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Dr. Mabuse
Septic Fiend
Sweden
9696 Posts |
 Posted - 07/15/2005 : 05:57:32 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by H. Humbert
quote:
Originally posted by Dr. Mabuse
Post-modernist was my impression. Mind you though, I've never fully understood the concept nor the complete definition of post-modernism. I can be somewhat off. If such is the case, please educate me.
Honestly I have no idea what his response would be. Let's ask him.
Hybrid, are you a post-modernist?
I don't think HYBRID can answer that question, because he doesn't seem to know what post-modernism is. I submit these quotes from this thread:
Me: "The only we have to go on is the basic post-modernist claims that everyone creates their own reality."
HYBRID: "Saying I am a particular way, like a "post-modernist" puts or suggest I only thnk within those guidelines of that, and this sir is just not true."
At the end of that thread, he still hasn't answered the my science-question, which leaves me to believe he doesn't know the answer. Then there is the lack of understanding the importance of peer-review, even though it was probably performed (sort of) before he submitted his paper on hominid(?) skeletons in school. |
Dr. Mabuse - "When the going gets tough, the tough get Duct-tape..."
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"Equivocation is not just a job, for a creationist it's a way of life..." Dr. Mabuse
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Valiant Dancer
Forum Goalie
USA
4826 Posts |
Posted - 07/15/2005 : 06:55:02 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by Trish
quote:
Originally posted by pleco
Trish, that won't matter.
Yes, unfortunately, I do understand this.
quote:
If I understand correctly, HYBRID states that all evidence is subjective unless you physically perform the experiment or see it yourself personally. If you just read about it or listen to someone (college professor perhaps), then it may be (and possibly is) falsified and is therefore unreliable. And since we do not possess the ability to go back in time, evolution is unprovable by that standard.
And, in order to justify his own philosophy, HYBRID states that he did not come to his perspective by believing what he has been told or what he has read. Which, logically speaking, means that he has physically seen the things that he states is true. This would include the "mystery schools", Illumanati, etc. I must assume that HYBRID has firsthand witnessed those things and lived to tell about it.
Hmm, I didn't understand HYBRID to call himself any type of empiricist. I understood that he was a complete subjectivist. In which case, the only evidence that matters is that which you choose to believe, whether objectively correct or incorrect.
I believe he talked around a point which would indicate that he believed that all interpretations of evidence are subjective. From the tacks he's taking, it's rolled over into existentialism.
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BigPapaSmurf
SFN Die Hard
3192 Posts |
Posted - 07/15/2005 : 07:42:36 [Permalink]
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All interpretaions are subjective of course, but when all the smart mofos interpret things the same way, it becomes a pretty good bet.
Religion claims absolutes, science only appears to. |
"...things I have neither seen nor experienced nor heard tell of from anybody else; things, what is more, that do not in fact exist and could not ever exist at all. So my readers must not believe a word I say." -Lucian on his book True History
"...They accept such things on faith alone, without any evidence. So if a fraudulent and cunning person who knows how to take advantage of a situation comes among them, he can make himself rich in a short time." -Lucian critical of early Christians c.166 AD From his book, De Morte Peregrini |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26031 Posts |
Posted - 07/15/2005 : 22:59:37 [Permalink]
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I know this comes very late, but I think the members here missed an important opportunity to get the basics of evolutionary theory discussed. I refer to the exchanges about alleged fossils of gigantic hominids. Particularly, this one:
quote:
Originally posted by GeeMack
Giants Were Among Us:
The only reference on that page to anything having to do with evolution is in a single paragraph.
"Gigantopithecus and Meganthropus are names given to giant hominids found by paleontologists, but since they don't fit too well in the imaginary evolutionary chain, they don't get much attention. Meganthropus is the giant Java man who inhabited Southeast Asia over a million years ago. He stood12 feet tall and weighed several hundred pounds."
Followed by:quote:
Originally posted by HYBRID
This is a red flag to the evolutionary theory...
The point I'm making is that there is nothing about a giant hominid which would be a problem for evolutionary theory. For two reasons:
1) The hominid family tree is not a vine. If a speciation event from one of our ancestral species lead to a separate branch which developed huge hominids which later became extinct, so what? It would have no bearing on the idea that Homo sapiens sapiens evolved from earlier hominids.
2) Even if we were the current endpoint of a "family vine," the implied idea that evolutionary theory states that humans have always gotten larger is ludicrous. Our ancestors had much larger brow ridges than we do, and probably always had sagittal crests, which are now only found in some populations of living humans. In other words, even if modern humans evolved from some 12' ancestor, so what? Evolutionary theory does not state that we can't be smaller than our ancestors.
In other words, the posts in which people here contradicted HYBRID's assertion of this fossil evidence were a waste of time. Whether or not giant hominids ever existed was beside the point. What was clear, from that single statement of HYBRID's, quoted above, was that he was trying to force evolutionary theory to be something that it isn't. To make it state things it never would.
In still other words, if HYBRID's argument had truly rested upon these giant fossils, then yes, arguing about their existence would have made sense. But HYBRID's argument was that evolutionary theory couldn't cope with such fossils, which is simply not the case.
It's only the "evolutionary theory" that HYBRID has created in his own mind which can't cope with giant hominid fossils. And because he arrogantly thinks his own, personally created "hominid evolution" is what other people understand as hominid evolution, this misunderstanding is entirely of his invention.
It sucks that HYBRID took this red herring, buried it in a straw man, equated it with "reality" and caught a few people here off guard and got them arguing the wrong thing, but I think we all need to examine this for future reference. It's not even this particular argument, but just the style of equivocation at the heart of it that seems important to note. |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
Posted - 07/16/2005 : 02:41:25 [Permalink]
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Of course. Damn. That blew right by me as well... 
HYBRID's writing style is such that it takes some concentration to see where he's coming from, and most (I didn't open all of them) of his references are creationist and even outright woo-woo sites. Couple that with the attitude, and it's easy to got off on tangents. Never the less, I'd still like to see some speculations, from anyone, on how the skeleton; joints and spinal structure particulary, might have to be to support a giant biped such as described.
Oddly enough, or perhaps not, I get the feeling that HYBRID is into some sort of variation on Intelligent Design.
But I have decided that if Hybrid comes back, I am no longer going to respond to his statements. I see neither enlightenment nor even a good story resulting from the effort.
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26031 Posts |
Posted - 07/16/2005 : 09:49:10 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by filthy
Never the less, I'd still like to see some speculations, from anyone, on how the skeleton; joints and spinal structure particulary, might have to be to support a giant biped such as described.
Well, HYBRID's assertion that scientists haven't even looked at such possibilities is absurd. We know, for example, that the mass of an animal is proportional to its volume, whereas the strength of bone is proportional to its cross section. Since bone strength rises by a square rule (area), while mass rises by a cube rule (volume), the bones of larger animals tend to be much larger than those of smaller animals, to cope with the increased weight they must support. From the data I've seen, this is true from the smallest shrew through the largest dinosaur.
We have no reason to think that this would not be true for giant hominids. So, anyone who displays a femur from an allegedly large animal which displays the same length-to-cross-section ratio as that of a smaller animal's femur, we know to either be lying, playing a joke, or to be ignorant of structural materials science.
The Maryland Science Center used to have - 25 years ago - a display of what a 20' human would probably look like, based on the above and other properties of large animals. Instead of having a height-to-width ratio of about 3 (a normal average), this guy was less than twice as tall as he was wide. In other words, a 20' person well over 10' wide (as opposed to a 6' person, 2' across). The difference was obvious and stunning. |
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
Posted - 07/16/2005 : 11:31:14 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by Dave W.
quote:
Originally posted by filthy
Never the less, I'd still like to see some speculations, from anyone, on how the skeleton; joints and spinal structure particulary, might have to be to support a giant biped such as described.
Well, HYBRID's assertion that scientists haven't even looked at such possibilities is absurd. We know, for example, that the mass of an animal is proportional to its volume, whereas the strength of bone is proportional to its cross section. Since bone strength rises by a square rule (area), while mass rises by a cube rule (volume), the bones of larger animals tend to be much larger than those of smaller animals, to cope with the increased weight they must support. From the data I've seen, this is true from the smallest shrew through the largest dinosaur.
We have no reason to think that this would not be true for giant hominids. So, anyone who displays a femur from an allegedly large animal which displays the same length-to-cross-section ratio as that of a smaller animal's femur, we know to either be lying, playing a joke, or to be ignorant of structural materials science.
The Maryland Science Center used to have - 25 years ago - a display of what a 20' human would probably look like, based on the above and other properties of large animals. Instead of having a height-to-width ratio of about 3 (a normal average), this guy was less than twice as tall as he was wide. In other words, a 20' person well over 10' wide (as opposed to a 6' person, 2' across). The difference was obvious and stunning.
How very interesting. I read similiar some years ago, but don't recall much of it beyond the bone having to be larger by proportion.
Now the question is: would a hominid spine of such proportion support this temendous torso in an upright, bipedal position? And I would think that the hip and knee joints would have to be massive in proportion or of some different design, or both. And even then, I think, the critter would probably have been about as agile as Bush's thought process'.
The problem, as I see it, is in that we are an upright (as well as uptight} biped. Bipedal dinosaurs actually supported themselves more like a cantilever than a column, with a large tail for a counterbalance. Thus their weight was supported in a more even manner. The same holds true for ratites, less the tail. But their spine and leg joints are quite different from ours, as can be seen any time you cut up a chicken (a chicken is not a ratite, but it's along the same lines).
And we haven't even started to speculate upon the caloretic intake that would be required to fuel such a creature.
As far as I know, we are the only biped on earth, indeed perhaps the only creature, with such inferior design that our own, healthy skeleton can cripple us without an outside injury. And we are told that God loves us... And they say that we were designed by intelligence....
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist!
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 07/16/2005 : 15:58:58 [Permalink]
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quote:
Now the question is: would a hominid spine of such proportion support this temendous torso in an upright, bipedal position?
The human skeltal system is not quite fully adapted for an "upright" posture. It would make a certain ammount of sense, from a survival/selection point of view, that a honimid much larger than humans would have even less of an upright posture than we do.
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
Posted - 07/16/2005 : 16:44:53 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by Dude
quote:
Now the question is: would a hominid spine of such proportion support this temendous torso in an upright, bipedal position?
The human skeltal system is not quite fully adapted for an "upright" posture. It would make a certain ammount of sense, from a survival/selection point of view, that a honimid much larger than humans would have even less of an upright posture than we do.
Agree. It would probably have a gait rather like one of the great apes (other than ourselves), and hardly be a biped at all. Failing that, I would think that there would be some other arraingement.
There are not many other bipeds that have our posture. In fact, the penguin in the only one that comes to mind quickly, and it's main means of locomotion is swimming.
Evolution sucks, but what else is there?
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist!
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26031 Posts |
Posted - 07/16/2005 : 18:38:35 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by filthy
Now the question is: would a hominid spine of such proportion support this temendous torso in an upright, bipedal position? And I would think that the hip and knee joints would have to be massive in proportion or of some different design, or both. And even then, I think, the critter would probably have been about as agile as Bush's thought process'.
Everything would need to be different, since muscle strength is also related to cross-sectional area, and not volume. An 18' person, having 27 times the mass of the average 6' person, would need muscles 27 times stronger. But scaling muscles up by a factor of 3 in all directions (to get a proportional 18' human), only increases muscle strength by a factor of 9.
So, along with overly-thick bones, a giant human needs overly-thick muscles (in the example, the radius of the muscles needs to increase by more than a factor of 5, not 3). And also the tendons and ligaments would be that much thicker, too, along with the insertions into the bones at each end. All this thickening is going to change the geometry of how the bones and muscles work together.
Don't forget that a giraffe's neck has the same number of vertebrae as a human neck (and most other mammals). But it is quite obvious that the giraffe has quite a different structure to its neck than does a human. It's quite plain that the bones aren't just longer and thicker, they also take on radically different shapes. |
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dv82matt
SFN Regular
760 Posts |
Posted - 07/16/2005 : 19:47:06 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by Dave W.
Everything would need to be different, since muscle strength is also related to cross-sectional area, and not volume. An 18' person, having 27 times the mass of the average 6' person, would need muscles 27 times stronger. But scaling muscles up by a factor of 3 in all directions (to get a proportional 18' human), only increases muscle strength by a factor of 9.
Just a nitpick. I seem to recall that chimps are much stronger than their muscle mass would indicate. Apparently they have a more efficient muscle structure than we do. I'm not sure how this relates to the cross-sectional area.
I couldn't find much on Google, but there's this.
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
Posted - 07/16/2005 : 20:10:05 [Permalink]
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Great minds think alike. A little earlier, I was mulling the giraffe's neck, and also it's legs. The legs appear spindly in proportion to the rest of the animal, but the bones are quite massive. These animals are not lightweights
So, boiling it down, the giant hominid would be a truly mishappened beast, as alien to us as anything that the Hollywood folks could come up with. And we have yet to touch upon it's nutrition. How much and of what sort of food would it require? And could it consume enough through an enlarged, human-type mouth and throat to keep it going?
Virtually all of the really huge, terristrial mammals are/were vegetarin. I'm including extinct species such as the giant sloths as well as modern ones such as elephants and hippos. Indeed, the really big dinos such as Diplodicus were plant eaters. It makes sense because plants are the most available of consumables. However, this requires a fairly specialized digestive system and an almost constant intake of fodder, and for the most part these systems, due to the difficulity of processing vegetation, fail to extract all of the nutrients from their grazing or browsing. This is why ungalates such as cows chew the cud, re-processing the food. Others, such as equines, simply pass it through and keep eating.
One one gets a chuckle at the picture of a dozen Nephelim(sp?) laying around the south meadow, rythmicly working their jaws and farting contentedly.
But if this were so, their dentation would have only the slightest resembelence to ours.... Enough already...!  It just ain't so!
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist!
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26031 Posts |
Posted - 07/16/2005 : 20:27:46 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by dv82matt
Just a nitpick. I seem to recall that chimps are much stronger than their muscle mass would indicate. Apparently they have a more efficient muscle structure than we do. I'm not sure how this relates to the cross-sectional area.
Apes have different mechanics than people do, but King Kong would still have the need for increases in both bone and muscle cross-section to maintain a proportional strength to his size.
Let's take an example where I make up some numbers (too lazy to go hunting): let's say that a 4-foot, 100-pound chimp can spring up into the air 10 feet from a crouch (a ridiculous feat for a human). For a 16-foot tall, 6,400-pound chimp to spring into the air a proportional 40 feet, he's going to need much larger muscles than "proportionality" would allow.
"Ah," you might be saying, "but what if a scaled-up human just had the different muscle and bone arrangement that chimps do? Wouldn't that eliminate the need for relatively gigantic muscles?" Well, yes, but then that huge person wouldn't look like a proportionally larger Homo sapiens, he would look more like a giant shaved chimp.
The claim being made with that femur is that these allegedly bigger people looked exactly like bigger people. Change the places at which muscles attach to bone, and change the shape of the bones, in order to allow for relatively smaller muscles, and you're no longer looking at a strictly human body shape. You're looking at "something else" which, of course, evolutionary theory would have no problems incorporating. |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
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dv82matt
SFN Regular
760 Posts |
Posted - 07/16/2005 : 21:06:25 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by Dave W.
"Ah," you might be saying, "but what if a scaled-up human just had the different muscle and bone arrangement that chimps do? Wouldn't that eliminate the need for relatively gigantic muscles?"
Yeah, this is more or less what I'm saying.quote:
Well, yes, but then that huge person wouldn't look like a proportionally larger Homo sapiens, he would look more like a giant shaved chimp.
I think we are in agreement that a proportionally larger Homo sapien is not in the cards in any case.quote:
The claim being made with that femur is that these allegedly bigger people looked exactly like bigger people. Change the places at which muscles attach to bone, and change the shape of the bones, in order to allow for relatively smaller muscles, and you're no longer looking at a strictly human body shape. You're looking at "something else" which, of course, evolutionary theory would have no problems incorporating.
Agreed. Of course scaling the muscles up by a factor of five without changing the muscle and bone arrangement would hardly result in a strictly human body shape either. |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26031 Posts |
Posted - 07/16/2005 : 22:47:51 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by dv82matt
Agreed. Of course scaling the muscles up by a factor of five without changing the muscle and bone arrangement would hardly result in a strictly human body shape either.
Which was my point, all along.  I think your "nitpick" was really an agreement.
As an aside, one of the web sites I found while double-checking my memories on this stuff (and I've unfortunately since lost the site) did the calculations for an ant being scaled up to human size, just like in the old saying about how such an ant would be able to lift six times its body weight. It's not true. 30-something pounds is the right answer, it turns out.
And while a human scaled down to the size of an ant would be able to lift (on average) less than a gram, he'd still be able to lift over a hundred times his own body weight. The lesson to be learned? Endoskeletons seem to be better for strength than exoskeletons.
And that's even ignoring the fact that many - if not most or all - insects breathe through their skin, and require the air to be diffused through their tissues. Another scaling-up problem, since surface area (for air pores) only increases with the square of body size, while volume (the amount of tissue requiring air) increases with the cube of body size. Six-foot ants would likely suffocate before they lifted anything. |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too. |
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