Richard Dawkins: "Who Was the First Human?" (ForaTv)

(ForaTv) Complete video at: http://fora.tv/conference/new_yorker_festival_2011

Biologist and author Richard Dawkins presents a thought experiment to explain human origins. Following each generation backwards across millions of years of evolution, Dawkins shows why no species -- including homo sapiens -- can truly be said to have a "first" ancestor.

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What Is Reality? Richard Dawkins talks with Henry Finder. Presented in collaboration with the New Yorker Festival, on October 1, 2011.

Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and the author of the Times best-selling books The Selfish Gene, The God Delusion, and The Greatest Show on Earth. His new book, The Magic of Reality, an illustrated science guide for adults and young people, comes out in October. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Royal Society of Literature.

Henry Finder is the editorial director of The New Yorker.

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[Prophiscient]

- "However, how does he knows there is no First person????"

Because - as he explained - all children are very much like their parents. There was never a first modern human who lived like Tarzan of the apes. Children and parents are always the same species, but over multiple generations things gradually change, so pointing out the "first" of a new species is arbitrary.

If we could see all our ancestors, it would be hard to tell who the first "modern" human was, because the parents were similar.

[TheNeverborn]

@MrBoomSonic Yes. Evolutionary theory predicts that there was no "first" person, and modern genetics confirms it. The current consensus is that the population of hominids from which modern humans get our genes was never smaller than about 10,000 individuals. If we did descend from only two individuals in the last several thousand years, our DNA would tell the story. It tells a completely different story, ergo Adam and Eve as described in Genesis are a myth.

[mouthyweasel]

From a fish to slobbering religious lunatic in only 185 million generations? Sweet.

[Casshyr]

@pulp7theman we started as rocks? wow jeez, i have studied evolution theory for years and i have never seen one scientist tells me that. I don't know what theory you are quoting from, but we don't evolve from rocks.

[pulp7theman]

Another book? and he complains about money grubbing preachers? lets go all the way back we all started as rocks--and that's pretty much were his followers are today LOL