Jay on the human origin story 2: Denying structure

Conversation
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Bit of both probably. Doesn’t matter. Scientists have moved on from Orthogenesis. Unfortunately, it sticks around as a common misconception, sometimes museums and textbooks haven’t updated their depictions either.

The right image shows that horse evolution wasn’t a linear progression towards one particular form. Horses of various sizes, number of toes, and feeding modes were living simultaneously at various times. One-toed evolved 2 times among horses (and it also evolved in other groups too) and some horses became smaller.

In other words… an expanding bush ≠ a single arrow

Here is a paragraph from this review paper that is particularly relevant:

Despite subsequent recognition that equid evolution was in fact more like a bush than a straight line (Simpson 1951; MacFadden 1994), it is still portrayed in a linear fashion in many museums and textbooks (MacFadden et al. 2012). Some trends in equid evolution do appear to exist by gestalt—today’s horses are indeed much larger, hypsodont, and have reduced digits relative to the earliest horses. Monodactyly had two separate evolutions, one in the Dinohippus/Equus lineage and one in the Pliohippus/Astrohippus lineage, strongly suggesting at least some adaptive utility and selection for this condition. It therefore requires careful attention to discuss the evolution of horses without slipping into verbal orthogenesis by drawing a straight line between the earliest horse and the lone surviving genus today, particularly given that trends of digit reduction and increasing hypsodonty do exist in at least some parts of the horse tree (Janis 2007). But evidence from diet, habitat, tooth morphology, and digit state do not match the orthogenetic pattern: decreasing body size was common in lineages such as Archaeohippus or Nannippus; not all tridactyl horses browsed; and not all hypsodont, monodactyl horses grazed (MacFadden 1994; MacFadden et al. 2012).

Why are you expecting that later small species had fewer toes? Some did, but what’s your point?

??? Why are you expecting some horses evolved to get more toes ???

I did link it.

They highlighted as clear outliers, which is the point I am making. Evolution isn’t never linear, and apparent trends can even flip.

Right… ergo, human brain size wasn’t linear.

From my impression, there is little consensus on this. Some have said this might be due to a switch to an agricultural diet (which is actually nutrient poorer compared to that of hunter gatherers). Another explanation I have seen is compatible with yours, that humans came to rely on social intelligence, so huge brains were not needed.

It’s also important to point out the fact that big brains isn’t exactly 1:1 correlated with intelligence. Neanderthals had bigger brains than us, but they had smaller frontal lobes but bigger hind brains. This goes to show that human encephalization isn’t really one parameter.

The reason why is that brain sizes increased significantly long before there was any sign of language. In fact, the appearance of language (strongest paleontology indicators of this are abstract art work) seems to coincide more with the recent brain size reduction.

The hobbits of flores are probably descended from Homo Erectus, less likely an Australopithecus species, neither of which show signs of having had language.

I highly doubt hobbits fled to the island to run away from big brained hominins. Especially considering that hobbits themselves were likely descendants of the big brained Erectus.

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I don’t speak for all creationists, but it struck me that you are identifying creationism with Deism, as expressed by Darwin in his conclusion to Origins:

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

ChatGPT tells me that Darwin later shifted to a more agnostic position, which I already knew anyway so I don’t need to be told that again. But I think Darwin was wrong about a Creator who kickstarted the machinery of evolution and then walked away. I’m more in line with the geologist James Hutton (1726-1797). His Wikipedia entry states:

[i]Earth as a living entity

Hutton taught that biological and geological processes are interlinked. James Lovelock who developed the Gaia hypothesis in the 1970s, cites Hutton as saying that the Earth was a superorganism.

**Evolution

Hutton also advocated uniformitarianism for living creatures – evolution, in a sense – and even suggested natural selection as a possible mechanism affecting them…"[/i]

So I imagine the Creator as omnipresent and to be sought in what is hierarchically greater than the human individual (e.g. Smuts’ “Wholes” and Koestler’s “Monads”)

I don’t think it is a fact that the Flores hobbits showed a reduction in brain size. I think it’s more likely that their ancestors were small brained, well able to look after themselves in a wide variety of habitats, but steered clear of bands of large brained hominid bands that were better at warfare because they had rapidly evolving LLMs in their heads.

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That still leaves you with no point to your analysis.

As for your assertion regarding cranium size, the fitness of a human fetus whose head is too large to fit through its mother’s pelvis is zero.

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You aren’t giving me a lot of guidance. Here is a graph showing BUNCHES of apes whose brain size was increasing about 25 times faster than that of Australopithecus ancestors:

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Figure 5 (repeated)

And here is Nesslig20 explaining what is going on here:

His cited opinion piece concludes this: “the dramatic recent shrinkage of the brain within the species Homo sapiens implies that the emergence of modern human cognition (via the adoption of the symbolic information processing mode, likely driven by the spontaneous invention of language in an exaptively enabled brain) was not the culmination of the overall hominin trend towards brain enlargement, but rather a departure from it.”

That does tell me that the established narrative of human evolution is basically about bunches of apes with the smarts gradually getting more intelligent. They got so intelligent that after maxing out on brain size, some tens of thousands of years ago, they invented language as a sideline and as shown by their producing art.

As a layman, that frankly grates with me. I think that it’s a big thing that humans are the only animal that can talk. It seems to me that the ability of an infant to pick up the speech it hears around it, is voracious and hard wired amongst normal infants. Similarly for sign language that a deaf infant sees around it, if it’s lucky enough to have that early exposure, and bad luck for it if it doesn’t. To make out that an infant learns language because it’s intelligent seems to me, well, “unsupported”.

More than that, it seems to me that the established narrative is a bit unhinged, that there is a kind of hysteria around human smarts, aka “cognition” Atheism might not be directly to blame, except as the militant arm of western enlightenment. With Descarte’s “I think, therefore I am” as a hinge point.

Maybe it’s me that is unhinged, but insofar as it’s science that is the vehicle for the insanity I’m alleging, I have seen recently signs that science might be healing itself, as theoretically it should, as a basically adaptive methodology. One sign is in a book Dan suggested to me, Nicholas Wade’s “The Faith Instinct”, that I got in hand yesterday. I just knew that I would gobble it up, but how that would happen has come as a surprise. Wade repeatedly cites the anthropologist Lawrence H Keeley’s excellent “War before Civilization” (“the myth of the peaceful savage”) .

A third wonderful source was linked to by Nesslig20: DeSilva and others:

“When and Why Did Human Brains Decrease in Size? A New Change-Point Analysis and Insights From Brain Evolution in Ants.”

Almost incredibly, DeSilva’s article only contains the word “language” once, and then in a reference. But they do say interesting things about what I would call “the hive mind”. And the first screen has this note: “This article is part of the Research Topic Neuroethology of the Colonial Mind: Ecological and Evolutionary Context of Social Brains”

So maybe science will repair humanity’s vision of human origins via the back door of studying social insects.

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Could you explain what any of this has to do with the bad influence of atheism?

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Your assumption of linearity makes the whole exercise worthless.

But there’s no linearity, so trying to fit a line to it is absurd. BTW, you and I are still apes.

If you define “talking” as “vocal communication,” you’re utterly wrong.

As is the ability of an infant whale to pick up the vocal communications of other whales around it.

All scientific conclusions are provisional, and this is a field that has a long way to go in gathering fragmentary data. I would never describe that as “unhinged.”

It has always done so.

Again, you might want to read Ajit Varki:

Please keep in mind that this is merely a hypothesis.

A priori, the likelihood that a paper in a Frontiers journal is wonderful is very, very low. There are a lot of crap journals out there. MDPI is another publishing house that should be viewed with skepticism.

I second @John_Harshman’s question.

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That title is a contraction of the title of my first post "The bad influence of atheism on the human origin story told in the name of evolution. I’m hoping for responses to my secular inquiry on that theme. I’m trying to look at that story as a cultural production, driven by a kind of political correctness amongst an influential university-affiliated western sub-culture. And my conclusion is that the outcome has been basically the atheist origin story. This influence has bled more generally into how the general theory of evolution is presented. Atheism as a social movement can be mapped by looking at the human origin story told in the name of evolution.

If that-all sounds purely hostile then please bear with me. I myself have had an undistinguished academic career and although I was once royally fired from a university I loved (Fort Hare), the academic world generally treated me well, like a postal service treating a worker with a club foot. And I’m otherwise also poorly prepared to tackle this issue as a retired land surveyor rather than say a social scientist.

Here is a graph of social changes in England that I see as having created the fashion of political correctness, drawn from data provided by ChatGPT. The pivotal figure of T. H. Huxley can be seen as exploiting opportunities from being well aware of the trends shown here. The population was being drawn into manufacturing in urban centers and away from rural life culturally centered on worship. Oxbridge had insisted on Christian orthodoxy and controlled access to careers in the established Anglican church (that I worship in). Enforcement of adherence to the 39 Articles was under threat. There were opportunities for new model universities, e.g. London University, as a major career path for those aspiring to the upper middle class. But these new university men and women had to understand their clan ethos. And their badge of membership came to be atheism quartered with the theory of evolution, thanks to the opportunity that Huxley took advantage of in the Huxley-Wilberforce debate of 1860.

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Figure 8

I want to argue that the influence of atheism is a gold mine of various related elements, including focus on randomness, exalting human cognition, denying determinism, denying external agency, focus on within-species agency e.g. sexual selection. These being all about self creation as expressed in Descarte’s Cogito.In discussions I find myself easily dragged from one of these elements into another but in this thread on “denial of structure” I’m looking for responses to the notion of denial of a basic 2 step structure in human evolution, where the constraint system determining the first persisted after the branch point into the second. Talking here about Homo naledi and floresiensis.

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I would define “talking” as vocalising and understanding syntactical sentences, like these here. Many animals communicate vocally. A bush hyrax outside my bedroom window communicates “ga ga ga ga” on a soft falling scale then a shrill “aiiii aiiii” . I guess that is a male trying to communicate to any female in the tree. But that’s all I hear from it, the same vocalization endlessly. Talking is something else.

Granted, but do whales talk to each other? They might, humans have only in the last few decades learned that whales communicate in their foreign environment. But long experience with terrestrial animals has taught us that they don’t naturally pick up speech the way a human infant does.

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I saw that the authors came from Dartmouth College, Boston University, Ohio State, Oklahoma State. What I found wonderful was their analysis spanning anthropology and entomology in a fruitful way

Thanks for the link. I found this in the Amazon blurb on Ajit Vark’s "Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind"

At a chance meeting in 2005, Brower, a geneticist, posed an unusual idea to Varki that he believed could explain the origins of human uniqueness among the world’s species: Why is there no humanlike elephant or humanlike dolphin, despite millions of years of evolutionary opportunity? Why is it that humans alone can understand the minds of others…It was not, the authors argue, a biological leap that set humanity apart from other species, but a psychological one: namely, the uniquely human ability to deny reality in the face of inarguable evidence-including the willful ignorance of our own inevitable deaths."

OK but it seems to me that humans understand the minds of other humans because humans, uniquely, talk to each other. For example by asking “What’s on your mind?” “I’m worried why Janine’s water tanks aren’t full, seeing we have had so much rain.” The reason why humans sometimes don’t understand each other despite talking is because we talk across ideological divides. Like the corpus collosum sometimes inhibiting information transfer “I can’t hear what you are saying”.

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My response is that this is a meaningless word-salad.

It is by no means clear what the Hades you mean by “the human origin story told in the name of evolution”, and you have completely failed to articulate what "atheism has to do with it (whatever the hack ‘it’ is).

Likewise, on this new thread you have failed to clarify what “structure” you think is being ‘denied’ (it presumably has something to do with cranial sizes, but what is completely unclear), and again what atheism has to do with this.

Your Figure 8 adds little to this, as it is unclear even that there is a correlation between the three trends, and in any case correlation is not causation.

Therefore you have failed to adequately answer John’s question:

Could you explain what any of this has to do with the bad influence of atheism?

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That seems to be the narrative you want to push. But so far the only “corruption” we’ve seen is disagreeing with your opinions and considering possibilities you don’t like. We’ve not even got into questions of causes.

Have you considered, for instance, that the development of language leaves no evidence in itself? How can we scientifically study it? That your opinion seems obviously true to you isn’t exactly scientifically valid.

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I think you’re devoting a lot of energy to moving the goalposts.

The most current evidence very strongly suggests that they do. May I suggest acquiring, at a bare minimum, a Wikipedia-level view before taking a position?

Now you’re moving the goalposts to “speech.” What about humans who communicate using ASL?

Whether dogs understand words or intonation is my favorite way to introduce 3rd-graders to the concept of testing a hypothesis. Unfortunately, most creationists don’t grasp this, falsely portraying science as entirely after-the-fact interpretation, omitting the hypothesis testing because creationist gurus don’t really do it.

I’m sorry, the point of the affiliations is…? What exactly does “came from” mean in this context? Credentialism is a major aspect of pseudoscience.

Scientists typically measure the wonderfulness of a paper by whether the conclusions are justified by the evidence. You don’t appear to be using that criterion.

I’m sorry, but I don’t understand why you are cut/pasting the blurb. The name is Varki, not Vark. It appears that you are not interested in reading it.

You don’t know that this characteristic is uniquely human. You even admitted it at the start of your post! This goalpost-moving is transparently silly.

Do you think that you understand the mind of a dolphin better than do the other dolphins it constantly communicates with?

Indeed. As a Christian and a scientist, I find your choice of title to be both entirely unwarranted by anything you’ve presented here, as well as incredibly offensive.

Hint: very few scientists are as strident as Richard Dawkins.

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I see nothing in all that, even if it were true, that has anything clearly to do with atheism.

You haven’t clearly articulated what “a basic 2 step structure” means either, so it’s hard to know whether to agree or disagree.

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Terms like “word salad”, “what the Hades” and merely repeating an opening challenge, are about trying to halt a counter position at the threshold, a denial that signals an ideological divide. The main point in my paragraph that you call a word salad is about a secular inquiry. In simplistic theory, atheists should find it easy to address the possibility of a bad influence of atheism on the human origin story. I started along this road when I was an atheist.

The denied 2 structure I’m talking about is shown in figure 2:

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Figure 3 (repeated)

I used the trends shown in figure 8 (below) to depict the opportunities that T.H. Huxley and like thinkers grasped around 1860, to get on a bandwagon of those aspiring to the upper middle class of university men and women, provided they understood their clan ethos whose badge of membership came to be atheism quartered with the theory of evolution.

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Figure 8 (repeated)
That’s how the human origin story told in the name of evolution came to express the atheist origin story. I don’t see that there has to be antagonism between theism and evolution. ChatGPT identified 4 scholars during the Islamic Golden Age (8th–14th centuries) who used domestic breeding to foreshadow the theory, though without the 18th century Western geological knowledge of deep time pioneered by James Hutton. The modern antagonism between Islam and Evolution e.g. in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, surely has modern causes.

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That’s condescending. Like I said, I think the issue of whether whales vocalise and understand syntactical sentences is currently open. Humans talk using sound in air, whales communicate (and sense) using sound in water. But whether whales structure sounds into syntactical sentences, seems to be open.

I have raised the equivalence of signing and speech several times. Signing provides a great way to get a grip on language from the outside, as well as a plausible evolutionary path for language. For me, striking features are that sign languages are created within communities and are generally mutually unintelligible unless they have a common root.

It’s wrong to associate my position with pseudoscience. The point of raising the respectable affiliations of those authors is that earlier you said this:

So, without reading what those authors said or using any other information than a journal name, you wrote them off. Well, if you want to rely on metadata like that, the next step would be to look at the authors’ standing. And that’s what I did.

Sorry, I really didn’t want to call him a pig, it really was a typo. I put back in bold above the crucial first sentence in my paragraph, which explains why i’m not driven to read Varki’s book which, according to the Amazon blurb, asks:

“Why is it that humans alone can understand the minds of others…It was not, the authors argue, a biological leap that set humanity apart from other species, but a psychological one: namely, the uniquely human ability to deny reality in the face of inarguable evidence-including the willful ignorance of our own inevitable deaths.”

In support of my claim, without language there would be no music scores, computer coding, literature, engineering, philosophy, theology, or manufacturing. That list isn’t exhaustive. The ability of an infant to pick up the language it hears or sees around it has proved to be so clearly adaptive, that I read that blurb as demonstrating how the human origin story is treated like a playground for ideas, a silly triviality, a confection.

I think dolphins understand the mind of other dolphins better than I do, but I understand your mind through the medium of our discourse.

I’m not the only guy who thinks that other animals are dumb in the sense of their infants not being able to learn the grammar and vocabulary they hear or see around them.

If I may ask, what church do you worship in Mercer? I’m sorry that you find the title “The bad influence of atheism (on the human origin story)” incredibly offensive. How could I make it less so?

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That’s a great candidates for this thread:

Correlation is not causation: your daily dose of spurious correlation - Peaceful Science

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No Jay.

What I was “signal[ing]” was that you have failed to communicate effectively.

Pompous rhetorical flourishes like “in the name of” serve to obfuscate, rather than elucidate, your point. Put into non-rhetorical English, it would mean something like “in furtherance of”.

So we are left with:

… the human origin story told in furtherence of evolution.

But the original title of Darwin’s book introducing his Theory of Evolution was The Origin of Species, humans are a species, so of course the “human origin story” is part of “evolution”.

So what we are really left with is:

… one part of evolution told in furtherance of evolution.

To which, the natural reaction would seem to be:

Yeh? So? And your point is?

Kindly restate your thesis in plain English.

Who has “denied” this? Give evidence.

What has this denial got to do with atheism? Was it an atheist organisation that made this denial? Was it a prominent atheist?

What you are complaining about would seem to be more an outdated/over-simplified presentation to the public, than any purported “influence of atheism”.

(And I’m not even sure that this even counts as a ‘denial’. In high-school, I was taught a, similarly outdated and oversimplified version of physics – Newtonian Physics. Was that a ‘denial’ of Relativistic Physics? I think not.)

You have failed to establish any relationship between your figure and your purported “bandwagon”.

The vast majority of those failing to attend church, and being urbanised as part of the Industrial Revolution would never have heard of Darwin’s thesis. And the number of universities didn’t start growing rapidly until the 20th century.

You have failed to demonstrate that your figure is anything more than a non sequitor. (@Dan_Eastwood & @Faizal_Ali – it is not even a spurious correlation as no correlation has been demonstrated.)

You have also failed to demonstrate what any of this has to do with “atheism” – the closest you came was falling church attendance – but not all who fail to attend church are atheists.

And even if you had demonstrated an increase in atheism prior to Huxley et al, that would still have not demonstrated that this created an “opportunity” for them – you are making a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

This in turn means that you have failed to demonstrate any “influence of atheism” in your less-than-clear-or-well-argued claims, good, bad or indifferent. You might with as well be blaming “the bad influence of philately”.

This in turn renders your thread-titles nothing more than unsubstantiated atheism-bashing. (And that Dan, is why I’m unwilling to “just leave him alone”.)

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In what way? It seems like a reasonable standard. I would also suggest that you try to understand that correlation is not causation.

You did say that, but then you contradicted it by claiming, without evidence, that humans are “unique.” You’re all over the place.

Your insistence on “syntactical sentences” makes no sense, as it is redundant. I’m certain that I can communicate without sentences, btw.

And how is that different from spoken languages?

If you don’t want to be identified as a duck, stop quacking like one.

I did not. I wrote very clearly that the likelihood was very, very, low, not zero.

I still don’t see why you think that their affiliations are relevant to the standard for evaluating a scientific paper, but then I’ve only published 44 of them and reviewed hundreds more. Can you explain?

I clearly stated the standard, which you have ignored in favor of a straw man and a predictable Gish Gallop.

And by the way, by the time one finishes grad school, one has a personal scientific standing that outweighs any institutional affiliation.

I’ll write again, in a “syntactical sentence,” that scientists typically measure the wonderfulness of a paper by whether the conclusions are justified by the evidence. Is there anything unclear about that?

Clearly you don’t, as virtually everything you’ve written here indicates.

Yet your dog has a far better understanding of your emotional state than do the people around you. That’s communication, too.

You’re also not the only guy who conflates correlation with causation, but that doesn’t make doing so correct.

So are we 12-year-old boys now, using last names only, Jackson?

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@Jay, I’m ready to throw in the towel on this topic. You haven’t established any connection to atheism (which isn’t even a single entity), why it is bad, how to define what good/bad means in this context, or defined any sort of structure to be denied. On top of that, the title is kind of insulting to atheists.

I have set a short Topic Timer for final comments, if any.

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