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Richard Dawkins: There Never Was a First Homo Sapiens

04 min 28 sec

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Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins explains a thought experiment imagining every generation of a single ancestor back millions of years. He argues that because of the gradual process of evolution, there was no single point when Homo erectus became Homo sapiens.
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01 hr 35 min 57 sec

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Previous FORAtv comments:

mbucari1

Posted: 01.10.12, 12:27 PM

@Haamed Hosseini I'm afraid you're mistaking. Within the Recent African Origin theory, one theory of H sapien's phylogeny is that H erectus and H ergaster are the same species. Under this theory, H erectus migrated out of africa. That population didn't speciate, and remained intact until its extinction over 1Ma later. The remaining H erectus speciated, giving rise to H heidelbergensis which in turn gave rise to H sapiens. H sapiens then migrated out of Africa, competed with H erectus, and won.

jaranda +
FORA.tv Staff

Posted: 01.05.12, 12:17 PM

Some Facts about Richard Dawkins - In 2006, Dawkins founded The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Science and Reason. The purpose of this foundation is to “support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and suffering.” - He is well known for his views and support of Darwinism, atheism, and secular humanism. - He was raised in an orthodox Anglican home, but has said that by the age of 16, he had lost all religious faith. - As an undergraduate at Oxford, Dawkins studied biology under Nobel Prize winner Niki Tinbergen. - In 2010, he appeared with fellow scientists, Stephen Hawking, James Dyson, Paul Nurse, and Jim Al-Khalili, in The Genius of Britain , a television series highlighting major British scientific achievements throughout history.

Haamed Hosseini

Posted: 01.01.12, 03:46 PM

This clip really questions Mr Dawkins' knowledge: 1. homoerectus was not our ancestor; they were our rival cousins; 2. there was a single homosapian who is our ancestor and scientists call him scientific Adam : see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GegZmWO1Cr8 (national geography project) I am sure Dawkins knows about this but he prefers to lie! All human beings share a single mutational mark on their y chromosome; the very specific mutation that marked the beginning of homosapians could not happen in more than one individual case at the same time. On the other had, Islam has paid attention to this issue to base its anti-racist doctrine; never in Qur'an Adam is seen as the first human created out of dirt. the story is about how god decides to give autonomy to one of his already existing creatures (mutation towards greater levels of self awareness and consciousness); Qur'an unlike bible claims all mankind are created from one person from whom was created his partner (his daughter!?) and then from the couple came men and women spreading on the earth; so all humans share one single parent (4:1 - O mankind, realize the rules of your nurturer, who created you from one soul/person and created from it its mate and dispersed from both of them many men and women.)

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