How atheist ideology messed up the human origin story

[Jayjay4547]

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

Cali misses no opportunity to call me a liar.

His model railway link was puzzling. The presenter made out that he had only given ChatGPT one simple instruction to write a script, but it looked to me that he had a second interaction where his input was his acting it out. Or maybe not. To build his story of how faulty ChatGPT is, he was vague. Anyway, the final product looked a lot better to me than i could have made from the same brief.

Cali's fear about having to give ChatGPT his email address was odd. If he was put off by that, why not use another LLM like Copilot? Which is owned by Microsoft Corp. Giving them your email address would be the least of your perils.

The shocked social response to LLMs is endlessly interesting, not that we should feel the least bit safe about them. But on this forum, if you don't like something ChatGPT has said in response to a question from me, surely you should address the text? As the presenter in the railway video did, when he said that a particular locomotive described by the LLM as "weathered", was not actually weathered.

[Jayjay4547]

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.

I haven’t been able to look at your video, so I can’t understand what you mean by “just mobbed the leopard”. Was it something like these clips from the “all-out brawl” that I have put up here before?

Leopard baboon brawl sequence.png (1.71 MiB) Viewed 693 times

Why was the leopard wise to lease the area? According to you the baboons had no sticks or rocks. I can believe that. Did they really also have no teeth? They just showed up together? What the @#^% are you saying?

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

I was once in that environment and did put myself at risk because of my priors. I’m grateful to still be here years later.

But you are really saying something weird about my persistence here.

[The_Metatron]

They neither used or displayed their teeth. There was just suddenly a pile of them, and that cat figured out there was no fucking way he could take them all. So, it left.

Stall have no evidence for those weapons or elevated fortresses? Tough break when you’re trying to make a point to people who won’t simply take your word for it, isn’t it?

[Cito di Pense]

What the @#^% are you saying?

As made plain to you repeatedly, you have never shown that the only alternative to canines is spears, or else the species in question is wiped out by predators. You haven't even shown that with modern baboon troops the difference is canines and not sheer numbers. Here's another simple fact about obligate carnivores: They don't typically waste their energy trying to obtain a meal when it's obvious they're not going to get it without excessive cost to themselves, if other game is plentiful. Your wank-fantasy of strength against individual strength, is something you dredge up using your flimsy ideological priors, one man with a spear. Your nine years of persistence here is evidence of a compulsion to rationalize (and cling to) an obviously-flimsy faith, or else you'd be trying to sell it on its own merits, rather than as a panacea for an ontological malaise you feel and then project into others.

[Jayjay4547]

Stall have no evidence for those weapons or elevated fortresses? Tough break when you’re trying to make a point to people who won’t simply take your word for it, isn’t it?

I’ve come to expect that debunkers will disagree with me.

About your “elevated fortresses” I had just remarked that if hominins slept in trees like baboons do and where leopards prey on them, although baboons can hang from thin terminal branches using all four limbs, well then the hominins would have built nests like chimps and gorilla do, but better suited to supporting a group of them, using weapons.

Sure you can lampoon that notion by calling such a nest as a fortress, but the opposite picture of unarmed hominins sleeping individually in a tree where there are leopards capable of hunting baboons, makes me fear for them.

They neither used or displayed their teeth. There was just suddenly a pile of them, and that cat figured out there was no fucking way he could take them all. So, it left.

It would have to be a silly leopard not to know that the baboons did have teeth and knew how to use them. Here is a more objective account of a similar rescue by baboons, as recounted by Sir Percy FitzPatrick (1862 – 1931), a South African author, politician, mining financier and pioneer of the fruit industry, in his “Jock of the Bushveld” :

.-..The long spotted body was crouched on a flat rock just below the baboons; he was broadside to us, with his fore-quarters slightly raised and his face turned towards the baboons; with wide opened mouth he snarled savagely at the advancing line, and with right paw raised made threatening dabs in their direction His left paw pinned down the body of a baboon. The voices from the mountain boomed louder and nearer us as, scrambling down the face, came more and more baboons; there must have been hundreds of hem; the semicircle grew thicker and blacker, more and more threatening, foot by foot closer. The tiger [idiomatic Afrikaans for leopard] raised himself a little more and took swift looks from side to side across the advancing front, and then his nerve went, and with one spring he shot from the rock into the bush.
There was an instant forward rush of the half moon, and the rock was covered with roaring baboons, swarming over their rescued comrade; and a moment later the crowd scrambled up the slope again, taking the tiger's victim with them.

What is mainly missing from your account is the messaging between animals, and the practical reality that the messages were conveying. You don’t have the baboons (proxy for hominins in your story) communicating anything to the leopard. All they need do is show up in their numbers. If that worked in nature, then sardines make the mistake of not schooling in big enough numbers to scare the whale.

That lack of messaging in your account enacts the trope of humans evolving on an empty stage. That is the acausal aspect of the atheist origin story in which humans just naturally and gradually got bigger brains because that’s adaptive.

But the reality was more like the working of a creative machine. Early hominins satisfied the narrow criteria for using spears as a workaround solution to gaining access to savanna resources. Making better spears involved using tools and improving their use involved the group acquiring a structure. And so on.

Yesterday a friend brought around a created machine in form of an alarm clock that wasn’t working. She thought that the battery might be flat so borrowed a Phillips to open it up. It turned out there was no battery, this must have been one of the last generations of mechanical alarm clocks. Inside was an amazingly complex, beautiful and precisely made set of works. It made me sad to think of this last gasp of an industry going back centuries and the hopes of the last craftsmen and of their families. A big thing had died.

That mechanical clock also made me think this morning, about how one cannot understand the Watch on the Heath without appreciating the industry that made it and the intent in all those involved in that industry.

[Fenrir]

Yes, by all means chatter about the watch while ignoring the heath you found it on. Noone will think less of you.

[Calilasseia]

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

Cali misses no opportunity to call me a liar.

His model railway link was puzzling. The presenter made out that he had only given ChatGPT one simple instruction to write a script, but it looked to me that he had a second interaction where his input was his acting it out. Or maybe not. To build his story of how faulty ChatGPT is, he was vague. Anyway, the final product looked a lot better to me than i could have made from the same brief.

Cali's fear about having to give ChatGPT his email address was odd. If he was put off by that, why not use another LLM like Copilot? Which is owned by Microsoft Corp. Giving them your email address would be the least of your perils.

The shocked social response to LLMs is endlessly interesting, not that we should feel the least bit safe about them. But on this forum, if you don't like something ChatGPT has said in response to a question from me, surely you should address the text? As the presenter in the railway video did, when he said that a particular locomotive described by the LLM as "weathered", was not actually weathered.

You keep missing the fucking point, don't you?

Namely, that it's not fit for purpose as a genuine aid in anything resembling proper exposition of intricate topics, because it falls on its face in elementary circumstances too often. That's before we consider the security holes. Plus, try checking those actual sources on cyber security I mentioned, instead of pulling your usual schtick of pretending you know better on every topic than actual experts with decades of research labour behind them.

And once again, that post wasn't about you specifically, but you couldn't resist letting your Trump style narcissism have an outing, could you? You're not the only user of this bot on the planet, and there will be instances of the indolent and duplicitous among that user base with no connection to you whatsoever. But you've already established a track record of trying to turn threads into wank platforms for your ego, and no one here will be fooled by any synthetic indignation on your part at having the spotlight aimed squarely at your discoursive inadequacies.

But since you decided to turn my comment into another excuse for preening your ego, your infantile recourse to this chatbot because you're now too lazy to bother exercising your own neurons in the production of your apologetic faeces, is almost as farcical as your having wasted nine years on a wank fantasy and blatant lies.

You've discovered something shiny whose workings you know nothing of substance about, but which appeals to your toddler-level brand of magical thinking, and delude yourself with the pathetic fantasy that you can sweep away Nobel calibre science with made up apologetic shit, because said shit now has the AI stamp of approval.

Some of us have encountered laboratory rats that exhibit more cognitive sophistication than you.

[Jayjay4547]

[to The_Metatron:]What the @#^% are you saying?

As made plain to you repeatedly, you have never shown that the only alternative to canines is spears, or else the species in question is wiped out by predators. You haven't even shown that with modern baboon troops the difference is canines and not sheer numbers.

It’s not at all plain what it is that you claim to have repeatedly shown me. You seem to be proposing Australopith “sheer numbers” as equivalent to the baboon’s canines. But baboons also have sheer numbers. What would those sheer numbers of hominins have actually done to menace their predators? Make a menacing noise? A baboon troop can also make a menacing noise, see Fitzpatrick’s account above.

Here's another simple fact about obligate carnivores: They don't typically waste their energy trying to obtain a meal when it's obvious they're not going to get it without excessive cost to themselves, if other game is plentiful.

You claim that obligate carnivores would not have significantly preyed on the chimp brained hominins because that would involve excessive cost to themselves. But that takes us back to the more objective advice from ChatGPT that the short canines and short toes of Australopithecus would have put them at a disadvantage compared with baboons, when hunted by a leopard in a tree. So a leopard would expend less energy hunting hominins in a tree, than on hunting baboons.

By “If other game is plentiful” you mean, predators would be spoiled for choice and that does sometimes happen, see videos of bears after salmon. But leopards do bother to hunt baboons in high trees from which a fall would be dangerous.

Your position that hominins were somewhat invisible to predators expresses the atheist origin story of humans evolving on an empty stage. A more objective origin story would be that humans were created in a unique set of intimate relations involving spears, predators, alternative prey and the foraging resources offered by the savanna.

What was unique about those relations was that they led to the JWST, ChatGPT and what-all that will lead on to. While their contemporary baboons are still baboons. No offence meant to them.

Your wank-fantasy of strength against individual strength, is something you dredge up using your flimsy ideological priors, one man with a spear.

My discussion with Jesse above was not about individual strength, it was all about hominins necessarily acting in and as groups. I pointed out that the chimp-brained hominins were hobbit sized. See this graph, using data provided by ChatGPT:

>>>>>

Equilibrium Hominid Heights.jpg (22.33 KiB) Viewed 543 times

Notice the lack of a clear trend over 18 million years, the tiny average height 1.26m, and the light average weight of 36kg. A small, bipedal, short-canine body plan evidently worked well enough over maybe 8 million years, to have allowed them to travel over the land masses accessible from Africa that weren’t too cold. It’s reasonable to ascribe that to acting as groups, using spears and using tools that weapon-making opened the door to.

Your nine years of persistence here is evidence of a compulsion to rationalize (and cling to) an obviously-flimsy faith, or else you'd be trying to sell it on its own merits, rather than as a panacea for an ontological malaise you feel and then project into others.

I don’t know about an ontological malaise. What has kept me here has been following the thread of a human origin story created by a group-think that I don’t seem to share, where anything smelling however faintly of “creation” is understood as that side of the bread that isn’t buttered. That unquestioned sticking to “right thinking” is expressed more clearly on this atheistic forum than in formal texts like John Reader’s pretty good deep history “Africa”, where the thread is buried in masses of reasonable treatment. This forum is a laboratory where the atheist origin story can be studied in its nearly naked form.

[Calilasseia]

Oh look, it's that favourite creationist pastime, misrepresenting a proper concern for evidence as "groupthink" and "dogma", along with yet another resurrection of the tiresome fiction that is the "atheist origin story" bullshit.

Once again, it was SCIENTISTS who were responsible for the evidence-based account of our origins that you summarily and duplicitously reject, preferring instead your foetid little wank fantasy about Australopithecines becoming arms manufacturers and video game warriors.

Doesn't matter how often you regurgitate these lies, no one here with functioning neurons is fooled by them, and those of us who paid attention in class increasingly regard your underhand and inadequate discoursive conduct with the scorn and derision it deserves.

Indeed, your lies are the only things that are genuinely naked here, displaying their genital malformations in lurid fashion before anyone unfortunate enough to be within exposure. Indeed, your entire nine year exercise in futile peddling of drivel is best described as an act of ideological indecent exposure, the flashing of grubby unwashed bits because it gives the possessor of said grubby unwashed bits a cheap thrill. And, like every other piece of creationist apologetic pornography served up by the requisite merchants of filth, seedy and sleazy to the core.

While you no doubt think, as is common to all tinfoil hat fantasists, that you're some sort of hero thrusting with righteousness engaged in a battle with forces of evil though that must be defeated at all costs, your self-image is even more a mirage grounded in neurodisorder than your cartoon version of prehistory. To the rest of the world, you're no different from any number of urine-soaked tramps railing against creatures of the methylated imagination, inconsequential and exerting zero effect upon the pursuit of proper, rigorous science built upon facts. Indeed, the only reason we endure your ravings is so that we can point thereto as an example of the aetiology of creationist fantasising at its most luridly inadequate. In short, we're handing you enough rope to hang yourself with, and you're obliging us in spectacularly hilarious manner.

That's the part you've never understood all this time - namely, that you're doing so much of our work for us. It's the same with many other creationist mouths on sticks, who don't realise that they're being handed the opportunity to fulfil Voltaire's lone prayer, and delivering handsomely. The joke is on you, and has been ever since you launched your posting career here.

As for your blatant projection, shove it.

[Jayjay4547]

Cali’s last posts was unhinged, but something constructive can be done with his second paragraph:

Once again, it was SCIENTISTS who were responsible for the evidence-based account of our origins that you summarily and duplicitously reject, preferring instead your foetid little wank fantasy about Australopithecines becoming arms manufacturers and video game warriors.

It’s true and important that scientists were responsible for gathering evidence on human origins, e.g. for the measurements I used above, on the height and weight of early hominoids. Society grants scientists the right to explain what their measurements mean, on the reasonable grounds that they know best, and that they will chart the path forwards.

But the concentrated abuse that Cali pours on me, expecting others to agree with him, shows that something else is going on here, in telling the human origin story. His calling the Biblical prophets “urine soaked tramps” shows that Cali is mainly concerned with setting up religion as the irreconcilable enemy of science. But religious belief doesn’t necessarily stand in the way of good science. For example this account from about 1900, in George Forbes’s biography of David Gill HM Astronomer at the Cape (p289):

I remember once meeting at lunch at the observatory a German savant who was staying there. The talk after lunch turned on scientific subjects – general science I think – and Sir David said something which implied rather remotely – his own Christianity. “Do you believe that?” asked the guest, almost startled. “I do.” was the answer, with a singularly impressive simplicity, which no doubt gave more occasion for thought and reflection than a long argument.

It’s reasonable to ask whether Cali’s use of SCIENCE as a hammer to beat Christians with, has influenced the human origin stories as presented on this forum by his comrade Jesse. Who claimed that unarmed australopiths could have relied on their numbers to save one of them from a leopard, citing a video I could not link to, of baboons doing that by climbing a tree. No complaint there from Cali about “peer review”. And no analysis in support of Jesse, just a bucket of shit on my head.

I haven’t argued exactly that Australopithecines became arms manufacturers and video game warriors. The evidence that Dart used a century ago to infer that they used weapons for defense, have turned out to be valid for their ancestors millions of years earlier. I have found curiously little evidence that primates make war on their predators, in several instances they lost interest soon after seeing predators off. It was genus Homo who made warriors, and still do.

If Australopiths were arms manufacturers, that was because spears evolved though the agency of primates who optimised factors like the tree species, time of year, length, stoutness, sharpness and efficiency of making a spear (and maybe equivalently, the knobkerrie). It may be that the craftsman and scientist’s close attention, care, fine motor control, respect for mentoring, and persistence, originated in practices that originated millions of years earlier.

[Fenrir]

Umm, Cali in point of fact does not use "SCIENCE as a hammer to beat Christians with". Simple reading will show you that.

Cali uses science to counter fantabulists.

Particularly those who feel the use of partisan factoids and sciency sounding majic words somehow aids their cause.

That many of those fantabulists are xians, most particularly of the yec and absolutist varieties, is an interesting factoid all of its own.

Many of those fantabulists find it quite confronting when others do not treat their effluent as automatically worthy of respect, particularly the mendacious narcissists.

Evidence JJ. You need some.

[Jayjay4547]

Who do you thing Cali's "urine soaked tramps" are, Fenrir?

[Fenrir]

Lrn to read

[Cito di Pense]

Who do you thing Cali's "urine soaked tramps" are, Fenrir?

There are those not only lacking in reading comprehension skills to master difficult material, but those who also willfully misstate and distort what others have clearly pointed out to them so that even they well understand what has been pointed out:

[to The_Metatron:]What the @#^% are you saying?

As made plain to you repeatedly, you have never shown that the only alternative to canines is spears, or else the species in question is wiped out by predators. You haven't even shown that with modern baboon troops the difference is canines and not sheer numbers.

It’s not at all plain what it is that you claim to have repeatedly shown me. You seem to be proposing Australopith “sheer numbers” as equivalent to the baboon’s canines. But baboons also have sheer numbers. What would those sheer numbers of hominins have actually done to menace their predators? Make a menacing noise? A baboon troop can also make a menacing noise, see Fitzpatrick’s account above.

In the very next paragraphs it was pointed out to you that predators don't waste energy on a target when it's more effort than evolved inclination to do things efficiently. A coherent social group is, often enough not worth the trouble. Statistically, that means that predators don't wipe out an entire species simply because it lacks long-enough canines. Similarly, numerous asshole apologists I've encountered seem to know what in my argument to ignore in order to avoid stuff that's too much trouble for them to deal with.

Your position that hominins were somewhat invisible to predators expresses the atheist origin story of humans evolving on an empty stage. A more objective origin story would be that humans were created in a unique set of intimate relations involving spears, predators, alternative prey and the foraging resources offered by the savanna.

Where did I make statements about "invisibility", JJ? See what I mean, you distort arguments and pretend not to understand them when they hook you. What I point out to you is that encounters between predator and prey are contingent and statistically not lethal to an entire species simply because it has no sharp points such as what you like in your creotard wank fantasies. If you feel as if evolution theory is being deployed to "beat you up" intellectually, it's because your intellectual weaknesses make you an ideal target for predators.

You claim that obligate carnivores would not have significantly preyed on the chimp brained hominins because that would involve excessive cost to themselves.

Another distortion from one known to lie for Jeebus. The argument was that a cohesive troop can mob a predator sufficiently to make it less than worthwhile to pursue prey there. You distort what you find yourself unable to counter with a legitimate argument. When did you ever demonstrate that lack of both canines and spears doomed a species to extinction? This is the point you avoid, because you're pathetically incapable of doing more than evasion and distortions of the arguments you have to deal with. You're unworthy to counter sound arguments, JJ, and you know it.

[The_Metatron]

…

It’s true and important that scientists were responsible for gathering evidence on human origins, e.g. for the measurements I used above, on the height and weight of early hominoids. Society grants scientists the right to explain what their measurements mean, on the reasonable grounds that they know best, and that they will chart the path forwards.

This is not how science works, either. You think science is simply explanations of measurements? You honestly think scientists’ work is a result of some priestly power society grants them, that “they know best”?

Perhaps in your god-addled mind, thats how you choose what’s true, based on the authority a bunch of theists grant some fuckface who simply wants to control said theists and get their money. You contribute to that shiny offering plate every time it comes around, don’t you JJ? The day may come for you when you realize religion has destroyed your ability to reason, and you pay them to do it.

In the world of science, it is the science itself that gives it authority. What scientists discover and conclude either speaks for itself, or it is rejected. It either explains what can be shown or it is rejected. My master of science degree didn’t come with any dispensations, robes, or authority. All it shows is I know how the process works, and I can apply it.

JAMA published a research paper on therapeutic touch in 1998. It was written by Emily Rosa when she was nine years old. No academic credentials yet, she was in third grade. Published scientific paper. No power granted by society, just a solid search for truth from a third grade girl. Where’s your published research paper, JJ? What qualifies you to make the claims you do?

But the concentrated abuse that Cali pours on me, expecting others to agree with him, shows that something else is going on here, in telling the human origin story. His calling the Biblical prophets “urine soaked tramps” shows that Cali is mainly concerned with setting up religion as the irreconcilable enemy of science. But religious belief doesn’t necessarily stand in the way of good science. For example this account from about 1900, in George Forbes’s biography of David Gill HM Astronomer at the Cape (p289):

I remember once meeting at lunch at the observatory a German savant who was staying there. The talk after lunch turned on scientific subjects – general science I think – and Sir David said something which implied rather remotely – his own Christianity. “Do you believe that?” asked the guest, almost startled. “I do.” was the answer, with a singularly impressive simplicity, which no doubt gave more occasion for thought and reflection than a long argument.

What your 125 year old anecdote hinges on is a belief. Belief is what you have when you have no evidence. Scientists are free to believe what they wish. Ask one, and they’ll tell you their beliefs are not based on science, they’re simply beliefs. You know what you won’t find? Your long dead hero’s published papers on Christianity. And, you know why. Well, maybe you know why. It’s because he knew perfectly well nothing of his Christian belief could be tested and shown. You know what that means? Not science.

Here’s a quote from Tim Minchen, with which I find no fault:

Science adjusts its views based on what’s observed. Faith is the denial of observation, so that belief can be preserved.

That’s pretty much what you do, isn’t it? It’s your modus operandi. That’s Latin, and it means, way of operating.

It’s reasonable to ask whether Cali’s use of SCIENCE as a hammer to beat Christians with, has influenced the human origin stories as presented on this forum by his comrade Jesse. Who claimed that unarmed australopiths could have relied on their numbers to save one of them from a leopard, citing a video I could not link to, of baboons doing that by climbing a tree. No complaint there from Cali about “peer review”. And no analysis in support of Jesse, just a bucket of shit on my head.

Get something straight, JJ. Perfectly straight. I didn’t record that sequence. Others did that, the people at PBS. It was either a recording of real events or it was a very well done CGI animation. You’ve leaned on PBS before to try to support your claims, as if they were some sort of authority. Yet, you don’t bat a fucking eye when you dismiss an event that their documentary crew recorded, because it doesn’t support your bullshit.

So, since I suspect that PBS documentary recording wasn’t a CGI animation (unlike the animated PBS show upon which you relied so heavily) I observed a recording of exactly what I described. Now I ask you, if yellow baboons can do what I described, are you really telling us that the somewhat more evolved Australopithecines could not? If so, why not?

Put your priors aside and think for a moment. Just for a moment. Mr. Leopard was after a single yellow baboon it had already wounded. The wounded baboon climbed a tree to get away from Mr. Leopard, who climbed the tree in pursuit. When the rest of the troop arrived, suddenly Mr. Leopard was faced with a problem. Mr. Leopard knows baboons possess the ability to hurt it. And suddenly, instead of just that one wounded baboon to attend to, he has to worry about the others, who are now surrounding it in three dimensions. There’s only one Mr. Leopard. Which baboon does he pay attention to? The wounded one, or the dozen or so around him, all of which he can’t watch? Suddenly, Mr. Leopard finds that wounded yellow baboon isn’t such easy pickings and retires to find a snack elsewhere. You have to give Mr. Leopard credit for recognizing a pooch that isn’t going to be screwed.

The difference between that event and your siege combat mentality is simple. Set piece battles rarely succeed. The baboons were using what the military call mass and maneuver. Instead of giving the aggressor a single objective to attack, it gives the aggressor a complex problem of multiple possible counter attacks from which it must defend, in addition to pressing his attack on the one objective. The battle stopped being at a time and place of Mr. Leopard’s choosing, and he became the defender instead of the attacker. Oh, the baboons surely aren’t thinking all this through, it is just a description of what they actually do.

I haven’t argued exactly that Australopithecines became arms manufacturers …

Stop your fucking lying, JJ. You’ve been doing exactly that, and doing it without presenting the tiniest shred of evidence for it.

and video game warriors. The evidence that Dart used a century ago to infer that they used weapons for defense, have turned out to be valid for their ancestors millions of years earlier.

Dart’s “evidence” was shown to be wrong. What is it with you and lying here? Did you just claim Dart’s “evidence” was developed millions of years before A. Afarensis existed?

I have found curiously little evidence that primates make war on their predators, in several instances they lost interest soon after seeing predators off. It was genus Homo who made warriors, and still do.

Do you even know what it means to make war? The resources it takes? You’ll probably find no such evidence. Why not? Do you think it could be that Australopithecines might have been too busy, you know, surviving to take resources away from that endeavor to toddle off to pick fights with predators?

If Australopiths were arms manufacturers, that was because spears evolved though the agency of primates who optimised factors like the tree species, time of year, length, stoutness, sharpness and efficiency of making a spear (and maybe equivalently, the knobkerrie). It may be that the craftsman and scientist’s close attention, care, fine motor control, respect for mentoring, and persistence, originated in practices that originated millions of years earlier.

Now, you’re here claiming the weapons technology you attribute without evidence to A. Aferensis originated millions of years earlier, again without evidence? That they had scientists working on weapons programs? A craftsman class of weapons makers? Combat arms trainers?

Lying for jebus has just taken on a new dimension.

[Jayjay4547]

Who do you thing Cali's "urine soaked tramps" are, Fenrir?

Lrn to read

Cali: March 28 2015: Only because some piss-stained Middle Eastern nomads made shit up on the topic 3,000 years ago,
Cali:April 3 2015: Only because some piss-stained Middle Eastern nomads
Cali:May 27 2015: Only because some piss-stained Middle Eastern nomads
Cali:June 01 2015: which tend to be the ones that the piss-stained Middle Eastern authors of their beloved mythology
Cali:June 15 2015: a collection of piss-stained Middle Eastern nomads, who were too dumb-fuck stupid to count correctly
Cali:Jan 31 2016: ignorant, superstitious, piss-stained Middle Eastern nomads,
Cali:Feb 18 2016: myths, written by ignorant piss-stained Middle Eastern nomads
Cali:Feb 22 2016: diseased scribblings of piss-stained Middle Eastern nomads
Cali:July 18 2016: that the semi-literate, ignorant, superstitious, piss-stained authors of mythologies
Cali:Dec 22 2023: Bronze Age fiction, invented by piss-stained nomads who were too stupid
Cali:Mar 10 2024: feculent, diseased scribblings of piss-stained Bronze Age nomads.
Cali:June 10:L2024: It's bad fiction, scribbled by piss-stained nomads
Cali: June 10 2024: of piss-stained Bronze Age nomads
Cali: Aug 11 2024: urine-soaked tramps railing against creatures of the methylated imagination

[fluttermoth]

Whine

[Calilasseia]

And I see the continued bleating and whingeing about the invective your drivel richly earns, while of course ignoring the substance contained in those posts, because at bottom you're a substance-free zone.

Oh wait, how many peer reviewed scientific papers have I brought here? And how often have I exposed you as a quote miner thereof? The diligent won't take long to embarrass you with the answers.

[Jayjay4547]

Whine

You missed my point, which was to support the claim I made on Aug 12th, that

His [Cali] calling the Biblical prophets “urine soaked tramps” shows that Cali is mainly concerned with setting up religion as the irreconcilable enemy of science.

and which Fenrir denied with:

Umm, Cali in point of fact does not use "SCIENCE as a hammer to beat Christians with". Simple reading will show you that.

I showed that Cali had called the Biblical prophets “piss-stained nomads” at least 13 times, before going to the even more extreme “urine soaked tramps”.

The purpose of someone saying that about people who lived thousands of years ago and who followed a lifestyle still used today, isn’t to analyse anything about history or lifestyle, it’s to hammer religion in the present, in this case Christianity, Jewry and Islam.

Cali’s polemics support my claim that there is such a thing as atheist ideology, which has been universally denied by Ratskep debunkers. And his association of SCIENCE with his polemics, supports the plausibility of my claim that atheist ideology has impacted on the human origin story as told in the name of science. It remains for me to show that there has been such an impact.

I have to restate my claim that the impact of atheism on the human origin story, has been an intuitive common understanding of what kind of story of human origins would be marketable and what could not be sold, in the social space created (to use a useful gross simplification) by the Huxley-Wilberforce debate of 1860. In other words, merely an enduring fashion, but one that could help make or could break an academic career.

This shadowy meta-story can be unpacked in different ways, as can the Genesis narrative. It has different sides to it. It can be understood as antithetical to Genesis, as distinctively acausal, as foregrounding the human intellect, as propounding self-creation by demigods. But centrally, the atheist origin story visions humans evolving as if they were actors on an empty stage. As if there were no other actors. . If that is a true insight, then the atheist origin story can be revealed as a false story by showing that there were indeed other actors. I claimed most recently to show that by drilling down to the particular reconstruction of early hominins competing with other primates in the role of alternative prey of leopards. I claim that with their bipedal body plans, short canines and short toes, unarmed australopiths would have been hopelessly out-competed by other primates in avoiding predation by leopards. I claim that this issue has not been considered by those promoting the human origin story told in the name of science. For them, hominins clambered about in trees as if there were no leopards around. No other actors.

Debunkers have addressed this issue by claiming that predation on hominins wasn’t significant, or that “sheer numbers” could be effective, or that there were “no canines” involved in leopard-baboon interactions. Whatever the reasonableness of those such positions, how much scientific authority can be used to support them? Considering the close interest that many scientists have in human origins, where is a peer-reviewed analysis of australopith competence in avoiding predation by tree climbing predators? Instead of throwing buckets of shit on my head, that is what Cali could make his point with.

[Cito di Pense]

What a mess of pathetic whining.