rationalskepticism.org

Alan B wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Because the creation is ruled by huge logic, even the most untrained eye can see that a fish is suited to swim in the sea.

So are whales. But then, they were once land animals...

I've tried to follow this 'skull' argument but what I don't get is, WTF has this Gawd ideology (and it is an 'ideology' and all that that implies) got to do with teef?

I can’t help you with a Gawd ideology, but what the contrast between australopithecus canines and ape canines has to do with atheist ideology can be explained from the historical path taken by the presentation of evolution.

When Darwin published The Descent of Man a decade after the blockbuster Origin of Species he devoted 2/3 of it to the novel concept of sexual selection. Whereas there had long been rumbling about natural selection in scientific society and it was Wallace’s similar ideas that had forced Darwin’s publishing hand, sexual selection was (so far as I know) Darwin’s own idea. And to a great extent, human origins have been presented in term of sexual selection, ever since. Thus on this thread, the long sharp canines of male chimps have been presented as mainly used in displays by alpha males to put the scare into the beta males. If that is the main mechanism used in explanation, then primate evolution is driven mainly by internal elements: you could draw a geographical line around a population of apes and these main causative elements will all be inside it.

By contrast, if you view primate canines in term of natural selection then they have to do with the interface of the population in its struggle for existence in relation to other organic beings. If you wander into a gorilla group you might first encounter the silverback and be effectively driven back. When the first Europeans encountered the Mauri they might have met the haka as a war dance, and been impressed. Those external relations are unbounded and hugely creative in terms of novel functionality that is seldom forgotten once acquired.

So I’m arguing that there has been a consistent trend amongst those presenting human origins, towards explaining human origins in term of internal factors, which has the effect of drawing attention away from external creativity that has the basic qualities associated with God. An agnostic might claim that society invented the concept of God to explain this unpredictable creative quality in the world.

Where the short blunt canines of Australopithecus males come in, is that, if you view them in terms of natural selection then you must immediately conclude that Australopithecus were deeply adapted into defensive kinetic weapon use. Because they faced the same predators as other primates and those canines would have been ineffective to put off predators. If the Australopithecus genus had occupied an island without predators, then one might expect their male canines to be like the females, but historically Australopithecus species and ones with similar body plans and similar teeth, spread widely out of Africa almost to the ends of the Earth.

If you look at human origins in that light it comes to look oddly MECHANICAL rather than inspirational. One aspect is that a head that doesn’t need to bite effectively, is freed from compromises that the human skull is clearly free from, and our heads support speech. There seems to be some evidence that human brains have been shrinking since around the time human speech appeared. Whether that line of argument is true or not, it sure is obvious.

And it’s curious that all the elements of that argument are vigorously opposed in this little laboratory of atheist thought.