...along with the death-wishing notion that this is 'the end of days', and that their nominated deity needs them to bring about the apocalypse for him.

Well, 'e's a bit 'elpless 'isself, really, i'n't 'e?

Animavore wrote:Thinking about it, I'm not even sure what the link between atheism and Natural Selection is even supposed to be. Is it because Dawkins just happens to be an evolutionary biologist that people are making this link?

I was raised Catholic in Ireland and the Church have no problem with evolution and the issue just isn't controversial over here (except in the North). I was taught evolution in Catholic school and accepted it from a young age. It just seems obvious to me almost.
I accepted evolution as a Catholic. I accepted it as a lapsed Catholic. I accepted it during my stint with Buddhism and I still accept it as the best explanation for the diversity of life now as an atheist. The topic had absolutely no bearing on me losing faith what-so-ever. Not only that, I never even heard of creationism until I read The God Delusion. I was something like 26 at the time. I can still remember the first time coming across creationism. The complete bafflement that there were people out there that believed such monumental bullshit it must've been dropped down from Taurus in the sky hit me so hard I was stopped in the next town for speeding.

Creationists seem to be blissfully unaware of just how made-up on the spot and modern their cult is. And how American it is. And also how heretical worshipping a book before God is. I mean, it's the fisrt fucking commandment.

EDIT: unaware

Natural selection gives a mechanism for how life achieves functional patterns without mind. [ie the creator-god myth]. Science generally [cosmology, physics, biochemistry etc] has begun to answer questions traditionally "answered" in religions. Thus, at the very least, the natural causes are in competition with god-causes. This does not mean that a theist is incapable of looking for natural causes, but an atheist [at least one coming from reason] would naturally look to natural cause, rather than divine cause to explain the world. Of course one does not have to use reason or have science to hold an atheistic position, but an atheistic position seems more intellectually respectable as there is no longer a requirement for a watchmaker god.

Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:I’m not to be drawn on this “persistence hunter” notion.

You’re not one to let facts and evidence stand in the way of a good story.
I understand.

No you don’t understand. I’m not to be drawn into the “persistence hunter” notion unless you establish its relevance. I’ve been enticed into that delicious topic before but it’s irrelevant to australopith ecology.

Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:It has no relevance to the antipredation strategy of the australopiths, that isn’t about “sophisticated weapon use” as you put it.

It is relevant and if you had a clue about what you were talking about, you’d understand why.

You don’t yourself try to explain why because actually you by reflex raised the point that though humans are poor sprinters, they are better at endurance running. When I pointed out that was irrelevant to defense against predation you tried to make a point out of your referring to modern man which is also irrelevant to the role of antipredation in the australopiths. Now you try to make a point out of the air. Come, if you think “endurance running” has some relevance to australopith antipredation, then make the point.

Sendraks wrote: And the act of “sharpening a stick” is sophisticated weapon use. Unless you’re suggesting that any random stick would do or that australopiths were capable of selecting, by some means, exactly the right sort of sharpened stick to use against a large predator.

You cited “sophisticated weapon use” as what enabled homo sapiens to abandon “persistence hunting”- and that implies weapons like bows and arrows, (preferably poisoned), razor-sharp arrow and spear heads, wooden-handled stone axes or spears thrown using a throwing stick. Now you wish to classify a sharpened stick as sophisticated. And yes, through the mechanism of natural selection, australopiths would have learned how to select am optimal stick to hold off a large predator and also how to sharpen that stick maybe using chewing the edge, splitting by pounding, singeing in a fire or rubbing on a rock. Seeing that a pom pom crab can be taught through the same mechanism, to pull an anemone in two so as to have one in each claw, and seeing the utility of a sharpened stick for stopping a predator. Bear in mind also that the design of a stopper-tool is less critical than a striker. The other day I used a pair of fencing pliers to stop an annoying dog.

Sendraks wrote: Because, you know, trial and error in this scenario isn’t going to work so well.

On the contrary, the high consequence of a slightly better defensive tool for breeding would create steep fitness gradient towards the best. As well as drawing individual and social attention to the weapon as a survival aid.

Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:I know a lot about dogs.

Apparently not.

I have had at least eleven dogs, ranging from terrier to Rhodesian ridgeback and as a surveyor I’ve come across a fairly wide variety of hostile dogs.

Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:I found that a variety of hostile dogs can be stopped by a proffered pointed stick.

You defend yourself against hostile dogs often then? Because I can think of a number of breeds that wouldn’t be deterred by anything less than high calibre firepower.

In my experience a dog won’t throw itself upon a ranging rod, reflector pole or GPS pole. It will try to get around the side and in the mean time it’s lost the initiative and would have made itself vulnerable to a striker tool. Of course the high significance to a predator on hominins is that having lost the initiative, it would need to get away before the troop could concentrate against it.

Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:– and descendants adept at weapon-using defense- these all support the inference.

Which came so much later in hominid evolution, any link to australopiths is beyond tenuous at best.

Modern descendants of the australopiths inherit major body-plan features with them; bipedal stance, arch-footed, grip suitable for throwing and clubbing. These aren’t tenuous links.

Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:According to Wikipedia Australopithecus garhi is associated with the emergence of Oldowan pebble tools. This inference is strong enough to be taken seriously, it’s not to be sneered away.

I certainly wouldn’t sneer it away. But I’d also point out that it is evidence which does not support your assertion of weapon use.

If you ignore the inference then you need to find a plausible explanation for the existence of a non-fanged non-horned 1.4m tall biped in an environment shared with up to 8 plausible predators. The savannah was their larder, not a modern “game park”

Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Keeping the predator at bay using a sharpened stick and then skewering it with sticks or smashing in its skull with large pebbles.

Do you have any idea of the resilience and relative strength of the kind of sharp stick required to skewer a large predator? These are not things that are just found randomly lying around. And as for “large pebbles” to stand a chance of crushing a the skull of leopard or tiger or equivalent, you’re talking rocks, sizeable rocks. And this is just big cats we’re talking about. Bears would be a different story altogether.

There are no bears in Africa.. The Oldowan culture is known as a ‘pebble culture” but the pebbles weren’t small. A geologist friend of mine remarked to me how large an Oldowan hand axe is- and my friend has unusually large hands himself. I envisage that a predator would lose the initiative through being unwilling to skewer itself and then in a few seconds it would face the prospect of multiple skewering and clubbing by the converging troop.

Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:The direction of adaptive pressure is logically towards reducing the number of prey individuals who could mount a credible defense. Scenarios that envisage a large troop moving in close defensive array are unrealistic because that isn’t an efficient foraging pattern.

We’ll let chimpanzees know that they’re doing it wrong. Not to mention every other animal species that travels in a large group.

I’ve watched foraging baboons whenever the opportunity arises and they move in open array, each focusing on what is available close by. With frequent upward glances. And with structured warning system in place.

Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote: Primates generally are great biters, far as I know we are the only living exception

Yup, chimps have a pretty nasty bite and they’re closer to australopiths than we are.

Goodness, you haven’t taken my very basic point starting point; that the australopiths, unlike chimps, didn’t have fangs. That’s one way that australopiths are closer to humans than they are to chimps. Apart from being much closer in terms of relatedness.

Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Once again, I present the pom pom crab as evidence that no high mental faculty is needed for carrying around a foreign object for defense.

That a symbiotic relationship exists between anemones and crabs is in no way analogous to the thought processes required to fashion weapons to defend against a large land dwelling predator.

The pom-pom crab shows that high mental faculties are irrelevant to acquiring a habit of Carrying around d a foreign object for defense. It’s actually more puzzling how this crab habit could have evolved: It’s instinctive to try to fend off a predator and to grab a stick would occur to any prey species capable of grabbing a stick. The narrowness of the adoption criteria is more not having a nearby tree to shin up, or not being a better climber than the predator. Where mental faculty comes in lies in the ability of the brain to control foreign objects at speed, with precision and decision in the face of a large intelligent predator whose weapons are part of its body, filled with sensors instantly telling it about body attitude. It’s our inherited facility with foreign objects that make humans relatively good tennis layers, golfers and football players.

Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:A primate would need hind feet adapted to grasping branches, if it were to be able to avoid predation by climbing away from a tree-climbing felid.

No it doesn’t. You’re specifying an adaption that isn’t necessary for climbing trees, only one that is required for a purely aboreal lifestyle. You are blatantly ignoring the physical attributes of the australopith that I’ve pointed out.

Picture a troop of baboons in a roosting tree in the Moreni reserve, being hunted by a leopard. Now imagine them having feet like an australopith and picture how well they would get along, walking on the branches.

Sendraks wrote: There is nothing to suggest that australopiths were dangerous to predators from any angle. A homo sapiens is only dangerous to predators if not surprised and/or attacked from the front. A leopard piling into the sides or back of homo sapiens is going to have much the same effect on an australopith.

Any prey taken unawares is in a hopeless position. I demonstrated, using moments of inertia, how a biped can much more easily face a new direction than can a quadruped. I see you haven’t followed that up.

Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:A predator on a gemsbok doesn’t just power over the horns. And a biped is relatively difficult to take in flank.

Well no. Partly because the horns are dangerous, partly because the skull is very thick. But I’ve seen plenty of examples of predators going straight for the throat, rather than the flanks of the animal. Whereas if all they have for defence is pebbles and sharpened sticks and you are a predator the size of a leopard, you can take em from the flank, front, back, above, whatever.

Yes horns are dangerous because they are pointy and vigorously handled. Of course predators go for the throat of certain prey like impala. But they don’t reach through or between the horns to get there.

Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote: You are relying a lot on bluster and Cali relies a lot on abuse.

Saying that scientists rely on evidence is not bluster.

It’s you Sendraks who has been relying on bluster. You are arguing on the side of the established human origin narrative constructed by scientists but you Sendraks aren’t using science. Not here and not now.

Sendraks wrote: The fact that you seem to think it is, speaks volumes of the quality of your argument, which is based on trying to shoehorn reality into a mythology which serves your own ends, rather expand our understanding of the natural world.

I’m particularly curious about the natural world and also about the story scientists build about the origin of our species. It’s curious that this story treats our ancestors as actors on the world rather than as creatures molded by other actors in the world.. Call me a rational skeptic. The mythology here isn’t mine, it’s the reactive and boring origin myth erected by atheist ideology. If science threw that monkey off its back it would just become more free.

How's it going there Jayjay, under the bridge?

Jayjay4547 wrote:No you don’t understand. I’m not to be drawn into the “persistence hunter” notion unless you establish its relevance. I’ve been enticed into that delicious topic before but it’s irrelevant to australopith ecology.

It is quite simple for anyone who understands the evidence, rather than clings to ideological fairytales.
If Australopiths were capable of using weapons to defend against attacks from large predators, why then did its later ancestors not leave evidence of equal or more advanced tool use? Why did homo sapiens evolve as a persistence hunter before turning to spears and more complex hunting methods? If australopiths were as adapt at weapon use as you claim and it did confer an advantage, why didn’t their successor hominids make use of it?

Jayjay4547 wrote:Now you wish to classify a sharpened stick as sophisticated.

A sharpened stick capable of deterring a predator, especially a large predator, is a sophisticated tool. You seem to understand that clearly not just any sharpened stick will do, but you don’t seem to appreciate the mental faculties required to properly asses what constitutes the right sort of stick.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Seeing that a pom pom crab can be taught through the same mechanism

You have presented no evidence to demonstrate that the pomp om crab is “taught” to form a symbiotic relationship with the sea anemone. Your understanding of the natural world is shocking in its ignorance.

Jayjay4547 wrote:On the contrary, the high consequence of a slightly better defensive tool for breeding would create steep fitness gradient towards the best. As well as drawing individual and social attention to the weapon as a survival aid.

In a group dynamic, no one else’s tools are put to the test so there is no trial and error of those tools. And the individual who failed the test is not in any position to inform anyone of what they’ve learned.

Jayjay4547 wrote:I have had at least eleven dogs, ranging from terrier to Rhodesian ridgeback and as a surveyor I’ve come across a fairly wide variety of hostile dogs.

Your limited anecdotal experience is noted. Any further claims that you know much about dogs will be summarily ignored. You clearly know jack and shit, both of which left town.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Modern descendants of the australopiths inherit major body-plan features with them; bipedal stance, arch-footed, grip suitable for throwing and clubbing. These aren’t tenuous links.

You don’t seem to understand the point being made. If australopiths were as adept at weapon use as you claim, why doesn’t this sophisticated weapon use manifest in early homo sapiens?

Jayjay4547 wrote:If you ignore the inference then you need to find a plausible explanation for the existence of a non-fanged non-horned 1.4m tall biped in an environment shared with up to 8 plausible predators. The savannah was their larder, not a modern “game park”

Simple explanation vs predators.
1. Group size vs predators.
2. Australopiths were clearly not that successful given they are not around today.

Jayjay4547 wrote:There are no bears in Africa..

No shit Sherlock. Again you miss the point by a country mile.

Jayjay4547 wrote:The Oldowan culture is known as a ‘pebble culture” but the pebbles weren’t small.

As a rule, pebbles are small. Even large pebbles are still small. They’re not going to do much to deter a large predator.

Jayjay4547 wrote: A geologist friend of mine remarked to me how large an Oldowan hand axe is- and my friend has unusually large hands himself.

A large hand axe is not a pebble and is fuck all use for deterring a predator. There is no evidence to suggest that a hand held object of such size would deter, let alone stop, an ambush predator.

Jayjay4547 wrote: Goodness, you haven’t taken my very basic point starting point; that the australopiths, unlike chimps, didn’t have fangs. That’s one way that australopiths are closer to humans than they are to chimps. Apart from being much closer in terms of relatedness.

Chimps do not have “fangs” they have large canine teeth.
These canine teeth are great for fighting each other, but of limited use vs a large ambush predator.

Jayjay4547 wrote:The pom-pom crab shows that high mental faculties are irrelevant to acquiring a habit of Carrying around d a foreign object for defense.

Forming a symbiotic relationship with another creature =/= selecting and using a tool.

Jayjay4547 wrote:It’s instinctive to try to fend off a predator and to grab a stick would occur to any prey species capable of grabbing a stick.

Many animals are capable of grabbing sticks and yet so few actually do.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Picture a troop of baboons in a roosting tree in the Moreni reserve, being hunted by a leopard. Now imagine them having feet like an australopith and picture how well they would get along, walking on the branches.

I’ve explained to you repeatedly the features of the australopith that would make it an able climber. I’m not going to explain them again. Your fixation with feet to the ignorance of everything else demonstrates classic creationist cherry picking.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Any prey taken unawares is in a hopeless position. I demonstrated, using moments of inertia, how a biped can much more easily face a new direction than can a quadruped. I see you haven’t followed that up.

I’m not sure you understand how irrelevant this is.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Yes horns are dangerous because they are pointy and vigorously handled. Of course predators go for the throat of certain prey like impala. But they don’t reach through or between the horns to get there.

Well no, given the horns are usually on top of the head and the throat underneath. Going through the head to get to the throat would be a nonsense.

Jayjay4547 wrote:It’s you Sendraks who has been relying on bluster. You are arguing on the side of the established human origin narrative constructed by scientists but you Sendraks aren’t using science. Not here and not now.

I’m not using science?
One of us is explaining what the available evidence demonstrates.
The other one of us, this would be you JayJay, is just making shit up to fit with a creationist ideology.

Jayjay4547 wrote:I’m particularly curious about the natural world and also about the story scientists build about the origin of our species.

What story? Scientists just inform of us of what the available evidence supports.
Story telling about creation is the provenance of the creationists, wooheads and sundry religious types who persist in pursuing intellectually redundant creation myths.

Jayjay4547 wrote:It’s curious that this story treats our ancestors as actors on the world rather than as creatures molded by other actors in the world..

If you understood anything about the ambundance of evidence that supports evolution, you’d understand that it is very much about how all the creatures in the world, and the environment, are molded by each other. Evolution does not treat any one creature as being the sole “actor” in the world.
That humans should be treated as the sole significant “actor” is very much the purview of religion.

JayJay wrote:
There are no bears in Africa

Well not since they went extinct.

Incidentally, since I wa suspended while this thread was progressing, and Bob was banned prior to my return, I've challenged him to a live debate on air.

Hi Bob

I'm a member at rationalskepticism.org who posted some questions and challenges, but I was suspended before you had a chance to respond, and you were banned as a troll before I could get back on to press further. I know you like the live, off-the-cuff debate, and wondered if you fancied taking me on.

I'm pretty well versed in evolutionary theory, although physics, specifically cosmology, is my real area of interest. I could do this live via Skype (or some other suitable internet medium), and I think you'd find me much more challenging than others you may have debated on air, including the celebrated professional scientists you've been eviscerated by, but since you have utterly failed to notice your guts on your shoes (those aren't purple shoelaces), I suspect that you haven't the wherewithal to be worried about this.

I can do this pretty much any time, though I'm in the UK, so time differences will have to be accounted for.

Up for it?

hackenslash

Possibly a bit confrontational, but if I'm not that, what am I?

I'll let you know if he responds.

Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:No you don’t understand. I’m not to be drawn into the “persistence hunter” notion unless you establish its relevance. I’ve been enticed into that delicious topic before but it’s irrelevant to australopith ecology... Come, if you think “endurance running” has some relevance to australopith antipredation, then make the point.

BOLDING shows restored snips from what I had said.

It is quite simple for anyone who understands the evidence, rather than clings to ideological fairytales.

I don’t cling to ideological fairy tales, i just argue that the understanding and presentation of evolution has been influenced by atheist ideology. My approach is naturalistic, though I attach more to the word “nature” than you might.

Sendraks wrote: If Australopiths were capable of using weapons to defend against attacks from large predators, why then did its later ancestors not leave evidence of equal or more advanced tool use?

Later ancestors did leave such evidence, in the form of advanced tool making, the Oldowan culture was immediately followed by the Acheulean technology.

Sendraks wrote: Why did homo sapiens evolve as a persistence hunter before turning to spears and more complex hunting methods?

A hand-held sharpened stick capable of piercing a hide isn’t part of a complex hunting method. In the Wiki entry on persistence hunting, complex hunting methods is taken to include bows and arrows, slings and thrown spears.

Sendraks wrote: If australopiths were as adapt at weapon use as you claim and it did confer an advantage, why didn’t their successor hominids make use of it?

I wouldn’t quite claim that defensive weapon use conferred an advantage. rather, it was an essential admission ticket to the resources of the savannah. At any rate, their successor hominids did make use of this capacity. Early Homo genus spread out of Africa over much of Eurasia, through widely differing biomes with different predators- including bears which you mention later. Modern man followed the same routes – and interestingly , the ancestry of living leopards apparently accompanied them. When modern man reached the Americas and Australia, their arrival coincided with the extinction of existing predators.

Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote: Now you wish to classify a sharpened stick as sophisticated. And yes, through the mechanism of natural selection, australopiths would have learned how to select am optimal stick to hold off a large predator and also how to sharpen that stick maybe using chewing the edge, splitting by pounding, singeing in a fire or rubbing on a rock.

A sharpened stick capable of deterring a predator, especially a large predator, is a sophisticated tool. You seem to understand that clearly not just any sharpened stick will do,

No,i don’t understand a sharpened stick to be a sophisticated tool; that term is universally understood to mean something like a bow and arrow. I don’t have clear understanding of how long or heavy an optimal “stopper’ would have been. All I know is that a pointed stick in the hands of a biped creates a problem for a hostile quadruped, stopping it, taking initiative from it and making it vulnerable to a strike.

Sendraks wrote: but you don’t seem to appreciate the mental faculties required to properly asses what constitutes the right sort of stick.

I don’t rely on mental faculties of the hominin, any more than the mental faculties of a pom-pom crab to select the right species and size of anemone. I rely on natural selection. See Boesch (1991) for fascinating account on chimps using found sticks to harass a trapped leopard.

http://www.eva.mpg.de/primat/staff/boesch/pdf/behav_leopard_predation.pdf

"I arrived at the site at 13:45 hrs and saw the chimpanzees around another large fallen tree under which the leopard was trapped in a deep and narrow hole. The leopard roared without interruption for the rest of the observation, barking loudly whenever it tried to strike the chimpanzees w i t h i t s paw. For the next 42 minutes, they s e t t l e d around the entrance, some grooming, others j u s t s i t t i n g or e v e n laying on the ground near the hole entrance. Now and then, females with youngsters neared t h e entrance and look advantage of the rare opportunity to have a close and safe look at a leopard. Some regularly threatened the animal. Seven times different Chimpanzees were seen to take a piece of a fallen branch and use it as a club, repeatedly trying to h i t or stab the leopard in its hole (average, of 4.44 strikes per instance), each time the leopard barked in response and jumped forward out of its shelter to hit the hand of the chimpanzee holding the club, seemingly unsuccessfully. But before it could try to escape from the hole, the noisy reaction of the group, with a minimum of 3 adults rushing towards it, forced it back to its refuge. The small entrance hole (about 70 cm at its highest point and narrowing down towards the leopard) prevented the chimpanzees from taking effective action and at 14.32 hrs i.e. 2 hours 22 minutes after the first sighting, they left the site, the leopard silently leaving the hole 11 minutes later.”

Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Seeing that a pom pom crab can be taught through the same mechanism to pull an anemone in two so as to have one in each claw, and seeing the utility of a sharpened stick for stopping a predator. Bear in mind also that the design of a stopper-tool is less critical than a striker. The other day I used a pair of fencing pliers to stop an annoying dog.

You have presented no evidence to demonstrate that the pomp om crab is “taught” to form a symbiotic relationship with the sea anemone. Your understanding of the natural world is shocking in its ignorance.

Well before this habit “evolved” crabs didn’t have the know-how that an anemone could be used as a defensive weapon, that ‘”potential” was not expressed anywhere. Afterwards, this know-how came to be embedded in the genome and expressed in the phenotype. And when people noticed it, they learned something which they wrote up in Wikipedia, were it became “knowledge”. it’s all learning, that’s what we do along with the rest of nature.

Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:On the contrary, the high consequence of a slightly better defensive tool for breeding would create steep fitness gradient towards the best. As well as drawing individual and social attention to the weapon as a survival aid.

In a group dynamic, no one else’s tools are put to the test so there is no trial and error of those tools. And the individual who failed the test is not in any position to inform anyone of what they’ve learned.

If the other troop members just stood around and waited for a leopard and its chosen victim slugged it out, they wouldn’t be behaving adaptively or much like other primates. More likely they would all pile in and take note of which actions were most telling. Sure, whole troops that failed to muster the right techniques or needed courage or numbers, must have been snuffed out many times. Africa is not for sissies, she is a harsh teacher.

Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:I have had at least eleven dogs, ranging from terrier to Rhodesian ridgeback and as a surveyor I’ve come across a fairly wide variety of hostile dogs. .In my experience a dog won’t throw itself upon a ranging rod, reflector pole or GPS pole. It will try to get around the side and in the mean time it’s lost the initiative and would have made itself vulnerable to a striker tool. Of course the high significance to a predator on hominins is that having lost the initiative, it would need to get away before the troop could concentrate against it.

Your limited anecdotal experience is noted. Any further claims that you know much about dogs will be summarily ignored. You clearly know jack and shit, both of which left town.

Fair enough, if you redact the experiences I recount, as you did.

Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Modern descendants of the australopiths inherit major body-plan features with them; bipedal stance, arch-footed, grip suitable for throwing and clubbing. These aren’t tenuous links.

You don’t seem to understand the point being made. If australopiths were as adept at weapon use as you claim, why doesn’t this sophisticated weapon use manifest in early homo sapiens?

As i said before, a sharpened stick and a river stone whether worked or not, are not sophisticated weapons. It would take a specifically adapted body to wield those unsophisticated tools against mammalian predators, especially social ones like lion and hyena and hunting dog.

Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:If you ignore the inference then you need to find a plausible explanation for the existence of a non-fanged non-horned 1.4m tall biped in an environment shared with up to 8 plausible predators. The savannah was their larder, not a modern “game park”

Simple explanation vs predators.
1. Group size vs predators.
2. Australopiths were clearly not that successful given they are not around today.

Your point 1 is often made, supported by the fact that baboons and chimps both move in troops and concentrate against some predators. But both are physically equipped to be able to hurt their predators by biting and using their powerful arms to tear those bites into gashes. Conspicuously, the australopiths didn’t have the necessary fangas.

A large part of the human self-visioning has to do with that lack. Almost everyone would agree that humans are animals and mammals but the term “beasts” is reserved for the Other and a “beast” is popularly rendered with fangs, talons, horns and a shaggy coat; all implied in a fighting antipredation .



The innocent little hominin cast naked into this field of fierceness like the hopper stage of an angel, might just be a figment created by an accident of taphonomy; he had a fang and he had a horn but they weren’t permanently attached to him.
Your point 2 has three problems. First, the Australopiths lasted for about 10 times longer than Homo sapiens has managed so far. Second, they embodied the basic body plan of creatures that have spread throughout the world and whose success has now created a planetary crisis. Third, whatever their success, it was enough to have left enough fossils to raise the issue of how this little angel cold have survived on the savannah.

Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:There are no bears in Africa..

No shit Sherlock. Again you miss the point by a country mile.

What was your point then?

Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:The Oldowan culture is known as a ‘pebble culture” but the pebbles weren’t small.

As a rule, pebbles are small. Even large pebbles are still small. They’re not going to do much to deter a large predator.

The Oldowan culture is sometimes called a pebble culture because it is amongst river pebbles that the hominins selected their tools. But as I said below, the Oldowan hand axes weren’t small. They were embarrassingly crude for an ancestor of ours, maybe because the stones that have kept their integrity while rolling and scraping down rivers are the most difficult stones to knock flakes off. The jump to Acheulean technology might mark the invention of mining and trade not a jump in competence.

Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote: A geologist friend of mine remarked to me how large an Oldowan hand axe is- and my friend has unusually large hands himself.

A large hand axe is not a pebble and is fuck all use for deterring a predator. There is no evidence to suggest that a hand held object of such size would deter, let alone stop, an ambush predator.

An Oldowan hand axe is a product of the pebble culture. I’m not suggesting that it could deter a predator, that would be the function of a stopper tool. But a hand-held Oldowan hand axe might break a predator’s skull.

Jayjay4547 wrote: We’ll let chimpanzees know that they’re doing it wrong. Not to mention every other animal species that travels in a large group.

Jayjay4547 wrote: I’m talking about chimps, not baboons.

You said, “not to mention every other animal species that travels in a large group” Baboons are one of those.

Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote: Goodness, you haven’t taken my very basic point starting point; that the australopiths, unlike chimps, didn’t have fangs. That’s one way that australopiths are closer to humans than they are to chimps. Apart from being much closer in terms of relatedness.

Chimps do not have “fangs” they have large canine teeth.

Google Images has many pics identified by “chimp fangs” The relevant point is that the australopiths didn’t have eye teeth at all like that.

Sendraks wrote: These canine teeth are great for fighting each other, but of limited use vs a large ambush predator.

Those fangs are great for killing other chimps, and what might kill a chimp might maim or kill a leopard. see
http://sitemaker.umich.edu/mitani/files/watts_et_al_2006.pdf

Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:The pom-pom crab shows that high mental faculties are irrelevant to acquiring a habit of Carrying around d a foreign object for defense.

Forming a symbiotic relationship with another creature =/= selecting and using a tool.

The crab doesn’t know the word “symbiosis”; it selects a particular species of anemone or a particular size and sticks it on its claws, for use in defense. Incidentally I see it’s also called a “boxing” crab- reportedly because the anemones look like boxing gloves. But I wonder if it doesn’t make feinting motions like a boxer.

Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:It’s instinctive to try to fend off a predator and to grab a stick would occur to any prey species capable of grabbing a stick. The narrowness of the adoption criteria is more not having a nearby tree to shin up, or not being a better climber than the predator. Where mental faculty comes in lies in the ability of the brain to control foreign objects at speed, with precision and decision in the face of a large intelligent predator whose weapons are part of its body, filled with sensors instantly telling it about body attitude. It’s our inherited facility with foreign objects that make humans relatively good tennis layers, golfers and football players.

Many animals are capable of grabbing sticks and yet so few actually do.

Yes, I pointed out what might make the criteria for adopting this habit very narrow. The narrower the criteria, the more particular and interesting the origin narrative. If anthropology ever shakes the monkey of atheism on its back it might evolve towards a discipline like history.

Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Picture a troop of baboons in a roosting tree in the Moreni reserve, being hunted by a leopard. Now imagine them having feet like an australopith and picture how well they would get along, walking on the branches.

I’ve explained to you repeatedly the features of the australopith that would make it an able climber. I’m not going to explain them again. Your fixation with feet to the ignorance of everything else demonstrates classic creationist cherry picking.

All you have said is that the australopiths had powerful arms and can grasp branches.. I don’t have a fixation on feet, they are just significant evidence against an adaptation to out-climb a leopard-like predator. Have you ever watched arboreal monkeys or baboons in a tree? Those things live in three dimensions like the birds. We don’t , because we inherited the australopith’s feet.

Sendraks wrote:
I’m not sure you understand how irrelevant this is.

Help me to understand.

Sendraks wrote:
Well no, given the horns are usually on top of the head and the throat underneath. Going through the head to get to the throat would be a nonsense.

Here are some shots of a lion that was tactically unable to turn the flank of a buck standing in the water, got lunged at and left.



The write-up on this sequence called the lion a fraidy-cat but truly she was just being practical.

Sendraks wrote:
I’m not using science?
One of us is explaining what the available evidence demonstrates.

In the first couple of paragraphs of your post you gave a straight forward discussion but then you descended to pouring scorn without follow-up. Some samples:
Your understanding of the natural world is shocking in its ignorance
Your limited anecdotal experience is noted. Any further claims that you know much about dogs will be summarily ignored. You clearly know jack and shit, both of which left town.
No shit Sherlock. Again you miss the point by a country mile
Your imaginings s are hilarious and sadly out of touch with reality
Chimps do not have “fangs” they have large canine teeth
I’m not sure you understand how irrelevant this is

To support that ploy you snipped my argument leaving only the preamble, to give the impression that I hadn’t made one. I put back those snips in bold. It’s OK to snip but one should be scrupulous to show the argument.
And you haven’t linked to a single outside source. That’s not science. Like me, you are just having a discussion.

Sendraks wrote: The other one of us, this would be you JayJay, is just making shit up to fit with a creationist ideology.

Nah. I’ve been presenting an argument that scientists have looked at australopiths for nearly a hundred years, without recognising that they were looking at an animal whose distinctive features arose from its unique habit of defending itself using sticks and stones.

Sendraks wrote:
What story? Scientists just inform of us of what the available evidence supports.
Story telling about creation is the provenance of the creationists, wooheads and sundry religious types who persist in pursuing intellectually redundant creation myths.

Whenever text is written about past events of our ancestry that forms an origin narrative.

Sendraks wrote:
If you understood anything about the abundance of evidence that supports evolution, you’d understand that it is very much about how all the creatures in the world, and the environment, are molded by each other. Evolution does not treat any one creature as being the sole “actor” in the world.

If anthropologists ignored the ways that predators, sticks and stones molded the bodies and minds of our ancestor australopiths then they ignored evolution, in the human origin narrative.

Sendraks wrote: That humans should be treated as the sole significant “actor” is very much the purview of religion.

You should read the Bible, that treats God as the actor and teacher and Mankind as the balky learner.

I’m sincerely sorry about the length of this post. Time constraints prevent me from shortening it. I have to focus now on a job that has become urgent.

Jayjay, you should read the Simarillion, it treats Ainur as the creator together with the Valar and Maiar and mortal beings as the actors.

I’m not going to go through JayJay’s waffle line by line any more, it is not worth it, especially when he keeps erecting the same fabrications again and again. I’ll just cover the key points.
1) I’ve still no idea what an atheist ideology is. The best I can work out is that it is anyone who disagrees with JayJay’s fantastical musings about the world or it is a disparaging term concocted by JayJay for people who base their views on the available evidence rather than make shit up.

2) A sharpened stick capable of wounding or deterring a predator is a sophisticated tool. It clearly cannot just be “any stick” as not all types of wood have the strength to be an effective weapon or retain a point for any length of time. The selection and retention of such a weapon is a task that requires a degree of mental sophistication and there isn’t the evidence to support australopiths having that kind of reasoning.

3) The Oldowan tools are also not evidence of sophisticated weapon tool making. If australopiths had, in the previous million years, been making effective sharpened sticks, it is surprising that the evidence doesn’t show much progress in tool making by the time of oldowan. Certainly none of the hand tools constitute effective weapons for deterring a predator. Indeed the absence of effective weapons for defence or offense

4) The whole point of the “ambush” approach adopted by the big cat family is so the prey doesn’t have a chance to escape. Ambush implies a significant element of surprise on the part of the predator. For the australopith defensive weapon with a stick to be correct, they would a) always have to be so armed, b) capable of reacting with sufficient speed with said weapon to deter the attack and c) also retaining the necessary composure to do so. We don’t have any evidence to support these points and indeed, the available of evidence doesn’t support the developments in weapon use that surely would have been present by the time of Oldowan tools.

5) By the time early homo sapiens was jogging prey to death across Africa, one has to wonder why, if its ancestors had been so adept at selecting weapons, that it was adopting the persistence hunting method. Either somewhere between australopiths and later hominid evolution, the development of weapons was abandoned or that weapon development didn’t properly come about until the time of homo sapiens. The available evidence supports the latter.

6) The available evidence on chimps harassing leopards shows, first and foremost, the advantage of numbers vs a single predator. The paper also makes clear in the latter stages that:

Tai chimpanzees do use weapons with leopards, as seen in example 2, but it is not clear if they could be able to kill or harm a leopard with such a tool?

The use of weapons by the chimps in the paper, which was limited to chimps in a jungle environ rather than the savannah, also showed the chimps engaged in actively trying to locate and harass a leopard they had determined was in their vicinity in order to drive it away. The paper doesn’t provide evidence that the chimps carried weapons around or supply further information to the extent to which chimps were overly discerning in which suitably heavy bits of wood they picked up.

The paper also shows that the smaller less aggressive chimp species, such as our closest living relative the bonobo, rely on moving in much larger party sizes than the larger more aggressive chimp species.

7) The paper which JayJay linked (which was interesting and I thank him for posting it), is about the different group size strategies adopted by chimps in differing environments, in varying levels of predation and food abundance. One of the central findings of the report is that chimps in the tropical forest suffer a higher rate of predation than those in the savannah, in part due to the density of the leopard population. This is a very telling piece of evidence about the survival of australopiths as a species, without recourse to any imaginings about weapons.

They. Moved. Into. The. Savannah.

Clearly the savannah being a less obvious food rich environment than the jungle required different strategies for gathering food. The challenge on the savannah was finding food and water, with predation being much less of a consideration because of the lower density of predators. Combine this with a nomadic lifestyle and you’re pretty much set for explaining how australopiths persisted and what drove the adaptions leading to homo sapiens as a savannah dwelling persistence hunter.

8) Trees on the savannah are not an abundant feature as they are in a tropical rainforest, therefore retaining an arboreal lifestyle would not have been advantageous for australopiths. Their biology shows an upper body strength that would have made them very capable climbers, which would have been sufficient for evading the most likely predation on the savannah in the form of Lions and hyenas, which are much less capable climbers than leopards. There is nothing about this that suggests australopiths were adapted for living in trees, just for climbing them as a short term measure of defense.

9) That the crab doesn’t understand symbiosis is irrelevant. The relationship between the crab and the anemone is not evidence of the kind of learned behaviour. JayJay’s presumption is that all such behaviours are the result of some sort of “one size fits all” approach to species defence.


In summary, the available evidence shows us that australopiths survival was largely due to their moving into a low predation environment, the savannah and physical adaptations to survive in that environment. There is no evidence to support the conjectures that australopiths had the necessary mental faculties to select suitable weapons to defend against predation, given that the apex predator of that environ (the Lion) would not be deterred by such items. Group size acts partially as a deterrant against predation, but principlally as a means of ensuring the survival of the group overally, as opposed to any specific individual.

Oh ffs

All the garbled bollocks JJ's spouted over the years and had countered with reference to hard evidence.... it's all back in this thread AGAIN, as if you can just keep repeating lies to have them believed.

And he dares to claim that everyone else is touting an ideology. Talk about having an axe to grind.

Google Images has many pics identified by “chimp fangs”

Some dude on the net said, must be true!

The relevant point is that the australopiths didn’t have eye teeth at all like that.

Because, as you've had pointed out to you before, diet JJ, diet. Teeth morphology is about diet, not this anti-predation strategy you keep rattling on about, regardless of the evidence presented contradicting your assertions.

Sadly, this is just a cue for JJ to rattle on for another 2000 words of navel-fluff touting wibble about how he's right and my atheist ideology makes me disbelieve in fanged chimps lunging with their faces at lions.

Spearthrower wrote:

Google Images has many pics identified by “chimp fangs”

Some dude on the net said, must be true!

The relevant point is that the australopiths didn’t have eye teeth at all like that.

Because, as you've had pointed out to you before, diet JJ, diet. Teeth morphology is about diet, not this anti-predation strategy you keep rattling on about, regardless of the evidence presented contradicting your assertions.

Hang on, don't tell me JJ is trying to pretend that diet is irrelevant to tooth morphology? Because if he is, his apologetics are well and truly fucked. The evidence linking tooth morphology to diet is colossal. Indeed, it was the evidence of dietary-driven plasticity of tooth morphology, that led Dr Humphrey Greenwood to launch into a wholesale phylogenetic revision of the Cichlidae in 1976 (that's right, evidence of tooth morphology is important in fish), because previous taxonomists had made phylogenetic decisions about the relationships within the Family on the basis of erroneous data. But even prior to this, taxonomists were aware that tooth morphology was coupled to diet right across the vertebrate spectrum. This is something that has been a staple of biology for around 250 years, and ironically, much of the relevant groundwork linking tooth morphology to diet was already in place before Darwin showed up. The fun part being that Darwin didn't dismiss any of that work, instead, he stated that natural selection provided an explanation for those relationships, on the basis that the morphologies that worked were preserved, and morphologies that failed disappeared.

Spearthrower wrote:Sadly, this is just a cue for JJ to rattle on for another 2000 words of navel-fluff touting wibble about how he's right and my atheist ideology makes me disbelieve in fanged chimps lunging with their faces at lions.

Well if he's trying to dismiss diet as being important here, then he really is letting his own ideology blinker him to reality. Which makes his own assertions about "atheist ideology" all the more duplicitous.

Ever been bit by a horse? Formidable weapons, horse teeth. Horses, like chimps, dogs, cats, muskrats, alligators et. al. use whatever they've got in a scrap. For horses it's hooves and teeth. However, neither horse hooves nor horse teeth evolved as weapons. Neither did chimp fangs. Diet, man, that's the ticket.

Gorillas, our second closest ancestor, have enlarged canines to assist with the crushing of the incredibly dense bamboo they eat.

Chimps are omnivores.

Humans are also omnivores, and this is all reflected in our teeth.

But diet isn't everything.

Baboons have 4 large canines and don't eat food that requires canines that large. What gives? The 4 large canines most likely increased their ancestor's survival.

Look at their behavior today, and even gorillas. When threatened they will curl both sets of lips back and bar their teeth....long razor sharp teeth. Predators have to think twice about messing with them.

Which goes to show that its not an either or dichotomy, but rather evolution via natural selection combines a variety of environmental pressures on gene expressions after subsequent generations.

willhud9 wrote:Gorillas, our second closest ancestor, have enlarged canines to assist with the crushing of the incredibly dense bamboo they eat.

Chimps are omnivores.

Humans are also omnivores, and this is all reflected in our teeth.

But diet isn't everything.

Baboons have 4 large canines and don't eat food that requires canines that large. What gives? The 4 large canines most likely increased their ancestor's survival.

Look at their behavior today, and even gorillas. When threatened they will curl both sets of lips back and bar their teeth....long razor sharp teeth. Predators have to think twice about messing with them.

Which goes to show that its not an either or dichotomy, but rather evolution via natural selection combines a variety of environmental pressures on gene expressions after subsequent generations.

Epistasis only biases outcomes. That means if an animal accumulates a few adaptations towards herbivory or whatever, chances are the trend of acquiring herbivore traits will continue. And don't for get historical contingency. Pandas, being of the carnivore family must have had carnivore ancestors, but then drifted towards omnivore and then a herbivore lifestyle. Besides once acquired, a good set of canines is handy for defense.

Darwinsbulldog wrote:

willhud9 wrote:Gorillas, our second closest ancestor, have enlarged canines to assist with the crushing of the incredibly dense bamboo they eat.

Chimps are omnivores.

Humans are also omnivores, and this is all reflected in our teeth.

But diet isn't everything.

Baboons have 4 large canines and don't eat food that requires canines that large. What gives? The 4 large canines most likely increased their ancestor's survival.

Look at their behavior today, and even gorillas. When threatened they will curl both sets of lips back and bar their teeth....long razor sharp teeth. Predators have to think twice about messing with them.

Which goes to show that its not an either or dichotomy, but rather evolution via natural selection combines a variety of environmental pressures on gene expressions after subsequent generations.

Epistasis only biases outcomes. That means if an animal accumulates a few adaptations towards herbivory or whatever, chances are the trend of acquiring herbivore traits will continue. And don't for get historical contingency. Pandas, being of the carnivore family must have had carnivore ancestors, but then drifted towards omnivore and then a herbivore lifestyle. Besides once acquired, a good set of canines is handy for defense.

Quite right.

Oldskeptic wrote:

JayJay wrote:
There are no bears in Africa

Well not since they went extinct.

I can’t recall you making a mistake of fact, but where do you get that there were ever African bears? According to the Wiki entry there were only remote ancestors the size of raccoons.

laklak wrote:Ever been bit by a horse? Formidable weapons, horse teeth. Horses, like chimps, dogs, cats, muskrats, alligators et. al. use whatever they've got in a scrap. For horses it's hooves and teeth. However, neither horse hooves nor horse teeth evolved as weapons. Neither did chimp fangs. Diet, man, that's the ticket.

Well have you ever been bitten by a chimp? If you were rescued in time, you might still need a face transplant though being bitten by a much smaller animal than a horse. That’s so sensible for a biting prey species; to aim to maim. Sure, also zebra try to bite lions once they have been tackled and their teeth might not be adapted for that, but can you be sure that their hooves aren’t adapted to kick? As their ancestors got bigger so their hooves adapted to form single masses, well suited for kicking a pursuer. Like the australopith a zebra might look innocent of weaponry, but one still instinctively stays clear of the fat behinds of “tame” zebra.

The ticket to where? A primate needs a ticket to the savannah, full of resources but inhabited by other mammals who are adapted to be difficult and confusing prey.

Thomas Eshuis wrote:Jayjay, you should read the Simarillion, it treats Ainur as the creator together with the Valar and Maiar and mortal beings as the actors.

I never could get into the Simarillion but maybe you could say the same of Greek mythology where the gods and men are on an intellectual equality. Although I understand it was a capital crime to be an atheist in ancient Greece, that notion of equality might have excited Westerners in their long drift away from the Hebrew vision of the world. In the Bible God is the actor, the Israelites merely have the freedom to obey or not, to learn or not to learn , to evolve or not. So God sets the framework for growth, mankind grows within that framework. It’s an interesting vision for today, where that framework might appear as the global ecological system.

I made up a sequence of this waterbuck seeing off a lion, which is its habitual and successful predator- in a particular context where the lion couldn’t turn the buck’s flank. If she jumped into the water at one side that would be distant from the buck and would give the buck time to turn to face her again. Some calculation like that must have been in her head. Unfortunately the story line doesn't continue beyond the lion going off after her near escape. I imagine the buck backed into the water again, to restore the stalemate.


That to help demonstrate the importance turning the flank of prey, that would be difficult to do on a biped hominin.

Edit: add above point, plus chimps smaller than horses.

I notice you're ignoring my post and instead posting more irelevant wibble, although the pictures are rather good.