Scot Dutchy wrote:Why bother? Just FO there's a good thing. We dont need you anymore. Bye.

Poisonous.

One extreme result of Darwin having associated human origins with sexual selection, was Desmond Morris’ The Naked Ape (1967). According to Wikipedia, Morris chose that title “because out of 193 species of monkeys and apes, only humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) are not covered in hair. That is about how we look; not what humans can do and oddly, in the face of the fact that what distinguishes life from non-life is its organic nature: living things do stuff, enabled by deep layers of organic function. And in terms of function, what distinguishes mankind not just from 193 species of monkeys and apes, but from every other earthling species, is our faculty of speech. There is not one single member of another species, who could explain to a vet what ails them. I once heard a vet complain about that.

I need to say “speech” not “language” because of the smudgism trope in TofE that denies pattern and would make out that animals “also” have languages. But not many would have the hardihood to say that other animals also talk. One can’t easily deny either, that the formidable human capacity to share precise information is a planetary game changer with open-ended implications for all life on earth.

I was deeply impressed by The Naked Ape when it came out; that must be a measure of how trivial my conception of the human creation was back then. I was going with the cultural flow; according to Wiki it was translated into 25 languages.

Jayjay4547 wrote:that must be a measure of how trivial my conception of the human creation was back then.

Worry not, as it's still the case.

Jayjay4547 wrote:I was deeply impressed by The Naked Ape when it came out; that must be a measure of how trivial my conception of the human creation was back then. I was going with the cultural flow; according to Wiki it was translated into 25 languages.

One of the problems with pop science is that people often project their own biases on it. Because they’ve read something sciencey they feel like they can science and don’t bother to learn or understand actual science. Often they read a book that is decades old and keep referring to it despite people letting them know the science within it has moved on and that our understanding of such matters is much deeper today than it once was. Typically the people who believe they are sciencing despite not having kept up with the science or even learned the lessons of science ignore what they are being told by people who have and persist in their bias, seemingly in some weird form of nostalgia.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Scot Dutchy wrote:Why bother? Just FO there's a good thing. We dont need you anymore. Bye.

Poisonous.

Sadly you don't deign to participate in the wider forum, or else you'd find that pretty much everyone here would agree with you on this point.

Jayjay4547 wrote:One extreme result of Darwin having associated human origins with sexual selection, was Desmond Morris’ The Naked Ape (1967). According to Wikipedia, Morris chose that title “because out of 193 species of monkeys and apes, only humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) are not covered in hair.

Always bear in mind 2 things:

specificity: what does 'covered in hair' mean specifically? In reality, of course, we are covered in hair - both women and men. It's just not very thick or dense hair. Actually, most of the body is covered in one type of hair or another - the only parts almost universally lacking are on the the back of the ears, the lips, soles of the feet and palms of the hands, and the navel.

variation: humans actually exhibit a wide range of hair density, with some - typically men - being almost completely coated in thicker androgenic hair from the top of their heads down to their feet.

It's important to be specific and to account for variation so that one makes more accurate statements.


Meanwhile, while essentially all primates are hairy, there are plenty of hairless mammals from elephants, most pinnipeds, cetaceans, rhinos, hippos, most pigs, and of course, the mole rat.

Jayjay4547 wrote:That is about how we look; not what humans can do and oddly, in the face of the fact that what distinguishes life from non-life is its organic nature: living things do stuff, enabled by deep layers of organic function. And in terms of function, what distinguishes mankind not just from 193 species of monkeys and apes, but from every other earthling species, is our faculty of speech.

This is completely untrue. Pretty much all terrestrial animals employ speech. It's not speech in the human form, of course, but they make sounds to signal and send information to other members of their species. Those sounds can include emotional information, showing anger, sexual reception, contentment, or they can send warnings about imminent threats; they can represent threats themselves, or exactly the opposite.

There's fairly good evidence that many animals have the equivalent of nouns, but what other animals' speech doesn't have is grammar.

Jayjay4547 wrote:There is not one single member of another species, who could explain to a vet what ails them. I once heard a vet complain about that.

It's unclear why the expectation would be on the animal to employ human speech to converse with the human. Why are we not lamenting the exact same fact in humans being unable to a) understand what ails an animal via its speech, or b) be able to communicate with animals using their speech?

As such, the category 'cannot communicate with other species' seems to firmly include humans on even footing with other animals.

Jayjay4547 wrote:I need to say “speech” not “language” because of the smudgism trope in TofE that denies pattern and would make out that animals “also” have languages.

It's disappointing to see you come back from a break and immediately start engaging in these silly, self-defeating mental gymnastics. There is no such thing as a 'smudgism', and if there were, then that's exactly what your sentence above entails.

The onus is on you to be specific, not on the world to conform to your made up categories.

We know that some animals possess rudimentary language. Gibbons, for example, can signal a range of different threats which are understood by their fellows and consequently can act accordingly.

We don't know what whales' speech entails. It's entirely possible that they are actually building syntactic sentences comprised of qualitative information, conveying complex information to one and other. You don't know that they're not doing that. I know beyond doubt that you don't know, so it's best if you don't try and decree what is or isn't real for the sake of some other argument you wish to stake.

As I said: specificity. What you want to do is specify what it is that we can be sure animals don't possess. We know they have nouns, but it's unlikely they have prepositions, adverbs, or subordinating clauses, while all human languages do possess these structures. We don't know whether they can communicate time and space, even whether they can conceive of them in the same way, but then ethnographical research shows there are human languages which don't confer any information about time or space, so that's not much use.

Regardless, if one wishes to make confident statements, one needs to ensure that those statements are correct, not invent some special phrase to handwave away the evident problems with that statement.

Jayjay4547 wrote: But not many would have the hardihood to say that other animals also talk.

I would say with reasonable confidence that there are many animals which can talk. Aside from the cetaceans already mentioned, you need to watch videos on bonobo females getting together and having a good natter. It's a wonder to behold. And I do mean 'wonder', as in, it's entirely perplexing just what it is they're doing. One key hypothesis in the evolution of language is that it is a symbolic form of grooming; one that takes less time and is more efficient as one can effectively groom many relationships simultaneously. This could be the foundation of human language, and watching female bonobos, you'd be hard pressed to say that it's not occurring among them.

Jayjay4547 wrote: One can’t easily deny either, that the formidable human capacity to share precise information is a planetary game changer with open-ended implications for all life on earth.

Ok, but then one can't deny that proto forms of it exist throughout the natural world.

Jayjay4547 wrote:I was deeply impressed by The Naked Ape when it came out; that must be a measure of how trivial my conception of the human creation was back then. I was going with the cultural flow; according to Wiki it was translated into 25 languages.

I unfortunately was not yet born when it was published, and didn't read it until undergraduate Anthropology. It's a very good book. It is, of course, wildly outdated in many areas today given that it can't include the last 50 years of deep research into the many topics it covers. We have to remember that the scientific enterprise is not occurring at a steady pace, but has been exponential. The number of active researchers today in these topics is quite probably several orders of magnitude more than in the 60's. Consequently, the data they have uncovered and are uncovering on a daily basis is beyond the scope of any single human being to collate, compile and to know.

For a more up to date book in a similar vein you could try The Social Conquest of Earth, by E O Wilson. You might not be in agreement with his analysis of religion therein though!

felltoearth wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:I was deeply impressed by The Naked Ape when it came out; that must be a measure of how trivial my conception of the human creation was back then. I was going with the cultural flow; according to Wiki it was translated into 25 languages.

One of the problems with pop science is that people often project their own biases on it. Because they’ve read something sciencey they feel like they can science and don’t bother to learn or understand actual science. Often they read a book that is decades old and keep referring to it despite people letting them know the science within it has moved on and that our understanding of such matters is much deeper today than it once was. Typically the people who believe they are sciencing despite not having kept up with the science or even learned the lessons of science ignore what they are being told by people who have and persist in their bias, seemingly in some weird form of nostalgia.

Don't dismiss this comment as being an attack, JJ. It's actually not only unarguably true, it's also vital that we are all aware of the limitations of our knowledge comparative to what is actually known by the human species.

I've read that the last time a single human being's brain could have held all the information available to human society was around the 12th century, but again, human knowledge hasn't just grown steadily in that time, but has increased exponentially, orders of magnitude more bytes of information.

Even in a single field, it's damn near impossible to keep properly up to date - a fact I encounter routinely when it comes to teaching classes as last year's nicely designed slides now have to accommodate new findings that sometimes make an entire section of a course need a rewrite. Even in the most specific field of study, forgetting the rest of the diverse subject, I would need to spend more than 20 hours a week reading just to stay abreast of new finds, current models, experiments and discussions. Unless you are completely submerged in the enterprise, and are surrounded by peers similarly submerged, it's nigh on impossible to maintain a deep knowledge of even a very specific, focused area, let alone an entire discipline. That's just the reality you face, and for most people in the sciences, I think it's what they find so stimulating - there's always more you don't know, and encountering that and synthesizing it can produce the most wonderful revelations.

Spearthrower wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Scot Dutchy wrote:Why bother? Just FO there's a good thing. We dont need you anymore. Bye.

Poisonous.

Sadly you don't deign to participate in the wider forum, or else you'd find that pretty much everyone here would agree with you on this point.

Incidentally, as you probably don't believe it, and you're probably thinking 'well, none of you atheists disputed Scot's post' - the actual truth is that I did reply to it, but Scot was running across multiple threads calling me names, so they all ended up getting dumped to the Off Topic thread.

http://www.rationalskepticism.org/fun-g ... l#p2709979

Spearthrower wrote:

Scot Dutchy wrote:Why bother? Just FO there's a good thing. We dont need you anymore. Bye.

You can ignore Scot: most people here do apparently. He hasn't learned yet how to speak to human beings.

As you can see from the title of that post - it was originally written in this thread in response to Scot. His absurd reaction to having his behavior challenged resulted in it being removed from this thread, although I can't really understand why they didn't also remove his 'just FO' post to you at the same time, or why he didn't receive a curt slap on the arse for it.

Spearthrower wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:One extreme result of Darwin having associated human origins with sexual selection, was Desmond Morris’ The Naked Ape (1967). According to Wikipedia, Morris chose that title “because out of 193 species of monkeys and apes, only humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) are not covered in hair.

Jayjay4547 wrote:That is about how we look; not what humans can do and oddly, in the face of the fact that what distinguishes life from non-life is its organic nature: living things do stuff, enabled by deep layers of organic function. And in terms of function, what distinguishes mankind not just from 193 species of monkeys and apes, but from every other earthling species, is our faculty of speech.

This is completely untrue. Pretty much all terrestrial animals employ speech. It's not speech in the human form, of course, but they make sounds to signal and send information to other members of their species.

When people deploy the atheist ideological element of smudgism (denial of distinctively human abilities), they often say that there are animal “languages” but you are the first person I have met with the hardihood to use the word “speech” in this context. It’s not common usage; it’s extreme. A real and important distinctions between all humans and all other life is expressed in the common usages that humans talk, we have speech, and all other animals are dumb. Which is not to say stupid, by any means.

Spearthrower wrote: Those sounds can include emotional information, showing anger, sexual reception, contentment, or they can send warnings about imminent threats; they can represent threats themselves, or exactly the opposite.

I agree that animals send intentional messages to other animals. When a cow flourishes her horns at a dog she knows exactly what she is doing and so does the dog. When you see a sliver of white in a bull’s eye you had better “get the message”.

Spearthrower wrote: There's fairly good evidence that many animals have the equivalent of nouns, but what other animals' speech doesn't have is grammar.

Grammar is what enables meaning rather than mental states, to be conveyed through words. For example the meaning in: “The ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle is a constant” relies on grammar. Without grammar there cannot be speech.

Spearthrower wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:There is not one single member of another species, who could explain to a vet what ails them. I once heard a vet complain about that.

It's unclear why the expectation would be on the animal to employ human speech to converse with the human. Why are we not lamenting the exact same fact in humans being unable to a) understand what ails an animal via its speech, or b) be able to communicate with animals using their speech?

As such, the category 'cannot communicate with other species' seems to firmly include humans on even footing with other animals.

Part of the unique human faculty of speech is a prodigious ability of infants to learn languages by simply listening to speech in context. A proportion of adults retain some of this prodigious ability. Specialists have been able to decode Egyptian hieroglyphics and Babylonic cuneiform.

If any other animals could talk humans would have figured that out long ago and conversely, if any other animals could talk some would have also learned English. Surely they have the motivation.

Spearthrower wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:I need to say “speech” not “language” because of the smudgism trope in TofE that denies pattern and would make out that animals “also” have languages.

It's disappointing to see you come back from a break and immediately start engaging in these silly, self-defeating mental gymnastics. There is no such thing as a 'smudgism', and if there were, then that's exactly what your sentence above entails.

The onus is on you to be specific, not on the world to conform to your made up categories.

Well “smudgism” is a made up word but it points to a very real and important phenomenon of ideology. Its polar opposite is “exceptionalism”; the deprecated notion that humans are in a separate category to all other life and the intended end-point of the creation.

[I snipped where you repeated your argument]

Spearthrower wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote: One can’t easily deny either, that the formidable human capacity to share precise information is a planetary game changer with open-ended implications for all life on earth.

Ok, but then one can't deny that proto forms of it exist throughout the natural world.

Animals are enabled to do many things; to swim, burrow, make nests; but when one species is enabled in a particular important way, you find many species are similarly enabled. Birds catch fish, but even some bats also catch fish. It’s problematic to claim that “proto forms” of speech exist when we can’t map the path from dumb animal to talking human. In the case of our ancestors who are the only ones to have developed speech, they went through a period of rapid brain expansion from the time of Australopithecus. Whereas modern apes with brains the same size as Australopithecus, can’t talk. But if one compares a chimp with a human skull, it looks that chimps were blocked from this encephalisation, by their using the same skull for biting and for thinking.


So. plausibly, one factor that enabled the evolution of speech was that our ancestors abandoned biting in favour of using hand-held weapons. Of course, I have argued that before but even if I am wrong, it is a prospect that should occur to many, were it not for interference from pre-existing contrary notion that the human creation happened so “naturally” as to have been acausal. Isn’t it adaptive to have speech? So, humans must be just by chance, slightly ahead of a pack of species headed that way. But one clear implication of such a small feature as the lack of fang-like canines in male Australopithecus is that the creation of human speech followed a twisty structured path.

According to the Wikipedia entry on “ecological niche”, the Grinnellian niche concept “embodies the idea that the niche of a species is determined by the habitat in which it lives and its accompanying behavioral adaptations. In other words, the niche is the sum of the habitat requirements and behaviors that allow a species to persist and produce offspring.

The concept of a niche is associated with the notion of convergent evolution:

According to Vaclav Petr(2000) The Cambridge palaeontologist Simon Conway Morris and much earlier, Dart’s contemporary Robert Broom, both saw convergent evolution as signs that evolution is in some sense structured. Ecological niches can be visualised as “possible states” in phenotype space and the evolution of speech by our ancestors, as a narrow string-like path leading to the niche.

In an exceptionalist model, the focus would on this path as the pre-ordained road followed by the human creation. I don’t want to go there, as far as I can go is to say that the creation of human speech is such a recent development and so hugely significant a faculty, that it is prime evidence of how creation actually works via natural selection.

I will try later to respond to the rest of your post.

[edit:typos]

Jayjay4547 wrote:When people deploy the atheist ideological element of smudgism (denial of distinctively human abilities)

You write too many words, JJ. You should just go straight to your money-shot which is "huminz iz speshul, and Ray Dart divined it". He didn't really. You read what you read, and divine your special creation from whatever you read. You can't afford not to. If you went so far as to acknowledge one observation that conflicts with your idea of special creation, your head would explode.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Animals are enabled to do many things

Enabled by what agency, JJ? See, there you go again. It's your assumption that there is an agency. You can't prove agency as a conclusion using agency as an assumption. I have to look at your shit for about 45 seconds before I find a line or three where you do this. You victimize yourself; you give the game away with the language you use when you're not being careful, which is mostly.

Gawd! 190 pages and we're still going on about Primate and Human skulls and 'Atheist Ideology' (whatever that is). I would consider that I view the world and the Universe beyond from an atheist viewpoint - that is, I have no belief in the existence of a 'Supernatural Being'. It does not require an 'Ideology' to maintain or 'apply' this non-belief.

JJ, you've been asked about this non-existent 'Ideology' many times and you have always dodged the question and refused to answer, however 'wordy' your replies.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Spearthrower wrote: There's fairly good evidence that many animals have the equivalent of nouns, but what other animals' speech doesn't have is grammar.

Grammar is what enables meaning rather than mental states, to be conveyed through words.

Now you're concocting an idiosyncratic description of semantics; you don't know what you're talking about, which means you're not elaborating semantics, JJ. There are professors of linguistics, you know, and you could cite their "fairly good evidence" if semantic theory supported your bullshit. But you have a cockeyed approach to 'evidence', because all we can observe is behavior; we cannot observe 'semantics'. Your amateurish babble just underscores that you're out of your depth, again. Your take on evolution, genetics and cognition is nothing but self-absorbed ranting because somebody doesn't accept your idiosyncratic theism. It's your obsession to announce agency in creation, rather than its being a conclusion you reach from any data you can cite.

Jayjay4547 wrote:
When people deploy the atheist ideological element of smudgism...

Started to read with interest...

Got this far.

No longer interested.

The amount of bullshit self-serving, concocted slurs you've poisoned the well with in this thread is fucking absurd JJ.

Either stop acting like a total dick, or go join Scot Duchy in the toxic to humanity corner.

You give every appearance of wanting - even expecting your ideas to be taken seriously, but you can't hope to attain that when you act like a clown.

Make your decision now.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

When people deploy the atheist ideological element of smudgism (denial of distinctively human abilities)

See, this type of blatant lying, after having been repeatedly corrected, destroys any semblance of reason and honesty on your part in this discussion Jayjay,
Even if such denial takes place, which you consistently fail to demonstrate, it has fuck all to do with atheism.

A. One does not need to be an atheist to 'deny distinctly human abilities'
B. One does not need to 'deny distinctly human abilities'

Given A and B, there is no causal link between atheism and the 'denial of distinctly human abilities'.
Once again demonstrating that your fantasy of an atheist ideology is exactly that, pure fantasy that you cling to despite repeated corrections.

Spearthrower wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:I was deeply impressed by The Naked Ape when it came out; that must be a measure of how trivial my conception of the human creation was back then. I was going with the cultural flow; according to Wiki it was translated into 25 [actually 23] languages.

I unfortunately was not yet born when it was published, and didn't read it until undergraduate Anthropology. It's a very good book.

[

It’s relevant to my argument that you read that book in an anthropology course at least 20 years after it was a best seller and that you still regard it as “very good”. I want to argue that (a) the book is wrong on what is distinctive about the human species (b) it trivialises humanity (c) the book and your modern reaction to it reflects a continuing trend pioneered by Darwin in Descent of Man, towards telling the human origin story in terms of dynamics within the species. I claim these reflect an unrecognised but powerful influence of the creationist-evolutionist argument on how ToE is presented.

Spearthrower wrote:
It is, of course, wildly outdated in many areas today given that it can't include the last 50 years of deep research into the many topics it covers. We have to remember that the scientific enterprise is not occurring at a steady pace, but has been exponential. The number of active researchers today in these topics is quite probably several orders of magnitude more than in the 60's. Consequently, the data they have uncovered and are uncovering on a daily basis is beyond the scope of any single human being to collate, compile and to know.

Let’s test that against this extract from the Wikipedia entry:
Morris said that Homo sapiens not only have the largest brains of all higher primates, but that sexual selection in human evolution has caused humans to have the highest ratio of penis size to body mass. Morris conjectured that human ear-lobes developed as an additional erogenous zone to facilitate the extended sexuality necessary in the evolution of human monogamous pair bonding. Morris further stated that the more rounded shape of human female breasts means they are mainly a sexual signalling device rather than simply for providing milk for infants.[1]
Here is the product of some of this “deep research” into penis and breast sizes:


(a) As a guide to the differences between mankind and other hominoids, this pic omits the observation that among this clade only humans measure relative sizes, draw comparative diagrams and post them on the internet. So it misses the point about what is distinctively human.

(b) As a story of what is distinctively human, the pic, like Desmond Morris’ book, trivialises humanity. Really, so what if men have bigger penises than gorillas? That is a dead end and a silly concern as we face problems stemming from actual human distinctiveness of climate change, the sixth extinction, a spreading nuclear, state surveillance threats etc.


(c) In the article this pic came from the discussion is in terms of within-specie dynamics: the habits of adult hominoids and mainly, the males. Do the males practice infanticide, have sex with multiple females, protect their access to females using male social groupings? It doesn’t foreground the existential necessities of females or infants. And that in the face of two staringly obvious factors (i) human infants take hugely longer to become coordinated and to be able to feed themselves than other hominoids, presumably connected with the acquisition of language and (ii) the relatively large human penis can be seen as part of a human package of apparent (and deceptive) vulnerability; no fangs, no claws, no horns, no pelt, eggshell skull. Why isn’t this distinctive character in the human interface factored in?

Spearthrower wrote:
For a more up to date book in a similar vein you could try The Social Conquest of Earth, by E O Wilson. You might not be in agreement with his analysis of religion therein though!

EO Wilson, like Desmond Morris, is an intelligent and knowledgeable man and a great essayist, working on elaborating the established world picture. I can just imagine him going on and on about how social our species is, when really, we are in a predicament of being the only species that can talk, in an open-ended context created by that, which seems to include huge social organisation as well as huge ideological cross-talk whenever we try to place ourselves in the world.

Ok. Who was the smartarse that put in a picture of BJ instead of an Orangutan?

<foot tap>

I can wait all day you know!

Jayjay4547 wrote:
Here is the product of some of this “deep research” into penis and breast sizes

Testical size!

Genetalia!

And you want to document its errors. Did you catch them all? Literate as you are, JJ. So: Why did you post that image? It's not from wikipedia, or any site you can correct.

You replied to another one of my posts JJ, but I am not going to invest the time to read it until you invest the time to make a decision regarding your manner of posting.

Just as Scot was taken to task for being aggressive and generally toxic, so you need to stop using this forum as a platform as a means of venting your hostility about boogeymen atheists that exist only in your imagination.

Spearthrower wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:
When people deploy the atheist ideological element of smudgism...

Started to read with interest...

Got this far.

No longer interested.

The amount of bullshit self-serving, concocted slurs you've poisoned the well with in this thread is fucking absurd JJ.

Either stop acting like a total dick, or go join Scot Duchy in the toxic to humanity corner.

You give every appearance of wanting - even expecting your ideas to be taken seriously, but you can't hope to attain that when you act like a clown.

Make your decision now.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:

...

Here is the product of some of this “deep research” into penis and breast sizes:


(a) As a guide to the differences between mankind and other hominoids, this pic omits the observation that among this clade only humans measure relative sizes, draw comparative diagrams and post them on the internet. So it misses the point about what is distinctively human.

The Naked Ape was important because it gave voice in the popular imagination to the indisputable fact that humans are just one animal species among many, and that our behaviors towards and interactions with each other and the world are essentially no different to that of other animal: different in content, but not different in kind.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:
(b) As a story of what is distinctively human, the pic, like Desmond Morris’ book, trivialises humanity. Really, so what if men have bigger penises than gorillas? That is a dead end and a silly concern as we face problems stemming from actual human distinctiveness of climate change, the sixth extinction, a spreading nuclear, state surveillance threats etc.

You do your interlocutor a disservice by failing to acknowledge that they never declared the book a definitive statement on the comparable status of humans, and indeed explicitly mentioned that it wasn't, that it was a product of its time, and that those who specialise in this area of research have significantly progressed in our understanding of animal and human behavior since its publication.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:
(c) In the article this pic came from the discussion is in terms of within-specie dynamics: the habits of adult hominoids and mainly, the males. Do the males practice infanticide, have sex with multiple females, protect their access to females using male social groupings? It doesn’t foreground the existential necessities of females or infants. And that in the face of two staringly obvious factors (i) human infants take hugely longer to become coordinated and to be able to feed themselves than other hominoids, presumably connected with the acquisition of language and (ii) the relatively large human penis can be seen as part of a human package of apparent (and deceptive) vulnerability; no fangs, no claws, no horns, no pelt, eggshell skull. Why isn’t this distinctive character in the human interface factored in?

I fear you need to justify your 'presumablys' there, as you proceed upon the assumption that they are undoubtedly correct without offering any support as to why. Basically, your objections rely on your interlocutor justifying, to your satisfaction, why your concerns are not applicable or relevant while you continue to progress your argument on the basis that they are. To undertake this form of argument is for the claimant to declare themselves the sole arbiter of the discourse and thus the party duly authorised to set and place conditions upon the arguments of others. On present evidence I doubt that you will acknowledge this kind of discursive failure or recognise you own part in promulgating it, but I thought I'd mention it nonetheless.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

You seek to criticise Wilson and Morris for what they did not say and/or for what they should have said on the presumption that what was left out is far more important and significant than what was left in. All your argument amounts to is a plea that humans are the most human species of all, and therefore by that measure humans are superior, humanly speaking, to all other apes or mammals, and no doubt to all other animals, insects, plants and bacteria generally. You seem to have a great desire for other to acknoledge this on your behalf, so I have obliged you. But it is still a silly argument, one that proceeds entirely from its conclusion, and where that conclusion rests on an arbitrary condition that assumes that measuring every other organism against the metric of our singular species is both appropriate and relevant. One might as well criticise the Frenchman for not being a dressing table, and the dressing table for not being a liverwurst for all the good it will do.

Well, it all comes down to who has the biggest dick after all.

Is this what passes for a rational position?

RS