Oh...

This album just gets better. And is that fucking Phil Lynott?!

I was waiting for you to get to that.

I nearly didn't recognise him 'til he started singing. Our Phil could easily have starred in a musical.

He certainly plays a nutter beautifully.

How could I have been so culturally ignorant as to have never heard this before? It's like somehow not knowing who Shakespeare is.

It is kind of bizarre, I thought everyone of an age knew of it. And then there was that whole new recording and stage show not long ago. Mind you...do you have older siblings? Mine is 12 years older than me and was playing it non-stop when it was new. I guess with you being a few years younger than me you wouldn't have been around then.

I'm the oldest. The rest ask at which altitude they should leap.

Ah! Just finished the album *lies back, sparks cigarette, kisses bicep*

How was it for you?

The first proper album I ever bought.

Ani reborn!

Sendraks wrote:At some point we'll see a new thread from JayJay, which will essentially be a rehash of his assertions from previous threads.

You must be clairvoyant. The October 8 issue of London Review of Books has a piece by Leofrane Holford-Stevens , "The origin of Grammar: Language in the Light of Evolution”. It’s a review of a 2007 book by James Hurford. That’s a curiously old book of supposedly modern scholarship to be commenting on. The article itself on page 37 has a curious title: “Eating or Being Eaten”. Curioser and Curioser. No more than that, but I’ve been trying to figure out why that title and why now. There’s nothing in the text about eating or being eaten and what does that really mean anyway? It doesn’t express the condition of dumb animals: If you don’t eat you will be eaten! You must eat, or you will be eaten! My guess is, it’s an elliptical reference to the narrow scope of things our dumb ancestors did, whereas mankind watches a movie, drives a car, writes a letter. All that thanks to human grammar, what sets us apart from the rest of creation. As we know it. Maybe the title also carries a faint whiff of “Nature Red in Tooth and Claw”.

By just changing one word in that title, it stops being elliptical and becomes a directl] expression of the universal animal condition. Eating Without Being Eaten" . The giraffe stands in full view to eat the tree canopy from the outside.. And if a lion comes to eat him, the giraffe sees the lion in time and kicks the shit out of the lion. The opposing elements of Eating and not being eaten are like the two faces of a furrow or niche, the creative morphing structures in the environment that have guided evolution.

A title “Eating Without being Eaten” would also be a specific key to the evolution of grammar. Because it’s the bizarre way our ancestors avoided being eaten, that opened the creative pathway to the bizarrely slow maturing juvenile brain that lies in the eggshell skull of the grammar-deploying human being. That’s the main inference to be drawn from the short blunt canines of Australopithecus, that they had abandoned defensive biting which makes other higher primates dangerous to attack. There you have it Sendraks; right as always! But It’s worth repeating, the one sentence outcome from years of bickering on the internet. I’m as proud of it, as Johnson said of Monboddo, as a squirrel is of its tail.

I have a theory about why the erudite Holford-Stevens should bother to review an 8 year old book (he is a retired consultant scholar-editor at OUP and the LRB only publishes the writings of the erudite). My theory is that something about human evolution is bubbling up amongst the English intelligentsia, their collective mind is troubled in its sleep. Ninety one years since Raymond Dart held the tiny skull of the Taung child in his hand and saw those short blunt canines. And almost immediately was blown off course by the ideological necessity of telling the story of human creation in terms of what our ancestors did, instead of what happened to them.

You don't have a theory, you have a hypothesis. How might you test it?

I had chicken soup today. I ate without being eaten. The chicken ate without being eaten until it was just the right size. I can almost bet it didn't have canines too. Coincidence? I think not.

"Eat or be eaten" has nothing to do with the actual ingestion of food. It's metaphorical language for either being in control or being controlled. I thought everyone knew that.

THWOTH wrote:You don't have a theory, you have a hypothesis. How might you test it?

If he's doing science, then he has a hypothesis.

If he's doing theistic wibble pseudo-science - then he'll use whatever words serve to aggrandise his position.

Well look who's back! I've missed this particular brand of entertainment. Let's see if you've learned anything of substance during your sabbatical, shall we?

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Sendraks wrote:At some point we'll see a new thread from JayJay, which will essentially be a rehash of his assertions from previous threads.

You must be clairvoyant.

No, it's just that creationists, yourself included, are woefully predictable. Not sufficiently quantitatively predictable to be usable as clocks, but predictable enough from a qualitative standpoint, certainly.

Jayjay4547 wrote:The October 8 issue of London Review of Books has a piece by Leofrane Holford-Stevens , "The origin of Grammar: Language in the Light of Evolution”.

Ah, I wonder if ASPM and FOXP2 feature therein? I'll have to acquire a copy.

Jayjay4547 wrote:It’s a review of a 2007 book by James Hurford. That’s a curiously old book of supposedly modern scholarship to be commenting on.

Actually, according to the author's own website, the book in question was published in 2011. I think it's safe to conclude that he knows more about this than you do.

The 2007 work was actually The Origins of Meaning: Language In The Light Of Evolution. Details of which can be found here, again on the author's own website.

So already, you're returning to your old precedents of not being able to handle elementary facts. This does not bode well for the subsequent content of your latest post.

In the meantime, a useful review of the 2007 work, by Dean Falk writing in Nature, is reproduced here. the 2011 work is reviewed by Robert Berwick in Science, and the review is available in full here. That 2011 review points to some potentially worrying assertions in Hurford's work, some of which are not actually supported by the palaeontolgical record. Indeed, that review ends as follows, which should be telling you something very important about the need to pay attention to data instead of feel-good speculations:

Robert Berwick wrote:Tellingly for such an inherently historical science as evolution, the book contains very little about established hominin prehistory. There isn’t even an illustration of perhaps the single most striking fact about hominin evolution: whereas this clade once formed a bushy tree with many coexisting species, now there is only one lineage left, us. To be sure, Hurford does not seek to provide a historical explanation—he identifies his concern as “the ‘Why?’ and ‘How?’” of the origins of syntax. But history does matter. The available evidence points to a relatively recent appearance of symbolic activity in the human lineage, the adventitious convergence of old forms brought together for a new function just as Darwin suggested, roughly at the time of the last push of Homo sapiens out of Africa, 70,000 years ago. We can shed all of Hurford’s speculative baggage: There is no need for “symbolic behavior” in Australopithicenes or even Neandertals; no necessity for special pleading about Creole “simplicity” or eccentric “living fossil” languages; no call for language development to recapitulate phylogeny; and no difficulty reconciling the paradoxically long periods of apparent stasis in the paleoanthropological record with the observed bursts of functional innovation. All these empirical problems fade away, leaving us with a story altogether different from the one told in The Origins of Grammar.

Jayjay4547 wrote:The article itself on page 37 has a curious title: “Eating or Being Eaten”. Curioser and Curioser.

Well since I've already alighted upon problems with Hurford's book, as expounded by Berwick in the Science review, I suspect any apologetics you try to weave using this as a foundation are likely to be doomed even before you start.

Jayjay4547 wrote:No more than that, but I’ve been trying to figure out why that title and why now.

Oh, the fact that this is a central interaction of the entire biosphere, never occurred to you? And as a corollary, would be important in any list of topics being contemplated by a language acquiring species? The two questions "How do we find food?" and "How do we avoid being food for something else?" being pretty critical questions for any organism to answer, regardless of its language or abstract cognitive capabilities. But you demonstrated repeated failures with respect to elementary concepts throughout your past tenure, so veterans of your output won't be in the least surprised to see yet another one appear.

Jayjay4547 wrote:There’s nothing in the text about eating or being eaten and what does that really mean anyway?

Oh, you can provide a full, detailed quote to this effect for us all to read, can you?

Only once again, given how central to the biosphere trophism is, taking note of this elementary datum would be a step in the right direction if Hurford did indeed do this.

Jayjay4547 wrote:It doesn’t express the condition of dumb animals: If you don’t eat you will be eaten! You must eat, or you will be eaten!

Those of us who have actually engaged in real observation of the biosphere, know full well that organisms are likely to end up as food for something else, even after they've just had a meal themselves. I've observed myself, for example, numerous instances of insects paying visits to nectar producing flowers, feeding thereupon, and then ending up, 30 or so seconds later, in a spider's web becoming a meal for something else. Plus, some organisms do actually manage to die without being eaten first. I've seen several instances of dead adult labybirds, for example, which avoided being eaten by birds, because their aposematic colouration signalled their noxious taste, but which simply came to the end of the energy equation line and ground to a halt. I'm excluding here those instances of ladybirds that were attacked by entomophagous fungi (which here count as "predators" every bit as much as birds), and instead concentrating on specimens that exhibited apparent pristine condition when observed, but which, upon closer examination, were manifestly dead.

Once again, this should be telling you the utility value of data when talking about the real world.

Jayjay4547 wrote:My guess is

And here's where the trouble begins. You do too much guessing and not enough proper, diligent analysis.

Jayjay4547 wrote:it’s an elliptical reference to the narrow scope of things our dumb ancestors did

Well since the scope of activities that non-human animals engage in is pretty broad, and is widening as scientists gather relevant data here, I suspect that the same will turn out to be the case for our hominid ancestors. I also suspect at this juncture, that you're going to ignore much relevant data, preferring instead the music of the spheres of your own verbal diarrhoea, in the form of fantasy speculations and fabrications that are so manifestly ridiculous to those of us who paid attention in science classes, as to be beneath deserving of a point of view. Let's see how quickly this prediction comes true, shall we?

Jayjay4547 wrote:whereas mankind watches a movie, drives a car, writes a letter.

Oh, look, it's that "we're so special because we do things no other organism does" nonsense. Can you fly like a bird, JayJay? No? Guess the birds don't think of you as being "special" as a result.

In the meantime, we'll all have fun watching these budgies do a range of things that you probably think only humans can do, such as riding bicycles along a tightrope ...

Jayjay4547 wrote:All that thanks to human grammar, what sets us apart from the rest of creation.

Washoe the chimpanzee is pointing and laughing at you from the grave. Oh wait, aren't you aware of the experimental work that's been conducted with respect to language comprehension in primates?

Jayjay4547 wrote:As we know it. Maybe the title also carries a faint whiff of “Nature Red in Tooth and Claw”.

Another of your evidence-free speculations?

Jayjay4547 wrote:By just changing one word in that title, it stops being elliptical and becomes a direct expression of the universal animal condition.

You forgot all those other organisms. You know, the plants, fungi, various protists, not to mention the Archaea and Eubacteria. One could even extend this to viruses.

Jayjay4547 wrote: Eating Without Being Eaten" . The giraffe stands in full view to eat the tree canopy from the outside.. And if a lion comes to eat him, the giraffe sees the lion in time and kicks the shit out of the lion. The opposing elements of Eating and not being eaten are like the two faces of a furrow or niche, the creative morphing structures in the environment that have guided evolution.

Oh, you're finally accepting what I spent several months telling you, namely that trophic niches are of great importance with respect to evolutionary trajectories?

I really hope you have learned this. It's the first of many steps on the path toward abandoning your multifarious errors.

Jayjay4547 wrote:A title “Eating Without being Eaten” would also be a specific key to the evolution of grammar.

Except that there's a slight problem here. Two, actually. One, many of our hominid ancestors manifestly avoided being eaten long enough to produce descendants, whilst leaving virtually no evidence of the sort of symbolic communication usually associated with language. Two, that work on primate language comprehension, demonstrates that other primates possess a fair range of linguistic tools, but seem to lack the impetus to use them and develop them further. If it's possible for a chimpanzee to learn 350 symbols of American Sign Language and communicate effectively with humans using those symbols, one is led to ask why wild chimpanzees don't manifest the requisite talents. Of course, it could be that we're simply not able to collect the relevant data yet, and that some future researchers will provide a nice exposition to the effect that they do actually use and develop those talents, but in ways sufficiently divergent from our own experience to require diligent effort to determine. I'm not going to assert that this will happen, merely remain open to the possibility given the currently available data.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Because it’s the bizarre way our ancestors avoided being eaten

Er, no, most of our ancestors avoided being eaten via the usual methods. Running away, hiding, etc.

Jayjay4547 wrote:that opened the creative pathway to the bizarrely slow maturing juvenile brain that lies in the eggshell skull of the grammar-deploying human being.

Wrong. Oh wait, we have a little empirical issue to address here. Namely, that as Berwick points out in that book review I provided above, all the palaeontological evidence points to symbolic communication in humans being no older than 80,000 years before present. But, lo and behold, the genetic underpinnings making this possible, appear to have been present for a considerably greater period of time in our lineage. What was the reason for the delay, between acquisition of the genetic and physiological underpinnings making language as we know it possible, and the actual deployment of that capacity? The current human versions of ASPM and FOXP2 are, according the literature, of something like 3 million years vintage, yet only 80,000 years ago or so, did our ancestors put any of this to use in modern ways. That time lag requires explanation, and according to Berwick, none is found in Hurford's book. At least, none that is consistent with the data.

Jayjay4547 wrote:That’s the main inference to be drawn from the short blunt canines of Australopithecus, that they had abandoned defensive biting which makes other higher primates dangerous to attack.

Bollocks. Oh wait, this fantasy of yours was destroyed repeatedly. I surely don't need to cover the voluminous evidence that does this all over again?

Jayjay4547 wrote:There you have it Sendraks; right as always! But It’s worth repeating, the one sentence outcome from years of bickering on the internet. I’m as proud of it, as Johnson said of Monboddo, as a squirrel is of its tail.

That's rather like claiming you're proud of having defecated all over the Mona Lisa.

Jayjay4547 wrote:I have a theory about why the erudite Holford-Stevens should bother to review an 8 year old book

Well we're still waiting to find out which of the two books were actually reviewed, the 2007 one or the 2011 one. For which you were unable to provide even such elementary data as a correct citation.

Jayjay4547 wrote:(he is a retired consultant scholar-editor at OUP and the LRB only publishes the writings of the erudite).

Hmm. Tony Blair is one of their published authors. Hardly an example of erudition.

Jayjay4547 wrote:My theory fantasy speculation

Fixed it for you.

Jayjay4547 wrote:is that something about human evolution is bubbling up amongst the English intelligentsia, their collective mind is troubled in its sleep.

You're fond of indulging in these futile wet dreams, aren't you?

Jayjay4547 wrote:Ninety one years since Raymond Dart held the tiny skull of the Taung child in his hand and saw those short blunt canines. And almost immediately was blown off course by the ideological necessity of telling the story of human creation in terms of what our ancestors did, instead of what happened to them.

Bollocks. The only one displaying a desperate "ideological necessity" here is you. Courtesy of all that DATA you keep ignoring when it pisses all over your fantasies.