Interestingly, for Primates, we found that larger brain size was directly (and indirectly) associated with increased vulnerability to extinction. Our results indicate that under current conditions, the constraints on life history imposed by large brains outweigh the potential benefits, undermining the resilience of the studied mammals. Contrary to the selective forces that have favored increased brain size throughout evolutionary history, at present, larger brains have become a burden for mammals.
Okay. You mistook “hominins” for “homonyms”. I apologize for laughing, but that’s sorta funny.
All members of the genus Homo are called hominins. The older term “hominids” is now defined as all primates. I’m not talking about same spelling with different meanings.
Momma always said: “If you can’t say anything intelligent, you need to be funny or bring gifts when you visit.” Don’t have any gifts for you, so I tried to be funny. I’m pleased that you laughed.
if the genus is Homo I would consider most of them human.
They are different species. No theological implications for me, but I speak for myself. Some people get hung up on which people have souls. I let God handle that. Then again, white men were concerned about which people could be enslaved in good conscience.
Yes, there are. I realize that I’m taking your comments even farther off topic than you acknowledged yours to be; however, … Slavers and slave owners who were faithful members of Roman Catholicism were bound by teaching that all humans could benefit from the sacraments. Which is why you’ll find slaves receiving the sacraments. As a consequence, slaves could and would undergo Christian marriage and it was common to keep children with their parents, at least until the kids reached their teens.
Protestant slavers and slave owners, on the other hand, commonly viewed slaves (typically non-white) as non-human and incapable of benefiting from sacraments, if any. Slaves were “bred” like farm animals and there was no common effort to keep families together. I hesitate to claim hard and fast slave-treatment practices among Catholics and Protestants. However, as an experienced genealogist, I am well acquainted with the difference between genealogical records for Catholics and for Protestants. Researching Roman Catholic ancestral lines is much easier–as long as they’re Catholic–than researching Protestant ancestral lines.
And yet we we ended up being the dominant specie on this planet?
Not me either. My question would rather be “if there were other human(from God’s perspective)species in coexistence, than wouldn’t that imply we’re a lot less special in God’s eyes than we previously thought?”.
Thanks @Terry_Sampson I didn’t know that.
At first glance Catholics seem to be “nicer” but on the other hand…they were happy to enslave other people. How Christianity and slavery were going hand in hand is something I’m really struggling with.
Also, why does Lyellian relative dating match very well with radiometric dating?
Lyell used the extinction rates of European molluscan faunas to originally define the Cenozoic epochs (a few were added a bit later in the early 1800s, after people found them).
Other parts of the world have different rates, here are those for the US East Coast:
<5% extinct: Chibanian-Recent (middle-late Pleistocene and younger) (<700 ka)
15% extinct: early Calabrian (early-middle Pleistocene) (1.6 Ma)
60% extinct: early Gelasian (late Pliocene, under Lyell’s age-definition) (2.4-1.8 Ma)
67% extinct: late Piacenzian (mid-late Pliocene) (3.0-2.6 Ma)
75% extinct: late Zanclean to Piacenzian (early to mid Pliocene) (~4-3.2 Ma)
100% extinct: Tortonian (late Miocene) (~7-~5 Ma)
No, Catholics slavers were not “nicer” than Protestant ones. Read about slavery in Brazil, where a special breed of dog was developed to guard slaves. Read about the building of Georgetown University, where priests kept whole harems of enslaved women.
Catholic Portugal was a major player in the slave trade. Portuguese slavers, after capturing Blacks in Africa, would shackle them and then baptize them before stuffing them into ships for the harrowing voyage to the Americas and other destinations. Ah, the sacrament of baptism. How nice. And the enslaved had no choice in the matter.
I wasn’t at all implying they were, hence the use of inverted commas. I appreciate these nuances can be sometimes lost with just a plane text for communication.
The question would be, could any slave owner ever be nice? Let’s not forget that almost every white person used to be implicated in slave trade one way or another. If you were born at certain times and certain countries, that was normal.
And if you happened to have certain status in society, chances of you owning a slave or two(hundred) were high. So are all these people in hell right now for what they’ve done, even though it was acceptable at the time?
Not everyone. Look at the Quakers and other abolitionists. The whole Darwin/Wedgwood clan was abolitionist. And slavery was practiced by the Hebrews. And by some Africans and some Indigenous Americans before any contact with whites.
There were the ones who tried to do the best they could (the sort that the Shelbys in Uncle Tom’s Cabin are based on) still, the system was highly problematic.
I gather that those few of my relations at that time who A. lived in areas where it was legal and B. were wealthy enough to own any, were in that category, given the few stories we have, like that after being voluntarily freed, one of the family slaves would come back every year for new shoes. Even though they were wealthy for my ancestors, they were still in the “own maybe 10, mostly inherited or grew up here” category.
In my view all living things are fundamentally made in the image of God – infinite potential to reflect the infinite actuality of God. And yet all living things are not the same, and the human mind makes a huge difference, and I believe that comes from a communication by God with Adam and Eve – an inheritance of ideas which made us His children.
But not only is this image of God defined by potentiality rather than actuality (according to me) but in practice, it is always the potentiality which concerns us more than actual capabilities (consider infants and children). Thus even when God first spoke to Adam and Eve, the potentiality was there in the entire species. Though… by that time Neanderthals and Denisovans were already gone as a distinct groups, absorbed into the homo sapiens expansion out of Africa.
P.S. I wonder sometimes, when reflecting on different “types of people” that there have been in the past, which–if any–may have been pre-human and which I would consider to have been human. I would think that a little “fact” that I’ve read about would separate the pre-humans from the humans. The fact came to my attention in a paper, “Neurobiology of Sexual Desire” [Source: NeuroQuantology | June 2013 | Volume 11 | Issue 2 | Page 332-359].
Arts and culture mainly utilize reasoning and abstractive thinking. They originate from higher-order cognition involving symbols or inferred meaning.
Science, that is, “re-search” or search again infers that people are trying to ascertain what Nature has already created. Only humans pursue these goals because they enjoy a vast
reservoir of episodic memories (unique to humans) that allow the formation of self-identity that in turn is capable of creating the concept of future that can be bound to the drive states to pursue and achieve long-term goals (an ideal). Animals do not have any of these capacities. If they do, then they are extremely limited; for example, rats have such a capacity lasting no more than several seconds.
Animals will never kill themselves (willfully) out of romantic fallouts. Countless numbers of young people have done just that when their intense love fell apart. Why does this happen? This happens because human strategies and human identity (self) are one and the same. They both originate within the executive regions; especially in the Brodmann area 10. “Self” is an abstract representation of accumulated episodic memories. Humans have a monster called “self”. Each and every decision has to be filtered through the self. It is the self that makes decision to kill the self; animals do not have a sense of self, so animals die only when they run out of food, or are killed by a predator, or by accident, but humans commit suicide even if plentiful amounts of food are available to them. In this regard, the methods of engineering human sexual desire are significantly more complicated than those of animals.
Wow! so what makes us human is capacity to commit suicide. Never thought of it like that and never heard anyone say that in public (probably because it is unsayable). But deep down it makes sense. And it puts another spin on the original sin, don’t you think? Perhaps that’s what it actually was. Not only some neanderthal became Human, but also committed one of the worst sins there are at the same time. Mystery solved!
