None of this has any relevance to my post.
The article was cited by someone else. I found a few quotes interesting.
You don't know what evidently, because your citations are not only irrelevant but incoherent to anything in my post.
"Citing deficiencies in how the Taung fossil material has been recently assessed..."
"The authors also debate the previously offered theoretical basis for this adaptation..."
That's very interesting.
How is anything you said relevant to that?
Explain please.
Also, you did not answer my question... again.
You just make sweeping claims... again
Are you saying that all scientists agree with you on this, and do "not question the taxonomy of the Australopithecus africanus, nor the evolution of the hominin over millions of years."?
Can you please provide the data verifying that claim?
From experience, I don't expect you can support your claim. That would not prevent you from continuing to make them though.
So I don't expect you to answer the question. Your unsupported claims will just keep coming.
View attachment 52613
@YoursTrue
I am reading this article - quite interesting. .. quite long.
Maybe, some of its contents may interest you.
Here is an excerpt...
For a century, every fossil discovery that could potentially be taken as evidence of an evolutionary connection between human beings and some “lower form” had precipitated a large number of mutually contradictory interpretations from ostensibly authoritative voices, often wildly divergent in their assessments of the fossil’s significance. More often than not, and certainly more often than Clark took to be the norm in most scientific fields, this proliferation of views had descended into “controversies of a polemical nature.
Scientists, being human, were liable to have very personal reactions to evidence concerning human origins, and the interpolation of such personal feelings into the assessment of fossil evidence led to a loss of objectivity and the propagation of as many interpretations as there were persons to do the interpreting. The personal, emotionally charged connection that investigators felt towards their own interpretations tended to inhibit their ability to dispassionately consider other possibilities, and often resulted in the undue use of polemical language. Disputants often claimed to be dispassionate in their respective assessments of the evidence, Clark pointed out, but their raucous dissensus gave them the lie.
Here is what I learned...
Raymond Dart, a professor in anatomy made the claim that "Australopithecus africanus" was an evolutionary ancestor of human beings, linking our species to a distant past in which our anatomical similarity to the apes was much more conspicuous.
More fossils were found with similar resemblance, which were dubbed Australopithecines. Debates over these fossils continued from then until now. With some considering these fossils to be nothing more than "another type of ape".
Such debates also related to the change to the “Modern Synthesis” or “Neo-Darwinian Synthesis”.
Tom Gundling, a biological anthropologist, "argues that the reinterpretation of early human fossils came about at last because of changes in theoretical approach, not simply because new and more complete fossils had been recovered".
He is said to be agree that the crucial factor in making the Australopithecines acceptable human ancestors in the eyes of many scientists was a broad shift in the dominant understanding of evolutionary theory in the nineteen thirties and forties.
Shifts away from experience or practice to theory no doubt, have left some scientists "on the other side"... and led to more debates.
The Extended (Evolutionary) Synthesis Debate: Where Science Meets Philosophy
Abstract
Recent debates between proponents of the modern evolutionary synthesis (the standard model in evolutionary biology) and those of a possible extended synthesis are a good example of the fascinating tangle among empirical, theoretical, and conceptual or philosophical matters that is the practice of evolutionary biology. In this essay, we briefly discuss two case studies from this debate, highlighting the relevance of philosophical thinking to evolutionary biologists in the hope of spurring further constructive cross-pollination between the two fields.
The sort of vigorous debate briefly sketched above is, we suggest, both typical of many areas of biology (including discussions on species concepts and on a number of ecological theories) and an excellent example of a dialogue at the interface of empirical biology, theoretical biology, and philosophy of biology. These are issues that can be settled decisively neither on empirical grounds (it is hard to imagine what sort of evidence, on its own, could possibly do that) nor even on a theoretical (as opposed to a broader conceptual) level—say, framed in the kind of mathematical terms that are the bread and butter of population genetic theory. The reason for this is that some of the crucial issues are conceptual (i.e., philosophical) in nature and hinge on not just matters of definition (what, exactly, counts as a paradigm?) but also on the entire framework that biologists use to understand what it is that they are doing (e.g., what is the relationship between systems of inheritance and natural selection, or, in multilevel selection theory, what counts as a level and why?). Kuhn (1962) famously referred to this as the “disciplinary matrix” characterizing a given field of inquiry.
Is a New and General Theory of Evolution Emerging?
Abstract
The “modern synthetic” view of evolution has broken down, at least as an exclusive proposition, on both of its fundamental claims: (1) “extrapolationism” (gradual substitution of different alleles in many genes as the exclusive process underlying all evolutionary change) and (2) nearly exclusive reliance on selection leading to adaptation. Evolution is a hierarchical process with complementary, but different modes of change at its three large-scale levels: (a) variation within populations, (b) speciation, and (c) very long-term macroevolutionary trends. Speciation is not always an extension of gradual, adaptive allelic substitution, but may represent, as Goldschmidt argued, a different style of genetic change—rapid reorganization of the genome, perhaps nonadaptive. Macroevolutionary trends do not arise from the gradual, adaptive transformation of populations, but usually from a higher-order selection operating upon groups of species. Individual species generally do not change much after their “instantaneous” (in geological time) origin. These two discontinuities in the evolutionary hierarchy can be called the Goldschmidt break (change in populations is different from speciation) and the Wright break (speciation is different from macroevolutionary trending that translates differential success among different species).
A new and general evolutionary theory will embody this notion of hierarchy and stress a variety of themes either ignored or explicitly rejected by the modern synthesis: e.g., punctuational change at all levels, important nonadaptive change at all levels, control of evolution not only by selection, but equally by constraints of history, development, and architecture — thus restoring to evolutionary theory a concept of organism. — The Editor
Continue next post...
All you have done 9s respond with a rambling nonsense post off topic.
Hopefully...
