Posted: Jun 19, 2019 5:19 pm
Spearthrower wrote:Jayjay4547 wrote:What is really bothering me here, is my growing suspicion that you are playing me and I have been ludicrously falling for it. I just can’t square your behaviour over those pics, with that of someone who as you say, has spent his adult life studying human evolution and teaching it to undergraduates... In my experience, professional teachers are all over their material and eager to explain it; to take and own the role of mentor.
Great, now add into that equation a potential student who is ignorant, arrogant, and who has spent years using evasive argumentative strategies to continue a line of argumentation that is fundamentally hostile to not just the discipline but the entire methodology uniting all the sciences.
I'm leaving that quote above so it is remembered within the context of this slice of conversation.
Jayjay4547 wrote:It’s not so dramatic. My position is simply this: Origin stories, like all historical stories, reflect the position of the teller and further his ideological position.
An assertion.
This thread IS that assertion.
So you're just repeating your assertion.
Really, the hundred plus pages in this thread show to what degree that assertion is valid. And the outcome is quite clearly that really all you've got is the assertion, which is why you're still making that assertion rather than having established it.
Every time you find your latest argument (babushka) has failed, or has been shown wrong, you return to asserting your premise again.
Laying aside anything contained herein, just in terms of discourse and persuasive writing, you've clearly got nothing to back it up.
Jayjay4547 wrote:Atheist ideology is the main biasing theme in the human origin narrative told by people like your good self.
As I said, this is just self-aggrandizing delusional bigotry on your part.
You can't actually draw a cogent line between the facts about hominids I've laid out and any atheistic position whatsoever. Rather, it's you who is trying to superimpose your god belief into the argument, but can't actually produce any coherent argument even for that.
In reality, there are plenty of religious palaeoanthropologists who still quite happily believe in their Yahwehs and Vishnus and ineffable messiahs while still coming to exactly the same conclusions as non-religious people about the factual details. In reality, science is perfectly open to everyone because it is necessarily intersubjective; the facts must be apparent and mutually recognized universally.
So your premise is just wrong on so many levels. But you're not actually interested in discussing the premise, you're not looking to test it out and see how well it stands up to reality. Rather, you're effectively proselytizing it, and you're doing so at the very people who you are targeting with it.
Thus, we have a litany of claims on your part which do not stand up to any degree of scrutiny but which you will never back down on (self-aggrandizing), we have utterly absurd notions you insist are valid like primates being selectively adapted towards 'defensive biting' against predators weighing 4 or 5 or more times as much as them (delusional), and all of these forms of arguments are part of a narrative you have constructed solely because of your hostility to people in this forum and your entire message is meant as one long put down, one long criticism, one long attack on them - that's the actual motivation (bigotry).
But you are very, very wrong and I fear you will probably depart this life remaining so very, very wrong because you simply are not amenable to anything, regardless of how evident or evidenced it is, of acknowledging your mistakes.
Jayjay4547 wrote:I don’t know how different a human origin narrative freed from that bias would look,...
Well, it wouldn't look any different because all the fossils remain, all the socioecology remains, all the observations and evidence remains, and you have no alternative that corresponds anywhere near as well to them as the supposed 'atheistic' one.
Jayjay4547 wrote:...but as far as I can see now, it would more invoke natural selection as opposed to sexual selection.
Then, as already established, you are myopic.
For a start, no religious narrative would employ natural selection as we can see both historically and contemporaneously by religious hostility towards natural selection. You yourself are guilty of it.
Secondly, your blind assertions and denial notwithstanding, sexual selection is part of natural selection and always has been. There is no 'opposed' there... it's the same thing. There are many, many factors in natural selection, it's not just predator-prey as you seem to think, in fact, for many species this isn't even a component at all. One example of this is modern humans today - predators have essentially zero selection on us now, but humanity is still undergoing evolution by natural selection and will continue to do so up until the moment that comprehensive gene-editing becomes both the norm and universally available.
When you don't grasp something as basic as this about natural selection, not only does it mean that your arguments are irrevocably flawed, but it also necessarily calls into question quite why you think you're in a position to expound on it.
As mentioned earlier: it's Dunning-Kruger, JJ. Your ability is nowhere near as high as your impression of your ability suggests. The very same skill set that includes knowledge of evolution is the same skill set you'd need to evaluate knowledge about evolution. Consequently, you are unable to evaluate your own knowledge, or to recognize superior knowledge in others. Basically, you're mentally blinkered. While it's not hard to imagine that being the case: we all suffer from it in many ways, what's near impossible for me to grasp is how you've maintained that self-belief over the years in the face of such a preponderance of evidence and merit countering your weak, poorly conceived and tragically misguided arguments. I have to say the only thing I can think of is towering hubris.
Do you think that's not you? Has anyone else in your life unrelated to all this said you're colossally arrogant?
If so, and if there's a spark inside somewhere that says 'i genuinely want to know stuff' then only you can free yourself from this position.
Jayjay4547 wrote: A narrative in terms of sexual selection focuses on internal elements within the group...
It doesn't as I already explained to you before. This is where you simply repeat errors as if they haven't been shown wrong.
Jayjay4547 wrote: instead of a struggle for existence in relation to other organic beings...
Other organic beings include other individuals of one's own species, particularly because their resource usage has a greater overlap with yours than an organic being of another species.
I told you this before. You can't counter it. You can only repeat the same poorly conceived idea almost like a mantra.
Jayjay4547 wrote: or to external conditions; the nexus where creativity is observed to express itself.
Nonsensical, just nonsensical.
Jayjay4547 wrote:There’s no part of my position that is hostile to the entire methodology uniting all the sciences, as you put it.
I disagree, but that's really rather irrelevant right at this moment compared to what you've just exhibited above.
Now put that back into the context you crafted earlier of someone in accredited, occupational expertise being lectured at by someone who clearly and comprehensively doesn't have a fucking clue what they're talking about.
That's you, JJ. It is you. I do understand if you don't see that as you, but in this topic, that's exactly who you are.
Jayjay4547 wrote:In the first place, I doubt that you are as authoritative as you pretend.
What's funny about this is that each and every time I've even mentioned any expertise it's always been to contradict your assertions about how I just don't get it, I just don't see it, that JJ's got special insight.
So it's actually you who's been appealing to authority.
I've never done so; quite the contrary, I've taken pains many times to explain my position on knowledge, that there are many things I could be wrong about, I've cited other people as being the source of my knowledge rather than pretending I alighted on it because of special me.
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