How atheist ideology messed up the human origin story

[Fenrir]

...but I wanted to point to the role of language-transmitted ideology as a separate channel to genetics, that is unique to human groups.

Imo is still laughing at you.

[Jayjay4547]

….That is the atheist ideology talking, egging on and normalising hatred and contempt for the other side.

Whine, whine.
ChatGPT, at least the way you use it, is nothing more than a glorified search engine.

It’s true that I used ChatGPT as glorified search engine, when I asked it for a list of hominin data that couldn’t be dismissed as reflecting creationist bias or incompetence. But if you look upwards on the same page as your post, you will see that I remarked on using it in two other ways:

(a) to identify (contra Cito) the logical similarity between Fenrir’s “Is there any event you couldn't interpret as supporting your bullshit?” And my response “Have you stopped beating your wife?”. So there I used it as a grammatical logician.

(b) To ask it to set out the established explanation for the sudden acceleration of brain growth in hominids: There I used it as the superego.

Calling ChatGPT a “glorified search engine” follows the dismissive line taken by Cito, Cali and Jesse, and shows up the surprisingly defensive, stuffy and reactionary position of debunkers here. The same when anything is introduced from Wikipedia or YouTube.

You're getting nowhere with your 'argument', and even if you did, you wouldn't have got any closer to proving a god.

I don’t come here to prove that god exists. I come here to argue that atheist ideology has messed up the human origin story. I realised that when I was myself an atheist. Someone else might appreciate that atheist ideology has messed up the human origin story, without ceasing to be an atheist.

Give some evidence of your god, JJ..

I feel obliged to answer that, although it's off topic. Large parts of Christianity have been opaque to me, but I find there is a space for me to move into. The ontological proof of God have never appealed. My understanding goes back to the circumstances of the early church in the Mediterranean cultures, under the Roman empire. A new conception took root there, that was “unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness." (1 Corinthians 1:23). It unexpectedly saved the Mediterranean civilisations from fascist Rome. It came from a mysterious place deep in the psyche, that I feel that I share in with all the wonders of the Creation.

[Fenrir]

Whine

[The_Metatron]

….

Genesis is a blatant collection of absurd ex recto fabrications, infantile nonsense …Laughable garbage…foetid Bronze Age mythology …the cartoon magic man …this risible mythology, …too stupid…Genesis is childish nonsense. …sad little Bronze Age mythology …a turgid dirge, whose cartoon magic man…foetid anthology.., drivel…feculent collection of bad fairy tales.

That is the atheist ideology talking, egging on and normalising hatred and contempt for the other side.

The “other side” is theism. You know perfectly well where you’re posting your nonsense. You’re here for the sole reason there are atheists here to pester.

Your behavior here, driven by your theism, is hateful and contemptible. You lie when it suits you. The theism that drives your behavior is hateful and contemptible.

Don’t you dare show up here and act all surprised when the atheists utterly see through you and reject your nonsense.

[Jayjay4547]

I see the lies are coming out again.
First, as I've already explained, LLMs don't deal in concepts. They're basically glorified string pattern matchers. Remember me mentioning Isabelle by contrast, do you? LLMs don't actually know anything, they simply grind out the results of pattern matching.

Your first evidence of my lying is to dismiss that I used LLMS effectively to make serious points on this forum: to prepare a list that couldn’t be dismissed as the product of bias, to analyse two sentences, and to express the consensus story for hominin encephalisation. If I had hidden my use of an LLM that might have come close to lying. That’s the usual deceptive use of LLMs, which makes a problem for English teachers. But I did the opposite.

Technologists stumbled on their unnerving finding that pattern matching machines that have been fed a mass of examples of speech, can talk and reason like a person. That’s been the biggest technology surprise of the 21st century so far.

I once tried using an imaging LLM to draw a sequence where a population perched on the moving peaks on a fitness landscape instead of climbing upwards on a static landscape. The results were frustrating. I also expected and confirmed that a LLM could produce an explanation for hominin encephalisation that I think is wrong. That’s why I call it the superego, rather than a demigod.

Second, the scientific view of origins is supported by evidence and in abundance, unlike your sad little fantasy about Australopithecines becoming arms manufacturers and video game warriors.

I got 87 matches to the word “warriors” on the current topic. The first page of references consisted entirely of you saying “video game warriors”, or me quoting you saying that. Except for once when you used “video game fantasy”. So you hammer again and again at misrepresenting my argument in a demeaning way.

I put the case that the abrupt start of hominin encephalisation marked a transition from competition between hominin groups and their predators, to group selection between hominin groups in terms of language. I didn’t come here with quite that story, I credit Rationalskepticism.org with it, via this debate.

Third, the three factors you mentioned are indeed drivers of evolution in hominids, for which again, scientists have provided evidence, and the first two demonstrably affect the evolution of all living organisms. Just because a chatbot happens to have been fed with something resembling proper sources on the matter instead of the usual profit-seeking garbage, is irrelevant.

The problem is exactly that climate change and meat eating affected all or many living organisms, but only one organism has so far created ChatGPT. It’s easy to present an origin story that uses scientific evidence of the benefits to the brain in eating meat to an audience that isn’t looking for problems with your story. One such problem could be, to explain why the mainly plant eating early hominins had bigger brains than their obligatory meat-eating predators:

Felid and peaceful hominin brain size graphs.jpg (104.86 KiB) Viewed 726 times

Data for the above provided by ChatGPT.

Another more snarky question could be to ask how a strictly vegetarian Brahmin could have been so good at maths:

Ramanujan vegetarian Brahmin maths.jpg (10.8 KiB) Viewed 726 times

Those three explanations for encephalisation express an origin story where agency is either inanimate (climate) or ascribes agency to the individual rather than to external actors.

Fourth, I see you're resorting to your usual duplicitous quote mining of my posts, stripping out the numerous FACTS I present, and instead parrot with the usual creationist ellipses my well-deserved invective aimed at your lies and bullshit, in order to present a specious caricature of me. Your discoursive conduct resides in the sewer.

Here’s another example of your invective, which you describe as “mining” from the rest of the post I am responding to. it brings out your animus, as found in ideologues. You seem to enjoy doing that, but it carries a penalty which I would like you to pay.

“asinine assertions rampant mendacity…usual shitty game of "let's misrepresent the opponent"….you a demonstrable and wilful liar...lies and duplicitous quote mines, …disreputable …peddling…dicoursive mendacity ….discoursive immaturity. …scorn and derision… Back to the gutter”

Fifth, that invective describes you sad little Bronze Age mythology perfectly. It's bad fiction, whose asinine assertions have been utterly destroyed by modern scientific discoveries, and I notice you snipped out the explicit examples of destroyed assertions I presented above, while pursuing your your typically creationist exercise in rampant mendacity. That you have to stoop to this disreputable level of conduct to continue peddling YOUR blatant ideology speaks volumes. Presumably because you have no answer to the FACTS I presented on the matter.

It would be expecting too much of nomadic herdsmen thousands of years ago, to come up with the findings of modern genetics. The Bible provides a record of mankind’s developing understanding of his place in the world, that I claim, has recently gone backwards in terms of the human origin story, due to the workings of atheist ideology. The invective you pour on the Bible robs you of part of the cultural inheritance that Englishmen in the past took seriously.

Sixth, I also note how you avoided even acknowledging the existence of other FACTS I presented, such as that citation covering genes for Archosaurian teeth in birds, my past discussion of serum antibody reaction tests (with relevant links), or Linnaeus' view on the close relationship between humans and chimpanzees. No, instead, you played your usual shitty game of "let's misrepresent the opponent".

Just take a look at the above condensation of your invective, to get a measure of “misrepresent the opponent”. Apart from that, you are just repeating your point five.

Seventh, your "atheist ideology" bullshit is just that. NOT treating the unsupported assertions of a Bronze Age mythology uncritically as fact, is the very ANTITHESIS of an "ideology", and you've been schooled on this so often here, thatvyour continued parroting of this bullshit makes you a demonstrable and wilful liar.

Eighth, if you're not man enough to address what I actually post, without resorting to lies and duplicitous quote mines, then it's long overdue for you to seek a venue suited to both your discoursive mendacity and your discoursive immaturity. You wouldn't have lasted five nanoseconds at my school, and my teachers would almost certainly have treated you with even more well-deserved scorn and derision than I do.

Indeed, your inadequacies in several departments render you unfit to address my tropical fish, let alone educated human beings.
Back to the gutter with you.

I wouldn’t have much time for teachers who treated a pupil with scorn and derision. Anyway your last two points are just preening and invective. Good, that leaves me time to shave before going to church.

[Cito di Pense]

Whine.

[Calilasseia]

Oh look, it's more sewage to clean up.

I see the lies are coming out again.
First, as I've already explained, LLMs don't deal in concepts. They're basically glorified string pattern matchers. Remember me mentioning Isabelle by contrast, do you? LLMs don't actually know anything, they simply grind out the results of pattern matching.

Your first evidence of my lying is to dismiss that I used LLMS effectively to make serious points on this forum:

No you didn't, you used them lazily as a substitute for original thought and writing, which has become another of your manifest inadequacies.

to prepare a list that couldn’t be dismissed as the product of bias, to analyse two sentences, and to express the consensus story for hominin encephalisation.

And then snidely sneered at the output using your tiresome "atheist ideology" lies.

If I had hidden my use of an LLM that might have come close to lying. That’s the usual deceptive use of LLMs, which makes a problem for English teachers. But I did the opposite.

No, you did what you always do here - pressed outside material into duplicitous apologetic service.

Technologists stumbled on their unnerving finding that pattern matching machines that have been fed a mass of examples of speech, can talk and reason like a person.

Ahem, computer scientists have known that this is possible since the 1960s. Eliza was an early example. All that's happened is that the software now has access to terabytes of data instead of kilobytes.

You really don't understand any of this, do you?

Plus, rules of inference have improved, as my mentioning the Isabelle proof assistant establishes, though whether LLMs have taken even a small leaf out of Isabelle's book remains to be seen. But even so, none of these systems have a genuine awareness of concepts of the sort educated human beings do.

Isabelle is successful because pure mathematics relies upon well-defined axioms and rules of inference, which as Turing demonstrated in his celebrated work, can be treated as yet more strings to parse and manipulate. But trained mathematicians are still required to ensure that proofs are genuinely rigorous. We still require trained mathematicians to check the concepts, which for an area of activity such as category tneory, demands especial care and attention.

But all of this is lost upon you, because you're not interested in rogour, you're interested in apologetics, and propping up your manifest ideology regarless of what the DATA has to say on the matter.

I once tried using an imaging LLM to draw a sequence where a population perched on the moving peaks on a fitness landscape instead of climbing upwards on a static landscape. The results were frustrating.

That's because you're using completely the wrong tools. But you're too busy scratching your ideological itch to wake up to this. Plus, biologists were working on this matter with far more limited assistance from technology, before your sperm met your egg. Ever thought of learning from their work?

I also expected and confirmed that a LLM could produce an explanation for hominin encephalisation that I think is wrong.

So now you're dismissing the output of your cherished LLMs, when said output doesn't genuflect before your ideological presuppositions? Quelle surprise. Hypocrisy, much?

That’s why I call it the superego, rather than a demigod.

No one cares. Those of us who paid attention in class, call it what it is, a tool. Which as you have amply demonstrated, can be easily misused.

Second, the scientific view of origins is supported by evidence and in abundance, unlike your sad little fantasy about Australopithecines becoming arms manufacturers and video game warriors.

I got 87 matches to the word “warriors” on the current topic. The first page of references consisted entirely of you saying “video game warriors”, or me quoting you saying that. Except for once when you used “video game fantasy”. So you hammer again and again at misrepresenting my argument in a demeaning way.

Liar. That's exactly what your tiresome fantasy consists of. Stop whining. Plus, I've never had to quote mine your posts to make the point, instead, I address your dribblings in detail, without duplicitous snipping of relevant context.

Once again, hypocrisy, much?

I put the case that the abrupt start of hominin encephalisation marked a transition from competition between hominin groups and their predators, to group selection between hominin groups in terms of language. I didn’t come here with quite that story, I credit Rationalskepticism.org with it, via this debate.

Apparently it never occurred to you that more than one process can be in operation simultaneously. But that's creationist point level thinking for you.

Third, the three factors you mentioned are indeed drivers of evolution in hominids, for which again, scientists have provided evidence, and the first two demonstrably affect the evolution of all living organisms. Just because a chatbot happens to have been fed with something resembling proper sources on the matter instead of the usual profit-seeking garbage, is irrelevant.

The problem is exactly that climate change and meat eating affected all or many living organisms, but only one organism has so far created ChatGPT.

Irrelevant with respect to prehistoric hominins.

It’s easy to present an origin story that uses scientific evidence of the benefits to the brain in eating meat to an audience that isn’t looking for problems with your story.

You mean an audience that understands how science operstes properly, insyead of treating it dishonestly as a branch ofvapologetics as you do?

One such problem could be, to explain why the mainly plant eating early hominins had bigger brains than their obligatory meat-eating predators

Heard of the ASPM gene have you? Which his a determinant of brain size in primates, and which has undergone accelerated evolution in the hominid lineage?

Another more snarky question could be to ask how a strictly vegetarian Brahmin could have been so good at maths:

Try because he benefited from recent evolution of ASPM.

Those three explanations for encephalisation express an origin story where agency is either inanimate (climate) or ascribes agency to the individual rather than to external actors.

Oh we're back to this bullshit again. What part of the word ECOLOGY do you keep dishonestly pretending you haven't been schooled upon repeatedly here?

Your made up shit on this matter has been pounded all the way to its constituent quarks repeatedly.

Fourth, I see you're resorting to your usual duplicitous quote mining of my posts, stripping out the numerous FACTS I present, and instead parrot with the usual creationist ellipses my well-deserved invective aimed at your lies and bullshit, in order to present a specious caricature of me. Your discoursive conduct resides in the sewer.

Here’s another example of your invective, which you describe as “mining” from the rest of the post I am responding to.

Snipping out substantive factual content I provided, while highlighting my well-deserved invective for a mendacious exercise in tone policing and blatant misrepresentation of my output, IS quote mining BY DEFINITION.

Try dwelling in something other than the discoursive gutter.

it brings out your animus, as found in ideologues.

Liar. Oh wait, how many detailed expositions of peer reviewed scientific papers jave I brought here, and in addition reported the contents thereof honestly, instead of force-fitting them to a blatant ideology as YOU have done? Both your naked projection and your chutzpah are nauseating to behold.

You seem to enjoy doing that, but it carries a penalty which I would like you to pay.

You're in no position to issue demands of this sort, given your own manifestly disreputable discoursive conduct.

And once again, it's duplicitous quote mine time, right on cue ...

<Egregiously dishonest quote mine snipped>

Once again, learn the basic lesson that unsupported assertions are a free-fire zone for whatever critique may be chosen to point out the vacuity and non-utility thereof. If you don't like having ridiculous nonsense fed into the shredder, then stop serving up ridiculous nonsense.

Fifth, that invective describes you sad little Bronze Age mythology perfectly. It's bad fiction, whose asinine assertions have been utterly destroyed by modern scientific discoveries, and I notice you snipped out the explicit examples of destroyed assertions I presented above, while pursuing your your typically creationist exercise in rampant mendacity. That you have to stoop to this disreputable level of conduct to continue peddling YOUR blatant ideology speaks volumes. Presumably because you have no answer to the FACTS I presented on the matter.

It would be expecting too much of nomadic herdsmen thousands of years ago, to come up with the findings of modern genetics.

Except that there's an elementary concept applicable here, that obviously flew over your head at low Earth orbit altitude. Namely, that a key assertion presented by the authors of said mythology, is that they were being handed information directly from a fantastically gifted magic entity. Yet that "information" manifestly didn't come from a fantastically gifted magic entity, which would not only have known about the proper operation of genetics, but which would also have known how to impart at least some of that knowledge successfully to the relevant target audience. Instead, it's blatant fabrication on the part of people with zero substantive knowledge.

That this elementary concept flew past you is again indicative of your discoursive inadequacies. And I didn't need to resort to an AI chatbot to inform you of that concept. There's a lesson here for you, but you'll doubtless refuse to learn it.

The Bible provides a record of mankind’s developing understanding of his place in the world

It provides a record of the ridiculous assertions humans can concoct when they lack proper substantive knowledge. Assertions that have in many cases been utterly destroyed by modern scientific discoveries. Indeed, I provided explicit examples of such assertions on my post, along with the DATA informing us that said assertions are nonsense, which you snipped while quote mining my post for cheap points scoring, and never once attempted even to acknowledge the existence of, let alone address in a substantive manner.

that I claim, has recently gone backwards in terms of the human origin story, due to the workings of atheist ideology.

And we're back to this pathetic lie once more.

Item one: NOT treating unsupported mythological assertions uncritically as fact, is the very [/b]ANTITHESIS[/b] of an "ideology".

Item two: basing postulates upon DATA is aso the very ANTITHESIS of an "ideology".

Stop lying.

The invective you pour on the Bible

Is well deserved, because the mythology in question contains risible nonsense, and has exerted a pernicious effect upon human history.

robs you of part of the cultural inheritance that Englishmen in the past took seriously.

And in the present treat increasingly as the irrelevance that it is. The only reason many people in the past genuflected before your sad little Bronze Age mythology, is because of the threat of being barbecued by murderous mythology fanboys. Once that threat was removed from developed societies, educated people, and scientists in particular, jettisoned this mythology and its unsupported assertions in ever increasing numbers, a piece of historical DATA you keep pretending doesn't exist for obvious and duplicitous reasons.

Sixth, I also note how you avoided even acknowledging the existence of other FACTS I presented, such as that citation covering genes for Archosaurian teeth in birds, my past discussion of serum antibody reaction tests (with relevant links), or Linnaeus' view on the close relationship between humans and chimpanzees. No, instead, you played your usual shitty game of "let's misrepresent the opponent".

Just take a look at the above condensation of your invective, to get a measure of “misrepresent the opponent”.

So, not even the faintest attempt to acknowledge the existence of the FACYS I presented, just more duplicitous tone policing as a backdoor ad hominem.

Is that gutter comfortable?

Apart from that, you are just repeating your point five.

Did you learn to READ at all? What parts pf the words "as a direct corollary of the above" failed to register while you were quote mining my post in a duplicitous act of irrelevant tone policing, in order to try (and fail) to distract from your manifest inability to address substance with more substance?

Seventh, your "atheist ideology" bullshit is just that. NOT treating the unsupported assertions of a Bronze Age mythology uncritically as fact, is the very ANTITHESIS of an "ideology", and you've been schooled on this so often here, thatvyour continued parroting of this bullshit makes you a demonstrable and wilful liar.

Eighth, if you're not man enough to address what I actually post, without resorting to lies and duplicitous quote mines, then it's long overdue for you to seek a venue suited to both your discoursive mendacity and your discoursive immaturity. You wouldn't have lasted five nanoseconds at my school, and my teachers would almost certainly have treated you with even more well-deserved scorn and derision than I do.

Indeed, your inadequacies in several departments render you unfit to address my tropical fish, let alone educated human beings.
Back to the gutter with you.

I wouldn’t have much time for teachers who treated a pupil with scorn and derision.

When that scorn and derision is deserved, it needs to be delivered. Another elementary concept that's flown past you.

Anyway your last two points are just preening and invective.

Bullshit. I leave preening to the likes of you, and that invective brings your duplicitous discoursive conduct into sharp relief. Though you're obviously too disreputable to learn from this.

Good, that leaves me time to shave before going to church.

Which apparently never taught you basic honesty.

[The_Metatron]

I just tuned into PBS to watch an episode of Nature, Primates: Secrets of Survival, in which a troop of yellow baboons worked together to distract one of JJ’s leopards that was hunting one of the yellow baboons it had already wounded. The wounded baboon climbed a tree, the leopard followed. The rest of the troop showed up and climbed that tree to distract that leopard.

No big claws, no big canines, no spears, no aerial fortresses. That troop of baboons used their social skills to work together to make that leopard change its mind about chasing after a baboon it had already bloodied.

Apparently, yellow baboons are one of the few species that will challenge a leopard. They didn’t mention what the others were. It was cooperation that saved that yellow baboon from the leopard that got a piece of it, JJ. It was a learned behavior, not weapons technology that saved the life of that yellow baboon.

So, tell us, JJ. If such cooperation works for yellow baboons, why would it not work for your little combat model siege warrior Australopithecines?

Have a look at this episode, if it’ll play for you: https://www.pbs.org/video/secrets-of-su ... es-vh6vss/

[Jayjay4547]

I just tuned into PBS to watch an episode of Nature, Primates: Secrets of Survival, in which a troop of yellow baboons worked together to distract one of JJ’s leopards that was hunting one of the yellow baboons it had already wounded. The wounded baboon climbed a tree, the leopard followed. The rest of the troop showed up and climbed that tree to distract that leopard.

No big claws, no big canines, no spears, no aerial fortresses. That troop of baboons used their social skills to work together to make that leopard change its mind about chasing after a baboon it had already bloodied.

Apparently, yellow baboons are one of the few species that will challenge a leopard. They didn’t mention what the others were. It was cooperation that saved that yellow baboon from the leopard that got a piece of it, JJ. It was a learned behavior, not weapons technology that saved the life of that yellow baboon.

So, tell us, JJ. If such cooperation works for yellow baboons, why would it not work for your little combat model siege warrior Australopithecines?

Have a look at this episode, if it’ll play for you: https://www.pbs.org/video/secrets-of-su ... es-vh6vss/

Thanks for that link, it didn’t pay for me but it seems similar to an incident described by Sir Percy Fitzpatrick in "Jock of the Bushveld", where a group of baboons also saved a comrade by distracting a leopard:

Jock Baboon E Caldwell Sml.jpg (82.91 KiB) Viewed 576 times

What changed the leopard’s mind was surely its calculation of the risk it faced, like in the video I put of an “all out brawl between a leopard and 30 baboons”, and of a single bushbuck ram facing down a leopard. In both those cases, the prey species was adapted to offer a realistic threat, in the form of the baboons long canines in a long jaw, and the bushbuck ram’s deadly horns. While the australopiths conspicuously lacked an equivalent natural means of avoiding predation.

Chimp Bushbuck Australopith.jpg (26.24 KiB) Viewed 576 times

You are wrong to say that baboons have no long canines.

It’s painful to think of what could happen to australopiths climbing a tree to distract a leopard, unless they brought up spears with them. One advantage of a spear when confronting a leopard in a tree is that a spear is long.

I agree that cooperation works for baboons, indeed it must be essential. And similarly for the hobbit-sized australopiths. In the pic below showing the two regimes in hominin evolution, (which I have used a few times), for the first regime, see that I listed “competition: hominin group vs predator.”

Two Regimes.jpg (54.61 KiB) Viewed 576 times

According to ChatGPT, in "The Selfish Gene," Richard Dawkins deprecated the idea of group selection as a significant evolutionary force. He argued that natural selection operates primarily at the level of the gene, rather than at the level of the group or the species. That view has been influential. The opposite view, applied to the human origin story, is that human encephalisation was driven by group selection where fitness of the individual was determined by the fitness of the group in competition with neighboring hominin groups. The fate of the losing Amalekites and Amorites in the Old Testament shows how that worked. In an arms race between groups, The fitness of the group depended on the use of language to optimise unified and appropriate group action. According to that interpretation, the individual was merely the witness or the tool in the evolution of the group. The individual brain was colonized by language.

Like baboons and bushbuck, the australopiths were just doing what they needed to do to survive, they were behaving in obligatory fashion, although in a null hypothesis, they used spears as a work-around for not having long canines or deadly horns. You could call them peaceful. But in the regime of language development, they had a choice between making peace or making war.

A human origin story based on group selection can be mapped onto the origin story in the Jewish book of Genesis, where the Taung Child corresponds to Adam or Eve and speech corresponds to the Tree of knowledge of Good and Evil. Admittedly but also centrally, the story involves them talking before they could talk. Stories need speech and are central to understanding.

So, paleontology can illuminate Genesis.

[Fenrir]

Could you at least read some of the multi-level selection work before you start free-association bullshitting about it?

And how is any of this remotely related to your atheist ideolology slur?

And yes apparently a bastardised and motivated cartoon version of paleontology can illuminate a highly edited and even stupider version of Genesis than the original if only ChatGPT is applied liberally. Wow, what a genius tool, what did we ever do without it.

[The_Metatron]

No, JJ. You do not have the freedom to casually claim Australopithecines “used spears as a workaround for not having long canines”. This is the whole point of what we are telling you.

You have no evidence for that claim. None. Not one shred. You’ve done nothing but try to infer a behavior based on what you imagine.

We're back to this: produce evidence for your claim.

[Jayjay4547]

No, JJ. You do not have the freedom to casually claim Australopithecines “used spears as a workaround for not having long canines”. This is the whole point of what we are telling you.
You have no evidence for that claim. None. Not one shred. You’ve done nothing but try to infer a behavior based on what you imagine.
We're back to this: produce evidence for your claim.

If australopiths used spears and paleontologists suspect that they did, then they will find direct evidence some time. Paleontology is a top science like geology. I mean, in the sense of not being crippled by cross-talk from ideology, as the atheist ideologue Richard Dawkins messed up some of evolutionary biology.

In the meantime, we are still stuck with indirect evidence, such as drove Dart to infer that the genus he named were weapon users. I’ve been over that indirect evidence so many times here. Lately I boiled the issue down to two killer questions to confront when reconstructing hominin ecology. One of those questions was:

With their short canines and toes, would Australopiths have been at a disadvantage compared with baboons, in their ability to escape from a leopard in a tree?

Implicit in that question is “without weapons”, specifically spears.

An objective intelligent agent with access to a vast body of information answered that question with a Yes. But debunkers have demurred.

Then you presented a more extreme scenario than trying to escape from a leopard, of hominins clambering up a tree to distract a leopard who was already in it. What level of threat could they have distracted the leopard with, considering their short canines and short toes? Leopards are known to farmers as surplus killers. Killing unarmed hominins in a tree, would be like going after a flock of sheep, just for the joy of killing.

A primate that competes with baboons needs to look like a baboon or have equivalent ability in regard to predator avoidance. Australopiths looked very different from a baboon, and that difference needs to be interpreted. Fenrir has stretched a finding that they were not adapted to throwing a spear, as Homo is, into his position that they couldn’t have used a thrusting spear- an effective weapon in some wars up till around 1850. But of all the mammalian body plans, the hominin one is the best and indeed the only one that can be interpreted as an adaptation into hand weapon use.

The hobbit size of Australopiths makes it a stretch for a human who visualises big warriors, to imagine hominins being able to distract a leopard in a tree, or escape for a leopard, or dissuade one from attacking on the ground. Unless that is, you factor in group behavior and the effectiveness of a thrusting spear in boundary defense. A group boundary supports structure in a group, for example, a structure in which infants are relatively well protected from predation. So, while as you said, group action is central to baboon survival, the hominin group was more numinous, it became an evolving entity itself through language.

[Jayjay4547]

Could you at least read some of the multi-level selection work before you start free-association bullshitting about it?

And how is any of this remotely related to your atheist ideolology slur?

And yes apparently a bastardised and motivated cartoon version of paleontology can illuminate a highly edited and even stupider version of Genesis than the original if only ChatGPT is applied liberally. Wow, what a genius tool, what did we ever do without it.

I at least looked up multi-level selection in Wikipedia where it falls under “group selection” but what I’m talking about seems to be better dealt with under “Dual Inheritance Theory” (DIT). But that doesn’t seem to credit group selection as the master driver, for example, driving biological adaptations of the human larynx as a late stage in the creation of language. What should more concern us is the group phenomenon of ideology, which emerges uniquely from the human biological capacity for speech.

Ideology should concern us because for one thing, that is plainly what is driving significant current events like the Israeli war, that could easily swirl out of control into a nuclear one. That would put the cat amongst the pigeons. Or the leopard amongst the hapless hominins in Jesse’s tree.

What all this has to do with atheist ideology is that atheist ideology has promoted a human origin story that is driven from the bottom up in a hierarchy of systems of relationships amongst living things. Atheist ideology did that as antithesis to the theist origin story driven from the top.

A promising approach to freeing scientific enquiry from the influence of ideology is to start from the premise that everything memorable that Richard Dawkins wrote in The Selfish Gene, is the opposite of the truth.

The good news is that ecologists could end up making more money, seeing that you deal with high level relationships between living things.

A human origin story that foregrounds relationships between our ancestors and the world they struggled in, based on palaeontology, can give us insights into the Bible, and Genesis in particular. Trying to map the other way doesn’t work in detail, because through language, humanity has accumulated more detailed information about the world, than was available to the ancient Jews. The weakness of attempts to do that created a tool for atheists to determine the modern mindset, especially in universities.

If you ask, in the light of paleontology, who is this guy Adam referred to in this old book, a plausible answer is, early hominins before encephalization. And the Tree of knowledge of Good and Evil is the human dilemma, now also confronting us in the form of LLMs. You make a big mistake in sneering about ChatGPT.

[Fenrir]

Seek professional help

[Fenrir]

It’s not about conscious or wilful actions by atheists. It about the market for ideas about human evolution being about them evolving on an empty stage without having been shaped by cognitive interactions with other species. And that market having been made by and for atheists, to build an atheist origin narrative of self creation that is almost uncoupled from the theory of evolution.

What all this has to do with atheist ideology is that atheist ideology has promoted a human origin story that is driven from the bottom up in a hierarchy of systems of relationships amongst living things. Atheist ideology did that as antithesis to the theist origin story driven from the top.

So which one is it?

Make your mind up.

[The_Metatron]

What level of threat did that gang of yellow baboons use to save their friend, JJ? Zero.

Nothing. No sticks, rocks, teeth. They just mobbed the leopard, who wisely left the area. A leopard is apparently smarter than you, realizing a mob of ten or twenty baboons is itself quite sufficient to make it leave. As are the baboons, realizing they are able to chase off a leopard if they just show up together.

You wouldn’t last five fucking minutes in that environment. Your priors would get you killed and eaten in no time.

[Calilasseia]

I've just alighted, completely by accident, upon this video clip (yes, I sometimes watch model railway videos):



The presenter conducted a simple experiment to discover what sort of output ChatGPT would generate, in terms of a script for one of his videos.

At the end, he points out the numerous elementary flaws lurking in tne script, which included basic errors of information about the models being reviewed, in some cases outright fabrications bearing no relation to the reality of the presenter's setup or standard presentation format, and several other moments of hilarity.

Now if ChatGPT litters its output with readily discernible errors on a topic such as railway modelling, which let's face it, doesn't possess the same importance in tne grand scheme as, say, cosmological physics, what howlers is it going to introduce into a serious topic?

Once again, we're dealing with a glorified string pattern matching algorithm with roots in Eliza, which has no actual understanding of the text it's processing. It has no mechanism for storing concepts, let alone how different concepts are related to each other, it has no proper understanding of dialect or regional speech idioms, and relies entirely for its input on what is effectively raw text, without any thought given to prior consistency checking of said text - it simply blindly accepts that input as part of its "training material", and indeed, experiments have demonstrated that the malicious can warp its "learning". There is even a a scientific paper covering this topic.

Is it therefore any surprise, that AI chatbots are most likely to be pressed into service by the indolent and duplicitous?

[Calilasseia]

Meanwhile,I decided to perform a little investigation, to see if I could throw my own test at ChatGPT, in order to highlight its manifest failings, but discovered that it wants access to my E-mail address. There is absolutely no way I am going to let a potentially malicious piece of software access my regular E-mail accounts, and anyone possessing even basic awareness of personal cyber-security should be taking the same position. You don't have to be a regular reader of Tne Register or a regular visitor to the Bleeping Computer website, to be aware that there is much potential for mischief and mayhem here, but if anyone wants to be given a chilling insight into the mendacious ingenuity of cyber criminals, both of those sources will readily provide some eye watering examples (along with a couple of hilarious failures on the part thereof).

Indeed, given the recent Crowdstrike débacle, in which a corporation specifically paid to provide cyber security protections for large IT infrastructures, managed to crash 8 million servers worldwide with a buggy update to their software, anyone with an awareness of the issues should be very wary of trusting an AI chatbot provider with any personal information.

[Jayjay4547]

.

Seek professional help

Some of the stuff I read here does threaten to drive me off the rails.

It’s not about conscious or wilful actions by atheists. It about the market for ideas about human evolution being about them evolving on an empty stage without having been shaped by cognitive interactions with other species. And that market having been made by and for atheists, to build an atheist origin narrative of self creation that is almost uncoupled from the theory of evolution.

What all this has to do with atheist ideology is that atheist ideology has promoted a human origin story that is driven from the bottom up in a hierarchy of systems of relationships amongst living things. Atheist ideology did that as antithesis to the theist origin story driven from the top.

So which one is it?
Make your mind up.

The earlier quote claims a bias towards neglecting interactions between peer species, the second claims a bias towards bottom-up explanations.

Interactions between peer species form a top-down explanation. Those peer species are autonomous actors who themselves are also connected in associations with other members of the community or food web. So for example, leopard relations with hominins were related to leopard relations with baboons. That system extends upwards unbounded to Gaia, in modern conception.

I admit that this explanation doesn’t completely resolve your issue. I have also claimed that the human origin story built by atheist ideology is acausal and that it makes humankind out to be an uncaused cause. I haven’t been able to put all those partial explanations into a whole and in fact I’m not good at that kind of exercise. The best I can do is say that atheist ideology is a house built over several centuries, with many parts, all designed to make a comfortable safe home for atheists.

[Fenrir]

So you have no idea what you are talking about.

I mean, we all got that long ago, but it's good to see your acknowledgement.