Edit Quotes fixed. Phew!

newolder wrote:
Quote attributions fixed but Spearthrower might want to fix them in the proper place - (and I'll delete this after...)

My recent inability to manage the quote function suggests I may well be becoming susceptible to Creationism!

Spearthrower wrote:

newolder wrote:
Quote attributions fixed but Spearthrower might want to fix them in the proper place - (and I'll delete this after...)

My recent inability to manage the quote function suggests I may well be becoming susceptible to Creationism!

So long as it's just a temporary hiccup in the chaos. Helping to keep the burning stupid in its proper dumpster might become a full time endeavour...

Spearthrower wrote:
My recent inability to manage the quote function suggests I may well be becoming susceptible to Creationism!

I'm sure it's nothing to worry about, but if you give your credit card number to that nice boy from The Microsoft who is going to remove the virus for your computer, or find yourself typing IN ALL CAPS you should probably seek professional help.

THEY LAUGHED AT EINSTEIN TOO!



someone call emergency services

Spearthrower wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Contrary evidence? All Spearthrower (or any other poster) needed to present was a pic of an Australopithecus male skull with long pointy canines. He didn’t present that. Instead he actually agreed that a Smithsonian note that Australopithecus like all later humans, had small canines.

And another lie! Fantastic!

As anyone can see, I haven't just posted a single picture of an australopithecine with sharp, pointy canines, I have posted several, and I did so within hours of JJ's initial claims that they did not possess them.

Actually, anyone can’t see that. Show that you posted several pictures of australopithecus skull with long, pointy canines, by posting those several pictures again.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Actually, anyone can’t see that. Show that you posted several pictures of australopithecus skull with long, pointy canines, by posting those several pictures again.

YES, SIR, SIR!


Oh wait, did you mean to ask me politely to go to the trouble of finding pictures in this thread that I already posted?

And the observant will, of course, notice that the requirement you've set is not what I said I'd done, and those educated in the topic matter will also notice that the requirement is impossible to achieve - that being one of the troubles JJ himself is having.

Apart from the error you made before about replicas and composites and don't seem able to comprehend, have you spotted yet, JJ, why your picture displays such a feeble grasp of the topic matter? It's one of those not-even-beginner mistakes that really rather ends up demolishing all your wittering about the special heroic insight you have into seeing the true animal.

Why do you do this to yourself, chap? It's a specialist topic, no one would expect you to know anything. If you didn't feel the need to engage with your ego but instead asked open questions (instead of agenda-driven ones) to try and learn then you wouldn't keep finding yourself in this mess (the jeering and sneering). If I started wittering a load of half-baked nonsense about engineering or land surveying, not only would you know I was talking out of my arse, you'd begin to think I was a few cards short of a full-house if I insisted that my ignorance meant I had special insight.

You can keep blaming everyone else, or you could eventually alight on the emotionally mature concept of you and your behavior being the one consistent part of the equation.

Here's a little clue for you, JJ.

Jayjay4547 wrote:It took 20 years for science to acknowledge the position of Australopithecus in our ancestry and another 70 to air brush out the gestalt that Dart had seen, sitting in his office in a new university he hadn’t wanted to go to, in a strange country, holding the little Taung skull in his hand. Truly that was an epiphany.

Does that help you attain an epiphany?

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Contrary evidence? All Spearthrower (or any other poster) needed to present was a pic of an Australopithecus male skull with long pointy canines. He didn’t present that. Instead he actually agreed that a Smithsonian note that Australopithecus like all later humans, had small canines.

And another lie! Fantastic!

As anyone can see, I haven't just posted a single picture of an australopithecine with sharp, pointy canines, I have posted several, and I did so within hours of JJ's initial claims that they did not possess them.

Actually, anyone can’t see that. Show that you posted several pictures of australopithecus skull with long, pointy canines, by posting those several pictures again.

Spearthrower wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Actually, anyone can’t see that. Show that you posted several pictures of australopithecus skull with long, pointy canines, by posting those several pictures again.

YES, SIR, SIR!


Oh wait, did you mean to ask me politely to go to the trouble of finding pictures in this thread that I already posted?

And the observant will, of course, notice that the requirement you've set is not what I said I'd done, and those educated in the topic matter will also notice that the requirement is impossible to achieve - that being one of the troubles JJ himself is having.

All I can observe is that YOU changed my “long, pointy” to the redundant “sharp, pointy” and my “Australopithecus” to “australopithecine”. Why can’t you just come right out and say what I changed.

After evading the challenge I put to you, you went on to change the subject by posting pics I had put up. That’s one of several options you could have taken:

(b) You could have actually re-posted these “several pics” of australopithecines with sharp [long] pointy canines. That would have simply ended my career on the ratskep forum and you would have got a deal of approval from your peers. There was every incentive for you to do that, if those pics existed.

(c) You could have withdrawn your accusation that I had lied. I don’t see that happening but like (b) above, it is on the face of it a theoretical possibility.

(d) You could have re-posted the pics that you actually had posted, from which I made this collation:



Then you would have had to make out that several of these pics were indeed of an Australopithecus male skull with long pointy canines. In the first place, that would have been difficult because the only skull there with long pointy canines, doesn’t seem to even be a fossil.

What is really bothering me here, is my growing suspicion that you are playing me and I have been ludicrously falling for it. I just can’t square your behaviour over those pics, with that of someone who as you say, has spent his adult life studying human evolution and teaching it to undergraduates. In my experience, professional teachers are all over their material and eager to explain it; to take and own the role of mentor. But here you put up a series of pics of clearly different provenance, without explaining any of them more than just saying “Ding Ding”. Then you claim they have told a story that they clearly don’t. And then you decline to re-post them for discussion, making out that to do so would be to “obey" (YES, SIR, SIR!) a layman. It just doesn’t compute.

Long, pointy, bitey canines.

Jayjay4547 wrote:
All I can observe is that YOU changed my “long, pointy” to the redundant “sharp, pointy” and my “Australopithecus” to “australopithecine”. Why can’t you just come right out and say what I changed.

I was talking to the observant and educated, JJ.

Jayjay4547 wrote:After evading the challenge I put to you,...

You challenged me?

Funny, I must have missed that! I only saw you attempt to order me to do something.

Jayjay4547 wrote:... you went on to change the subject by posting pics I had put up.

I know your tendency is towards historical revision, but the acceptance of that is usually aided when the subject of those histories is dead.

Jayjay4547 wrote:That’s one of several options you could have taken:

Oooh! You're going to give ME options about what action I might elect to do?

You really are being spectacularly arrogant today, aren't you JJ? Are you on the attack so that you don't have to defend the nonsense you posted last?

Jayjay4547 wrote:(b) You could have actually re-posted these “several pics” of australopithecines with sharp [long] pointy canines. That would have simply ended my career on the ratskep forum and you would have got a deal of approval from your peers. There was every incentive for you to do that, if those pics existed.

Which obviously contains a whole heap of inane assumptions.

Firstly, the notion that you would leave the website on account of anything factual - I already talked about this a page or two back - given your track record for simply evading reality and concocting fairy tales, for outright reality-denial... are we supposed to believe that a mere picture is going to send you scampering off with your tail between your legs?

Secondly, you assume I want you to leave the forum. That's genuinely ridiculous and something I've certainly never expressed, but undoubtedly generates a whole lot of the victimhood and martyrdom narrative threads that certain types of Christian thrive on. Who says I want you to leave the forum, JJ? In reality, all you'll ever see me asking of you is that you stop bullshitting. For me, there's space enough for everyone here, so long as they can abide by simple universal etiquette.

Thirdly, I neither expect nor aim for anyone's approval - not in this life, chap! My peers, in terms of rational skepticism, includes you - we're all equal members here, after all. In terms of this topic, who is supposed to be my peer here? There used to be some very knowledgeable palaeoanthropological folks here like Gib and Steviepinhead, and their presence would have made this discussion much more interesting for me (they'd have spotted the same errors you made, for example, and would also probably have noted some of the amusement I intentionally generated which you missed completely), and they'd have been able to actually have a technical conversation with me about anatomy which you can't.

Fourthly, when I've already made a post, it is not really my obligation to scurry off and find it on your command. Whether you acknowledge reality or not, there it remains.

Jayjay4547 wrote:(c) You could have withdrawn your accusation that I had lied. I don’t see that happening but like (b) above, it is on the face of it a theoretical possibility.

Well, I could also just as easily have compiled a list of your lies, because it's not like I've forgotten them JJ. This is just one example where you claim I haven't posted any pics of australopithecine crania when anyone reading this thread knows I have.

Jayjay4547 wrote:(d) You could have re-posted the pics that you actually had posted, from which I made this collation:

Spearthrower_Teeth_Comparisons.png

Which is fantastically convoluted because to have made this 'collation' of pics that I posted then you must recognize that I did in fact post said pics, ergo...

Jayjay4547 wrote:Then you would have had to make out that several of these pics were indeed of an Australopithecus male skull with long pointy canines.

What's fascinating here is how you appear to have willfully forgotten what happened the last time I explained to you in technical terms the morphological characteristics of an australopithecine skull. Remember how you abjectly failed to engage in discussion about said features, instead simply waving it away while declaring that it represented evidence about how you're completely right?

You may find such games amusing, but given your willingness to tell me what I am supposed to be incentivized by, you haven't explained to me what's in it for me to go into technical detail that you seem both unwilling and unable to engage with.

Jayjay4547 wrote:In the first place, that would have been difficult because the only skull there with long pointy canines, doesn’t seem to even be a fossil.

Which is pretty funny coming from the guy who relies wholly on casts apparently comprised of substantial artistic creativity, and which you don't seem to realize aren't really representing the thing you think they are.

That's one of MY points here JJ!

Jayjay4547 wrote:What is really bothering me here, is my growing suspicion that you are playing me and I have been ludicrously falling for it.

Oh I am playing you JJ. I am toying with your arrogance and pomposity, your self-absorbed ignorance.

Jayjay4547 wrote: I just can’t square your behaviour over those pics, with that of someone who as you say, has spent his adult life studying human evolution and teaching it to undergraduates.

That's fun. You want to try this again.

Jayjay4547 wrote: In my experience, professional teachers are all over their material and eager to explain it; to take and own the role of mentor.

Great, now add into that equation a potential student who is ignorant, arrogant, and who has spent years using evasive argumentative strategies to continue a line of argumentation that is fundamentally hostile to not just the discipline but the entire methodology uniting all the sciences.

One way of teaching such a person, JJ, might be first to deflate the windbag. It may not be a tactic you like, but you made this bed, chap.

And this is also one of my key points. I quite clearly made this point to you: I offered to meet you fair and square in the middle and help you understand, but your arrogance won't let you acknowledge that your understanding is poor or that one of the people you're repeatedly bigoted against might know more than you. You won't even ASK me to explain because that would require you acknowledge your lack of competence in an expert field - instead you write up these long attacks where you get to pretend that you're still in an instructional position while pretending that the reason I am not enlightening you is because of some nonsensical conspiracy you've contrived rather than it being a direct result of your typical stupid behavior.

I will get round to showing you wrong in my own time, JJ, after I've had my fun. Because you're unwilling to engage in honest discourse, that's what's left. My amusement, and potentially the amusement of other people who have read your guff over the years.

Jayjay4547 wrote: But here you put up a series of pics of clearly different provenance, without explaining any of them more than just saying “Ding Ding”.

Is that really all I said, JJ? Are you going to call that an honest rendition of my role?

Jayjay4547 wrote: Then you claim they have told a story that they clearly don’t.

I don't tell stories JJ - that's your rhetorical strategy.

Jayjay4547 wrote: And then you decline to re-post them for discussion,...

Again, the question would be why I would need to repost pictures that are already here in this thread.

Jayjay4547 wrote:making out that to do so would be to “obey" (YES, SIR, SIR!) a layman.

As usual, you attempt to turn it all round, just as when you likened everyone to crazed dogs rending each other, but then described responses as awful, terrible personalizations!

In reality, it's nothing to do with 'laymen' and everything to do with grammar:

Show that you posted several pictures of australopithecus skull with long, pointy canines, by posting those several pictures again.

Verb 1 with no subject = the imperative mood.

http://www.englishlanguageguide.com/gra ... rative.asp

Definition: Imperatives are verbs used to give orders, commands,warning or instructions, and (if you use "please") to make a request. It is one of the three moods of an English verb (indicative, imperative and subjunctive).

Orders
Adults do not usually give each other orders, unless they are in a position of authority. However, adults can give orders to children and to animals.

I am not subordinate to you, I am not a child, nor am I a (non-human) animal, ergo the fact that you felt you could order me about is the real point here. I am poking fun at your arrogance.

Now, had you made it a polite request, I might well have performed the desired activity - I'm helpful like that!

But I don't do tricks on command, JJ. You really should know that about me after all these years.

Jayjay4547 wrote: It just doesn’t compute.

Your calculations are simply you projecting whatever is useful for you onto the discussion.

The computation is clearly borked when you're basically erecting a self-serving conspiracy theory.

Spearthrower wrote:Here's a little clue for you, JJ.

Jayjay4547 wrote:It took 20 years for science to acknowledge the position of Australopithecus in our ancestry and another 70 to air brush out the gestalt that Dart had seen, sitting in his office in a new university he hadn’t wanted to go to, in a strange country, holding the little Taung skull in his hand. Truly that was an epiphany.

Does that help you attain an epiphany?

I take it that's a no then?

So you've posted a series of pics and made an argument on the basis of those pics, right. Part of your claim that you have special insight into what these animals really were, and that I was all wrong about scaling differences between floriensis and afarensis.

You also talked about the wonderful democratization of knowledge the internet provides us, whereby we no longer really even need experts, so even some random dude on the internet's pontifications have just as much value as, say, someone with actual accreditation and academic and field experience, because you know, all the information is just waiting there to be hoovered up by anyone.

Yeah, yeah, I know you're trying to change the topic JJ, but it's not going to change. I am going to have fun with this because your arrogance is outstripped only by your ignorance of the topic matter.

Spearthrower wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:The Wiki entry on Homo floresiensis doesn’t support your claim a about different scaling in essentially all the anatomical features

In 2015, the results of Bayesian analysis were published, which used more than 300 morphological characteristics of fossil hominins; the analysis was unable to distinguish between the different early hominin trees, but the greatest similarity of H. floresiensis was with Australopithecus sediba, Homo habilis and Dmanisi Man, raising the possibility that the ancestors of Homo floresiensis left Africa before the appearance of Homo erectus, possibly even becoming the first hominins to do so and evolved further in Asia.[21] (Wiki Homo floriensis)

Great. So can you now explain how that contradicts what I wrote?

Forgot this, did you JJ?

You have special insight into what kind of animal these were, right JJ?

Accordingly, here's the picture you posted:




Remember last time you tried this argument, you showed that you were unable to tell the difference between a male and a female?

This picture is even worse in that regard.

Go on, try and change the topic again.

174 pages? Seriously?
Is there somebody on piecework involved in this or is merely evidence that priming the soil with a good load of well-rotted manure can produce a bumper crop of argument that is ultimately pointless because the farmer is just trolling and/or prefers the taste of the manure in any case?

The argument is pointless but, the material posted in this thread by those with actual subject knowledge is highly educational. I just skip JayJay's nonsense and read the responses because there I actually learn stuff.

Spearthrower wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:
All I can observe is that YOU changed my “long, pointy” to the redundant “sharp, pointy” and my “Australopithecus” to “australopithecine”. Why can’t you just come right out and say what I changed.

I was talking to the observant and educated, JJ.

I am both of those things.

Spearthrower wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:After evading the challenge I put to you,...

You challenged me?

Funny, I must have missed that! I only saw you attempt to order me to do something.

Order, challenge, request, whatever. You said I lied in claiming you had failed to put up what was needed to settle an issue: i.e. a pic of an australopithecus male with long pointy canines. Then you said you had in fact put up several such. But you haven’t. The only pics you have put up of primate males with long sharp canines, weren’t even of fossils.

Spearthrower wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:... you went on to change the subject by posting pics I had put up.

I know your tendency is towards historical revision, but the acceptance of that is usually aided when the subject of those histories is dead.

That’s too obscure for me. The record above shows that you reacted to my order, challenge,request by putting up pcs I had posted.

Spearthrower wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:That’s one of several options you could have taken:

Oooh! You're going to give ME options about what action I might elect to do?

You really are being spectacularly arrogant today, aren't you JJ? Are you on the attack so that you don't have to defend the nonsense you posted last?

I didn’t post nonsense and I’m keen to get on to what I posted BEFORE you flared up this issue of canines. The options I raised are universal: (a) throw up a smokescreen (the option you are still taking), (b) prove using pics which I don’t recall you having posted (c) withdraw (d) discuss the pics you did post.

Spearthrower wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:(b) You could have actually re-posted these “several pics” of australopithecines with sharp [long] pointy canines. That would have simply ended my career on the ratskep forum and you would have got a deal of approval from your peers. There was every incentive for you to do that, if those pics existed.

Which obviously contains a whole heap of inane assumptions.

Firstly, the notion that you would leave the website on account of anything factual - I already talked about this a page or two back - given your track record for simply evading reality and concocting fairy tales, for outright reality-denial... are we supposed to believe that a mere picture is going to send you scampering off with your tail between your legs?

If you posted up a pic of an australopithecus skull with long/pointy or sharp canines that would show me that my whole understanding of human origins was wrong. It would be a bit like finding the earth is actually flat. Certainly I would leave this forum.

Spearthrower wrote: Secondly, you assume I want you to leave the forum. That's genuinely ridiculous and something I've certainly never expressed, but undoubtedly generates a whole lot of the victimhood and martyrdom narrative threads that certain types of Christian thrive on. Who says I want you to leave the forum, JJ? In reality, all you'll ever see me asking of you is that you stop bullshitting. For me, there's space enough for everyone here, so long as they can abide by simple universal etiquette.

Simple universal etiquette doesn’t include calling someone a liar, failing to back that up and making out you couldn’t respond to an “Order”. I don’t assume you want me to leave this forum, just that you could earn kudos for sending this creationist off with his tail between his legs as you put it.

Spearthrower wrote: Thirdly, I neither expect nor aim for anyone's approval - not in this life, chap! My peers, in terms of rational skepticism, includes you - we're all equal members here, after all. In terms of this topic, who is supposed to be my peer here? There used to be some very knowledgeable palaeoanthropological folks here like Gib and Steviepinhead, and their presence would have made this discussion much more interesting for me (they'd have spotted the same errors you made, for example, and would also probably have noted some of the amusement I intentionally generated which you missed completely), and they'd have been able to actually have a technical conversation with me about anatomy which you can't.

My arguments aren’t about details of anatomy but about obvious messages that are clear from pics readily available on the internet and that were indeed drawn by Dart nearly 90 years ago.

Spearthrower wrote: Fourthly, when I've already made a post, it is not really my obligation to scurry off and find it on your command. Whether you acknowledge reality or not, there it remains.

It would at least help you establish your point, provided such a post existed.

Spearthrower wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:(c) You could have withdrawn your accusation that I had lied. I don’t see that happening but like (b) above, it is on the face of it a theoretical possibility.

Well, I could also just as easily have compiled a list of your lies, because it's not like I've forgotten them JJ. This is just one example where you claim I haven't posted any pics of australopithecine crania when anyone reading this thread knows I have.

Ha ha Spearthrower my friend, an australopithecus skull WITH LONG SHARP CANINES, of which you claimed to have posted several, “within hours” of my post.

Spearthrower wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:(d) You could have re-posted the pics that you actually had posted, from which I made this collation:

Spearthrower_Teeth_Comparisons.png (795.84 KiB) Viewed 242 times

Which is fantastically convoluted because to have made this 'collation' of pics that I posted then you must recognize that I did in fact post said pics, ergo...

But dear friend, the only image in this collation (compilation?) of an animal with long pointy canines (c), doesn’t seem to be even be of a fossil, let alone an australopithecus.

Spearthrower wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Then you would have had to make out that several of these pics were indeed of an Australopithecus male skull with long pointy canines.

What's fascinating here is how you appear to have willfully forgotten what happened the last time I explained to you in technical terms the morphological characteristics of an australopithecine skull. Remember how you abjectly failed to engage in discussion about said features, instead simply waving it away while declaring that it represented evidence about how you're completely right?

You may find such games amusing, but given your willingness to tell me what I am supposed to be incentivized by, you haven't explained to me what's in it for me to go into technical detail that you seem both unwilling and unable to engage with.

You don’t need to bother with technicalities, just say where in that compilation (in my post above) are several images of australopithecus with long sharp canines.

Spearthrower wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:In the first place, that would have been difficult because the only skull there with long pointy canines, doesn’t seem to even be a fossil.

Which is pretty funny coming from the guy who relies wholly on casts apparently comprised of substantial artistic creativity, and which you don't seem to realize aren't really representing the thing you think they are.

Well casts are marketed because they are useful and images of them, readily available to all on the internet can be legitimately used on this forum. If you showed a boneclone of australopithecus with long sharp canines that sure would settle the issue discussed here.

Spearthrower wrote:
That's one of MY points here JJ!

I think you are referring to this image (top right] of an Australopithecus Afarensis skull s that you insisted was a composite of a number that you knew but didn’t identify, as if you were making some major point. Here it is, for comparison with an image you provided of a male (I suppose) skull. I supposed that from the context of your posting, not from what you said about it. Indeed you didn’t say anything about your image.



The image I put up came from Dinosaur Corporation and the metadata on it doesn’t bother to define its sex although it declares it to be of “museum quality”. That all supports what I claim to be of major importance in the story of human origins which is that the male skulls of Australopithecus looked notably like those of the females.

I don’t want to carry on badgering you on this particular issue.

Sendraks wrote:The argument is pointless but, the material posted in this thread by those with actual subject knowledge is highly educational. I just skip JayJay's nonsense and read the responses because there I actually learn stuff.

There's no point in reading JJ's endless stream of lies and bullshit.