tolman wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:There is a difference in consequentiality between defensive weapon use and the use of the same object as a tool. Consider a chimp using a stick to dig up a tuber. It can dig a bit and then put the tool aside and use its fingers again, then go back to using the tool. And it doesn’t matter much how sharp the stick is or how effectively the chimp uses the stick. Primates don’t generally spend all their daylight time foraging anyway so time is not critical. Admittedly one can over-draw this picture of inconsequentiality but there is a clear difference when a tool is used as an antipredation weapon. The whole body of the prey is then revved, pulse rate is high, a hominin would be sweating, it is thinking as hard and fast as it can, everything it does has consequence for its prospect of living.. The predator is itself acting on the calculated experience-based premise of success. And a mammalian predator is skilled and clever. In this situation there is a premium on using the tool with speed, accuracy and decision.

Two problems here seems to be you choosing only to use perspectives which maximise antipredator weapon use while minimising or ignoring other uses, alongside taking a largely either/or approach to things.

Even if we just considered weapon use, wouldn't an ancestor which was a general weapon user be expected to be better at antipredator weapon use than one which somehow (how?) restricted its weapon use to attacking predators?

That’s an interesting point. My answer is that (a) defensive weapon use was essential for survival by a primate with short blunt canines and non-opposable big toes, in the face of a leopard-like predator, at night while (b) defensive weapon use in those circumstances was a higher skills-hurdle than successful hunting.

It’s become clear through these discussions that diurnal primates face two main regimes of predation threat. During the day baboons climb trees to get away from lion who are relatively poor climbers when also baboons react aggressively to leopard, hyena and hunting dogs. Chimps also chase away leopard during the day. At night the tables are turned: leopard then hunt baboons who might threaten leopard by acting an masse (cf Fitzpatrick). That’s when most primates appear to be predated.
Let’s focus on the night regime. It was then essential that hominins had skills for reacting to a leopard. They couldn’t start with low skills to attack small predators and work up towards big ones: The big ones (leopard) were their night problem. We can’t assume that those skills gave immunity, any more than a baboon’s teeth make it invulnerable to leopard. But baboon canines complicate the leopard’s hunting. The level of skillset against a habituated night predator constitute an adaptive gradient for a primate.

In the daytime sure one could visualise low level skills at hand weapon use providing some level of protection against small predators and weapon skill evolving towards better access to territory.

tolman wrote:Even if for the sake of argument people took the position that the payoffs from competent antipredator weapon use were high, that wouldn't require that relevant abilities would develop first for antipredator use only.

The hominins apparently had a visa to places where chimp ancestors couldn’t survive, in spite of hominins having short blunt canines and non-opposable big toes. They might well have used hand weapons also to dig up roots but their existence shows they held a visa while the formidable skill of their predators and alternative prey shows how high their own skills at fast and accurate weapon use must have been to hold that visa.

tolman wrote:It would seem from what you write that you have a basic and deep aversion to the idea of antipredator weapon use being part of a general suite of tool use competence, even in the context where earlier tool use wasn't meaningfully about fighting predators.

Yes I think that the notion of our ancestors having the smarts to develop tool use of which weapon use was one consequence, is a crock, it’s an exceptionalist approach that isn’t applied to the origin stories of other species. No-one would argue that the pom pom crab ancestors needed “smarts” to stick anemones on their claws. Rather in our case, leopards, sticks and stones drew our ancestor’s attention to how useful weapons were, and made our ancestors skilled in using them at speed with accuracy.

tolman wrote:Also, it seems you frame evolution a bit differently to the way other people might.
If, for example, we imagine a hypothetical ancestor species did use tools for food collection, with the selective advantages purely in that regard being to do with things like efficient use of energy and minimising time spent exposed to at least some fraction of predators, and meaningfully enhanced survival in seasonal or other times of scarcity, if that ancestor started to use its tools to ward off some predators, it would seem that you would attribute all the 'credit' for the improved survival the antipredator use resulted in to the antipredator use itself, seen as an activity in isolation, and the 'credit' for the antipredator tool use was itself really attributable to the predators, since they are 'actors'.

However, someone else could look at the same situation and point out that the successful antipredator activity itself seemed to depend on the basic skills that everyday practice with regard to food collection resulted in, and the familiarity with tools and the likelihood of having them at hand.

Even if the food collection was 'just' a matter of using sticks to dig and using sticks and stones to crack nuts, it would be a meaningful contributor to good motor skills and the ability to use tools as extensions of the body, but if we imagined it also extended to scavenging, it could involve things quite similar to actual antipredator weapon use, like cutting skin with sharp stones and using rocks and clubs to break bones, as well as providing opportunities for interacting with potentially dangerous competitors whose main focus was on scavenging rather than eating our ancestors, where actions of less-than-adequate competence on our part could be ameliorated by withdrawal and still serve as useful learning experiences in a way which wouldn't be the case with predators which were intent on eating us.

If our ancestors did habitually scavenge animals killed by predators then they would indeed have habitually had interactions quite similar to those when avoiding being eaten themselves by those same predators. For example there are many video clips of lion in battle royal with hyena. Make your mind up. Did Australopithecus shin up a tree whenever it saw a lion, or did they habitually drive lion off their kills? Or if there were no lion, sabretooth felids?

tolman wrote:It would seem you'd recognise that as you went to seemingly strange lengths to avoid considering such a situation, to the extent of concluding ancestors 'must have' regularly practised with weapons to be better predator-fighters when such practise without obvious associated immediate reward would seem to be something requiring a meaningful amount of foresight and imagination in ancestors where you deride the idea of 'smarts', or a peculiarly specific instinct.

I actually likened weapon practice by ancestors to the play behaviour of juvenile monkeys, endlessly grabbing and biting, grabbing and biting. They don’t do that out of meaningful foresight and imagination. Or do they? What goes on in their furry little heads is obscure but I dare say they know and are hard wired into where and how they live. My point about weapon practice, which you make a big issue of, was just about how strange a troop of Australopithecus would seem, if one could have met them; how very different from a troop of other primates.

tolman wrote:It would seem that your approach is coloured by a non-scientific desire to give all the credit to predators as agents of the creative environment, yet someone without a particular predator fixation but who still had a predilection for crediting 'the environment' for religious or other philosophical reasons could obviously consider the above scavenging situation and give credit to our competitor species for pushing us to be increasingly good offensive tool users, in what would appear to be the same basic way you do with predators.

I don’t have a predator fixation. Predators are objectively important in any biome, they influence the skillset/bauplan of their prey in easily identified ways that we also use to distinguish between species. So we have no problem recognising that a porcupine is spiky while a springbok is good at running and jumping. If we don’t get the message, the porcupine will rattle its quills and the springbok will pronk.

Rather let’s say that any rational person modelling our ancestors as habitual scavengers would have to suppose them highly adept at defensive weapon use, because the primary predators would have habitually attacked them violently. It would be non-adaptive for predators to allow kleptoparasites just to stroll off with their kills.

Speaking of that term “Defensive” fighting, one might object that it’s not defensive to attack a bunch of predators eating their kill. Treves and Palmqvist used the term “counterattack”. Isbell (994) used “Aggressive defence”. The heart of the issue is the nature of the weapon used; whether it works against an animal that is fighting back or not. If the other animal is fighting back, then effective hand weapon fighting requires a stopper weapon, which has no use in hunting. That weapon creates an asymmetry between defence and offence. The stopper might well have been the original weapon while striker weapons evolved to exploit the vulnerability of the antagonist that had been stopped.

tolman wrote:That is, someone else could share your basic philosophical leanings and apply them perfectly well to a quite different and more inclusive narrative.
Indeed, wouldn't an environment arguably be more 'wholeheartedly creative' if our evolution was shaped by more of the species we interacted with?

I’m not out to develop a “more inclusive” narrative or show how “wholeheartedly creative” the environment is but to explain the bauplan of Australopithecus and why the established origin story hasn’t recognised the role of predators in that. Where “creative” comes in is that, once the intimate relationship with predators and weapons is recognised, it also becomes clear that the particular solution shown to our ancestors, preadapted them in physical and social ways for adapting the egg-shell skull and long immaturity of the sentence-forming and tool-making genus Homo.

It was the narrow and structured path followed by our ancestors that was associated with creation.

tolman wrote:Furthermore, would it seem reasonable to you that ancestors could be good at assaulting predators while being unlikely to have those skills and that belligerent attitude reflected in other aspects of their behaviour (like driving off competing species from food sources)?

I'm not suggesting that such ancestors roamed around like constantly-rage-fuelled psychopaths, and aggression does need to be controlled such that it isn't dangerous to the individual and their kin, but if the skills were there, not to use them where that would seemingly provide an advantage would appear to require some kind of explanation.

Sure, with also the worrying notion that when their ecological success led to hominin troops colliding with others, that could plausibly have led to warfare between them, like with chimps. Their antagonistic interface with the environment became less about predators and more about neighbouring troops of the same species.

tolman wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Consider also the social context, where a successful defence benefits all who might have been prey in that encounter, drawing favourable attention to the heroes and drawing their attention to the means whereby they gained that favour.

Hero worship? Really?
Doesn't that seem to require some reasonably sophisticated theory of mind on the part of the worshipper?

Emotions like admiration, hatred, resentment, jealousy and love are surely shared with other social mammals? They refer to behaviour based on memories of past interactions.

tolman wrote:Wouldn't an ancestor capable of making reasonably 'smart' associations between a weapon and a successful defence be capable of doing the same thing with regard to any tool which provided some immediate reward?

I don’t see where “smartness” comes in. Simply learning from the benefit. A rat learns pretty quickly not to press a lever that electrifies the bars of its Skinner box, and to press another lever that delivers water. For hominins, a tool that saved one’s life would draw more attention than one that helped draw termites out of a nest.

tolman wrote:Thinking of other animals, do they need anything more than emotional feelings with regard to fear or danger which are lower in the presence of a potential defender or herd leader or when in a group than when the leader isn't there or they are on their own?

Jayjay4547 wrote:Alpha male primates are talked down somewhat because of their bullying, occasional infanticide and unequal benefit from grooming but experts have told me that if one wants to end the adventurous habits of a troop of primates, you take out the alpha male.

Which doesn't require anything like a concept of 'hero'.

It seems to be aggression or the potential for it which both helps a given animal become a leader by outcompeting rivals and which makes it more likely to face a threat than the average group member.
Recognising aggression seems to be all that is needed.

I’m sorry, I can’t make out what point you are making in those exchanges.

tolman wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Consequentiality in excellence of weapon use also arises because to use a hand weapon implies making a choice – for example, between that and climbing a tree. You had better be at least as good at using that weapon as you are at climbing the tree.

Indeed - you already need some meaningful weapon-use competence before trying to use a weapon on a dangerous predator is a good idea.

True, but that’s an irreducible complexity argument, requiring a Just So Story response. What one can validly do with the fossil evidence of Australopithecus is figure out the skillset implied by its bauplan. And when you do, that throws up evidence of preadaptations for genus Homo. One can say that, to a first approximation, humanity has two skillsets: an older one of handling objects at high speed with accuracy, selecting and refining those objects. And a newer skill of rapidly constructing and parsing sentences whereby we can exchange an indefinite amount of precise information. These skillsets have both been highly creative. And they reflect “ecological niches” in other words, pockets of stasis in a twisting creative path realised by nature.

That’s a path largely recognised thanks to a drive towards telling the story of human origins in terms of self-creation.

Fapfapfapfapfapfapfap.

That has as much meaning as this latest bullshit about self-creation. Enjoy.

Yes, I really can't be bothered to read it. The business with weapons manufacture really gets up my nose. I don't understand why he can't just accept that we descended from animals that started walking upright, eventually figured out that throwing sharpened sticks at animals they wanted to eat guaranteed more meat in their diet, that cooked meat tasted better than raw, that weaving sticks together for shelter made them a little more comfortable when they slept, and that all these innovations happened over centuries, millennia, and thousands of millennia, and that eventually their descendants built cities and made guns. It's not a difficult concept to understand once you remove the mythology of gods from the story.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

tolman wrote:Two problems here seems to be you choosing only to use perspectives which maximise antipredator weapon use while minimising or ignoring other uses, alongside taking a largely either/or approach to things.

Even if we just considered weapon use, wouldn't an ancestor which was a general weapon user be expected to be better at antipredator weapon use than one which somehow (how?) restricted its weapon use to attacking predators?

That’s an interesting point. My answer is that (a) defensive weapon use was essential for survival by a primate with short blunt canines and non-opposable big toes, in the face of a leopard-like predator, at night while (b) defensive weapon use in those circumstances was a higher skills-hurdle than successful hunting.

Even if someone agreed that at some time X, defensive weapon use somehow became rapidly essential for survival, that wouldn't be any argument that other kinds of tool use at time X (or before time X) were less likely.

Indeed, someone could reasonably take the view that if defensive tool use had become essential at time X, then a species which didn't already have reasonable tool-use skills would seem likely not to have survived.
Of course, that doesn't mean such survival couldn't have happened, as looking back on evolutionary history as a whole there are likely to have been many unlikely things which did happen.

Surely, someone who took a philosophical position of organisms as being pure puppets of the environment but without a particular predator fixation could (and would?) argue that the environment was responsible for all tool use, and that a species which had been shaped for countless millennia to be general tool users gradually becoming competent at wielding weapons against would-be predators is just as environment-driven as your seemingly narrower scenario.

Surely, you'd have to agree that even if you disagreed with them regarding the evolutionary importance of predator-defence for either simple species survival or as an enabling factor for ancestors occupying previously-denied habitats, someone with such a perspective would have no obvious philosophical need to focus on predators, and if they saw religious significance in their environment-entirely-controlling-evolution perspective, their view would be, in religious terms, as good and genuine as yours?

Your scenario might be more dramatic than theirs, but that doesn't necessarily make it more credible.

Jayjay4547 wrote:It was then essential that hominins had skills for reacting to a leopard. They couldn’t start with low skills to attack small predators and work up towards big ones: The big ones (leopard) were their night problem.

Even if you're claiming that leopards suddenly appeared as a problem, why would that preclude defensive skills having already been developed for use against 'lesser' predators, or tool-use motor skills in general having been gradually developed?

Wouldn't gradual improvement seem to be the way things work in evolution generally?
Is there any evidence that tree-climbing predators did suddenly appear, and did so at the time you're thinking of?

Jayjay4547 wrote:In the daytime sure one could visualise low level skills at hand weapon use providing some level of protection against small predators and weapon skill evolving towards better access to territory.

So are you suggesting some kind of non-transferability of skills from daytime to nighttime?

Jayjay4547 wrote:

tolman wrote:It would seem from what you write that you have a basic and deep aversion to the idea of antipredator weapon use being part of a general suite of tool use competence, even in the context where earlier tool use wasn't meaningfully about fighting predators.

Yes I think that the notion of our ancestors having the smarts to develop tool use of which weapon use was one consequence, is a crock, it’s an exceptionalist approach that isn’t applied to the origin stories of other species. No-one would argue that the pom pom crab ancestors needed “smarts” to stick anemones on their claws. Rather in our case, leopards, sticks and stones drew our ancestor’s attention to how useful weapons were, and made our ancestors skilled in using them at speed with accuracy.

Yet you seem happy with ancestors having the wit and foresight to regularly practise using tools as weapons in order to be ready for future predator encounters.

Why do you try to suggest not only that any tool uses other than predator defence somehow require significantly more intelligence, but effectively claim that that's what everyone else must think as well?
Do you have any evidence that that's what everyone else actually thinks?

A gradualist, generalist approach to tool use doesn't seem to require much in the way of 'smarts' at all, since there's lots of time for behaviours and anatomy to co-evolve, with behaviours becoming significantly instinctual, as well as 'cultural'.

Jayjay4547 wrote:If our ancestors did habitually scavenge animals killed by predators then they would indeed have habitually had interactions quite similar to those when avoiding being eaten themselves by those same predators. For example there are many video clips of lion in battle royal with hyena. Make your mind up. Did Australopithecus shin up a tree whenever it saw a lion, or did they habitually drive lion off their kills? Or if there were no lion, sabretooth felids?

It's not only large predators which eat other animals, there are smaller predators/scavengers as well.
It would certainly seem that an ancestor which did use tools to assist in scavenging would be in a reasonable position to use those tools on more evenly-matched competitors if they were competing for access to a kill. A group of animals busy eating seems a rather better target for stone-throwing practise than something fast-moving intent on eating you, and if something more your size attacks or stands up to you when you're already carrying a stick and have some experience of using it to beat on dead animals, it wouldn't seem to require many 'smarts' to take a swing, or huge skill to at least put it off trying again.

Of course, if some competitor isn't determined to kill you and all you're competing for is food, outside famine situations where food is a life-or-death matter, taking on something where the risks were excessive would be a bad idea, but scavenging situations would seem to provide a whole spectrum of risk scenarios which would allow for starting small and gradually getting better over evolutionary timescales. That wouldn't require obvious 'smarts', since scavengers of all sizes seem generally capable of working out when to eat, and when to retreat.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

tolman wrote:It would seem you'd recognise that as you went to seemingly strange lengths to avoid considering such a situation, to the extent of concluding ancestors 'must have' regularly practised with weapons to be better predator-fighters when such practise without obvious associated immediate reward would seem to be something requiring a meaningful amount of foresight and imagination in ancestors where you deride the idea of 'smarts', or a peculiarly specific instinct.

I actually likened weapon practice by ancestors to the play behaviour of juvenile monkeys, endlessly grabbing and biting, grabbing and biting. They don’t do that out of meaningful foresight and imagination. Or do they? What goes on in their furry little heads is obscure but I dare say they know and are hard wired into where and how they live. My point about weapon practice, which you make a big issue of, was just about how strange a troop of Australopithecus would seem, if one could have met them; how very different from a troop of other primates.

It seemed more like an attempt to deny the transferability of other skills by suggesting that to be any good at attacking predators, ancestors would logically have to have practised just to be good at attacking predators.
If you were thinking of play in general improving antipredator skills by being transferable, surely those general skills would have been available for other uses, and regularly using them for other uses would have improved antipredator abilities?

Why wouldn't the creative environment (were we to choose to anthropomorphise it) have used all the means at its disposal to 'improve' us?

Jayjay4547 wrote:Rather let’s say that any rational person modelling our ancestors as habitual scavengers would have to suppose them highly adept at defensive weapon use, because the primary predators would have habitually attacked them violently. It would be non-adaptive for predators to allow kleptoparasites just to stroll off with their kills.

As I said, scavengers (or animals-which-scavenge) in general seem to have abilities at assessing relevant threats, and are unlikely to go head-to-head with larger competitors.
Lions at a kill seem likely to be primarily occupied with eating, and what other lions are doing, and maybe with competitors who may be some immediate threat to their wellbeing, or their eating.
Running off after some ancestor of ours might get them a new kill, but it would very likely mean someone else literally ate their current lunch.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

tolman wrote:Furthermore, would it seem reasonable to you that ancestors could be good at assaulting predators while being unlikely to have those skills and that belligerent attitude reflected in other aspects of their behaviour (like driving off competing species from food sources)?

I'm not suggesting that such ancestors roamed around like constantly-rage-fuelled psychopaths, and aggression does need to be controlled such that it isn't dangerous to the individual and their kin, but if the skills were there, not to use them where that would seemingly provide an advantage would appear to require some kind of explanation.

Sure, with also the worrying notion that when their ecological success led to hominin troops colliding with others, that could plausibly have led to warfare between them, like with chimps. Their antagonistic interface with the environment became less about predators and more about neighbouring troops of the same species.

Why would that be 'worrying' if the skills involved (whether solely regarding predators, or more widely regarding 'competitors as well) had already been developed for such uses before populations rose as a result which then led to conflict?
The 'credit' for the skills would still seem to be 'deserved' by the original uses which led to them.
Unless you're arguing that antipredator skills are not transferable (which you don't seem to be), you'd seem to be in a position where you think some subsequent uses of them which they had enabled both directly by existing and indirectly by improving survival would be some kind of threat to their 'evolutionary importance'.

And with regard to chimps, given that their fighting is largely weapon-free, would you suggest that the fact that groups do fight meant that the form of their canines, etc was meaningfully 'self-created'?

Jayjay4547 wrote:

tolman wrote:Wouldn't an ancestor capable of making reasonably 'smart' associations between a weapon and a successful defence be capable of doing the same thing with regard to any tool which provided some immediate reward?

I don’t see where “smartness” comes in. Simply learning from the benefit. A rat learns pretty quickly not to press a lever that electrifies the bars of its Skinner box, and to press another lever that delivers water. For hominins, a tool that saved one’s life would draw more attention than one that helped draw termites out of a nest.

'Saving one's life' would seem a relatively advanced concept compared to things like the immediate pleasure-reward of eating.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

tolman wrote:Indeed - you already need some meaningful weapon-use competence before trying to use a weapon on a dangerous predator is a good idea.

True, but that’s an irreducible complexity argument, requiring a Just So Story response.

It obviously isn't an 'irreducible complexity' argument, since potential pathways for gradually developing abilities without taking great risks in the process are clear.

Just more hopeless notions of what JayJay thinks is important being projected onto animals that lived millions of years ago.

I'd like to see an experiment where naked JayJay is dropped into the wilderness and what he does to survive is monitored. It'd be funny to see how long it took before he either a)died of starvation dehydration or exposure or b)realised how utter pointless his defensive stick was over the real priorities.

I have watched lions get kicked hard by their prey, the kind of kick that would break bones. And still they continue the attack. A wallop by a stick might stop an attacking dog but on a predator on the hunt it would do shit all. That predator needs to kill and while it would prefer to not be hurt if it takes a couple of hits but gets to eat you its going to do that.

And on an ambush predator your stick is going to do nothing. Because that animal is going to jump you down before you can use your stick and if you are in a group it will drag you off before your mates can hurt it either.

Internal and external pressure is important for species evolution and is understood to be so by the field at the large. The only person who seems to have a problem is Jayjay because for some reason he wants external pressure to be more important. Somehow that will fight off those evil atheists (and all the theists) who study evolution and allow his god creator in or something. Its baffling.

I can certainly see the point of someone wondering if people projecting modern human abilities and interests back in time might bias their interpretations of our evolutionary history.

However, for someone's claim that that has happened to be believed, they'd have to show that it has happened, and the way to go about that would first seem to require presenting an unbiased assessment of what the current state of biological thinking actually is, in terms of what abilities and behaviours existed when, and their contemporaneous evolutionary significance.
I don't see any evidence that Jayjay has actually done that.
Indeed, his constant references to generations-old ideas would tend to suggest he might have difficulties doing it
For him to claim anything has 'messed up the human origin story' would seem to require he calmly explained what he thought the story is now in terms of how it is taught.

Secondly, it hasn't been demonstrated at all that to whatever extent ancestors may be looked at through human-tinted spectacles, such bias is meaningfully correlated in nature or extent with degree of religious belief.

Thirdly, there would seem to be reasonable grounds for someone to think that what Jayjay was doing was itself involving excessive projection. While he clearly has an aversion to 'smarts' with regard to any mechanisms he sees as 'competition' for his predator-based mechanism even if it isn't clear those competing mechanisms require much in the way of 'smarts', he seems happy to attribute modern human emotional states and the reasonably sophisticated underlying reasoning seemingly involved in some of them to distant ancestors without any obvious hesitation.

Why is it Jayjay seems to treat this need for weapon proficiency to be an urgent developmental task? Did leopards and their ilk just rock up in Australopithecus land one day and start attacking them to the point of extinction within a few weeks if they didn't sort their shit out quickly? No they didn't. Evolution don't happen like that. Changes in species physical attributes takes ages to happen and likewise their behaviour often doesn't change that quickly either.
Australopithecus' teeth didn't change dramatically overnight and they didn't become pathetically defenceless prey overnight either.

There's always this ridiculous rush to the extremes in his arguments and assumptions. No big toes= can't climb trees. No big teeth=defenceless. Can't outrun a cheetah=definitely going to die if anything chases you. Can't fight off lions and hyenas=can't scavenge. No weapons=incapable of not being eaten or possibly using any number of the ways other prey animals avoid being the dish du jour.

If you can't see of the big, dangerous animals, your scavenging privilege is down the order of what's that common fucking phrase again? The "pecking order", that's it. Means you get to have your turn when you can get in to the food without becoming a side order. If you can't force others off the kill, then you wait or go hungry or go eat something else, since your diet isn't just restricted to meat and scavenging isnt the entirety of your food supply.

It always has to be that if Australopithecus wasn't the master of something, they just can't do it at all with Jayjay. Or at least not well enough to survive. It's total bollocks.

Hmmm! Chimps fashion weapons for hunting: Long thin sticks for hunting termites, sticks with a sharp angle/hook at the end for hunting grubs, and sharp pointy sticks for hunting monkeys. They fashion a new weapon every time, on the spot, but when defending themselves or the group, if they use a weapon, they just pick up whatever is handy on the ground and wave it around.

If, as JayJay likes to do, you try to draw parallels between Chimps and similarly brain sized A. afarensis and impute making, keeping, and training with defensive weapons it's just not there. If any conclusions could be inferred of A. afarensis compared to Chimp behavior it would be on the hunting ape side not the warrior ape side.

Yep. I like to think of modern chimps as being at the same level of evolution our ancestors were when they began to:

fashion weapons for hunting: Long thin sticks for hunting termites, sticks with a sharp angle/hook at the end for hunting grubs, and sharp pointy sticks for hunting monkeys. They fashion a new weapon every time, on the spot, but when defending themselves or the group, if they use a weapon, they just pick up whatever is handy on the ground and wave it around.

It's going to take a few million years before they make assegais.

monkeyboy wrote: Why is it Jayjay seems to treat this need for weapon proficiency to be an urgent developmental task? Did leopards and their ilk just rock up in Australopithecus land one day and start attacking them to the point of extinction within a few weeks if they didn't sort their shit out quickly? No they didn't. Evolution don't happen like that. Changes in species physical attributes takes ages to happen and likewise their behaviour often doesn't change that quickly either.

My argument isn’t that humanity evolved much more quickly than suits an atheist ideology origin narrative (e.g. contra Agrippina) , it’s that humanity evolved much more in response to logical imperatives created by the external world than suits an atheist ideology origin narrative.

I do actually think that evolution enthusiasts see evolution in much more plastic (or gradualist) terms than justified but that’s not the point I’ve been arguing.

monkeyboy wrote: Australopithecus' teeth didn't change dramatically overnight and they didn't become pathetically defenceless prey overnight either.

On your “overnight”, see above. On defencelessness, we can’t have been descended from ancestors that have ever been pathetically defenceless, primates are generally not defenceless on the contrary they are distinctively dangerous to attack. However prey do sometimes find themselves in hopeless situations and it might well have been during those contexts, when the tipping point was reached between biting, and using a stick to keep a predator away. A similar tipping point might have been reached many times amongst giraffe ancestors between butting and kicking, "soon" reflected in the difference between Sivatherium and Giraffa jumae; two distinct body plans and skill sets that made sense in different ways.

monkeyboy wrote: There's always this ridiculous rush to the extremes in his arguments and assumptions.

I Deny that.

monkeyboy wrote: No big toes= can't climb trees.

I never said that, very likely Australopithecus did climb trees under particular levels of threat from non-climbing predators and were better at it than we are. I pointed to the PQ17 style risks to the troop and the time costs in being treed.

monkeyboy wrote: No big teeth=defenceless.

No big teeth,+ no horns+ no talons=defenceless while unarmed.

monkeyboy wrote: Can't outrun a cheetah=definitely going to die if anything chases you.

Yes definitely, also couldn’t avoid being run down by leopard, hunting dogs, hyena or doubtless, sabretooth. That’s what they tell you; don’t run away

monkeyboy wrote: Can't fight off lions and hyenas=can't scavenge.

Can’t habitually scavenge. Make up your mind: did Australopithecus shin up a tree when they came across predators or did they drive primary predators off their kills?

monkeyboy wrote: No weapons=incapable of not being eaten or possibly using any number of the ways other prey animals avoid being the dish du jour.

Primates are generally distinctively bad at a number of ways other prey animals avoid being the dish du jour. Their metabolic rate is about half that expected for a mammal that size. Living in groups, giving warning calls and living in trees where the branches shake as they move around, most primates are highly conspicuous. Foraging by day, most primates are easy to see. When they retreat to refuges, those are well known and repeatedly visited by their predators. Two distinctive plusses: (1) except for hominins, primates are more adept in trees than other mammals their size (2) except for hominins, primates are fearsome biters thanks to the long sharp canines in their males and their hands being able to grip and hold on (e.g. to the back of a hyena) and to tear out a gash.

monkeyboy wrote: If you can't see of the big, dangerous animals, your scavenging privilege is down the order of what's that common fucking phrase again? The "pecking order", that's it. Means you get to have your turn when you can get in to the food without becoming a side order. If you can't force others off the kill, then you wait or go hungry or go eat something else, since your diet isn't just restricted to meat and scavenging isnt the entirety of your food supply.

It always has to be that if Australopithecus wasn't the master of something, they just can't do it at all with Jayjay. Or at least not well enough to survive. It's total bollocks.

It’s not “total bollocks” Monkeyboy, that’s your own extreme rush to extremes, typical of ratskep posters. Mine are obvious issues for any little boy watching the Royal Procession of the established human origin story. And the common fucking phrase you are looking for is “food chain”. Our Australopithecus ancestors were inside that, they weren’t on top or in some magical theoretical space estranged from intimate relations with peer species.

Agrippina wrote:Yep. I like to think of modern chimps as being at the same level of evolution our ancestors were when they began to:

fashion weapons for hunting: Long thin sticks for hunting termites, sticks with a sharp angle/hook at the end for hunting grubs, and sharp pointy sticks for hunting monkeys. They fashion a new weapon every time, on the spot, but when defending themselves or the group, if they use a weapon, they just pick up whatever is handy on the ground and wave it around.

It's going to take a few million years before they make assegais.

I suspect even longer - the iron ore deposits will have been exhausted a long while before they reach that level...

Alan B wrote:

Agrippina wrote:Yep. I like to think of modern chimps as being at the same level of evolution our ancestors were when they began to:

fashion weapons for hunting: Long thin sticks for hunting termites, sticks with a sharp angle/hook at the end for hunting grubs, and sharp pointy sticks for hunting monkeys. They fashion a new weapon every time, on the spot, but when defending themselves or the group, if they use a weapon, they just pick up whatever is handy on the ground and wave it around.

It's going to take a few million years before they make assegais.

I suspect even longer - the iron ore deposits will have been exhausted a long while before they reach that level...

Probably. I do think though that they will develop tool-making before that happens, but as I said, a few million years. By that time humans will have ceased to exist. I dunno I'm having flights of fancy here.

I see JayJay is peddling the bare faced lie yet again, that the rest of us are purportedly ignoring the lessons of ecology. That's all he has to offer to prop up his fantasies - fabrications and lies.

Calilasseia wrote:I see JayJay is peddling the bare faced lie yet again, that the rest of us are purportedly ignoring the lessons of ecology. That's all he has to offer to prop up his fantasies - fabrications and lies.

Sounds like the Brexit camp.

Don't remind me, I'm going to have to live with the fallout from that despite not falling for their lies ...

But of course, whilst dwelling on the matter of what we are taught by ecology, one of the central lessons that ecology teaches us, is that a whole complex suite of behaviours on the part of organisms, has an effect upon the destiny of the populations containing those organisms. At the very least, which individuals choose which other individuals to mate with, on its own influences the population genetic destiny, and does so by definition, as I've schooled him repeatedly on. If other behaviours influence that mate selection process, then they too, albeit indirectly, influence the population genetic destiny. Behaviours that result in some individuals making bad choices, and being removed from the gene pool before they can mate, again by definition influence the population genetic destiny, by removing possible genetic input into future generations from those now-removed individuals. Elementary concepts such as this are capable of being mastered by reasonably astute 10 year olds, let alone adults applying their brain cells to the matter.

Indeed, since the business of mate selection is performed by the potential mating individuals themselves, this on its own destroys JayJay's whole "narrative of self-creation" bullshit he routinely and tiresomely erects, whenever those of us who paid attention in class recognise the applicability of said elementary concepts to the biosphere, and take note of their actual observable occurrence. But of course he'll pretend that this was never expounded here, in order to continue peddling his tiresome lies and bullshit.

Jayjay4547 wrote:
No big teeth,+ no horns+ no talons=defenceless while unarmed. .

Climbing a tree.
Keeping an eye out.
Clustering into a group and making loud noises.
Throwing rocks.

These are all defences against predation.

Funny how we have managed, and still do manage, to keep growing our numbers despite the numbers of predators out there, even though most of us don't have weapons. I lived for 8 years in an area where venturing out at night, just to sit out on the veranda exposed me to quite a few animals that would've killed me given the chance, and yet they didn't. I wonder why especially since I didn't keep a spear handy while sitting there with boomslangs, mambas, and puff adders just on the other side of the fence. Not to mention wild pigs, cane rats, troops of monkeys, mongoose, any number of animals that, if they'd ganged up on me, single human sitting outside enjoying the night air, and yet I didn't get attacked, not ever. Strange that.

Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:
No big teeth,+ no horns+ no talons=defenceless while unarmed. .

Climbing a tree.
Keeping an eye out.
Clustering into a group and making loud noises.
Throwing rocks.

These are all defences against predation.

You forgot farting. Biological weapons are the most efficient.

aban57 wrote:

Sendraks wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:
No big teeth,+ no horns+ no talons=defenceless while unarmed. .

Climbing a tree.
Keeping an eye out.
Clustering into a group and making loud noises.
Throwing rocks.

These are all defences against predation.

You forgot farting. Biological weapons are the most efficient.

The old touch of diarrhoea never goes amiss.