Racism

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Posted by Ernie Nemeth

My thoughts are that when I heard the idea that white skin is a mutation I started thinking of other ways such a trait could be explained without resorting to calling it a mutated version of the original. It seems to me that either conclusions should not be reached until we have more data or we have to consider the real possibility that there are other worlds and other humanoids indigenous to each.

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The scientists are drawing conclusions, based upon the genetics, about when certain mutations came into existence. What conclusions about the point in our DNA timeline that these changes happened is up for debate?

There is another article that I read somewhere about how this particular change is just one indicator for skin color and there are others. I'll find that and post it next, it will validate your point.

I am not "against" extraterrestrial origin for anyone, how could I be? I'm a member of Project Avalon and a long-standing explorer of Creation and the potentialities of consciousness.

I think there is something "more" to this insistence, in the New Age, that whites are not from this planet, though.

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Posted by Ernie Nemeth

Somehow melanin-deficiency seems ...uh... racist.

Oh now I get it. Sometimes I'm a bit slow. Not good at such word-play.

Turned the table on me. Nice one.

Point taken.

sorry

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Absolutely no need to apologize. I don't take it personally as it is a pervasive phenomenon and it is not about you or I, individually. It is about assumptions and about an inordinate concentration upon a particular way of being that, by its nature, is exclusive and invalidates all other perspectives. So I do not see it as personal or exclusive to you, or any other individual either. it is systemic.

Ernie, a quote relevant to our conversation about light skin and, strangely enough, also my example from yesterday:

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Researchers agree that our early australopithecine ancestors in Africa probably had light skin beneath hairy pelts. “If you shave a chimpanzee, its skin is light,” says evolutionary geneticist Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania, the lead author of the new study. “If you have body hair, you don’t need dark skin to protect you from ultraviolet [UV] radiation.”

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There is always "more" research to be done. And more information to synthesize and add to pre-existing knowledge. I would be very excited to hear that extraterrestrial strands of DNA, coming from exo-planets circling other stars, have been discovered in the human genome and, who knows, that may happen. I hope it will, because I also don't believe the human family is unique to Terra. We may have to get to those planets and sample the DNA of the life there before it happens, though, but when it does, I will celebrate the findings with you and Agape. Until then, for me, Occam's Razor applies. :)

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/atta...6&d=1581606205
Researchers have identified genes that help create diverse skin tones, such as those seen in the Agaw (left) and Surma (right) peoples of Africa.

New gene variants reveal the evolution of human skin color
By Ann Gibbons

Most people associate Africans with dark skin. But different groups of people in Africa have almost every skin color on the planet, from deepest black in the Dinka of South Sudan to beige in the San of South Africa. Now, researchers have discovered a handful of new gene variants responsible for this palette of tones.

The study, published online this week in Science, traces the evolution of these genes and how they traveled around the world. While the dark skin of some Pacific Islanders can be traced to Africa, gene variants from Eurasia also seem to have made their way back to Africa. And surprisingly, some of the mutations responsible for lighter skin in Europeans turn out to have an ancient African origin.

“This is really a landmark study of skin color diversity,” says geneticist Greg Barsh of the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in Huntsville, Alabama.

Researchers agree that our early australopithecine ancestors in Africa probably had light skin beneath hairy pelts. “If you shave a chimpanzee, its skin is light,” says evolutionary geneticist Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania, the lead author of the new study. “If you have body hair, you don’t need dark skin to protect you from ultraviolet [UV] radiation.”

Until recently, researchers assumed that after human ancestors shed most body hair, sometime before 2 million years ago, they quickly evolved dark skin for protection from skin cancer and other harmful effects of UV radiation. Then, when humans migrated out of Africa and headed to the far north, they evolved lighter skin as an adaptation to limited sunlight. (Pale skin synthesizes more vitamin D when light is scarce.)

Previous research on skin-color genes fit that picture. For example, a “depigmentation gene” called SLC24A5 linked to pale skin swept through European populations in the past 6000 years. But Tishkoff ’s team found that the story of skin color evolution isn’t so black and white. Her team, including African researchers, used a light meter to measure skin reflectance in 2092 people in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Botswana. They found the darkest skin in the Nilo-Saharan pastoralist populations of eastern Africa, such as the Mursi and Surma, and the lightest skin in the San of southern Africa, as well as many shades in between, as in the Agaw people of Ethiopia.

At the same time, they collected blood samples for genetic studies. They sequenced more than 4 million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)—places where a single letter of the genetic code varies across the genomes of 1570 of these Africans. They found four key areas of the genome where specific SNPs correlate with skin color.

The first surprise was that SLC24A5, which swept Europe, is also common in East Africa—found in as many as half the members of some Ethiopian groups. This variant arose 30,000 years ago and was probably brought to eastern Africa by people migrating from the Middle East, Tishkoff says. But though many East Africans have this gene, they don’t have white skin, probably because it is just one of several genes that shape their skin color.

The team also found variants of two neighboring genes, HERC2 and OCA2, which are associated with light skin, eyes, and hair in Europeans but arose in Africa; these variants are ancient and common in the light-skinned San people. The team proposes that the variants arose in Africa as early as 1 million years ago and spread later to Europeans and Asians. “Many of the gene variants that cause light skin in Europe have origins in Africa,” Tishkoff says.

The most dramatic discovery concerned a gene known as MFSD12. Two mutations that decrease expression of this gene were found in high frequencies in people with the darkest skin. These variants arose about a half-million years ago, suggesting that human ancestors before that time may have had moderately dark skin, rather than the deep black hue created today by these mutations.

These same two variants are found in Melanesians, Australian Aborigines, and some Indians. These people may have inherited the variants from ancient migrants from Africa who followed a “southern route” out of East Africa, along the southern coast of India to Melanesia and Australia, Tishkoff says. That idea, however, counters three genetic studies that concluded last year that Australians, Melanesians, and Eurasians all descend from a single migration out of Africa. Alternatively, this great migration may have included people carrying variants for both light and dark skin, but the dark variants later were lost in Eurasians.

To understand how the MFSD12 mutations help make darker skin, the researchers reduced expression of the gene in cultured cells, mimicking the action of the variants in dark-skinned people. The cells produced more eumelanin, the pigment responsible for black and brown skin, hair, and eyes. The mutations may also change skin color by blocking yellow pigments: When the researchers knocked out MFSD12 in zebrafish and mice, red and yellow pigments were lost, and the mice’s light brown coats turned gray. “This new mechanism for producing intensely dark pigmentation is really the big story,” says Nina Jablonski, an anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University in State College.

The study adds to established research undercutting old notions of race. You can’t use skin color to classify humans, any more than you can use other complex traits like height, Tishkoff says. “There is so much diversity in Africans that there is no such thing as an African race.”

I have also found an article that again suggests that humanoid DNA has diverse roots, and that we did not all walk out of Africa nor do we share one single female ancestor, as the science today would suggest...

https://www.npr.org/2020/02/12/80523...-human-origins

Although there is no suggestion that the DNA is other-worldly, the single-anscestor, out-of-Africa meme is slowly loosing steam.

It won't be long, if our masters allow it of course, that our off-world connections will be uncovered.

It begins:

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About 50,000 years ago, ancient humans in what is now West Africa apparently procreated with another group of ancient humans that scientists didn't know existed.

There aren't any bones or ancient DNA to prove it, but researchers say the evidence is in the genes of modern West Africans. They analyzed genetic material from hundreds of people from Nigeria and Sierra Leone and found signals of what they call "ghost" DNA from an unknown ancestor.

Our own species — Homo sapiens — lived alongside other groups that split off from the same genetic family tree at different times. And there's plenty of evidence from other parts of the world that early humans had sex with other hominins, like Neanderthals.

That's why Neanderthal genes are present in humans today, in people of European and Asian descent. Homo sapiens also mated with another group, the Denisovans, and those genes are found in people from Oceania.

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Posted by Ernie Nemeth

I have also found an article that again suggests that humanoid DNA has diverse roots, and that we did not all walk out of Africa nor do we share one single female ancestor, as the science today would suggest...

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This article did not say that at all. This is what it said.

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About 50,000 years ago, ancient humans in what is now West Africa apparently procreated with another group of ancient humans that scientists didn't know existed.

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I've just posted, a few days ago, many articles above talking about Neanderthal and Denisovan. Have not gotten to the other, unknown genetic traces of other hominids, but that was part of the plan going forward. All humans are primarily Homo sapien, with strands of DNA that come from the other hominid and other groups that inhabited other parts of the planet. Please see: Posts 361, 362 and 364.

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Posted by Ernie Nemeth

Although there is no suggestion that the DNA is other-worldly, the single-anscestor, out-of-Africa meme is slowly loosing steam.

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It is not losing steam. What you are speaking about is, first, a straw man, but there are different forms of hominid that live in different parts of the world that interacted with and mated with Homo sapien, which we all are, primarily and dominantly, and who came out of Africa.

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Posted by Ernie Nemeth

It won't be long, if our masters allow it of course, that our off-world connections will be uncovered.

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From your mouth, to your Divinity's ears. :)

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Posted by Agape

Apologies to Mark/Rakhyt for interjection. Apologies to myself for discussing our starry origin as I’m aware of without being able to “prove it” in lab.

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No need to apologize. Thank you for interjecting, all voices and comments are welcome.

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Posted by Agape

I’m not “new age” and our origin is not “new age”, it’s not only ancient - in your terms - it’s perhaps, older than this piece of Universe.

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I will accept your self-definition as a valid expression of your sovereignty, to define yourself as you so desire. When you say "our", of whom do you speak?

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Posted by Agape

We all are translucent plasma bodies in origin. That’s “softer than unboiled egg”. There’s no “DNA” floating in our plasma bodies since DNA is coagulated fragments of information net condensed to this gravity and atmospheric pressure.

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Granted.

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Posted by Agape

If you break an egg and what you call “white” is actually transparent and translucent.
It has no colour at all.

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There is no racism, as we know it, beyond the body. Thank you for pointing it out.

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Posted by Agape

Perhaps ..

if all the broken fragmented information/mind/dna within us start working together can it return a piece of it self to the original yolk ?

Scientifically impossible from eggs perspective but there’s so much we do t know about life beyond DNA, yet.


Wish you all happy colors to your Sunrise

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And the same to you!

A species with two extra chromosomes cannot mate with a species with two less. That is science's most basic tenet. There are no other hominids with the same number of chromosomes as humans on earth. How did they procreate with these apes then?

And since our own chromosome #2 is obviously spliced, it has been manipulated by some sort of intelligence, other than the source of creation.

And since science refuses to acknowledge this particular obviousness, I refuse to believe anything else they have to say because I know their premise is faulty. Since the premise is the foundation for all the rest of their conclusions, I have to reject it all.

I also believe that their classification and toxicology methods are biased since they are trying to prove an assumption the entire field believe to be true - that all humans are from earth and that there is no life anywhere else in the entire universe.

Lloyd Pye comes to mindas supporting something similar.

How do you think this argument fits into the research ongoing?

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Posted by Ernie Nemeth

A species with two extra chromosomes cannot mate with a species with two less. That is science's most basic tenet. There are no other hominids with the same number of chromosomes as humans on earth. How did they procreate with these apes then?

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I'm not sure about your numbers, but I can say that apes are not the same as hominids. There is a discussion about gene splicing, which is how science currently explains the ability of different forms of humans to interact sexually and have children. This discussion about the topic is very interesting.

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Posted by Ernie Nemeth

And since science refuses to acknowledge this particular obviousness, I refuse to believe anything else they have to say because I know their premise is faulty. Since the premise is the foundation for all the rest of their conclusions, I have to reject it all.

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Science does not "refuse to acknowledge this particular obviousness", but what you believe or not is your choice.

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Posted by Ernie Nemeth

I also believe that their classification and toxicology methods are biased since they are trying to prove an assumption the entire field believe to be true - that all humans are from earth and that there is no life anywhere else in the entire universe.

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I think rather than this being the case, evidence to the contrary has not been found nor are scientists looking, in particular, for such origins. Remember, it is only in recent months and years that ufology has gone mainstream.

In support of a link shared by Ernie above and, also, the wide-ranging implications of the interaction of many types of humans across the span of time and space to create the human family that we now consider to be a single type of being, Homo sapiens sapiens. What the article is stating, is that prior to this point there has been evidence of unknown human hominims inside of Africa. We are used to talking about Neanderthal and Denisovan, but there are apparently others as well that were distinct enough to merit their own classification.

Early humans in Africa may have interbred with a mysterious, extinct species – new research

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/atta...0&d=1581625699

One of the more startling discoveries arising from genomic sequencing of ancient hominin DNA is the realisation that all humans outside Africa have traces of DNA in their genomes that do not belong to our own species.

The approximately six billion people on Earth whose recent ancestry is not from Africa will have inherited between 1% and 2% of their genome from our closest but now extinct relatives: the Neanderthals. East Asians and Oceanians have also inherited a small amount of ancestry from the Denisovans, another close relative of Homo Sapiens.

Now a new study, published in Science Advances, suggests that early humans living inside Africa may also have interbred with archaic hominims. These are extinct species that are related to Homo sapiens.

The interbreeding outside Africa happened after our Homo sapiens ancestors expanded out of Africa into new environments. It was there they had sex with Neaderthals and the related Denisovans.

This led to new discoveries. Early genetic studies of people from across the globe had previously suggested that our current distribution was the result of a single expansion out of Africa around 100,000 years ago. But the identification of Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry in modern Eurasians complicated things.

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/atta...1&d=1581625768

We still think that most – anywhere between about 92% and 98.5% – of the ancestry in people not living in Africa today does indeed derive from the out-of-Africa expansion. But we now know the remainder came from archaic species whose ancestors left Africa hundreds of thousands of years before that.

What was happening inside Africa?
Insights into interbreeding have been driven by the much greater availability of modern and ancient genomes from outside of Africa. That’s because the cold and dry environments of Eurasia are much better at preserving DNA that the wet heat of tropical Africa.

But our understanding of the relationship between ancient human ancestors within Africa, and their connection with archaic humans, is beginning to deepen. A 2017 study of ancient DNA from southern Africa investigated 16 ancient genomes from people alive over the last 10,000 years. This showed that the history of African populations was complex. There wasn’t just a single group of humans around in Africa when they expanded out 100,000 years ago.

It’s a result that was supported earlier this year by a paper examining ancient DNA from four individuals from what is now Cameroon. Taken together, this research suggests there were geographically diverse groups in Africa well before the main expansion out of the continent. And many of these groups will have contributed to the ancestry of people alive in Africa today.

In addition, it now appears that there was potentially gene-flow into ancient African Homo sapiens populations from an archaic ancestor. One way in which this could happen is for people to expand out of Africa, have sex with Neanderthals, and then migrate back into Africa. Indeed, this has been demonstrated in one recent study.

The new paper provides evidence that there may also have been gene-flow into the ancestors of West Africans directly from a mysterious archaic hominin. The researchers compared Neanderthal and Densiovan DNA with that from four contemporary populations from West Africa. Using some elegant mathematics, they then built a statistical model to explain the relationships between the archaic hominins and modern Africans.

To understand where we are, we have to understand where we come from. In that vein, since we are Project Avalon and interested in the Human Experience, we have to take a bit of time to think broadly about topics that interest us and to use holistic methods to address the questions that divide us. Our curiosity about who we are goes down into the depths of our biology, our psychology and our spirituality and to get at our societal structures, perhaps, it is necessary to understand many different aspects of those areas.

So in that spirit, a part of our search here will be to examine what science is saying about a number of different topics that may have some bearing upon the question. I've already begun by looking at our ancient ancestors and predecessors, which will continue, but I will also begin to look into where science currently stands in regards to Panspermia and questions of "Alien Origin", as far as that might lead us. At the very least, it is a useful exercise to understand where exactly modern science is on these issues, if only to point out how far we have yet to go.

Of course, we are all in this together, so your input is necessary for this discussion to bear fruit and for a full record to be co-created by the members of this grand project. Thank you in advance for your contributions!

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/atta...2&d=1581627436

Do We Share DNA with ET?

If there’s life beyond Earth, the genetic code might be our common bond.
BY DANIEL OBERHAUS

The primary difficulty of interstellar communication is finding common ground between ourselves and other intelligent entities about which we can know nothing with absolute certainty. This common ground would be the basis for a universal language that could be understood by any intelligence, whether in the Milky Way, Andromeda, or beyond the cosmic horizon. To the best of our knowledge, the laws of physics are the same throughout the universe, which suggests that the facts of science may serve as a basis for mutual understanding between humans and an extraterrestrial intelligence.

One key set of scientific facts presents an intriguing question. If aliens were to visit Earth and learn about its inhabitants, would they be surprised that such a wide variety of species all share a common genetic code? Or would this be all too familiar? There is probable cause to assume that the structure of genetic material is the same throughout the universe and that, while this is liable to give rise to life forms not found on Earth, the variety of species is fundamentally limited by the constraints built into the genetic mechanism.

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/atta...3&d=1581627534

On Earth we have only sequenced the genomes of a small percentage of living organisms and have only recently completed the human genome. We have successfully cloned several animals, but technical and ethical roadblocks prevent scientists from doing the same with humans. If an extraterrestrial civilization isn’t burdened with ethical dilemmas about cloning, however, sending the genetic code for humans and other species may be the most effective way to teach them about our biology.

References to our genetic makeup have been a feature of interstellar messages from the very beginning. Although the first genes wouldn’t be sequenced for another three years, the 1974 Arecibo message, an interstellar radio message sent from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, included a rudimentary bitmap of DNA’s helical structure. Designed by Frank Drake, the founder of SETI, with input from Carl Sagan, the Arecibo message consisted of 1,679 binary digits arranged as a rectangular bitmap. The resulting image depicts the numbers one through 10 and the atomic numbers for the five elements that make up DNA, as well as the formulas for the sugars and bases in DNA nucleotides, a crude drawing of a human, a graphic representation of the solar system, and a picture of the Arecibo telescope.

Would aliens be surprised that life on Earth shared an underlying genetic code? Or would this be all too familiar?

In 1999, two interstellar radio transmissions known as Cosmic Calls included symbols for each of DNA’s four nucleotides. To date, however, only a single interstellar transmission has encoded any genetic information.

To commemorate the 35th anniversary of the Arecibo message, the artist Joe Davis traveled to Puerto Rico to broadcast the genetic sequence for the large subunit of the ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase oxygenase (RuBisCO) molecule. RuBisCO is the most abundant protein on Earth and plays a major role in converting atmospheric carbon dioxide into energy-rich molecules for plants. To encode this genetic information in a signal, Davis first considered representing each of the 1,434 nucleotides with a two-bit ID (C=00, T=01, A=10, G=11) to create a 2,868-bit sequence representing the RuBisCO molecule. The problem with this, of course, is that there isn’t enough information to use analysis techniques such as those described above by Elliott. Thus, any ETI that received this message would have no way to determine the coding schema used to create the message, which would essentially be an unintelligible mess of data.

For better or worse, it is unlikely that any extraterrestrials will ever receive, much less understand, Davis’s message. None of the stars selected by Davis have been confirmed to host planets, and two of the target stars aren’t likely able to support life even if they do. GJ 83.1 is a flare star, a type of dwarf known for periodic bursts of intense radiation and Teegarden’s star is a red dwarf, a type of star that is widely believed to be too cool to support life unless the planet was so close to the star that it would become tidally locked, meaning that half of the planet would be in perpetual night.

Even if there are intelligent inhabitants around any of the three “RuBisCO stars,” the odds that they would be able to interpret Davis’s message is quite low, given the lack of context or redundancy to correct for message corruption during transit. Davis was the first to admit that his interstellar message was meant more for his fellow passengers on spaceship Earth than extraterrestrials, but this stunt points the way to a promising future for METI (messaging extraterrestrial intelligence).



In the last few decades, biologists have sequenced the genomes for thousands of species, including humans. These are effectively the “blueprints” for the species, but we are only just beginning to learn how to read the code. A sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence may have developed genetic engineering to the point where genomes are the equivalent to an executable computer program, which would allow them to artificially recreate a human and other terrestrial species in their own labs. This assumes that extraterrestrials are made of the same genetic “stuff” as life on Earth, but this may not be as large of an assumption as it first seems.

In some ways, it would almost be more disturbing to make contact with an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization populated by fleshy, mostly hairless hominids than a civilization of eight-eyed cephalopods, but this possibility is not entirely out of the question. As the astrobiologist Charles Cockell has argued, empirical evidence suggests that certain features of life are deterministically driven by physical laws. Extrapolating from this, it is reasonable to believe that “at all levels of its structural hierarchy, alien life is likely to look strangely similar to the life we know on Earth.”

Cockell’s argument is analogous to the case made by pioneering cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky that extraterrestrials are likely to think like us because they are subject to the same basic physical constraints. Minsky argued that we will be able to converse with an extraterrestrial intelligence because they will think like us. If all intelligent creatures are faced with the same fundamental problems (restraints on space, time, and materials) and the methods of intelligence are determined by the nature of the problem at hand, Minsky reasoned that extraterrestrial intelligences will arrive at solutions similar to our own, namely symbolic systems for representing these problems and processes for manipulating those systems that can also be described symbolically.

It would be naïve, of course, to suggest that evolution is totally determined by the laws of physics given the significant and obvious role that chance plays in the trajectory of evolution. For example, research suggests that the probability of an asteroid impact resulting in global cooling, mass extinction, and the subsequent appearance of mammals was “quite low” 66 million years ago. It was sheer cosmic bad luck that the asteroid impacted the relatively small portion of the Earth’s surface that was rich in hydrocarbons and sulfur that ultimately choked the Earth with stratospheric soot and sulfate aerosols. In this case, the site of the asteroid impact changed the history of life on Earth in a way that could never be predicted by deterministic evolutionary laws.

The point is that although the trajectory of evolution isn’t predictable in advance, the variety of species it produces is not boundless. This contradicts the intuitive interpretation of Darwinian evolution, which suggests that natural selection results in a “tendency of species to form varieties” in infinite number.

On the contrary, Cockell argues that “evolution is just a tremendous and exciting interplay of physical principles encoded in genetic material” and “the limited number of these principles ... means that the finale of this process is also restrained and universal.”

Consider, for example, the emergence of cellular life on Earth. Is the cellular form something that we might expect to emerge on an extraterrestrial planet, or would extraterrestrial organisms find a different mode of self-assembly?

Might an extraterrestrial intelligence have a genetic code built from six or more nucleotides? It’s unlikely.

In the 1980s, the biologist David Dreamer used carboxylic acids extracted from the famous Murchison meteorite to demonstrate that these simple molecules would spontaneously form cellular membranes when added to water. According to Cockell, this suggests that the ingredients for cellular life are “strewn throughout the Solar System in carbon-rich rocks,” which means “we might expect the molecules of cellularity to form in any primordial cloud, ready to deliver their cargo of protocell material to the surface of any planet with a waiting abundance of water.” Later experiments demonstrated that meteorites are far from the only source of molecular material that can form cellular membranes, suggesting that this mode of organization is likely common in the universe.

Similar physical laws also limit the possibilities of still more fundamental aspects of biology, such as the structure of DNA. One of the most remarkable features about DNA is that it is composed of only four nucleotides—adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine—that can only combine in very limited ways: adenine pairs with thymine and cytosine pairs with guanine. Is the fact that there are only four nucleotides or that they combine into two base pairs an evolutionary accident? Might an extraterrestrial intelligence have a genetic code built from six or more nucleotides, and might these nucleotides be different from the four that comprise the DNA of life on Earth? This is a possibility, of course, but there are strong reasons to believe that it is unlikely.

Adding more nucleotides to the equation increases the amount of information available to the system and means that smaller molecules can contain the same amount of information as longer molecules in genetic pools with only four nucleotides. The trade-off, of course, is that the percentage of bases that a given nucleotide can link with halves with each base pair added to the system.

For example, in a two-nucleotide system, each base can pair with half of the bases. In a four-nucleotide system, each base can only link with a quarter of the bases, and so on. Thus, Cockell argues, “as you add more bases, it gets more difficult to find ones that are sufficiently dissimilar to make it easy for them to be distinguished when the molecule replicates,” which results in a higher rate of errors. Indeed, computer models of RNA, the molecular interface between DNA and basic proteins, suggest that four nucleotides result in the greatest fitness.

As for the types of base pairs, research using synthetic nucleotides to expand the number of base pairs in the genetic code has demonstrated that swapping these synthetic base pairs out of the normal code or adding them usually produces unstable results. However, organisms such as bacteria that have synthetic nucleotides added into an expanded genetic alphabet have been shown to be stable under stringent laboratory conditions. The results of ongoing experiments with the many possible base pairs suggest that the four base pairs we see in RNA and DNA are optimized to meet the conditions that allow for its replication, but also the preservation of its structure.

If the brain and its cognitive structures are in fact optimized for the embodied experience of the organism, this suggests that the thesis that extraterrestrials will think similarly to us is not so far-fetched after all.



Daniel Oberhaus is a staff writer at Wired, where he covers space exploration and the future of energy. He is the author of Extraterrestrial Languages.

Not much depth to this article, but it came out back in 2013, when this research was starting to shift the narrative. I see this article as indicative of the realization on the part of geneticists and a growing segment of the general populace that the history of the planet and its people may be a lot longer and more intricately involved than has been previously admitted.

I think it is also a tacit admission that Tolkien's LOTR series and his research in the record storage facilities of Oxford may have uncovered real histories of ancient populations otherwise lost to common knowledge.

Middle Earth on planet Earth: Prehistoric human interbreeding created ‘Lord of the Rings world’

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/atta...6&d=1581693939

A prehistoric ‘Lord of the Rings-type world’ once existed on Earth with a number of different human species interbreeding and populating the globe at the same time, it has been claimed.

Extensive interbreeding between members of ancient human-like groups is thought to have produced a number of different sub-species living across Europe and Asia between 30,000 and 50,000 years ago. Scientists say new genome sequences from two extinct human relatives – Neanderthals and Denisovans – suggest these archaic groups bred with anatomically-modern humans, and each other, more extensively than previously thought.

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/atta...7&d=1581693952

The findings, unveiled at a meetings at London’s Royal Society this week, suggest interbreeding could go some way to explaining the genetic diversity of today’s humans.

One geneticist compared the findings with the fictional world of Middle Earth in JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which sees mythical hominid species – such as dwarves and elves – living side-by-side.

Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London who attended the meeting but was not involved with the research, said afterwards: ‘What it begins to suggest is that we’re looking at a Lord of the Rings-type world — that there were many hominid populations.’

Humans who originate outside of Africa owe two per cent of their DNA to Neanderthals, while Oceania populations – such as Australian Aborigines and Papua New Guineans – got four per cent of their genome from Denisovans breeding with their ancestors.

Engaging the same theme as above, in 2008 the discovery of these fossils led to another evocation of LOTR and the idea of a multiplicity of human types coexisting in the same time-frame. Given such diverse origins, and in relation to our topic in this thread, there is some cultural evidence for stark differences between people, which could lead to very firm ideas and stereotypes over time and across space.

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/atta...9&d=1581695409

Were “Hobbits” Human?
Debate rages over an Indonesian fossil find

By Guy Gugliotta

In 2003, researchers excavating a limestone cave on the remote Indonesian island of Flores made an extraordinary discovery: the 18,000-year-old bones of a woman whose skull was less than one-third the size of our own.

Modern humans were already living throughout the Old World during her time—yet she was physically very different from them. The researchers, led by paleoanthropologist Peter Brown and archaeologist Michael Morwood, both of Australia's University of New England, concluded that the woman represented a previously undiscovered species of archaic human that had survived for thousands of years after the Neanderthals had died out.

They named her Homo floresiensis and nicknamed her the "Hobbit," after the diminutive villagers from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy. The team has since recovered bones from as many as nine such people, all about a yard tall, the most recent of whom lived about 12,000 years ago.

The Hobbits of Flores created an uproar among anthropologists, causing them to question assumptions about evolution and human origins that had held sway for more than half a century. Some agree that the "Hobbits" are a distinct species. But others, such as anthropologist Robert Martin of Chicago's Field Museum, say the bones belong to small Homo sapiens—perhaps people who suffered from microcephaly, a condition in which the brain fails to grow to normal size. Five years after the initial discovery, says Martin, "nobody's budging an inch."


Some critics say that it would have been impossible for a hominid with a brain the size of an orange to make the sophisticated tools found at Ling Bua Cave—let alone hunt with them—and that they must have been crafted by modern humans. But supporters of the separate species hypothesis modeled the shape and structure of the Hobbit brain and say it could have made the tools.

When Smithsonian anthropologist Matthew Tocheri and other researchers analyzed the Hobbitt wrist, they found a primitive, wedge-shaped trapezoid bone common to great apes and early hominids but not to Neanderthals and modern humans. That fits a theory that Hobbits are less closely related to Homo sapiens than to Homo erectus—the human ancestor that is thought to have died out 100,000 years ago. Morwood has found crude Homo erectus-type stone tools on Flores that may be 840,000 years old.

The skeptics retort that disease is a more likely explanation for the wrist bones. A study this year speculated that the Flores people could have suffered from hypothyroidism, a form of cretinism found relatively frequently in modern Indonesia that, the researchers say, could also produce deformed, primitive-appearing wrists.

Rick Potts, director of the Smithsonian's Human Origins Program, who once doubted that the Hobbits were a separate species, says he's changed his mind: "Flores was this wing in the building of human evolution that we didn't know about. There is no reason that 800,000 years of experimentation could not evolve a small but advanced brain."

And then there is the NatGeo version.

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/atta...0&d=1581695659

New Fossils Hint 'Hobbit' Humans Are Older Than Thought
Teeth and bones reveal a likely ancestor of the famous tiny humans found in Indonesia.

BY ADAM HOFFMAN

FOR THE PAST decade, a fossil human relative about the size of a toddler has loomed large in the story of our evolutionary history. This mysterious creature—found on the Indonesian island of Flores—has sparked a heated debate about its origins, including questions over its classification as a unique species.

But now, a scattering of teeth and bone may at last unlock the mystery of the “hobbits,” also known as Homo floresiensis.

The 700,000-year-old human remains are the first found outside Liang Bua cave, the site on Flores that yielded the original hobbit fossils. The much older samples show intriguing similarities to H. floresiensis, including their small size, and so provide the best evidence yet of a potential hobbit ancestor.

“Since the hobbit was found, there have been two major hypotheses concerning its ancestry,” says Gerritt van den Bergh, an archaeologist at the University of Wollongong in Australia and a contributor to the work.

According to one theory, H. floresiensis is a dwarfed form of Homo erectus, an ancient human relative that lived in East Asia and parts of Africa until about 143,000 years ago. But other researchers think the hobbits evolved from even earlier, smaller-bodied hominins such as Homo habilis or Australopithecus.

“These new findings suggest that Homo floresiensis is indeed a dwarfed form of Homo erectus from Java, a small group of which must have gotten marooned on Flores and evolved in isolation,” van den Bergh says.

The fossils also dispel any lingering theories that the hobbits were a form of diseased Homo sapiens, with smaller heads and statures due to developmental conditions such as Down syndrome or microcephaly, the birth defect linked to the modern Zika outbreak.

Second Site
Archaeologists found the first hobbit fossils while excavating Liang Bua cave in 2003. The ancient human relative stood about 3.5 feet (1.1 meters) tall and weighed around 75 pounds (35 kilograms)—and yet it was a full-grown adult.

Further work at Liang Bua cave revealed that the hobbits made stone tools and may have had similarly handy neighbors on the island of Sulawesi. But without any additional remains, their evolutionary history has been shrouded in mystery.

The latest excavation site, called Mata Menge, is located in the So’a Basin of central Flores, approximately 46 miles (74 kilometers) southeast of Liang Bua.

Since 2010, the team has found thousands of stone tools as well as the fossils of small elephants, giant rats, komodo dragons, and crocodiles. When they expanded their excavation in 2014, the team at last unearthed hominin skeletal remains, including a jaw fragment, six teeth, and a small piece of cranial bone.

“Initially, we thought we were dealing with a juvenile mandible, because it was so tiny—even smaller than the Homo floresiensis mandibles,” says van den Bergh. “But after a CT scan, we were surprised to see that the root cavity was fully developed, indicating that it was an adult specimen.”

Shocking Age
While four of the teeth came from the same adult as the jaw fragment, a closer inspection revealed that the remaining two were “milk teeth,” each belonging to a separate infant. The team then used statistical techniques to compare the jaw and teeth bones with corresponding fossils in other species such as H. habilis, H. erectus, and the original H. floresiensis.

Their analysis, published today in Nature, indicates that the Mata Menge fossils most closely resemble H. erectus, though they are considerably smaller in size, and they have many common structural features with H. floresiensis.

“The fossils are very similar, but the Mata Menge fossils are slightly more primitive compared to H. floresiensis from Liang Bua,” writes Yousuke Kaifu, an archaeologist at the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo, Japan, and lead author of the study.

To determine the age of the fossils, another research team took samples of the surrounding sediment layers and used a highly precise dating technique called argon-argon dating, which measures the decay of radioactive argon over time. They also isolated a tooth fragment and used a combination of dating methods based on the decay of uranium.

Their results, also published today in Nature, show that these fossils are about 700,000 years old—making them the oldest hominins to be found on the island.

“I kind of expected this, but was shocked when I first saw the fossils and realized the fact that such small people were around as early as 700,000 years ago, when large-bodied Homo erectus were around on the continental parts of Asia,” writes Kaifu.

Ancestral Bones
Although the archaeologists can’t yet be certain that the older hominin remains belong to the same species as H. floresiensis, the analysis suggests that the Mata Menge dwellers are the hobbits’ likely ancestors. This categorization is further supported by the stone tools from Mata Menge, which bear a striking resemblance to those found at the Liang Bua site.

The authors note that other stone tools have been found on Flores dating back as early as one million years ago, around the same time H. erectus was living on nearby Java.

Combining all the evidence, a chronology begins to unfold in which H. erectus settled on Flores and then shrank to the hobbit size seen at Mata Menge and Liang Bua.

“I think that they’ve provided very good evidence for why it has some characteristics that are suggestive of Homo floresiensis, and that Homo erectus was the likely ancestor coming from Southeast Asia,” says Rick Potts, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Human Origins Program at the National Museum of Natural History.

Some skeptics may contend that 300,000 years is an unreasonably small window for Homo erectus to reduce itself to hobbit size.

But while there’s no other indication of such rapid changes in our hominin ancestors, Potts says there are recorded case studies of other mammals that have become small quickly in response to limited resources or a lack of predation on an island—a process known as island dwarfing. For example, the red deer on the island of Jersey shrank to one-sixth of its original size over just 6,000 years.

As the team continues to excavate Mata Menge, they hope to find more skeletal remains that could provide a more robust description of these human relatives, as well as older fossils that might help connect the developmental dots and form a coherent time line for this strange branch on our evolutionary tree.

“I think of Flores as being its own little laboratory of human evolution that will ultimately allow us to understand how the body evolved in response to environmental stresses,” says Potts. “It may take years to develop, but I think it’s a tremendous opportunity.”

When I really look deep at any life form I always marvel at the genius of the intelligence that created it. But I have never attributed the life form types to a source creator. Since childhood I have fantasized about what sort of being could have come up with all these forms. And I have never considered these life forms to be accidental either. They were designed by a group of intelligent beings long, long ago.

The source creator created life, the one and only life, without form but fully functional. The forms were added later. Then this life was organized and toyed with; beings of great talent then explored all the various forms that could support it. And when they were done they recorded their inventions in a molecule that could hold the basic templates: DNA.

It is impossible for the DNA molecule to spontaneously happen by chance, not in a million billion times the age of the universe. It is so obviously engineered that its function, if we could understand it, would uncover secrets of the true workings of the universe, and perhaps even reveal the identity of what we would or will eventually call the progenitor race.

An Ancient Race whose art is the life forms of today.

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Posted by Ernie Nemeth

An Ancient Race whose art is the life forms of today.

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https://projectavalon.net/forum4/atta...1&d=1581699223

Real talk.

I don't find the nascent science of our times to be inimical to this idea at all. And I do see these differences, that are ancient in nature, as probably a part of our cultural evolutionary history as well, as disparate ideals of supremacy come from in-group and out-group dynamics, which lead to the formation of societal institutions and mores that support the cohesion of the group.

If we intuitively understand the true dynamics at work, but that is at odds with the scientific interpretation, then how can complication and convolution add to our comprehension? Put another way, if we don't have the right fundamentals, the right foundation, how can we build a sound understanding of what is our true history or the way forward to a healthy future?

Science talks about DNA as if they understand it, but they do not. Even with the correlations between this gene and that expression, these are only surface features of something far more intricate and deep. DNA, as we understand it today merely codes for the hundred or so proteins. But a protein is not alive. So where does the life part get coded in?

I guess that's more than one question, isn't it?

I'm cross posting this video from my Evergreen thread at the request of Bill, who along with myself is curious to get Mark's reaction to it (and anyone else's for that matter!).

It's about 2 and a half hour long, but well worth every second. The time goes by fast - it's fascinating.

For those that aren't familiar with the events that took place in 2017 on the Evergreen campus, it goes like this in a nutshell:

The day of absence, as it's called, is an Evergreen tradition where the black staff and faculty willingly stay off campus for a day (i think it's just a day?) to emphasize their contributions to the school.

The problem arose when it was required for whites to stay off campus. A professor, Bret Weinstein, took issue with the requirement of whites to stay off the campus vis a vis the free-will decision of blacks to stay away. The madness that follows has to be seen to be believed.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=xq4Y87idawk

Hey. Thanks for sharing. I'm about an hour into it. Here is an interesting series of interchanges so far:

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The professor says its a reaction to the real inequities that are experienced in the outside world. 48:00. Rogan calls it misdirected. The professor says the colleges can't defend themselves. Rogan says it is happening to colleges all over the country and its pretty unprecedented. "Ideological mobs" have been operationalized, stemming from Postmodernism which has led to what the professor called absurdities.

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The professor then calls this phenomenon, "The Postmodern Bully" and states that it is so new, nobody knows what to do with it. Earlier discussion sees the professor explaining the social justice warriors as being 2 groups in 1. One, people who want equity. Two, people who want revenge.

The professor calls this, "The Era of Peak Bull****".

I understand his perspective because I am experiencing it now in a sense. I am engaged in criminal justice reform at the local level and the progressive activists in town are calling the conservatives intent upon keeping the system intact and retaining control more reliable than me as an outsider, coming in, seeking reform. It turns into upside down mirror world when ideology is in control.

I understand and am familiar with both sides of this equation.

There is an issue of wanting to empower these college kids, and then there is the other side of things where you want to prepare them for the world outside of the colleges, which is a world still based upon white supremacy. The colleges are incubating false realities, where these extreme perspectives are flourishing and, because of the Age of the Internet and phones, videos and all kinds of social media posts are revealing these things to the rest of the world in ways that have never been possible before. It is like watching the sausage being made in the kitchen as they work through their ideologies and discover that they are not workable out in the real world.

We are in an era that is brand new in this country. And people are trying to figure out how to move forward into the future seeking equitable opportunities for all people. And there will always be extremists in this situation. I remember being in college myself and being exposed to extremist views, like the 5% Nation, the Nation of Islam, the Black Moors, Hebrew Israelites, Wa****aw nation and more, all intent upon seeking separation from the "White Devil" and creating black nations or "homelands" in America.

I, of course, knew of the NOI and Marcus Garvey based upon my being raised by parents who were civil rights activists throughout their lives, but these other groups were new to me and I studied them then and actually incorporated some of those views into my Sci-Fi/Fantasy novel, Temple of the Sky in which a world where Africa is off-limits to technology - made so by the Eloheem Anunnaki - and continent-spanning cities cover the rest of the planet, which is the final battleground for a galaxy spanning space opera that incorporates albino Illuminati princes, journeys to multiple dimensions, genetic engineering of white people, psychic powers and reincarnation.

Growing up the way I did, on military bases around the world, I experienced a diverse surroundings from the youngest ages, which was not the case for most Americans during the 1960s, 70s and 80s. So I knew the reality of living around white people, which was very difficult back then, for those of us who integrated white spaces. I don't know if I've ever shared that here but entire classes would taunt me with racial epithets, I was chased home from school, fights on paper routes and playgrounds, adults coming after me cursing me out for stepping on their lawns walking home from school, not being allowed in my friends homes, yards or pools, ad infinitum.

When my family lived off-base in Illinois and Oklahoma, those were the worst experiences of this type of racism. It was not at all like that on the bases in the DOD school system as racism was literally illegal and would result in loss of rank, money and potentially a career if engaged in directly. But there are many black kids who go to these colleges and this is their first experience of white people. Living with them, getting to know them as individuals, learning that people are truly people. When real knowledge trumps ideology, we see real growth. That is what ALL OF THIS will result in. For this nation as a whole.

What these students are doing stands in counterpoint to what they see out in the world around them with the Proud Boys, the Tiki Torch crew of White Nationalists, the known biases of corporate America and the workforce and the substantial number of states where melanated skin is a very rare sight indeed which many view as hostile to diversity. It is a necessary discussion and dissection of the pros and cons, of the extremes, as is the rest of the discussion on the opposite side of the political spectrum, that this nation needs to have and that the world is experiencing by proxy.

Ok, this was kind of rambling and I'm not sure if I have addressed what y'all were interested in discussing. Do I need to watch more or have I captured the gist of the entire video?

Mark i know you're a busy dude so i appreciate you taking the time to watch some of the video and respond so thoughtfully.

What troubled me wasn't that the students were in search of some form of equity, it was that they seemed to be seeking power masquerading as equity. In other words, they wanted to reverse the historical roles of blacks and whites, not create a sense of fairness. And a large group of those students were actually white!:)

Hey how can I get ahold of this book of yours?

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Posted by Mike

What troubled me wasn't that the students were in search of some form of equity, it was that they seemed to be seeking power masquerading as equity. In other words, they wanted to reverse the historical roles of blacks and whites, not create a sense of fairness. And a large group of those students were actually white!:)

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I did not look at the videos of the students so I was not aware of that. But I'm not surprised. I do have thoughts about it, though. First though, how did it trouble you and why, Mike?

The Millennials and Gen-Z have grown up and are maturing in an era where multiculturalism has formed their very base perceptions of the world. Television, videos, music beginning in the 80s but intensifying in the 90s and especially the 00s have presented them with a world that does not exist, one in which it seems like the entire nation is diverse, where black and brown folks exist equitably with white folks. The commercials, the movies, the music have shaped their view of the world, not to mention having a black president for 8 years in the form of one Barack Hussein Obama. Still speaking in crass generalizations, while "they" knew that racism existed, because their youths, the late 90s and the entire 00s, were well within the era of political correctness and movements like the Tea Party and white "nationalist" organizations were seen as the extreme fanatical edge of politics, they had no idea that racism was so pervasive in this nation.

And so, Drumpf and his election, the seemingly swelling ranks of organizations dedicated to white supremacy and nationalism, the intensifying movement proselytized by racist pamphlets and banners being placed on college campuses - which the campus in my town, Texas State University, has been at the forefront of - has awakened them to the reality that older generations have never lost sight of. That we are not in any way "post-racial" and that what some call hate and others call protecting the white race from dilution and extinction, has given rise to a pervasive fear in many that the world as they knew it is gone forever. So they want to protect what's left by building walls and passing legislation to limit immigration that further "browns and blacks" the USA. For their children, creating, in effect, a neo-apartheid form of governance and minority rule in this country. Whites as "protected class".

But for the babies, these young college students, they feel betrayed. They have lived in a different world, a media bubble, that was popped quite abruptly.

They believe in a different kind of world than that we currently exist in, apparently. The depths of their perceptive betrayal and the extremities of their responses, are, perhaps, exemplified - by some few - in these videos.

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Posted by Mike

Hey how can I get ahold of this book of yours?

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I left a link to my amazon site up in the post above. :handshake:

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Posted by Ernie Nemeth

If we intuitively understand the true dynamics at work, but that is at odds with the scientific interpretation, then how can complication and convolution add to our comprehension? Put another way, if we don't have the right fundamentals, the right foundation, how can we build a sound understanding of what is our true history or the way forward to a healthy future?

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What do you suggest are the right fundamentals, the right foundation?

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Posted by Ernie Nemeth

Science talks about DNA as if they understand it, but they do not. Even with the correlations between this gene and that expression, these are only surface features of something far more intricate and deep. DNA, as we understand it today merely codes for the hundred or so proteins. But a protein is not alive. So where does the life part get coded in?

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Is your understanding greater than those who spend hours a day studying genetics? I'm afraid your comments seem like a further erosion of the expertise of those who seek higher understanding by delving deep into the known science and accumulated knowledge of humankind. I agree, there are deeper understandings to be had. I also agree that there are suppressed sciences, ancient understandings of the nature of the material, psychological and spiritual aspects of the greater reality that some are aware of, but most are not. But a blanket rejection of science as we understand it sounds more like a celebration of a cult of ignorance or, worse yet, an arrogant, cultural rejection of our nascent understanding of the science of creation that does not support the advancement of Terran humankind as a species.

And, it is a discipline in continuous progress. Growth. Addition to the wellspring of knowledge that has been accumulated across the centuries.

I don't see where such a perspective is useful in any discussion as it is a blanket rejection of rationality based upon opinion, rather than observed knowledge.