Posted: Jun 12, 2019 1:08 pm
Cito di Pense wrote:Jayjay4547 wrote:I’m not claiming something about “design”. I’m arguing from form-fits-function that the short blunt canines of our deep ancestors showed, about their relations with other species, that they were adapted away from biting in predator avoidance. I have been arguing FOR a natural selection perspective CONTRA sexual selection.
You can probably name a few species extant today that you could claim have "evolved away from" predator avoidance, but that didn't take up clubbing predators silly
Minor correction: I said, "adapted away from biting in predator avoidance”, not “away from predator avoidance”. Yes the use of biting for predator avoidance is itself unusual, though common amongst primates. Just try to grab a vervet monkey you caught in a trap. And the use of kinetic hand weapons might have been unique to our ancestors. But the evidence is right there in their canines and the hominin body plan. Many animals have other nearly unique adaptations, consider the elephant’s trunk. But our ancestor’s habit was numinous. For one thing it freed females from being held back from developing language, by a biting habit of their males.
Cito di Pense wrote:Maybe your problem is that there are too many examples of evolution that shout sexual selection at you, hence you know sexual selection is important in general.
Nope, that’s not my problem Cito.
Cito di Pense wrote: You are claiming something about design, namely that humans are a special case in evolution (your 'talking apes" schtick) and you must either be taking me for a fool or somebody who didn't read your exchanges in the last few pages of this thread.
There is something rather distinct about human beings: speech and a symbiotic relationship with objects. These are causing the sixth extinction, maybe the most significant situation since the Cambrian. Distinctiveness in our ancestors led to more and wider distinctiveness in us. But that’s not an argument about design.
Cito di Pense wrote: You only seem to care about the human story as far as defensive biting is concerned (or any other features, for that matter). You don't care about evolutionary principles in general, which you seem quite prepared to accept in every context except for human evolution.
I think “evolutionary principles” did apply in human evolution, just that atheist ideology biased its presentation so strongly as to make the story tellers to not understand what KIND of animals human ancestors were.
Cito di Pense wrote:This is because you're trying to reach a pre-determined conclusion, a teleology. You're arguing that one lineage of primates lost its sharp, enlarged canines because it didn't need them any more. You're practically a Lamarckian in reverse, implying that features disappear when they're not used any more. But no, JJ. You only care about teeth. That's the story you made up, and you are sticking to it. The way you cling to that story, which is really just a "hoomins is speshul" story is comically obsessive and only seems directed at your conviction that you've come up with a Big Idea. The previous few pages of this thread have made that abundantly clear.
Well teeth are pretty important guides to how an animal interfaces with its environment. And female primates give a good guide to the best tooth forms, for every purpose except predator avoidance- which they leave to the males in a rather Faustian pact. I have never yet come across a sentence with the word “teleology”, that seemed to be going anywhere.
Cito di Pense wrote:Jayjay4547 wrote:
I might have said I have no LIFE SCIENCES training. My SCIENTIFIC training is I guess fairly typical of posters, with a BSc (Eng) and an MSc.
You are typical of 'posters,' JJ, but 'posters' are not your competition. Your competition are people who are trained in the relevant disciplines. At least one of them has shown up in this thread and abundantly shown that your Big Idea is idiotic. "Posting" is the only context in which you can deceive yourself into thinking you're more educated than you really are. You are not showing any capacity to use any kind of scientific training, and that's because your scientific training doesn't apply to the topic you're trying to tackle. Engineering is all about design, JJ, and that is where you're coming from. Just for grins, JJ, what is M. Sc. in surveying good for? Learning to use laser ranging without blinding yourself? I honestly don't know, and am curious.
It was about generalised matrix inverses, specifically the form introduced to surveyors by the Swedish geodesist Arné Bjerhammar as the Stochastic Ring Inverse but known usually as the Moore-Penrose or “pseudo” inverse. It turns out to have useful properties in rigorous survey adjustments for example of so called “as built” surveys.
Cito di Pense wrote: You're here, anonymously, specifically to avoid requirements for credentials, and yet you're trying to flash your credentials, never having tried to demonstrate that anything lies behind them. Your credentials are entirely irrelevant unless you can show you learned something in the process of applying them. Spearthrower has not flashed his credentials; rather, he has shown that he has learned something in applying them.
I just put you right about your claim that I had admitted to having no scientific training.
What threat? Come on Cito, what “sub standard operating system” were you talking about? Just name it, what is your problem?
Cito di Pense wrote:Jayjay4547 wrote:As to me being drowned by the expertise of others, I can be impressed by explicable demonstration, not by unlabelled and un-discussed pics of teeth or a pic of a line of jeering youths.
Your conduct in general makes it abundantly clear that you do possess the capacity to recognize expertise when it smacks your feeble narrative silly. That's why you decline to engage with Spearthrower at this stage of the game. It was, if you recall, a discussion of dentition that has made that abundantly clear, and led to pointing out several cases in which you have lied.Jayjay4547 wrote:that would have shut me up on the line I was pursuing.
The point is not to shut you up, JJ. This is not a scientific society and you're not presenting the results of your research to an audience of peers; you're just serving as the creationist chew toy du jour. If you had a modicum of self-assessment, you'd shut up on your own recognizance. We've found that pointing out your lies, when backed by expertise even you can recognize, is an effective way to shut you up in exchanges with particular posters. By pointing this out to you, by showing that I myself recognize when and where you have lied, I hope to shut off the spigot of intellectual sewage that constitutes your replies to me.
Once a poster reaches the level of personal animus of calling another a liar, it really does end all prospects of rational discussion, and Spearthrower persisted in that with open eyes. And so are you now, please stop doing that.