Call me a bookaholic, but I bought this ~460 page book just to get the original of this great quote by Kent State University anthropologist C. Owen Lovejoy:
[Graphic: Billingham, J., ed., "Life in the Universe," MIT Press: Cambridge MA, 1981]
"In short, man is not only a unique animal, but the end product of a completely unique evolutionary pathway, the elements of which are traceable at least to the beginnings of the Cenozoic. We find, then, that the evolution of cognition is the product of a variety of influences and preadaptive capacities, the absence of any one of which would have completely negated the process, and most of which are unique attributes of primates and/or hominids. Specific dietary shifts, bipedal locomotion, manual dexterity, control of differentiated muscles of facial expression, vocalization, intense social and parenting behavior (of specific kinds), keen stereoscopic vision, and even specialized forms of sexual behavior, all qualify as irreplaceable elements. It is evident that the evolution of cognition is neither the result of an evolutionary trend nor an event of even the lowest calculable probability, but rather the consequence of a series of highly specific evolutionary events whose ultimate cause is traceable to selection for unrelated characters such as locomotion and diet. ... Thus I conclude that man is a highly specific, unique, and unduplicated species. ... From what we know of the human evolutionary pathway and of the critical elements that have directed it, the odds against its reexpression are indeed remote, if not astronomical. No other mammal even remotely shares the unique attribute complex that defines either man or his evolutionary pathway." (Lovejoy, C.O., "Evolution of Man and Its Implications for General Principles of the Evolution of Intelligent Life," in Billingham, J., ed., "Life in the Universe: Proceedings of the Conference on Life in the Universe, held at NASA Ames Research Center, Mountain View, California, June 19-20, 1979," [1981], MIT Press: Cambridge MA, Second Printing, 1982, pp.326-327).
The implications of this fact that "... man is ... a unique animal ... the end product of a completely unique evolutionary [sic] pathway ... the absence of any one [element] of which would have completely negated the process..." include:
- No theory of naturalistic evolution can predict (i.e. retrodict) and therefore cannot explain the appearance of man, as admitted by evolutionists as diverse as Paul Davies and Richard Dawkins:
"PD: ... The question that we have to ask is if the earth was hit by an asteroid tomorrow and everything but simple microbes were destroyed and we came back in another 3 or 4 billion years, would we expect to find homo sapiens here again. Well, of course not.
RD: Of course we wouldn't!
PD: No, of course not. But the question is would we expect to find any intelligent life and I think most biologists would say no. ...
RD: Yes ... If you wiped our life and started again-no, you would not get Homo sapiens. I tell you what you would get, you would probably get a great diversity of living form . You'd probably get plants, animals, you'd probably get parasites, you'd probably get predators, you'd probably get large predators, small predators. You might well get flight, you might well get sight. There are all sorts of things that you can guess that you might get. You would certainly not get a re-run of what we've got."
(McKew, M., "The Origin of the Universe," Interview with Richard Dawkins & Paul Davies, Lateline, Australian Broadcasting Commission, 19 June 1996, in Australian Rationalist, No. 41, Spring 1996, pp.72-73); - We are alone in the Universe, either actually in the sense that there is no other human-level intelligence elsewhere, or effectively in the sense that it would be so rare that we could never become aware of it and vice-versa (so SETI is a waste of time and money);
- Even such `mistakes' as the loss of the ability to synthesise vitamin C due to a mutation in the gene which codes for the L-gulono-γ-lactone oxidase (GLO) enzyme in man's ancestral primate was one of those "irreplaceable elements ... such as diet" without which man would not have arisen (and even if he had, he would not have developed agriculture and therefore civilisation); and
- If an Intelligent Designer did bring about man, then he would have had to have the degree of control (and therefore the power and knowledge) over the process that only an omnipotent, omniscient God (like the God of the Bible) would have!
Stephen E. Jones, BSc (Biol).
Genesis 25:7-10. 7Altogether, Abraham lived a hundred and seventy-five years. 8Then Abraham breathed his last and died at a good old age, an old man and full of years; and he was gathered to his people. 9His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah near Mamre, in the field of Ephron son of Zohar the Hittite, 10the field Abraham had bought from the Hittites. There Abraham was buried with his wife Sarah.
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2 comments:
You seem to have misread that particular 'quote'. Lovejoy is proposing that Homo sapiens is the result of a particular evolutionary unique pathway, just like all other forms of life are the result of a particular evolutionary pathway.
He and the Dawkins quote you put in afterwards is implying that if we were to rerun the development on life on this planet, we should not expect humans to re-emerge.
You can't simply make a quote as implied by your title by simply cutting out swaths of the text.
For example you quote this "... man is ... a unique animal ... the end product of a completely unique evolutionary [sic] pathway ... the absence of any one [element] of which would have completely negated the process..."
But this quote isn't entirely true as you cut and paste statements from different sections.
The last half of your quote comes before the first part.
"We find, then, that the evolution of cognition is the product of a variety of influences and preadaptive capacities, the absence of any one of which would have completely negated the process, and most of which are unique attributes of primates and/or hominids. "
Here is talking about the evolution of cognition, not man per se and he even ends that sentence with "most of which are unique attributes of primates and/or hominids".
Your end conclusions are flawed as follows
1. Evolutionary theory predicts trends and options, not pre-determined finality. You're confusing natural selection with Larmarckism.
2. You make an assumption that we are alone. Even if we are alone, we can never know unless we explore the entire universe. We may never know how unique life is until we are capable of travelling to distant planets outside our solar system. Thus this point is personal opinion and irrelevant to your argument.
3. The loss of vitamin C synthesis is obviously not a show stopper for primate development or the development of civilization. Lovejoy was talking about about gross dietary shifts that were required for powering the brain (meat, high protein plants, novel long term storage plants such as tubers). You're seeing specifics where Lovejoy is talking about generalizations when he mentions diet etc.
4. So God designed us to have a faulty vitamin C synthesis gene? Way to stick it to us God. I'm sure all those sailors who died of scurvy thank you every day for that one.
Anyway, nice try at quote mining, but next time try not to blatantly mash it up. Not having the full quote in your post helps to keep up crafty evilutionists on our toes as well.
Anonymous
>You seem to have misread that particular 'quote'. Lovejoy is proposing that Homo sapiens is the result of a particular evolutionary unique pathway, just like all other forms of life are the result of a particular evolutionary pathway.
I did not misread it. Thanks for confirming my point!
>He and the Dawkins quote you put in afterwards is implying that if we were to rerun the development on life on this planet, we should not expect humans to re-emerge.
That's right. Darwinian evolution cannot explain the origin of humans (or anything in particular).
>You can't simply make a quote as implied by your title by simply cutting out swaths of the text.
I did not "make" the quote "by simply cutting out swaths of the text." I got rid of extraneous text that was unncessary to the point I was making. That is standard practice everywhere quotes are made, including evolutionists' writings.
Evolutionists Barrow & Tipler quote even less of Lovejoy's essay than I do (which is where I saw it in the first place), but make the same point:
"In short, the evolution of `cognition', or intelligence and self-awareness of the human type, is most unlikely even in the primate lineage. As C.O. Lovejoy puts it: `...man is not only a unique animal, but the end product of a completely unique evolutionary pathway, the elements of which are traceable at least to the beginnings of the Cenozoic. We find, then, that the evolution of cognition is the product of a variety of influences and preadaptive capacities, the absence of any one of which would have completely negated the process, and most of which are unique attributes of primates and/or hominids. Specific dietary shifts, bipedal locomotion, manual dexterity, control of differentiated muscles of facial expression, vocalization, intense social and parenting behaviour (of specific kinds), keen stereoscopic vision, and even specialized forms of sexual behaviour, all qualify as irreplaceable elements. It is evident that the evolution of cognition is neither the result of an evolutionary trend nor an event of even the lowest calculable probability, but rather the result of a series of highly specific evolutionary events whose ultimate cause is traceable to selection for unrelated factors such as locomotion and diet [Lovejoy, C.O., in Billingham, J., ed., "Life in the Universe," MIT Press: Cambridge MA, 1981, p.326]." (Barrow J.D. & Tipler F.J., "The Anthropic Cosmological Principle," [1986], Oxford University Press: Oxford UK, 1996, reprint, pp.131-132)
>For example you quote this "... man is ... a unique animal ... the end product of a completely unique evolutionary [sic] pathway ... the absence of any one [element] of which would have completely negated the process..."
>
>But this quote isn't entirely true as you cut and paste statements from different sections.
>
>The last half of your quote comes before the first part.
It does *not*. You either do not have Billingham's book (pp.326-327) in front of you or you are misreading it. My quote follows *exactly* the order as in the book, as per the following segments punctuated by ellipses:
"In short, man is not only a unique ... as locomotion and diet. [pp.326-327] ... Thus I conclude that man is a highly specific, unique, and unduplicated species. [p.327] ... From what we know of the human ... or his evolutionary pathway." [p.327]
>"We find, then, that the evolution of cognition is the product of a variety of influences and preadaptive capacities, the absence of any one of which would have completely negated the process, and most of which are unique attributes of primates and/or hominids. "
>
>Here is talking about the evolution of cognition, not man per se and he even ends that sentence with "most of which are unique attributes of primates and/or hominids".
Lovejoy treats "man" and "cognition" as synonymous. What *is* "man per se" without "cognition"? Just another ape.
>Your end conclusions are flawed as follows
>
>1. Evolutionary theory predicts trends and options, not pre-determined finality. You're confusing natural selection with Larmarckism.
Thanks again for confirming my point!
>2. You make an assumption that we are alone. Even if we are alone, we can never know unless we explore the entire universe. We may never know how unique life is until we are capable of travelling to distant planets outside our solar system. Thus this point is personal opinion and irrelevant to your argument.
I am making a *prediction* that we are alone. That can be falsified if SETI is successful or if there is a "Close Encounter of the Third Kind".
>3. The loss of vitamin C synthesis is obviously not a show stopper for primate development or the development of civilization.
I maintain that it is. For starters, the primates which did not lose the ability to synthesis vitamin C are called the Lower Primates and those that did are called the Higher Primates (including monkeys, apes, hominids and man).
>Lovejoy was talking about about gross dietary shifts that were required for powering the brain (meat, high protein plants, novel long term storage plants such as tubers). You're seeing specifics where Lovejoy is talking about generalizations when he mentions diet etc.
Disagree. Lovejoy's whole point is that humans are unique in the sense that human level intelligence (i.e. "cognition") "may be expected to be exceedingly rare" in the entire Universe (p.327).
That's why his essay is in a book about the existence of extraterrestrial life, and in particular human-level intelligent life.
>4. So God designed us to have a faulty vitamin C synthesis gene?
Yes. Think of it as a genetic switch. By turning off that switch, a "dietary shift" was forced or confirmed in a line of primates which could then survive only in a high vitamin C environment (e.g. in tropical fruit trees) in which they developed skills of "keen stereoscopic vision", brachiating arms, etc). Without that switch being turned off, they would have remained insectivorous Lower Primates.
>Way to stick it to us God. I'm sure all those sailors who died of scurvy thank you every day for that one.
You fail to follow my argument. There would not *be* "sailors" in the first place (or atheists to criticise God), if there was no God who created man via a unique pathway, an "irreplaceable element" of which was a mutation that caused the loss of vitamin C synthesis.
>Anyway, nice try at quote mining, but next time try not to blatantly mash it up.
It was not "quote mining" and I did not "mash it up." Barrow & Tippler took it the same way as I did.
>Not having the full quote in your post helps to keep up crafty evilutionists on our toes as well.
You are not on your toes because either you don't have Billingham's book (pp.326-327) in front of you, or you are misreading it.
I do not necessarily regard evolutionists as "evil" (although some may be) but just *wrong*.
My quoting the text in between the ellipsed would have made no difference to the point I was making, and so I left it out for clarity. Again, Barrow & Tipler had even less of the quote than I did and made the same point.
I let your comment through without reading the pejorative "quote mining" part at the end, implying that I dishonestly rearranged the quote and left parts out to make Lovejoy appear to say what he didn't meant.
That is *false* which is easy to prove in this case because two evolutionists Barrow & Tippler had even less of Lovejoy's quote than I did and made the same point.
In future I will reject all comments that contain pejorative elements (including allegations of "quote mining") as per my stated policy: "Those [comments] I consider sub-standard will be rejected with no explanation."
Stephen E. Jones
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