Hunting the First Hominid Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Hunting the First Hominid - Essay Example on a Y.† The explicit pathway of evolution can be traced only through fossil records of extinct species located by paleoanthropologists, who track hominids backward in time. The emergence of the first hominid is confirmed by radiometric dates to be a period between 5 million and 7 million years ago. As all early hominids are African, it is also accepted that the First Hominid lived in Africa. However, finding out the definitive new adaptation that transformed a particular primitive species into the First Hominid is difficult. Based on essential hominid adaptation, it may be assumed that the identification of the First Hominid may be founded on the following unique hominid characteristics, which are key features that differentiate apes from hominids : hominids are essentially bipedal; hominids are apelike creatures that have lost their sexual dimorphism; hominids have thick dental enamel; Hominids are hand-graspers or manipulators, with long, opposable thumbs and big toes that are closely aligned with the remaining short, straight toes. On this basis, a description of the First Hominid may read like this: â€Å"An ape-brained and small-canined creature, with dental enamel of unknown thickness. Large if male but smaller if female. May be spotted climbing adeptly in trees or walking bipedally on the ground. Last seen in Africa between 5 million and 7 million years ago.† There are two contenders for the title of First Hominid. In 2001, Yohannes Haile-Selassie of the University of California, Berkeley, discovered a specimen in Ethiopian sediments between 5.2 million and 5.8 million years old, named Ardipithecus ramidus kadabba, which means â€Å"root ape.† The specimen includes more than 20 teeth, pieces of two left humeri, a partial ulna, a partial clavicle, a half of one finger bone and a complete toe bone. The second contender is the 6 million-year-old Orrorin tugenensis, or â€Å"original man,† found by a joint French-Kenyan team headed by Brigitte Senut of the

The Chinese Room Argument Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

The Chinese Room Argument - Research Paper Example Strong AI is intended to try and be like human in their cognition or even supersede him in their capability to solve problems. However, John Searle argues against the idea, he says that consciousness is an emergent property of a physical system that is only caused by a particular kind of physical process, and it is absurd to relate consciousness with a proper behavior. He further maintains that it is not worth thinking that consciousness is there, just because you have the right behavior. Computers are not conscious because they behave in the correct way, because the physical processes involved in human mind and computers are different. According to him, the basic physics and processes are everything. A person is likely to think that other people are conscious not because they operate as you do, but because it is evidently known that the physical performance of their brains are basically the same: and the same common kinds of physical effects occur in their brains as yours, therefore, the same emergent properties can be expected. My opinion is totally in contrast with Searle’s view that seems to divide things into two perspectives, that is the physical objects and abstraction of a physical system that also appears to be different in all. According to my understanding, the distinction between different kinds of properties is inconsistent. In human beings and other living things, emergent properties are caused by the processes within them as it is in the artificially made objects. The only difference here is artificial, but in real sense the emergent property is general to both AI and the human brains. It is clear in response which includes the range of actions made by artificial objects, organisms or systems in relation to the environment in which they exist. The surrounding could include other systems, other organisms or even the physical environment. This response is