover, the second interesting is the upright female has another advantage: when she’s in estrus (heat) it doesn’t show. Conclusively, finding Ardi is a base point for us to discover more about our early human.

By: Robert

Robert — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 06:18:25 +0000

This post is fascinating. I’ve always been one to find attraction in the grand or ultimate answer. Growing up in a Christian household, I was taught to value inherent characteristics; love, the soul, the spiritual in general all hold in me a sort of guilty fascination. I use the word guilty in response to my intrigue towards and agreement with modern scientific knowledge and modern non-religious philosophy. In the world today, neuroscience, biopsychology, and science have taken a strong hold on the positions previously held by “inherent ideas” It’s easy to see the mind as a computer, a B. F. Skinner box containing little more than A=B and equations. This Ardi follows those ideas. It allows scientists to make rational interpretations on the origins of fundamental human characteristics. That we could have developed sexual-coexisting-relationships in response to not being able to determine if a female is in heat is in ways the most soul-sucks equation, yet still, the knowledge stirs inside me the same feelings as ideas of inherent characteristics. At root, I think this similarity is the results of my love for complexity. Equation oriented sciences focus on reducing complexity through explanation, and can in that way suck the soul out of concepts and ideas. Ardi though bares witness to the infinite complexity of our equations. We can as humans understand what we came from and how we evolved; we can place evolution into the frame of an equation, but the bottom line is that the equation is still quirky, it is still odd and unpredictable, infinitely complex and subject to nuance we can understand without a time machine. We may be machines, but that doesn’t mean we can be understood.