[SolarCross]

As an addition to my last post and as an answer to your question in the your opening post "Why does the Bible mention unicorns?" consider this...

Animals with two horns are commonplace: bovines, sheep, antelope, rhinocerous but for people in the time of the Hebrew's enslavement in Babylon and in that region animals with just one horn never happen but we know from fossil records that, although rarer than two horned animals, animals with a singular horn have existed in pre-history, such as the Elasmotherium sibiricum already mentioned in this thread. People today are not the first people to go digging and find weird bones of animals they had never suspected existed. Likely legends of dragons began as ancient people happened upon dinosaur bones. See ancient people are not stupid they can do their own kind of speculative science so when they find a 6 foot long wing bone of a pteradon whilst digging out a well or a buildings foundation they can quite rationally observe and deduce some things from it. It appears to be from a reptile because the bones have some reptilian characteristics, it looks like the bone was part of a wing indicating the animal in question can fly and it is really, really big indicating the animals is, well, big, much bigger than any reptile they ever suspected could exist. They of course had no means at their disposal to judge the age of the bone as techniques for that had not been developed yet so for all they could guess specimens of this fantastic and rather scary animal are still around today.. somewhere.. but where? It can fly, they know, so they look at the sky searching for signs of this animal and then one night see a shooting star, a meteorite, flash in the heavens, put two and two together and get a fire breathing dragon. Now enters the story teller... Story tellers are always trying to make compelling stories and searching for interesting elements with which to make a story and what could be more interesting that a giant flying reptile that breathes fire like a shooting star? So from a single random anomalous bone find innumerable entertaining fictions are spun of fire breathing dragons as big a house who feast on virgins and hoard gold.

For the Hebrews and the old Testament unicorn the same thing happened. My own dramatisation follows:

Jew 1: Hey so we got the flood and all the animals aboard the ark and.. well now what? How does the story progress from there?

Jew 2: What if.. a wizard disguises himself as a goat to get on board the boat? To save himself from the flood?

Jew 1: Hmm.. I dunno, we'd have to rewrite a lot of the preceding chapters to properly bring him in?

Jew 2: So? We rewrite a little, no problem.. it could be really good, look he... he sneaks aboard the boat and then falls in love with Noah's daughter and then...

Jew 3 (bursting into the studio from the market): Hey did you hear the news! Some old farmer up north in Ardra Province was digging a new latrine when he found the most incredible skull. It is quite like a horse, they say, but bigger and.. get this.. it has a single horn growing right out of the centre of its forehead!

Jew 1: Wow, I have never heard of any animal having a single horn like that. What is it called?

Jew 3: No one knows, no one has ever seen such a thing, I think. The man that found it is calling it a unicorn because.. well.. it has one horn...

Jew 2: Alright whatever, let's get back to work, so there is this wizard and he covets Noah's daughter..

Jew 1: Wait a minute! I just had an idea, this ark.. right.. is meant to save all the animals from the flood but what if some animals didn't make it? They would drown and never be heard of again, just bones in the earth after the flood recedes... Like that unicorn.

Jew 3: Oh yeah! I like it. It sort of underscores the importance of getting on the ark by showing what happens to those that didn't make it. And it ties into real events like that weird skull that the farmer found. And of course if the animal didn't make it, it can't be an animal that people still see today or it breaks the suspension of disbelief.

Jew 1: Well it's a nice embellishment. I think we should put it in.

Jew 2: But my wizard!

Jew 1: No we are going with the unicorn, forget the wizard.

[Hindsite]

The video explains most of it well enough. Thanks for your speculation anyway.

[Drlee]

The unicorn’s grave was rediscovered near a temple in the capital Pyongyang, with a rectangular rock engraved with the words ‘Unicorn Lair’ at its entrance, according to the report.

Unicorns could read?

And we killed them? Pathetic. Just Pathetic.

[Rei Murasame]

I would say through error. However, that is only an educated guess.

Okay:

[...] A compelling candidate human adaptive allele to emerge from genome-wide scans is a derived coding variant of the Ectodysplasin A (EDA) receptor (EDAR), EDARV370A (370A) (Sabeti et al., 2007; Grossman et al., 2010). Computational fine-mapping of the selection signal and the restricted occurrence of 370A in East Asian and Native American populations have led to suggestions that 370A was selected in Asia (Bryk et al., 2008). In support of this hypothesis, 370A was shown to associate with increased scalp hair thickness and incisor tooth shoveling in multiple East Asian populations (Fujimoto et al., 2008a, 2008b; Kimura et al., 2009; Park et al., 2012). However, because association studies quantify correlation rather than causation, it remains to be ascertained whether 370A is the genetic change driving the observed phenotypes.

The biochemical properties of 370A support the possibility that the variant directly causes the associated phenotypes. Structural models predict that V370A lies in the EDAR Death Domain (DD) required for interaction with the downstream signal transducer EDARADD(Sabeti et al., 2007). Moreover, overexpression of 370A has been reported to up-regulate downstream NFκB signaling in vitro relative to 370V (Bryk et al., 2008; Mou et al., 2008). This finding suggested that a pre-existing mouse model, in which the ancestral 370V allele is overexpressed, might provide insight into 370A’s phenotypic consequences (Headon and Overbeek, 1999; Mou et al., 2008). Indeed, transgenic mice expressing multiple copies of 370V have thicker hair shafts as seen in humans with the 370A allele (Fujimoto et al., 2008a, 2008b; Mou et al., 2008). In addition, these animals exhibit increased mammary gland branching, enlarged mammary glands and hyperplastic sebaceous and Meibomian glands that secrete hydrophobic films as a barrier to water loss in the skin and eyes, respectively (Chang et al., 2009). These latter phenotypes led to the proposal that the 370A variant may have been selected in response to cold and arid environmental conditions (Chang et al., 2009).

[...]

To estimate the allele’s geographic and temporal origin, we performed more than one million spatially explicit demic forward simulations modeling the appearance and spread of 370A in Asia (Itan et al., 2009) (Supplemental Information S1). We used approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) (Beaumont et al., 2002) to compare simulated to observed allele frequencies and to estimate key evolutionary and demographic parameters (Fagundes et al., 2007; Itan et al., 2009; Ray et al., 2010). This analysis estimated the 370A allele originated in central China (Figure 1B) between 13,175 and 39,575 years BP (95% confidence interval (CI)), with a mode of 35,300 years BP and a median of 30,925 years BP. The estimated selection coefficient has a 95% CI between 0.030 and 0.186, with a mode of 0.122, and a median of 0.114 (Figures S2–4, Table S1–S4, and Supplemental Information S1).

[...]

Amazing, I know! Evolution is a thing.



Blatantly obvious walking refutations of creationism are walking around on the planet. I am a walking blatantly obvious refutation!

[anasawad]

What does a picture of Asian girls have to do with proving evolution ?

[Rei Murasame]

That phenotype is the most visibly obvious testament to evolution in humans, because it blatantly is an adaptation to climatic conditions and a pretty comprehensive one at that. So when creationists are literally having this argument with me, the whole argument takes on a kind of hilarious and surrealist dimensionality.

Look back at the conversation.

They cannot argue that 'god created East Asians different because he knew where they'd live', because that adaptation is obviously a migratory effect, they simply have no argument.

[anasawad]

Since all skin colors are adoption to climate, isn't look at the mirror more of an evidence >?

[Rei Murasame]

I have no idea why you are contesting what I'm saying here. Just accept what I say.

Telling Hindsite to look at his European self in the mirror is not as fun an argument as telling him to deal with the fact that Asians look like Asians for an evolutionary reason. Only when that happens, does it become hilarious, because then he is forced to try and explain to me why I don't look like his people do, without the use of the Neodarwinian synthesis. It is of course impossible for him to do that, therefore he will be forced to try to erase my identity even as I am having the conversation with him.

It also highlights that creationism cannot survive cross-cultural exposure. It's the kind of nonsense that could only be believed if you never had to explain the existence of anyone other than yourself.

[anasawad]

I know, but 'm downloading a 31 GB file now so its really a natural response to react by bugging everyone i can currently. Evolution made it this way. :P
BTW, i dont think he's here anymore.