God is one hell of a bastard is he not JayJay.

How does he get round all the planets JayJay. Must be like a bee keeper having hives all over the universe.

Jayjay4547 wrote:
There is nothing I find offensive in your post, to make me wish you should withdraw it, on the contrary I much appreciate your politeness. I have often explained what I understand atheist ideology to be, though you might not have happened on those posts, while those who have suffer from convenient amnesia.

Nope, I don't think you have. On repeated questioning from me, and from others, you've completely failed to outline what it actually is.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Darwinsbulldog wrote:Look Jayjay,
Just tell me one thing. Why is god such an evil cunt? Why weaponise insulin?

Statements like that reflect an unnecessary position for an atheist, it should be perfectly possible for an atheist to think that the system out of which insulin emerged has worked pretty well on the whole and is pretty satisfactory. The poster puts himself in a high position relative to the system out of which insulin emerged and also outside of the system, as an objective observer. All that is summed in the ancient term hubris.

Nope, they reflect the position that if religious people spout bollocks such as special creation, then they deserved to get called on said bollocks. Also that some members of the board appear to have a healthy sense of humour and small tolerance for nonsense.

The character of the Yahweh deity in the bible is that of a mass murdering psychopath who insists on absolute obedience, punishes though crimes and cares more about what kind of animal you burn and the state of the feet of the food you consume than it does about the welbeing of thinking beings. Evil cunt doesn't even begin to describe it.

Jayjay4547 wrote: I now think it would take a hundred students a hundred years to work out how atheist ideology has influenced the narrative of human evolution but the sun around which all these aspects turn is denial of creation.

Yeah, but what is it? Just us a hint? A sketch, an outline. Could you give me, five points of atheist doctrine? how about a paragraph?

Afterall, you seem more than content to waste everyone's time answering questions that no-one is really asking.

How about a change? Why don't you answer a question that everyone is actually asking you? What is atheist ideology?

Jayjay4547 wrote: The people who don’t deny creation are called Creationists.

And a lot of other things beside. If you want to believe your special fairy tale, that's okay by me. Don't bring your soiled sheets out in public and not expect me to object to you having them try and rub them in my face though.

You started this topic by arguing:

Jayjay4547 wrote: "the human origin story has been presented as one of self-creation, in reactive opposition to the Genesis story"

All you've done so far is argue about hominid behaviour, avoid answering dozens of direct questions asking you what it is and generally have a fool made of you.

Avoiding answering questions is typical of theists. They cant and wont.

It is pure madness to believe in something for which there is no evidence for its existence. To believe a rag written and rewritten with fairy tales. No evidence and nothing at all. That is it JayJay just a load of crap. What a shame all that wasted thought. Dont you ever think about that. The waste.

And we're still dodging the question I see "what is atheist ideology"? There is no definition, just as there is no clear definition for God, therefore I think we can safely say that "atheist ideology" does not exist.

Sendraks wrote:JayJay please describe the atheist ideology, because no one here knows what the fuck you are talking about.

Still waiting JayJay.

You claim to have already described it, although no one here as any recollection of you doing so. If you have described it already, and this isn't just another one of your many lies, it will be easy enough for you to find and quote the relevant description.

Oldskeptic wrote:

JayJay wrote:

It’s not a masturbation fantasy to argue that the short blunt canines of Australopithecus shows that they had abandoned defensive biting, that makes other higher primates dangerous to attack.

The teeth and skull of A. afarensis do not show that they had abandoned defensive biting. Nor do they show that A. afarensis could not inflict nasty bites and tear out chunks of skin and flesh.

Suppose I’m wrong, would it then be accurate to call my argument a masturbation fantasy? What does Cali’s language say about his preparedness to consider arguments he doesn’t like?

You claim that A afarensis could inflict nasty bites and tear out chunks of skin and flesh. What evidence have you produced of that? A lacerated human arm with nothing torn out of it and a human ear with part of the rim torn off. Your pic of Australopithecus tells us little without a comparative pic of other large mainly ground-living higher primates. Here is a male gorillas skull. There is a creature that could actually tear out chunks and gashes.

Oldskeptic wrote: What the teeth and skull of A. afarensis show is a change of diet where sideways grinding became more important than fangs in their survival until successful reproduction. Asserting that early hominins lost their sharp fangs without already having or developing better survival strategies along their way to less pronounce canines is absurd.

Careful with that word “absurd”, considering your extravagant claim about what Australopithecus would have been able to do with its teeth to deter a predator. Anyway, what are you claiming- that our ancestors MUST have first used better survival strategies and THEN their male canines were reduced? Well I do suspect that was the order: their ancestors had at some time adapted into a successful weapon using antipredation strategy. Maybe the two adaptations worked to some extent together. Fangs do very likely interfere with chewing, which is why female primates usually don’t have fangs.

Oldskeptic wrote: There is no evidence that A. afarensis couldn't climb trees effectively, or that they didn't have lookout systems to detect danger from predators in advance. There is no evidence that they were an occasional, let alone a preferred prey, of any large predators. Lions tend to stick to four legged grazers and sabertooth cats on all continents seem to have preyed on only very large herbivores.

No evidence, unless you count the Laetoli footprints as evidence of Australopithecus feet

And unless you compare with this pic of baboon feet; animals that do climb trees with an effectiveness that influences their avoidance of leopards.


Other primates have excellent ability to detect danger from predators in advance, to warn, take avoiding action and stay out of dangerous areas. But other primates are also anything but helpless prey.

Oldskeptic wrote: And while leopards will kill and eat just about anything Cali has correctly pointedhat out that leopards are primarily stealth ambush hunters and generally hunt at night. They sometimes take chimpanzees and monkeys, but that is at night and in the trees where the chimps and monkeys are sleeping. Neither long sharp canines or your pointy sticks would be of much use in that situation.

Long sharp canines are a factor why a leopard might hunt for hours in a baboon roosting tree without making a kill. And why that same leopard risks being killed by baboons in the day. The Rising Star cave strongly suggests that Australopithecus inhabited caves with the familiarity of bats and pointy sticks would have been pretty useful against leopards trying to winkle them out at night. Sticks and also stones stored as ammunition and thrown.

Oldskeptic wrote: Further more there is no evidence that A. afarensis fashioned any tools or weapons let alone carried them around with them. There is evidence of A. afarensis using stones to scrap meat off bone or crush bones to get at marrow, but none whatsoever to indicate that they worked the stones because none have ever been found.

You aren’t up to speed on the links tolman provided, of a site near lake Turkana where Australopithecus or a contemporary did manufacture stone tools.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-32804177

Oldskeptic wrote: JayJay, what you have done is create your own story of human evolution story out of one anatomical feature of early hominins then proceeded to embellish it with many things that you wish to be

Well I’m not up against simply rational criticism, I’m pointing out something that has been staringly obvious for ninety years. When the kitchen sink, a wardrobe and bedspread are all thrown at me, I find that what works best is to latch onto the least ambiguous distinctive feature of Australopithecus and hammer on that.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Well I’m not up against simply rational criticism, I’m pointing out something that I think has been staringly obvious for ninety years..

F.I.F.Y
I'm not surprised that it isn't "staringly obvious" that you have failed to properly consider why others have not noticed this obvious thing. Its almost as if they did and reached different conclusions to you based on evidence and a far better understanding of the subject matter. But, you don't like that because you're far too invested in your idea.

Now, about this atheist ideology, got a description coming any time soon?

Oh goody. Not.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

THWOTH wrote:

Sendraks wrote:JayJay please describe the atheist ideology, because no one here knows what the fuck you are talking about.

I think this is essentially a plastic idea that can be, or at least is being, applied to anything that challenges, disagrees with, or falsifies explanations from mythology. One has to bear in mind that there are no positive arguments or evidences for Creationism, with it being proposes almost entirely on the back of dogmatic/doctrinal assertions, a general incredulity about the sciences, and petulant bleating about science not being the 'proper' medium for addressing questions which creationists feel belong to them alone.

If atheists have any ideology at all it's probably found in simply being rational and honest about the assertions of creationist.

N.B. I offer this only in the absence of any meaningful or coherent description from the member who's actually putting the idea forward. If that member wishes to put forward a meaningful and coherent description of this so-called 'atheist ideology' I'd be more than happy to withdraw these remarks.

There is nothing I find offensive in your post, to make me wish you should withdraw it, on the contrary I much appreciate your politeness.

Well since THWOTH is one of the least offensive people I know, it would be pretty bloody hilarious of you to find anything offensive in his posts.

Jayjay4547 wrote:I have often explained what I understand atheist ideology to be

No you haven't. All you've done is blindly assert this. Real explanations are accompanied by DATA and testable correlations thereto. All you've done is blindly assert that anyone who happens not to genuflect before your manifest fantasies, does so on the basis of an entirely fictitious "atheist ideology", whilst the rest of us have pointed to DATA refuting the core assertions underpinning your fantasies. Pull the other one, JayJay, it's got fucking bells on and you know it. Not least because, once again, NOT treating unsupported assertions as fact is NOT a fucking "ideology".

Jayjay4547 wrote:though you might not have happened on those posts, while those who have suffer from convenient amnesia.

Oh look, more thinly veiled ad hominem aimed at those who don't genuflect before your fantasies. Where have we seen this before, boys and girls?

Oh wait, the "convenient amnesia! is YOUR "convenient amnesia", where you conveniently forget all the times you've been schooled on the relevant elementary principles. Principles such as, yet again ...

NOT TREATING UNSUPPORTED ASSERTIONS AS FACT IS NOT A FUCKING "IDEOLOGY".

Jayjay4547 wrote:I think it’s true that “atheist ideology” is a plastic idea, if that means bendable.

It's always been bendable to your apologetic convenience. It's one of the reasons the rest of us regard apologetics as worthless.

Jayjay4547 wrote:The Wikipedia definition of ideology

Ever tried looking for a definitive source? Such as a primary work by an actual expert in the relevant branches of philosophy, or a learned paper? Such as the primary works in the field of science I've brought here by the truckload in my time?

Jayjay4547 wrote:starts with this:

This is going to be good ...

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Ideology, in the Althusserian sense, is "the imaginary relation to the real conditions of existence." It can be described as a set of conscious and unconscious ideas which make up one's goals, expectations, and motivations. An ideology is a comprehensive normative vision, meaning that it is a set of standards that are followed by people, government, and/or other groups that is considered the "norm". [1][further explanation needed], a way of looking at things, as argued in several philosophical tendencies (see political ideologies). It can also be a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of society to all members of society (a "received consciousness" or product of socialization[further explanation needed], as suggested in some Marxist and Critical theory accounts. While the concept of "ideology" describes a set of ideas broad in its normative reach, an ideology is less encompassing than as expressed in concepts such as worldview, imaginary and ontology.

Actually, I have a concise and rigorous definition to offer here. Namely, an ideology is any collection of ideas, relying upon the treatment of one or more unsupported assertions as purportedly constituting "axioms" about the world. The reason this definition is rigorous, is because every data set analysed with respect to real, observable ideologies, points to that basis thereof in unsupported assertions treated as axioms. You''ll find that Nietzsche was merely one philosopher who understood this concept, and who, indeed, provided an implied critique thereof when he penned the following words in Beyond Good And Evil:

It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy has hitherto been: a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir; moreover, that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy have every time constituted the real germ of life out of which the entire plant has grown. To explain how a philosopher's most remote metaphysical assertions have actually been arrived at, it is always well (and wise) to ask oneself first: what morality does this (does he - ) aim at? I accordingly do not believe a 'drive to knowledge' to be the father of philosophy, but that another drive has, here as elsewhere, only employed knowledge (and false knowledge) as a tool.

In short, Nietzsche castigates those philosophers who erect grand metaphysical castles in the air, not because they are actually interested in the workings of the universe and its contents, but because they seek to impose an ethic upon the universe and its contents, regardless of whether the universe and its contents actually agree with said imposition. In a little more detail, Nietsche castigates those who erect unsupported assertions in the metaphysical realm, with the ulterior motive of using these as a springboard to deliver ethical norms, and conformity thereto. Or, in other words, making shit up so that they can impose behavioural controls, which, lo and behold, happens to be another frequently observed central feature of many ideologies - the elision from "is" to "ought", or more usually, from "these are the axioms the world conforms to", to "conform likewise or else".

Even though Nietzsche did not explicitly couch his critique in terms of the manner in which grandiose fabrications have their basis in unsupported assertions, he evidently understood the concept. Unfortunately, philosophical discourse has had a habit of using florid prose to convey its message over the past 200 years, and teasing out the essential ideas from the resulting exercises in verbosity can be quite a chore even for the dedicated. Notable exceptions being the early Kierkegaard, before his disastrous romance and subsequent wallowing in religion, and the frankly robotic approach to linguistic philosophy on the part of Martin Heidegger, which is difficult to approach for entirely different reasons. I wouldn't recommend Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as an example, because it seeks to attain the status of a formal proof without a well-defined formal system in place.

But, having digressed temporarily, the central notion still stands, namely the manner in which ideologies are founded upon unsupported assertions treated as purportedly constituting fact. Religions and political philosophies alike come under the heading of 'ideologies' when the definition I provide above is in place, and do so in a manner that facilitates analysis and critique within a robust conceptual framework. But clarity of thought is all too frequently opposed by pedlars of real ideologies, because said clarity of thought inexorably penetrates the apologetic smokescreens they try to lay down - some because they know no better, and have yet to encounter ideas outside the ingrained ideology, and others because they do know better, but are seeking to mask desceptively the fragility in the face of proper analysis possessed by their ideologies.

Moving on ...

Ideology refers to the system of abstracted meaning applied to public matters, thus making this concept central to politics.

Whoever wrote this obviously never read George Orwell's 1984.

All too often, the goal of those seeking hegemony for an ideology, is the control or even elimination of private thought. Even though the dialogue in the infamous Apple Macintosh 1984 advertisement was not part of Orwell's original text (I have a searchable electronic copy for checking this, just in case anyone asks), that dialogue could well have been written by Orwell to illustrate the insidious nature of real ideological thought. That monologue I reproduce here, so that everyone can savour its chilling nature (I'll highlight parts apposite to my discourse):

Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology—where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death, and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!

Of course, the very idea of shielding people from ideas deemed "dangerous" is itself an ideological concept, the unsupported assertion being peddled as a purported "justification" for this, being the assertion that any ideas not originating from the controlling doctrine purportedly constitute an intrinsic danger to those exposed thereto, as opposed to merely being a danger to the ideology and its internal contradictions. It's interesting to note that religions have absorbed this notion with particularly inhuman enthusiasm, and fundamentalist religions with truly terrifying zeal. It is no mere conicidence that creationism should be amongst the ideologies adopting this vision.

It's apposite here to offer up a passage from 1984, which reveals how ideologies, even when viewed as consistent, monolithic entities, are ultimately mere tools for control, both of discourse and of policy ...

It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of doublethink are those who invented doublethink and know that it is a vast system of mental cheating. In our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is. In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane. One clear illustration of this is the fact that war hysteria increases in intensity as one rises in the social scale. Those whose attitude towards the war is most nearly rational are the subject peoples of the disputed territories. To these people the war is simply a continuous calamity which sweeps to and fro over their bodies like a tidal wave. Which side is winning is a matter of complete indifference to them. They are aware that a change of overlordship means simply that they will be doing the same work as before for new masters who treat them in the same manner as the old ones. The slightly more favoured workers whom we call ’the proles’ are only intermittently conscious of the war. When it is necessary they can be prodded into frenzies of fear and hatred, but when left to themselves they are capable of forgetting for long periods that the war is happening. It is in the ranks of the Party, and above all of the Inner Party, that the true war enthusiasm is found. World-conquest is believed in most firmly by those who know it to be impossible. This peculiar linking-together of opposites — knowledge with ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism-is one of the chief distinguishing marks of Oceanic society. The official ideology abounds with contradictions even when there is no practical reason for them. Thus, the Party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism. It preaches a contempt for the working class unexampled for centuries past, and it dresses its members in a uniform which was at one time peculiar to manual workers and was adopted for that reason. It systematically undermines the solidarity of the family, and it calls its leader by a name which is a direct appeal to the sentiment of family loyalty. Even the names of the four Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy; they are deliberate exercises in doublethink. For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient cycle be broken. If human equality is to be for ever averted — if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently — then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.

An earlier paragraph is equally revealing:

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth. Ultimately it is by means of doublethink that the Party has been able — and may, for all we know, continue to be able for thousands of years — to arrest the course of history.

Ironic that Orwell's dissection of the underlying duplicity of ideological thinking, should have become for some an instruction manual in preserving their own duplicitous ideologies. But this, of course, is another observed feature of real ideologies - all too frequently, those expounding them to would-be adherents, are not actually adherents themselves. They profess adherence, and possess sufficient facility with polished apologetics to convince the deluded faithful that they are adherents, but frequently, the most ruthless exponents of ideological pedagogy, are not the ideological purists, but the cynical pursuers of power entrenching their position atop the adherents.

Another reason why JayJay's "atheist ideology" is but a fiction, because none of the people JayJay hurls this specious accusation at, has any interest in wielding power over others. All too frequently, they are simply interested to know which ideas are supported by evidence, and which aren't.

Implicitly, in societies that distinguish between public and private life, every political or economic tendency entails ideology, whether or not it is propounded as an explicit system of thought.

No it doesn't. This is another reason why relying upon Wikipedia as a primary source is a bad idea. Because it is entirely possible (indeed, many of the posters here demonstrate this by example) to appraise ideas analytically without relying upon unsupported assertions treated as purportedly constituting "axioms" about the world. The existence of people who appraise ideas in this manner, destroys the above assertion wholesale.

This is, once again, why I prefer rigorous formulation of concepts over copy-paste apologetic cherry-picking.

Moving on ...

Jayjay4547 wrote:To my mind that passage starts off very badly for an encyclopedia entry and then gets better.

As opposed to starting off fairly badly and getting worse, as I've just demonstrated?

But then I am not surprised to see a pedlar of ideology think this.

Jayjay4547 wrote:In the sense that I’m interested in, an ideology is a received consciousness, it applies to public matters (ie to public discourse) and it may be implicit.

In other words, in the sense that it lends itself to your apologetic convenience. But as I've just observed, and indeed as Orwell did all those years ago, ideology is all too frequently applied to attempts to control private thought and discourse as well. Furthermore, explicit references to the core assertions underpinning an ideology are frequently omitted in any arena, where the widespread dissemination thereof is understood already to have taken place.

Jayjay4547 wrote:As atheism is the claim that there is no god

WRONG!!!!

Atheism, in its rigorous formulation, consists of suspicion of unsupported supernaturalist assertions AND NOTHING ELSE. In short, it consists of "YOU assert that your magic man exists, YOU support your assertions". You've been schooled on this often enough to have learned this.

Indeed, because atheism in its rigorous formulation, does not present assertions of its own, it fails to be an "ideology" by definition.

But this of course won't stop you peddling the entirely predictable lies here, will it JayJay?

Jayjay4547 wrote:atheist ideology is a set of attitudes that make it difficult for a rational person to see how there could be a god.

Bollocks. Oh wait, I myself have happily stated, openly and explicitly on these forums, that if REAL EVIDENCE for such an entity arose, I would happily accept that evidence. This on its own destroys your above assertion. I simply happen to have standards when it comes to evidence, but of course I expect the duplicitous twisting on your part of my insistence upon proper standards for evidence, as purportedly being a part of your fictitious "atheist ideology".

Indeed, with respect to the matter of whether or not a god-type entity actually exists, I am on public record (including in this post in this very thread) as having stated that the emergence of real evidence for the existence of a god-type entity will be far more catastrophic for religion than for atheism. For reasons that should be obvious to anyone exercising some intellectual diligence with respect to the matter. But, just so that everyone is reminded of the relevant paragraph, I repeat it here:

[4] Those of us who don't regard mythological entities as real, don't dismiss summarily the existence of any god type entity, merely those entities constructed upon contradictory, paradoxical or absurd axioms. Unfortunately, all the products of mythology to date have been demonstrably thus constructed. Indeed, I'm on public record here as issuing repeatedly, the statement that any genuine god type entity that does exist, will almost certainly be so far removed from all previous human experience, that the evidence for the existence thereof will falsify all of our mythologies at a stroke. I'm also on record as saying that any such evidence will be of such a counter-intuitive nature, that the people best placed to address it will be particle physicists.

Now the very fact that I can conceive how a genuinely existing god-type entity is going to be far more problematic for religion than for atheism, this alone destroys your fatuous and manifestly false assertion about "a set of attitudes that make if difficult for a rational person to see how there could be a god". It's bollocks all the way down from you, JayJay, but it's never been anything else but bollocks all the way down from you.

What we actually think, JayJay, though you've never bothered taking notice of what we actually think, preferring instead to treat the fabrications of your own imagination as a superior substitute for the facts, is that supernaturalists have never provided anything other than unsupported assertions and fabrications, with respect to the multiplicity of asserted magic entities they have, at various points in history, presented as being purported candidates for a real god-type entity. Furthermore, many of the assertions and fabrications supernaturalists have provided as an inferior substitute for actual DATA on the matter, eliminate their chosen candidates, on the grounds that said assertions and fabrications are replete with internal contradiction, paradox or absurdity. Any genuinely existing god type entity will be consistent with known observed data, and not need all manner of weird inventions to prop up said actual existence, certainly not the sort of baroque concoctions that supernaturalists have a habit of offering up. But once again, you'll almost certainly ignore this elementary fact, and continue peddling your "atheist ideology" lies and bullshit.

But we're used to the manner in which supernaturalists never bother finding out what we actually think, and instead prefer their own fabrications on the matter to the actual DATA, which is another reason we regard the entire supernaturalist enterprise with scorn and derision, having endured its endemic duplicity for so long.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Believe it or not, I was an atheist myself, off and on, for a long time.

Given the manner in which you manifestly disregard what atheists tell you about what they actually think, and instead prefer your own fantasies on the subject to the actual DATA, no one here regards this latest assertion of yours as anything other than another of your manifest lies and fabrications. Perhaps if you hadn't pursued a path of relentless discoursive mendacity for the past three years, people wouldn't be treating your assertions with this level of scorn and derision.

Jayjay4547 wrote:My saying “off and on” expresses how close atheism and liberal Christianity are to each other.

No they're not, and I've presented substantive reasons for this above. Not the least being that atheism, unlike any brand of supernaturalism, doesn't erect any unsupported assertions, contrary to the lies you've posted on the subject above.

Jayjay4547 wrote:It didn’t occur to me that there might be such a thing as atheist ideology until I started coming across what seemed to me to be odd positions being expressed on atheist forums.

Here we go again with the predictable lies and bullshit ...not least because none of us here have ever encountered any creationist who genuinely started life as an atheist. Much more frequently, we've encountered the reverse situation. On the basis of this DATA, your above assertion looks increasingly like another of your fabrications.

Jayjay4547 wrote:A recent pretty extreme example is this post:

Darwinsbulldog wrote:Look Jayjay,
Just tell me one thing. Why is god such an evil cunt? Why weaponise insulin?

Apparently you were too mentally incompetent to work out the facts underlying this post. Allow me to school you thereupon.

Insulin is not only a critical molecule for the survival of every vertebrate on the planet (though it's interesting to note that different species have different amino acid sequences for their insulin molecules, said sequences being phylogenetically instructive), but it's critical to survival within a narrow dosage range. Too little, and hyperglycaemia is the result, at which point, the increased glucose content of one's blood accelerates the rate at which atherosclerosis will bring one's life to an end. Too much, and the crashing of blood sugar levels (hypoglycaemia) will result in unconsciousness and possibly death. Worse still, insulin is itself, in the wrong doses, damaging to the retina (see:diabetic retinopathy), and as a consequence, diabetic patients without strict control of insulin dosage enjoy (if that word can ever be applicable to this situation, of course) increased risk of blindness in later life. Insulin is also, in excess, toxic to the kidneys (see: diabetic nephropathy), and in the worst case situation, failure of proper insulin management within the body, as occurs with diabetes, can result in diabetic ketoacidosis, a medical emergency.

Why would any entity genuinely conforming to the epithets 'omnipotent' and 'infinitely benevolent', arrange for such a critical part of our metabolic processes to be replete with dangers? An entity genuinely conforming to that description could have delivered something far less troublesome, and prevented vast swathes of human suffering at source by doing so. That this hasn't happened, leads to the conclusion that the requisite asserted entity does not exist as claimed. At best, the entity in question does not exist full stop, and thus the matter of all that human suffering ceases to be a product of intent, and instead arises simply from the basic rules of organic chemistry. At worst, the entity in question does exist, and went ahead with a metabolism replete with dangers and suffering, at which point the question becomes "did this entity do this because there was no other way (in which case the adjective 'omnipotent' ceases to apply) or because all that suffering and misery was an essential part of that entity's plans for the future (at which point the adjective 'benevolent' ceases to apply)?"

But of course, you never bothered with what was manifestly for you, the tiresome business of addressing any of these underlying facts, and their unconfortable and inconvenient consequences for supernaturalist assertions. Instead, you simply chose to treat a succinct encapsulation of the issue as an "odd position" and "extreme", because it didn't genuflect before your ideological presuppositions.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Statements like that reflect an unnecessary position for an atheist

Bullshit. Consideration of why the observed data is incompatible with supernaturalist assertions, is an entirely proper activity for an atheist, and should be an entirely proper activity for every human being on the planet.

Jayjay4547 wrote:it should be perfectly possible for an atheist to think that the system out of which insulin emerged has worked pretty well on the whole

See above.

Jayjay4547 wrote:and is pretty satisfactory.

Ah, complacency. Another familiar part of the supernaturalist aetiology.

As someone who will almost certainly have to confront these issues head on in later life, and will have to ponder the manner in which my own body is slowly destroying itself despite my best efforts, I find your complacency here frankly appalling.

Jayjay4547 wrote:The poster puts himself in a high position relative to the system out of which insulin emerged and also outside of the system, as an objective observer.

Poppycock. Oh wait, he's simply evaluating the DATA. You know, something that scientists do?

Jayjay4547 wrote:All that is summed in the ancient term hubris.

As opposed to your hubris, in posturing as being in a position to lecture the rest of us on the conduct of discourse, whilst manifestly and hypocritically exempting yourself from the rules you seek to impose upon us. Your repeated peddling of manifest lies and fabrications about us and published scientists, being an example of said rampant hubris and hypocrisy.

Jayjay4547 wrote:In spite of those problematic aspects, I found that positions like Darwinsbulldog’s were rarely challenged by atheists or by people arguing against creationism.

Oh, you didn't for one moment think that this might be because the DATA manifestly supported said statements? How typically creationist of you. But then creationists routinely demonstrate that the only DATA they like, is quote minable data.

Jayjay4547 wrote:I started noticing related positions being set out by authoritative writer Steven Jay Gould (who had me eating out of his hands) and the Christian Kenneth R Miller.

Neither of whom would entertain your fantasies here, if they had ever become aware of them (in Gould's case, he's now prevented from doing so by that little inconvenience called death).

Jayjay4547 wrote:That started a long (for me) walk towards a hypocritical position on atheism

Fixed it for you. Courtesy of the large body of DATA manifestly pointing thereto.

Jayjay4547 wrote:that worked productively

"Productively" almost certainly in the sense of ideological masturbation, but not in any other way ...

Jayjay4547 wrote:with a critical position collection of made up shit

Fixed it for you again ...

Jayjay4547 wrote:on established stories about human evolution that had been on my mind for years.

Spare us the bullshit, JayJay, because we know it's bullshit. You started entertaining some fucked-up fantasies on the subject, and when you realised that proper, tenured, competent research scientists didn't genuflect before your fantasies, instead of jettisoning those fantasies, you made up more shit to try and justify continuing clinging to those fantasies, including all sorts of defamatory bullshit about "ideological bias" on the part of those competent scientists, whilst quote mining papers to feed your fantasies and ignoring all the vast quantities of DATA destroying your fantasies. You chose made up shit over DATA, and now you're accusing anyone and everyone who makes the opposite choice of the very self same failings you're guilty of - classic creationist projection.

Jayjay4547 wrote:I now think

This remains to be supported with DATA ...

Jayjay4547 wrote:it would take a hundred students a hundred years to work out how atheist ideology made up shit has influenced the narrative of human evolution creationist masturbation fantasising

Fixed it for you.

Jayjay4547 wrote:but the sun around which all these aspects turn is denial of creation.

There's nothing to "deny", JayJay. Denial implies rejection of established fact, not rejection of mythological assertion peddled as purportedly constituting fact, despite zero evidence supporting said mythological assertion. "Creation" is nothing more than a mythological assertion,, that some childish fantasists prefer over the hard work of learning about the actual science, none of which supports any of the dribblingly encephalitic drivel found in Genesis. "Creation" is nothing more than made up shit, manufactured by a collection of piss-stained Middle Eastern nomads, who were too dumb-fuck stupid to count correctly the number of legs that an insect possesses, and who thought the entire universe and its contents were conjured into existence by an imaginary magic man waving his magic todger about. What's more, they thought that this all supposedly happened 22,000 years after prehistoric Germans invented sex toys.

It's childish drivel from start to finish, JayJay, and all too often, even a brief examination of the adults who continue clinging to this sad little fairy tale, reveals that many of them are either so mentally incompetent that they belong in a special hospital, or wilfully duplicitous on a grand scale. America is full of these people, a combination of the stupid and the mendacious, who routinely demonstrate that they're either complete fucktards when it comes to basic facts, or shot through with dishonesty on a truly pathological and potentially criminal scale.

Jayjay4547 wrote: I mean, denial that the human observer is embedded in a creative event

Bollocks. This is another of your duplicitous fabrications. We simply dispense with the woo-laden assertions you bring to the table on the matter, and concentrate on the actual scientific DATA.

Jayjay4547 wrote:able to take an excited interest in what has happened to far in the past but grossly unable to predict what will be interesting about its future.

Oh please, this really is fucking retarded.

Please tell the world's physicists, including the world's research cosmologists, that they're "grossly unable to predict what will be interesting about its future", and watch them point and laugh at you as you do this.

The same goes for the world's biologists, who will also have a good chuckle at your simplistic and naive eructations - Dunning-Kruger at its fucking finest.

Jayjay4547 wrote:The people who don’t deny creation are called Creationists.

No, they simply deny every scientific fact that destroys their mythology-based fantasy.

Jayjay4547 wrote: It doesn’t worry me that some creationists do a lot of denial themselves, or that some are “right wing” or “conservative”.

We're back to complacency again. That didn't take long, did it boys and girls?

Presumably it doesn't worry you how many of them also lie through their teeth about the science, and lie through their teeth about anyone who doesn't genuflect before their sad little ideological masturbation fantasies?

Oh wait, one of the reasons you don't worry about this, is because you're manifestly a practitioner of the same tactics. Your posts contain lies and fabrications by the supertanker load, including this latest one of yours.

Jayjay4547 wrote:And it doesn’t worry me that creationists are generally not University Men.

You mean it doesn't worry you that none of them could stand the heat of real academia? Quelle fucking surprise.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Being the unwashed has turned out for me to be darn interesting.

Actually, I know quite a few people who would be regarded as "unwashed plebs" by many of your fellow creationists (especially the rich Republican ones in the USA), yet have more honesty and integrity in their fucking toenail clippings than all the world's creationists put together.

It's really indicative of how much you've lost here, that even when faced with someone as inoffensive and conciliatory as THWOTH posting in this thread, you couldn't help but post yet more lies and bullshit on a grand scale in response thereto. It's the reason why I regard the only legitmate response to your lies and bullshit, to be to carpet bomb them head on and expose them for the lies and bullshit they are. It's the reason I continue to regard your posts with eminently deserved scorn and derision - you could not even respond to as mild a contributor as THWOTH without continuing your tirade of lies and bullshit, a tirade of lies and bullshit you've been peddling for three whole fucking years, despite having had said lies and bullshit exposed as lies and bullshit repeatedly, by recourse to relevant DATA destroying your lies and bullshit. It's all you have to offer here, lies and bullshit with a side salad of yet more lies and bullshit, followed by lies and bullshit dessert and lies and bullshit cocktails, your entire performance here has consisted of presenting a gigantic smorgasbord of lies and bullshit, and you'll probably follow that up with the lies and bullshit cheese board.

I want it on record here that I regard your ideology as a pernicious, venomous evil, because of the manner in which its adherents become pedlars of lies and bullshit, not only to others, but to themselves. Your ideology manifestly corrupts, perverts and destroys everything that is decent with human beings, it encourages human beings to become liars and crooks, in pursuit of a sad little fairy story and its imposition upon others. I would rather insert venomous spiders down the front of my underwear than become a creationist, because I've seen first hand over the best part of a decade, how the entire creationist enterprise is driven by lies and bullshit, is riddled with hubris, hypocrisy and in some cases outright convictable criminality. Creationism stinks, it stinks of filth, it stinks of the gutter into which the effluent of humanity's dark side flows before entering the sewers, it stinks of every brand of toxic outpurings from the cloaca of diseased imaginings, and frankly, I will not rest until every sane human being regards it in the same light.

Jayjay4547 wrote: I now think it would take a hundred students a hundred years to work out how atheist ideology has influenced the narrative of human evolution but the sun around which all these aspects turn is denial of creation.

What a completely moronic thing to say.

You're effectively classing not merely biology as necessarily atheist even when many biologists are grown-up theists simply because it doesn't rely on divine magic, but by extension you are calling all of science 'atheist' if it simply constructs rational models of reality which don't rely on magic or deities.

And, of course, with the transparent self-centredness typical of a certain kind of believer, you're either ignoring all the believers who believe meaningfully different things (since they would also be 'denying' your idea of creation simply by not supporting it), or dishonestly pretending that incompatible beliefs are compatible, all for the sake of attacking atheists.

As it is, it doesn't seem like you're even clear on the difference between 'atheist' and 'secular', something which a non-retarded twelve-year-old should be easily capable of learning if they didn't know it already.

And as already pointed out and largely if not entirely ignored by you, any scientific (let alone any biological) explanation for anything is god-free, and hence compatible with atheism. There is no 'atheistic' need to privilege any particular explanation over another since all are god-free and all have no need of (or place for) divine magic.

tolman wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote: I now think it would take a hundred students a hundred years to work out how atheist ideology has influenced the narrative of human evolution but the sun around which all these aspects turn is denial of creation.

What a completely moronic thing to say.

You're effectively classing not merely biology as necessarily atheist even when many biologists are grown-up theists simply because it doesn't rely on divine magic, but by extension you are calling all of science 'atheist' if it simply constructs rational models of reality which don't rely on magic or deities.

And, of course, with the transparent self-centredness typical of a certain kind of believer, you're either ignoring all the believers who believe meaningfully different things (since they would also be 'denying' your idea of creation simply by not supporting it), or dishonestly pretending that incompatible beliefs are compatible, all for the sake of attacking atheists.

As it is, it doesn't seem like you're even clear on the difference between 'atheist' and 'secular', something which a non-retarded twelve-year-old should be easily capable of learning if they didn't know it already.

And as already pointed out and largely if not entirely ignored by you, any scientific (let alone any biological) explanation for anything is god-free, and hence compatible with atheism. There is no 'atheistic' need to privilege any particular explanation over another since all are god-free and all have no need of (or place for) divine magic.

Do you think he'll ever let anything as inconvenient as facts get in the way of his lies and bullshit?

Jayjay4547 wrote:

tolman wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:

tolman wrote:
What makes you think hand axes are overwhelmingly predator-defence-weapons as opposed to being used as other kinds of tools?

Oldowan hand axes might have been also used for other purposes I’m just arguing that the adaptive stress towards using them with precision, speed and force equivalent in effect to how other primates and predators used their canines, and the necessity for carrying those axes while foraging and of selecting optimal ones, led to weapons having had game-changing impacts on the neuron and skeleton-muscular system of our hominin ancestors. Their short blunt canines being the most unambiguous evidence of that impact.

If your intention actually is to argue in the hope of convincing anyone, it's a pity you do it with such incompetence and apparent obsessiveness.

You hope to demonstrate my lack of competence but your lack is as great as mine. Neither of us will be able to refer to the “general knowledge” resource of Wikipedia to resolve the issue of how Australopithecus might have been able to avoid predation, seeing that it had short blunt canines.

People need look no further than this thread to see the copious evidence that you systematically try to pretend that predator defence was the sole or overwhelming reason behind tool development while providing no supporting evidence for that position, despite the fact that the earliest known tools seem much less suited to predator defence than to other uses.

It appears you are obsessed to the point of unreason on this issue, since you would rather claim that ancestors must have been habitually training and carrying weapons for predator defence and viewing such weapons as symbolically important than admit that other forms of tool use would seem to be well-suited to safe skill development while doing immediately useful things with repeated and rapid positive feedback.
In your world, before they could be any real use, tool-users had to have somewhat sophisticated forward planning skills to prompt them to train with and carry weapons in the expectation of some future benefit, while somehow not having the wit to realise (even over very long timescales) the other profitable uses to which those skills could be put.

Jayjay4547 wrote:It was logical necessity that caused hominins to carry hand weapons wherever they foraged and their intimacy with hand weapons arose out of that.

What a silly thing to say.
Until they had gained meaningful defensive skills which would cause attempted weapon use to be advantageous rather than deleterious, there clearly was no 'logical necessity' to carry tools for defensive use.
What you seem to mean by 'logical necessity' is that such carrying of potential weapons even by animals with no skill in their use is necessary in order for your theory not to be a heap of shite, and to allow you to fantasise with zero evidence that predator-defence was somehow the sole or the overwhelming reason for significant tool-use development.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Well for something like 700 000 years, australopithecus barely improved their tool making skills before the Oldowan culture. In all that time they kept on bashing river cobbles, arguably the very worst kind of stones to try to give an edge to, seeing that the stones had rolled and bashed down the stream bed during floods for miles without splitting.

Had ancestors used rocks in places remote from streambeds, how likely would such things be to be fossilised and then discovered later?
And, of course, the long period of apparent* stasis once more gives the lie to your unscientific representation of your pseudoGod gaia/environment as the 'generous' sole driver of evolution.
A rational biological explanation for such a period of apparent stasis where the opportunities and raw materials seem likely to have stayed fairly constant is that some genetic changes had to arise, spread and come together in order for the organism to get any 'further'. That essentially seems to be natural selection working on chance variation, with 'advances' depending on the organism gaining capacity to allow advance to happen.

(*bearing in mind the patchiness of discoveries)

You should layoff asking JayJay to explain what atheist ideology is. He's explained it very simply and succinctly as a set of rational attitudes that make it difficult to believe in gods. I can get fully on board with that definition, but then I have to ask him what fault he can really find in that? By JayJay's definition of atheist ideology I suppose that theist ideology could be explained as a set of irrational attitudes that make it easy to believe in gods.

JayJay's complaint is that this set of rational attitudes leads to the undermining of belief in creation by something greater than ourselves. JayJay would rather have his set of irrational set of attitudes prevail over a set of rational attitudes. The point of his in this thread isn't that atheist ideology messed up the human origin story; It's that rational attitudes interfere with creationism.

Oldskeptic wrote:You should layoff asking JayJay to explain what atheist ideology is. He's explained it very simply and succinctly as a set of rational attitudes that make it difficult to believe in gods. I can get fully on board with that definition, but then I have to ask him what fault he can really find in that? By JayJay's definition of atheist ideology I suppose that theist ideology could be explained as a set of irrational attitudes that make it easy to believe in gods.

JayJay's complaint is that this set of rational attitudes leads to the undermining of belief in creation by something greater than ourselves. JayJay would rather have his set of irrational set of attitudes prevail over a set of rational attitudes. The point of his in this thread isn't that atheist ideology messed up the human origin story; It's that rational attitudes interfere with creationism.

BOOM!

And this, folks, is why why we hand out Orsons.

Oldskeptic wrote:You should layoff asking JayJay to explain what atheist ideology is. He's explained it very simply and succinctly as a set of rational attitudes that make it difficult to believe in gods.

If so, he's colossally muddied the water himself by repeatedly appearing keen to avoid answering questions, and repeatedly and shittily lying about what atheists have written while trying to pretend that his repeated dishonest misrepresentations are typical examples of 'the atheist ideology'.

He's certainly done that to me, lying repeatedly about what I wrote despite repeated attempts to correct him, and even if one accepted his hopeless lies as truth, all he seemed to be getting on his high horse about was nothing more than the fact that people who don't believe that gods exist are not obviously likely to show more deference or respect to them than they would to other fictional characters humans had invented.
Or, at least, they are not obviously likely to do so in the absence of religious thugs and delusions keen to enforce fake respect because, seemingly like jayjay, they consider that honesty isn't really important in the context of religion.

And in the context of this thread, his moronic ideas regarding 'the atheist ideology' seem to centre around 'atheists' (ie 'biologists') pushing a 'self-creation narrative' in opposition to Genesis, where 'self creation' seems to be a subjective label he essentially applies to anything he doesn't like which doesn't have a god (or a Gaia-like pseudobeliever's pseudogod) in it.

It's quite clear that if an atheist had come up with his pet hypothesis, he could have dismissed it out of hand as being a 'self-creation' narrative, since not only did it contain zero gods but it also contains animals adopting new and increasingly intelligent behaviours, and undertaking repeated training to improve their performance in future situations.

He tries to use 'the atheist ideology' as an explanation for the non-adoption of ideas like his, despite the fact that his idea, expressed in simple biological terms without his wibbling about Gaia. is not only entirely compatible with atheism but would also be perfectly compatible with his evil atheist biologist determined to find theories where our ancestors chose to do something smart and so started driving their own evolution.

The only thing seemingly saving his ideas from his own vitriol is that they are his and not anyone else's.

Therefore the thread should be entitled: "How rational attitudes messed up the irrational creation story."

Or "How DATA messed up the peddling of blind assertions as fact yet again" ....

Agrippina wrote:Therefore the thread should be entitled: "How rational attitudes messed up the irrational creation story."

Living near the Cradle of Humankind as we do, it is difficult not to ask the question as to why god did put those fossils into the ground.

juju7 wrote:

Agrippina wrote:Therefore the thread should be entitled: "How rational attitudes messed up the irrational creation story."

Living near the Cradle of Humankind as we do, it is difficult not to ask the question as to why god did put those fossils into the ground.

The trouble is that people don't ask that question. They just accept that the fossils were leftovers from a global flood.

tolman wrote:
[to Jayjay4547] People need look no further than this thread to see the copious evidence that you systematically try to pretend that predator defence was the sole or overwhelming reason behind tool development while providing no supporting evidence for that position, despite the fact that the earliest known tools seem much less suited to predator defence than to other uses.

So long as you to stigmatize my post as obsessed, unreason fantasy, a heap of shite and silly, I hope that some readers will appreciate that your account of my position isn’t to be trusted. What I have been arguing is that the short blunt canines of Australopithecus shows that they had abandoned defensive biting, which makes other higher primates dangerous to attack. Whatever steps led to that abandonment it had been completed by the time of Australopithecus afarensis, but maybe not completed at the time of Ardipithecus, suggested by the comparison below:


I suggested that the intimacy of using a hand weapon for defense might explain the origin of the intense interest that their human descendant have in tools. But my main interest is in ways that their habit preadapted Australopithecus for framing and parsing sentences. Because that was the great creative game changer for life on this planet.

tolman wrote: It appears you are obsessed to the point of unreason on this issue, since you would rather claim that ancestors must have been habitually training and carrying weapons for predator defence and viewing such weapons as symbolically important than admit that other forms of tool use would seem to be well-suited to safe skill development while doing immediately useful things with repeated and rapid positive feedback.

It would be immediately useful to hit a jackal on the head with a stone before it grabs your baby. Take the case of the stone “hammers” such as found at Lake Turkana.


Some surfaces of the cobbles were said to show marks of miss-aimed blows intended to flake the core. Not that it can be easily predicted where to hit a river stone so as to flake it. But anyway, if the first blow fails, the worker has plenty of time to hit the core gain. There s/he is, sitting in the sun at the shore of a lovely lake, banging away. Nothing better to do than make a few “hammers”. Same with using a straw to fish termites out of a nest. But defending against a predator would be different; every available resource in the prey animal’s being is then drawn into the effort to avoid being eaten. Brain, nerves, muscles and skeleton are all working at their ultimate effectiveness. And how well they do their task is consequential- not only for that animal, but for its relatives in the troop.

You require a “safe” environment for developing weapon using skills? That would be Lamarkian. Darwin’s contribution was that what drove natural changes was unsafeness: the unsurvival of the unfit.

tolman wrote: In your world, before they could be any real use, tool-users had to have somewhat sophisticated forward planning skills to prompt them to train with and carry weapons in the expectation of some future benefit, while somehow not having the wit to realise (even over very long timescales) the other profitable uses to which those skills could be put.

Seems more like your world, to require “sophisticated forward planning skills” for an animal to knowingly carry weapons around. The cows in my village are no smarter than a hominin but they know darn well what their horns are for, and they don’t hesitate do demonstrate that by flourishing their horns at my dogs. And the dogs get the message, loud and clear. If a thing is a weapon, all animals concerned recognize that. Survival depends on it. A hominin for whom hand weapons had demonstrated their effectiveness, would need no forward planning to carry them around wherever it needed to go.

One problem would be around practicality. For example, a pile of throwable stones might be accumulated near the entrance of a cave, but it wouldn’t be feasible to carry around a big weight of throwable stones while foraging.

tolman wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:It was logical necessity that caused hominins to carry hand weapons wherever they foraged and their intimacy with hand weapons arose out of that.

What a silly thing to say.
Until they had gained meaningful defensive skills which would cause attempted weapon use to be advantageous rather than deleterious, there clearly was no 'logical necessity' to carry tools for defensive use.
What you seem to mean by 'logical necessity' is that such carrying of potential weapons even by animals with no skill in their use is necessary in order for your theory not to be a heap of shite, and to allow you to fantasise with zero evidence that predator-defence was somehow the sole or the overwhelming reason for significant tool-use development.

Tool use and tool development are different. “Development” implies change. The evidence is that between 3.3Ma and 1.7Ma there was minor change, that is, over most of the lifespan of Australopithecus. 4 to 2Ma. So I don’t fantasize that predator defense was the sole of overwhelming reason for significant tool-use development. I infer from the small blunt canines of Australopithecus that defensive weapon USE was the reason for their small blunt canines. Their bipedalism, long backs and arched feet without opposed big toes are consistent with that adaptation, as is the thin hairless sweaty skin probably developed during that time. I infer that Australopithecus had evolved symbiotically with hand held weapons and in that partner relationship, the biotic partner had adapted more rapidly.

That’s more than just a way of looking at it; it helps one appreciate that in the current age weapons have Darwin-Bushed into the broader set of “tools” and they are adapting much more quickly than their biological partners. That might be ominous for human and other life.

tolman wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Well for something like 700 000 years, australopithecus barely improved their tool making skills before the Oldowan culture. In all that time they kept on bashing river cobbles, arguably the very worst kind of stones to try to give an edge to, seeing that the stones had rolled and bashed down the stream bed during floods for miles without splitting.

Had ancestors used rocks in places remote from streambeds, how likely would such things be to be fossilised and then discovered later?

“Fossil” Rocks?!!! In Africa, stone age “rocks” litter some landscapes far away from streambeds. I‘ve got a little Oldowan scraper on my shelf, that I found in the road. At least I think that’s what it is. My cousin collected a whole bowl of later undoubted stone age tools from our Limpopo Province farm. A retired English professor in the local town has a tray of them in his lounge. One place you can be reasonably sure that a given stone ISN'T many millions of years old is if it lies in a stream bed, where stones are ground up. The Lake Turkana tools weren’t found IN a stream bed but NEAR one, from which they were sourced. What enabled them to be precisely dated was that they were excavated from a particular level in layered bed, in the style of classic geology dating.

tolman wrote: And, of course, the long period of apparent* stasis once more gives the lie to your unscientific representation of your pseudoGod gaia/environment as the 'generous' sole driver of evolution.]

I’m not invested into “pseudoGodgaia/environment”t except as valid agent of creation as opposed to the trope of self-creation that you insist on, for example in your post below.

tolman wrote: A rational biological explanation for such a period of apparent stasis where the opportunities and raw materials seem likely to have stayed fairly constant is that some genetic changes had to arise, spread and come together in order for the organism to get any 'further'. That essentially seems to be natural selection working on chance variation, with 'advances' depending on the organism gaining capacity to allow advance to happen. (*bearing in mind the patchiness of discoveries)

So to your thinking some genetic change happened that could equally have happened a million years later or earlier or might by chance never have happened, and so the origin of humankind was a chance outcome. That is a self-creation trope. I’m rather interested in ways that a successful defensive weapon use preadapted Australopithecus for being able to frame and parse sentences. Because those ways, though staringly obvious, don’t seem to have been noticed. One thread of preadaptations lies in the association of human language with the nervous system that controls the hands, rather than what deals with emotions, as in the vocalizing by other primates. Another set of aspects is around release of compromises on brain development involved in using the same head to think with and to bite a predator with. In other words, what was stopping female primates from developing language, by their being in lockstep with the male expression of their genes. A third thread is around social compromises faced by young of other primates, who need to grow up fast to avoid becoming prey. Another social aspect is the availability of weapon use to female hominins witjhoutv a feeding penalty such as would be faced by female primates with fangs, so adding defensive depth to protection especially of young. That would increase the feasibility of investing in very slow maturing young.

I’m not discarding the role of genetic change, I just think that being able to name the site of some genetic change like FOXP2 doesn’t help that much with explanation of origins, whereas the intimate relationship between ancestral habits and how that predapted our ancestors for creative change, is useful and interesting and weirdly neglected.

More shite. It deserves this: