On human evolution, human race, and Godwin's Law: My information is from Wikipedia and from a general amateur interest in the subject. (I find that Wikipedia i

On human evolution, human race, and Godwin's Law: My information is from Wikipedia and from a general amateur interest in the subject. (I find that Wikipedia is reliable when you stay away from the politicized and widely-known subjects.) For knuckle-walking or its absence in early hominids, see http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v410/n6826/full/410324b0.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v410/n6826/full/410324b... -- which admittedly only establishes the possibility, not the certainty, that the human-chimpanzee MRCA did not knuckle-walk -- as well as http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327213.700-humans-may-have-learned-to-walk-in-the-trees.html http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327213.700-humans-ma... and the work of Tracy Kivell of the Max Planck Institute. (Annoyingly, both these sites are behind paywalls.) The obscure field of forensic anthropology has a fair amount of information about the dichotomy between Iberians and Upper Paleolithic survivors (Cro-Magnons, plus Neandertal genes if the two subspecies of H. sapiens were inter-fertile). However, the whole question of human races and human differentiation in general is anathema in this day and age because of Hitler -- although for some reason social engineering is (mostly) not anathema because of Stalin. The result of this is that somewhere in the back of everyone's mind is the tripartate division into "Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid" of the 19th and early 20th centuries, which is not correct. I know much more about Europe than about the rest of the world; but Europe was first peopled by Cro-Magnons, who evolved "Race" and "species" are not the same thing in this context. I don't want to get into semantic games, but the difference between an Iberian (dark-white, small, long-headed, fine-boned) and a Germanic or UP Survivor (pinkish-white skin, tall, broad-faced, 'uncouth', large-boned, broad-headed) is plainly visible, and the differences between either of these and, say, the mainstream Chinese type (broad, stocky, somewhere between these two in height) or the small "Bushmen" type (related to the Iberians, but with a different type of hair) or the large, "archaic" "Bantu" type of Africa. While there seem to be some correlations of race with temperament, intelligence, social fluency, and so on, these are generally not very strong, and individuals can generally overcome them -- and as a Catholic, I'm not about to start advocating apartheid or genocide or anything _regardless_ of what the genetic studies say. For a little more on Iberian spread in Europe, see Stephen Oppenheimer's _The Origins of the British_; Iberian or pre-Iberian descent tends to correlate with mtDNA haplogroup H and Y-DNA haplogroup R1a and its relatives; but I'm afraid that most of what I've figured out here has been my own piecings together, and I have more urgent things to do than to write a book on the subject. And it's not Godwin's Law if Hitler was actually a factor. (http://xkcd.com/261/ http://xkcd.com/261/) I don't have a dog in the fight of evolutionism versus creationism, but if I had to pick an "ism" I'd pick the former. I'm a Catholic, but I'm certainly not a Creationist -- and I find evolution to be thoroughly consistent with the style of a God Who, as Dawkins lamented, couldn't even be bothered to tell his followers to wash their hands before eating. (However, I find it troubling that "posting something that may be an oblique challenge to my beliefs" is an adequate criterion for a down-vote.) Regardless, I'll say one thing: this comment has taught me a lot about the contents of "what you can't say" (http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html) on Hacker News. (Yes, that was a sneer, but I hope a sneer can be forgiven me after getting as badly flamed as I just did. And perhaps it'll inspire some of my interlocutors and down-modders to reconsider their beliefs...?) Edit: I have another comment in response on my position on global warming, so look for that as well as this one.