Posted: Jun 26, 2016 2:29 pm
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.
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.