Jayjay4547 wrote:

theropod wrote:Charlie just doesn't seem to get it. I'm not talking about toys in his youthful play.

I'm absolutely convinced that the differences in a bows curvature, draw length, string materials, nocking techniques, fletching methods, stiffness, weight, straightness, point thickness to width ratio and a host of other problems are readily addressed by analyzing the problem and working toward a solution. I also think these issues were addressed in a social cooperative structure. Different solutions arose for different settings and demands, and we see that in all the different bow styles that arose and are still in use today.

These were the result of trail and error. Big deal. Trial and error is nothing but the scientific method applied to physical problems. See the early efforts of NASA attempting to get a rocket to NOT blow the fuck up on launch. If something about your bow setup, or main booster engine, is wrong you'll figure out the reason and go hungry, or build a whole new raocket and try again (learning from your errors). Miss a tweety bird in your childhood and mommy fixes you a hot dog. Miss that same bird when your offspring are starving and tell me the physical issues of relying on stone age materials did not incorporate analytical thinking. I'm gonna need to see a lot more than your objections to convince me you have a basis in reality for making those assertions.

If it were not for successful diversification of the bow and arrow most of us wouldn't be here. That bow made for long shots in a prairie at big game isn't gonna work in a thick tropical forest targeting little monkeys in the tops of trees. Hmmm, speaking of tropical paleolithic weapons, I wonder if there was any analytical thought that went into the development of poison arrows/darts, and the frogs that source some of those toxins? Like putting two and two together?

Really?

RS

The bow and arrow is irreducibly complex which means that its origin must make an interesting story but we don't know what that is. Maybe it involved an exaptation from a musical instrument. Maybe not.

Whut?



RS

Fenrir wrote:Of course it is fairly obvious it is impossible to propel any arrow or arrow-like projectile by any other means than a bow, and most definitely not with string or a stick alone or any other combination of the two.

No...wait...of course it's possible, and methods using stick or string or other combinations of the two have been known from antiquity.

Irreducible complexity, the standard unthinking fallback of people who don't even know what the word's mean.

I do know what “irreducible complexity” means. It’s a sort of stick you can poke into evolutionist’s hole gets them all stirred up. Disambiguation: it can also be applied to a thing that does something, if you took any part away it would be useless. For that use.

You are in a weak position to make out that a bow and arrow is an obvious weapon, seeing the original inhabitants of your country never invented it. In spite of Australia having a wide variety of habitats, in some of which it would surely be useful. The aboriginals invented some other marvellous weapons, but curiously no bow and arrows.

In a world where a weapon is something you hit with or throw, a weapon made of a whippy stick, a long thin straight stick and an animal sinew doesn’t seem plausible, a machine you pull and release.

edit: gut to sinew

Jayjay4547 wrote:The bow and arrow is irreducibly complex which means that its origin must make an interesting story but we don't know what that is. Maybe it involved an exaptation from a musical instrument. Maybe not.

Yeah, I would have thought something more like a sling to propel projectiles would be a more likely candidate than a musical instrument — you know, because that's also a weapon, with a somewhat similar mechanism. Though, what would I know? My ancestors probably invented haggis. But, no, let's go with a musical instrument as being the possible precursor to a more accurate and effective hunting weapon... or maybe not.

Anyway, wot 'ave bows 'n arrers gotta do wiv a bleeding great wooden boat that didn't exist?

Jayjay4547 wrote:Good point. I should have said, Western ex-Christian atheists, referring to people who put up 69 posts scoffing at a story about an extinction event, in the very century where it’s becoming clear that an extinction event is happening- incidentally, brought about by the success of the scientific method. Not that someone brought up in an Eastern society would find the Western atheism inaccessible, just as Buddhism is accessible to a modern American.

There is no such thing as a Western or Eastern or ex-Christian or ex-Muslim or ex-anything else type atheist. Read my sig. An atheist is in a state of non-belief with respect to the existence of a supernatural deity - nothing else. An atheist cannot therefore be qualified by a previously held belief-label.

Alan B wrote:Anyway, wot 'ave bows 'n arrers gotta do wiv a bleeding great wooden boat that didn't exist?

Yeh, it didn't even 'ave a bowsprit!

Jayjay4547 wrote:
The bow and arrow is irreducibly complex which means that its origin must make an interesting story but we don't know what that is. Maybe it involved an exaptation from a musical instrument. Maybe not.

Such nonsense.

Arrows - or at least very long, thin spears, fletched for stability - were long propelled by the atlatl before the development of the bow.

Tying a flexible sapling down while constructing shelters or snares, then playing with the taught string, could easily demonstrate the ability of a bow to propel the already-developed projectile.

On a side note - ever notice that almost every claim that something is "irreducibly complex" is such complete and utter bullshit as to be laughable?

Weaver wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:
The bow and arrow is irreducibly complex which means that its origin must make an interesting story but we don't know what that is. Maybe it involved an exaptation from a musical instrument. Maybe not.

Such nonsense.

Arrows - or at least very long, thin spears, fletched for stability - were long propelled by the atlatl before the development of the bow.

Tying a flexible sapling down while constructing shelters or snares, then playing with the taught string, could easily demonstrate the ability of a bow to propel the already-developed projectile.

On a side note - ever notice that almost every claim that something is "irreducibly complex" is such complete and utter bullshit as to be laughable?

Indeed. Anything that has been manufactured can be traced back to its origins and be broken up (reduced) to its components. All you have to do is a little studying of the ancient past. The records are there, and they're even found in the modern world. If our friend wants to know how rudimentary bows and arrows were made, the people living in the Kalahari still make them that way.

Here's how they poison them.

and here, more about how complex they are and how they've been made for 64,000 years.

Thinking behind the bow and arrow.

Also you'd think that being South African, he would know from his history what weapons were found here when the settlers came here.

Here are details of weapons used by Africans, past and modern. To claim that they are "irreducibly complex" is just a nonsense assertion.

However, I don't see what the invention of the bow and arrow has to do with proving that kangaroos actually jumped all the way from the Middle East to Australia. There's a picture doing the rounds on Facebook about this.

Fenrir wrote: JJ, I try not to spout ridiculous and ignorant crap about Africa, I'd appreciate if you could attempt the same about places you obviously know nothing about.

I’m not a gatekeeper for my country Fenrir, anything you like to say about what has happened near me, I’ll give it fair attention. Besides I do know something about Australia, I lived there as a small child and again as an adolescent. It’s not ignorant crap that Australia is the only continent where bows and arrows were not used by the original inhabitants. I googled “Why did Australian aborigines never use the bow and arrow?” and that linked some interesting non-ignorant discussions. Don’t let’s bring up the continent of Antarctica.

Fenrir wrote: If you look very very closely at a very small scale map of Australia you may, just, be able to discern a place called the Torres Strait.

Where is your logic here? If the map scale were small enough then the Torres Strait Islands wouldn’t appear at all. If the map scale were large enough the islands would look large. You are trying to do some teaching here but it’s going wrong. I can use Wikipedia like anyone else and it shows the islands quite nicely.

Fenrir wrote: It's up the north, and, totally surprisingly, has a long and well documented history of bow use, and had (before colonial times) a well developed and extensive trading network with areas both to the north and the south. Australians have been well aware of the existence of and use of bows for a very long time and had access to the necessary technology if they had wanted it. Perhaps there are other reasons they weren't used or did not spread across the rest of the continent? I wouldn't know, perhaps they weren't very popular.

According to Wikipedia the Torres Strait Islands are politically part of Australia because the Queensland government annexed them but geographically they are part of Melanesia. To claim that because the islanders use bows and arrows therefore the Australian aboriginals did, is like saying that because there are monkeys on the Rock of Gibraltar therefore there are monkeys in Britain.

It’s unreasonable to claim that because there has long been trade between the islanders and the NE tip of Australia, therefore “Australians have been well aware of and use of bows for a very long time” . Some Australians maybe. Not necessarily those aborigines living in the SW corner for example. Or those in the Gibber desert. At any rate, not before the internet came along. What point are you wanting to make anyway- that the use of bow and arrow was communicated rather than being invented separately whenever and wherever they would be useful? I absolutely agree. The genesis of the bow and arrow seems to have been a difficult and seldom-occurring event, that’s implicit in calling it irreducibly complex. I’m not claiming that God poofed the bow and arrow into being and showed some shaggy hunter how to use it. Or maybe I am in a sense, only calling God “The Muse” so as to avoid an argument. The connection between genesis of the bow and arrow and the genesis of genuses is beguiling. But I’ll stick to the point that the genesis of the bow and arrow must have been an interesting story though we don’t know it. Rudyard Kipling seems to have understood the intrinsic interest in genesis when he wrote stories like “How the alphabet was made”. The people who wrote Genesis also understood it.

Alan B wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Good point. I should have said, Western ex-Christian atheists, referring to people who put up 69 posts scoffing at a story about an extinction event, in the very century where it’s becoming clear that an extinction event is happening- incidentally, brought about by the success of the scientific method. Not that someone brought up in an Eastern society would find the Western atheism inaccessible, just as Buddhism is accessible to a modern American.

There is no such thing as a Western or Eastern or ex-Christian or ex-Muslim or ex-anything else type atheist. Read my sig. An atheist is in a state of non-belief with respect to the existence of a supernatural deity - nothing else. An atheist cannot therefore be qualified by a previously held belief-label.

I know that’s practically an article of faith amongst atheist posters but it still might be useful to distinguish between different flavours of atheist, especially if you include Buddhists in your fold. Different flavours might arise from different cultural origins or traditions. The tradition of Western ex-Christian atheism seems to me to be realised through publications. The Wikipedia entry on “Thinker’s Library” has this introduction:

“The Thinker's Library was a series of 140 small hardcover books published between 1929 and 1951 for the Rationalist Press Association by Watts & Co., London, a company founded by Charles Albert Watts. They consisted of a selection of essays, literature, and extracts from greater works by various classical and contemporary humanists and rationalists, continuing in the tradition of the Renaissance. Many of the titles were cheap reprints of classic books, aimed at a mass audience.”

Scanning down the list of 140 titles I picked out the following author names that rang bells for me:

H. G. Wells, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill,,Charles Darwin, Edward Gibbon, Thomas Henry Huxley, Sir James G. Frazer,J. B. S. Haldane, VoltaireAldous Huxley ,Mark Twain, Thomas Paine, ,Samuel Butler, Havelock Ellis, Albert Einstein, Julian Huxley, Bertrand Russell, William Kingdon Clifford

Maybe more would ring bells for you but my point is that these authors are close to the backbone of enlightenment pro- science culture up till 1951. The Wiki entry on founder Charles Albert Watts calls him a secularist and the entry on secularism is part of a series on “Irreligion”. That series doesn’t include “Buddhism”.

The little I know about Buddhism is partly from witnessing practicing Buddhists. In 1990 abouts, during a time of great political risk and opportunity in my country, a foreign Buddhist woman sat silently on the ground in Government Avenue. A year or so later a couple of Japanese Buddhists lead a March from the Gandhi settlement in Phoenix, beating drums using strange curved sticks. We walked past and over soiled surgical gloves and bloody puddles. That left strong impressions on me; these people aren’t big talkers. They weren’t irreligious either.

So those are my grounds for distinguishing between flavours of atheism, if you want to count Buddhists as atheists. Buddhism might well appeal to Western ex-Christian atheists, and some western scientists do follow that path. I see that as a growing process.

I've never thought of myself as any flavour of atheist. I simply gave up believing in fairytales when I realised that they weren't true. This included my father's belief in the god of Zionism and my mother's changing belief system that went with whatever the flavour of the month was. Then catholic school finally clinched it for me. As a small child I questioned how so many beliefs could all follow the same god. Surely if he was real and people were supposed to worship him, they'd all do it in the same way and for the same reasons. So I gave up on it and read books about reality instead.

Jayjay4547 wrote:I do know what “irreducible complexity” means. It’s a sort of stick you can poke into evolutionist’s hole gets them all stirred up. Disambiguation: it can also be applied to a thing that does something, if you took any part away it would be useless. For that use.

I think what gets people stirred up is the knowingly dishonest misuse of the term, or the use of the term by people too thick to realise that they're misusing it.

Even if in the biological context of 'fit for a specific current purpose' some system is 'irreducibly complex', that plainly doesn't mean 'unevolvable', yet various creationists seem happy to pretend that it does.

Much of the time the creationists highlight breaking a current system by removing any element of it as the only important thing, which obviously suggests that evolution claims the only way the current system could have come about is by the sudden addition of that element in essentially its current form.
That seems to be a deliberate misdescription of biological thought, since most people would take the view that on relatively short timescales the current form of a system was usually the result of relatively recent small changes to a rather similar system. The last large-scale addition of some component may be much further back in time, possibly at a point where the accumulated small changes between then and now mean that then, the system in question was much more roughly similar to the current system only with some part missing, yet possibly having one or more useful functions which the current system may lack.

A misconception and misrepresentation of "irreducible complexity" that is inexcusable, in the light of the fact that Hermann Joseph Müller sorted this all out in 1918.

How can non-belief be a 'flavour'? A person can view the world from a number of different perspectives as part of their character. That doesn't 'flavour' their fundamental non-belief. A Buddhist would not say that their 'non-belief' is different to a non-Buddhist's 'non-belief'. How a non-believer lives their life is irrelevant.

If I go and learn more about Islam, would that make my atheism 'more Islamic' or 'more unIslamic' than it previously was?
Would I be more Allah-free than I was before?

Weaver wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:
The bow and arrow is irreducibly complex which means that its origin must make an interesting story but we don't know what that is. Maybe it involved an exaptation from a musical instrument. Maybe not.

Such nonsense.

Arrows - or at least very long, thin spears, fletched for stability - were long propelled by the atlatl before the development of the bow.

Tying a flexible sapling down while constructing shelters or snares, then playing with the taught string, could easily demonstrate the ability of a bow to propel the already-developed projectile.

On a side note - ever notice that almost every claim that something is "irreducibly complex" is such complete and utter bullshit as to be laughable?

When I pointed out that the bow and arrow is irreducibly complex that wasn’t bullshit. Your speculation that its invention could have followed from experience with snares or shelter building is in line with what I said about exaptation and it’s no more plausible than an origin from a musical bow

That’s all speculation but what is fact is that in the entire continent of Australia, with a wide variety of habitats, continuously inhabited for around 60k years, the inhabitants never developed the bow and arrow. So the genesis of the bow wasn’t actually as obvious as you make out. It was an invention and like many others its invention happened only a few times maybe only once. Its use spread through communication in which warfare might have figured prominently. Why the Australian aboriginals didn’t use bows and arrows is a reflection of their cultural isolation from the rest of mankind, since before the bow and arrow weapon was invented somewhere else.