Jie wrote: I happen to be an artist. What you're saying is basically that when I'm in my home, the house itself has the know-how to make a painting.
In my next sentence below, I said something different than what you claim I’m “basically saying”, when I named the artist as Gaia. But to follow your line of questioning as well as I can; we can see the house but we can’t see the artist. In a way that’s also true in your analogy. I’m not an artist, you are. But what can one physically point to that makes me not an artist and you one? I could even falsely claim to be an artist. But put us each in a room with some paint and after a while an observer will see art on the walls of your room and no art on my walls.
Jie wrote:
"Gaia" is a handle I could use for "who" is knowledgeable, also "God". Something bigger than us. But as soon as one does that, it draws the argument into bickering about the exact nature of what is bigger than us, or flat denial of the possibility. Basically as I see it, humans are observably made up of a hierarchy of organs and smaller bits, but we are also carried along in an unpredictable creative system, which can lead to the intuition that we aren't at the top of the natural hierarchy. Why should we be?
This assumes the existence of such a natural hierarchy. Can you give a demonstration of it?
The observable hierarchy runs from the lowest upwards, as atoms, molecules, body organs, the animal, community, nation, biome, biosphere.
Jayjay4547 wrote: Seems to me that when a population experiences a different climate the circumstances expose a previously hidden potential for surviving creatively in the new context.
Jie wrote: Only if there's already something in the gene pool that can enable the population to survive the change. Extinction is just as likely, if not more so.
Jayjay4547 wrote: I’m claiming, it’s not something in the gene pool so much as something in the logic of the situation, of which the physiology of the species of interest is part; to use an analogy, that population is the key that fits the lock that’s called a ”niche”. So species in a biomes are like a bunch of keys and when change sweeps over a biome sometimes one of the keys turns out to fit. To stretch the analogy, the lock opens a door to a whole new set of doors.
Jie wrote: No, it's definitely something in the gene pool. The physiology of the species of interest comes from the gene pool.
I’d agree that the gene pool provides mobility in the direction of increasing fitness through variation within the pool. But it’s in the live animal that fitness is tested. For example, a primate weighing 40 kg might be able to survive the attack of a hunting dog by hitting it with a rock but a 10kg monkey wouldn’t. That’s the arena where the logic of the context is expressed.
Jie wrote: I have read the[Jayjay’s] claims. They seem to boil down to the silly idea that the fact that Australopithecus lacked large canines is sufficient evidence in and of itself to conclude that they used clubs and other weapons to crack the skulls of large felines, even if no such tools have been found where they lived. You've made the claim, but failed to support it.
Well teeth are pretty important, they are one of the prime sites where the body meets the world. If you found yourself in a cage with a chimp then suddenly its canines would seem important. That’s why you probably won’t meet an adult chimp except if there are bars between you and it and that’s also why some primatologists are missing fingers. That’s according to Jane Goodall’s advice on not keeping cute baby chimps that grow into inconvenient adults.
To see the significance of canines you need to place the hominins in their food chain context where they were habitually preyed on by predators who had alternative prey-which were themselves highly adept at not being eaten. The hominins ability to feed themselves depended also on their ability to go to places with food, in such numbers and such foraging array, at such times of day and season as suited them, while conforming to the will of their predators as little as possible. To be able to eat as much as possible while being eaten as little as possible. That was the great adaptive driver.
Looking at the hominins in evolutionary time, we see later small-brained small-canine australopiths associated with the Oldowan “pebble” culture., that’s recognized from chipped pebbles. A river stone must be about the least promising stone to chip; it has rolled a hundred miles down a river bed, being banged against other stones all the way- and getting rounded not chipped. Seeing that we couldn’t easily recognize an unchipped river stone as a tool, we can infer that the Oldowan hominins inherited a habit of selecting oval stones from river beds. After a million years of that an early technologist discovered that there were some native rocks that could take a better edge; material culture started being elaborated.
That isn’t “silly” as you claim, it isn’t an original idea of mine either, it’s Dart’s osteodontokeratic culture” notion from the 1950s, the notion that small brained terrestrial bipedal ancestors used sticks stones and bones as weapons to make their way in the world. A weird thing about that notion was that Dart and his followers (most famously the playwright Robert Ardrey) immediately focused on the offensive use of weapons, as opposed to a means of optimizing the hominin’s access to foraging area in the face of predation pressure. In other words, Dart didn’t see the biome as the creator; as the matrix that formed the species by the creative logic it constituted.
Dart’s “hunting hypothesis” was shot down in the 1970s on the grounds that the baboon skulls Dart had taken as evidence of hominin kills weren’t, and that the wear on hominin teeth suggested a plant diet. His vision of our distant ancestors as predators seems to be seeping back now, but what is still missing is the vision of our ancestors as embedded in a context that molded their bodies. For example in their review of the hominin –predator relations, Treves and Palmqvist
here argue that the hominins hid from predaors, fled from them, avoided areas where there were predators, retreated to fastnesses at night and warned each other of predators, and “might well” have “counterattacked" predators using weapons. Nothing at all about the different logic of what is adaptive when counterattacking using hand weapons, as opposed to counterattacking using teeth which is what other primates have to use when they counterattack.
Jie wrote: Jayjay4547 wrote: My argument is that “progress” is a word used to describe the experience of being embedded in a creative system. Creative means, more out of less.
That's an incorrect definition of creative. Makes me wonder how you're defining progress.
You need to show where my understanding of creativity as more out of less is wrong. Maybe by offering what you regard as the correct definition. That way our discussion might progress.
Jie wrote: Jayjay4547 wrote: And I’m claiming that “progress” in particular has been banned from use in evolution for polemical reasons.
That's something else you need to back up.
Well as I’ve been discussing at length with Cali, the reason given for denying the use of the word “progress” is that there is no end state in evolution. I counter that by arguing that we apply the word progress to technological evolution although we also don’t know where it is headed.
Jayjay4547 wrote: I don’t know about large gene pools and biodiversity, maybe so. Strong creativity is called genius and I’m saying, that’s a property of biomes, some more than others.
Jie wrote: Indeed, so you're saying. But can you back it up with some evidence?
Jayjay4547 wrote: For example, the elephant’s trunk, the bat’s sonar, the human’s speech
That expression is not a communication, it has no content, indeed it advertises non-communication of content. If you communicate some content I will try to respond.
Jayjay4547 wrote: It’s not a metaphor, I’m saying that creativity at the level of genius are actual properties of biomes.
Jie wrote: See, this is the kind of thing I was calling absurd before. You're implying not only that biomes are somehow aware of what's going on in them, down to the molecular level (mutations and such), but also that they're active participants that can consciously guide the changes. That's what creativity means.
Jayjay4547 wrote: I didn’t mean to imply all that, I’m trying to avoid personifying biomes by just pointing to what they do as something with particular properties of progress and creation.
Jie wrote: Trying to avoid? I could've sworn that's what you were trying to achieve, not avoid.
That’s good. To explain my aim, I’ve been deeply impressed by the narrowness of the critera that would have made it adaptive for a prey species to have abandoned biting for weapon wielding, and by the deeply creative implications of that for future adaptations, and by its irrelevance to what we regard as our human essence. For example, you call yourself an “artist” but there’s no obvious connection between being an artist and being descended from a primate that abandoned defensive biting. I’ve also been impressed by the excellent ability of African mammals, which were the peers of our ancestors . These impressions have made me think of human evolution as a narrow creative thread controlled by logic .
Maybe I can use the analogy of the fitness landscape. Dawkins sees populations “climbing Mount Improbable”, in a domain ruled by chance but it looks to me, it’s a domain ruled by logic and describable by fascinating story. What we can observe is the story and the logic; a bit like the stories historians build. I’m really not anxious to insist on personifying the process, or declaring that there must be a “consciousness” driving creativity or denying that. I think we can only see God’s hands in evolution, which is to be expected from being embedded in a hierarchy.
Sorry about the post bloat
Cheers
Edit:Goodal to Goodall sorry
by 
