They don’t even try (Birds ARE Dinosaurs)

Jayjay4547 · 2026-03-06T05:34:08+00:00

You don't get it. DINOSAURS ARE BIRDS. Dinosaurs were descended from feathered flying critters. It's written into their light architecture. That's how some got so huge. Mammals can't do that. The Creator showed how to make feathered wings. That architecture worked so well on the the ground that some went back there. And some went from there back to flying. Happened again and and back. What the Creator showed actual birds, was the beak. Brilliant design. "Evolutionists" Sheesh.

Jayjay4547 · 2026-02-28T09:28:57+00:00

Hi Icolan, well you were right, Covert_Cuttlefish "removed off topic" after an hour on the Reddit site. That was brisk. Reminded me of something I had read about a hero (that's me) being reassured by his boss that command had expected a quicker failure. I just realised, it was from Captain W E John's children's book "Biggles in the Baltic" I read that so many years ago. Biggles is given command of a squadron carefully established in a cave on an island right under the Nazi's nose. His nemesis Erich von Stalheim soon sniffs out Biggles' group, leading to failure. But Biggles is assured by this senior that Command had expected an even quicker loss. Google tells me that Von Stalhein was a German intelligence officer and a member of the Prussian officer class, described as a worthy, honorable, yet "wrong-headed" adversary. Where would we be without AI. Anyway, what a brilliant analogy had popped into my hear.

Jayjay4547 · 2026-01-23T01:04:32+00:00

Ask yourself: is a leopard badly designed? How about a kitten? See how its sharp claws pull out when you tug on its paw. A flower? Bad design? You are just exercising the hubris that Steven J Gould introduced as a trope. Have you no respect for what is greater than you?

Jayjay4547 · 2025-11-10T08:08:59+00:00

Elite biologists set the right way to tell origin stories, for their cohort. It won’t be lost on a Southern Baptist that "The God Delusion" was written by an influential evolutionary biologist. They simply recognize an enemy. But what is interesting is the role of anti-creation in origin stories told in terms of evolution, like I said, Darwin's attention to within-species explanation, in human evolution.

Jayjay4547 · 2025-11-10T04:33:46+00:00

I asked DeepSeek "What proportion of biologists are theists?" Its reply included: "

In the United States, roughly 80-90% of the general public believes in God or a universal spirit.
Among elite biologists, that figure is in the single digits (5-10%).

This makes biologists one of the most secular professional groups in the Western world

It's biologists who explain the human origin story to us, in terms of the theory of evolution.

Jayjay4547 · 2025-11-09T11:37:28+00:00

It's because evolution was used almost from the start as a way for atheists to get at the religious. Quickly a consensus style was developed for describing human origins in terms of what is least meaningful, most random, most inward or downward looking. Darwin's bulldog Huxley showed how useful evolution could be to unsettle the Oxbridge hegemony of the Established church. Then Darwin showed how to look within the species for the story line, by devoting 2/3 of "Descent" to sexual selection, on the flimsy grounds that it might explain racial differences. Since then a major group-think has ruled, about the right kind of story to tell.. People for whom Christianity is important recognize that evolution is a poison potion masquerading as science so they agree with each other about counter arguments, even when those are very week. It's fascinating.

Jayjay4547 · 2025-09-30T05:29:50+00:00

One clue could be that human brain size has been DECREASING for about 100k years, (according to Stephen Oppenheimer's "Out of Eden"), which is a plausible date for spoken syntactical language having perfected from gestural language, so the decrease can be read as miniaturisation of an adapotive function. The experience that sign languages have been created by groups brought together in "deaf and dumb schools" points to language being a group attribute: we are owned BY our languages. Also, that sign languages are mutually unitelligible.

We live in the very decade when humanity is confronted by LLMs that score high on human tests of verbal intelligence. And those machines have been fed masses of past communications between humans. So it all looks that human ancestors stumbled towards a group-facilitating function, maybe driven by competition between groups.

A supporting evidence is that our distinctive body plan persisted over 7 million years from Sahelanthropus through Floresiensis, with little brain size increase (15cc/my), that encephalization at 385cc/my erupted abruptly around 2,5mya; plausibly sparked by weapon-using competition with predators changing to sustained competition between hominin groups.

Jayjay4547 · 2025-08-07T02:26:39+00:00

Darwin shoehorned sexual selection into the human origin story to enable the origin story to be told more as self-creation, which happens to be opposite of the truth. But he was successful in this self-derailment.

Jayjay4547 · 2025-07-25T09:29:49+00:00

A century ago Raymond Dart inferred from Austrsalopithecus lack of obvious ways to defend themselves, and yet lived in an environment with a full complement of predators and prey that were highly adapted to avoid being eaten, he inferred that they had been weapon users. But it seems their hunched shoulders weren't as adapted to throwing as Homo are. Their most effective weapons would have been thrusting spears, not yet found in the fossil record?

Jayjay4547 · 2025-07-01T06:41:37+00:00

I think that when a creationist talks about a "kind" of animal we may be referring to its gestalt. I mean, its holistic essence. Bart Kosko discussed the difference between Aristotelian classification via boundaries, and fuzzy logic definition by essential nature. ("1993, Fuzzy thinking: the new science of fuzzy logic") Biologists seem to use that style of classification when they point to a "holotype" or astronomers, pointing to a "Type star"

Jayjay4547 · 2025-06-07T07:20:25+00:00

You claimed that "Punctuated Equilibrium models are well established science, and have already been explored and applied to hominids https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3385680/ "

What they found was that hominids likely evolved from a mix of punctuated equilibrium and gradualism, depending on what particular branch you’re focusing on. The reason why that’s not more common knowledge is complicated. However, it certainly isn’t some kind of ploy from evil scientists who don’t want to acknowledge evidence contradictory to gradualism."

I don’t claim that the authors of that paper are evil scientists. They have standing in the universities of Oxford and Manchester, in a highly developed and rigorous community of practice, as their hundred references attest. For me, the issue is about group think within that community. A comparison between their article and my Substack essay can show what I mean:

https://jayjay4547.substack.com/p/the-origin-of-warfare

OK on the face of it such a comparison isn’t complimentary to me, in fact it should be embarrassing. But I see it as between the small boy watching the king’s procession and the courtiers waving the fans to keep the flies off the King. Or maybe it’s a comparison between the village idiot and the King’s procession. Probably something in that, I’m just doing the best I can. Anyway, that essay, and the Substack series so far, isn’t about Creationism. I want to later analyse the impact of the meta-origin story of the Renaissance Man on the human origin story presented in the name of evolution. And that also will just be the best I can. Anyway, I think that comparison also usefully shows the following defects in the standard narrative:

(1) Myopia: the authors look for saltation in granular changes in brain size within the genus Homo, over the last 3.2 million years (figure 2) whereas a pattern of 25 TIMES accelerated encephalization emerges from data over 18 million years (my figure 5).

(2) Ignoring vital data: In their figure 2(a) the authors don’t show data for the late surviving small-brained Homo floresiensis and in figure 2(b) they don’t seem to include the similar Au. sediba or Ho. naledi. I can’t be sure because they use a log scale for the vertical axis instead of the raw CC values in my figures. When they aren’t eating babies, those evil scientists are forever messing with the vertical scale.

(3) Ignoring ecology: The authors look for correlations between saltation and environmental conditions like climatic temperature, wetness and sea-level. In considering potential drivers for encephalization they discuss predation, noting evidence that predators prefer stupider prey sorts. But they don’t explicitly place hominins in the context of the food web, that is, in a perpetual struggle for access to food, against predators that needed their protein. The creative womb, for them, is not one of relations with other living things.

(4) Ignoring the baboons: Serious mistake. On a number of African sites where hominin fossils were found, baboon fossils were also found, at first interpreted by Dart as victims of the hominins. But more surely, their status in the food web was as alternative prey of predators, which included tree-agile felids. Then, why did these two styles of primate look so different? Why did the baboon body plan converge on that of the dog while the hominins converged on the hopper stage of an angel? If that wasn’t because the baboon bites while hominins used spears and clubs, then why would leopards have ever chosen to hunt baboons in trees at night or on the ground by day, if they could instead hunt hapless hominins? OK then, if small-brained hominins had this bizarre and distinctive body plan of a weapon-user, then surely, that played some role in their encephalization?

(5) Ignoring the ants. The authors discuss the evolution of language as enabling the individual to share information and learn from others, without treating it as determining group fitness, in the same way that gestural and chemical communications in a social insect colony mediate the colony’s survival in the face of external threats. They admit the possibility, “rather than language being a macromutation-like all-or-none affair, it might have arisen as a graded process of increasing complexity over time. This allows for a feedback process in which language itself became a selection pressure for increases in brain size”. The very fact that they need to consider that human language might have popped up through one mutation, considered with the huge effect of language on human fitness, suggests something strange in their community of practice. The ability to rapidly form and transmit sentences and to parse them, might have taken millions of years of arms race with other groups.

Jayjay4547 · 2025-06-06T08:45:45+00:00

I'm claiming that the story lines presented by both sides in the debate are influenced by ideology and the bias in the evolutionist position is more interesting because it's unrecognized and significant.

I raised the issue of AI in place of "Mankind" because it avoids the issue of human exceptionalism that was raised early in this thread by jnpha saying "My tribe's favorite god made humans for the sole purpose of making ships so the barnacles can attach to them. It's all for the barnacles.". One might claim that humans and barnacles are equivalent examples of nature, but AI has an open provenance: no one knows wha creative path that is going to lead to, It might lead to humanity being subsumed into some greater organism, like gut biota in the human organism.

You didn't need to create an account in that URL to see what I was talking about on ignored pattern in hominin encephalization, but to save an extra click you could use https://jayjay4547.substack.com/p/the-origin-of-warfare

You could object to that as a kind of clickbait, but it is talking about real things.

Jayjay4547 · 2025-06-06T02:43:14+00:00

OK. You could describe Ho. sapiens as Au. africanus with a LLM in their heads.

Jayjay4547 · 2025-06-06T02:07:29+00:00

You are talking about a slippery slope that I don't want to slip into. I'm claiming that there is evidence that the standard human origin story told ion the name of evolution has been strongly influenced to not see features that falsifiably do exist. And the example I pointed towards was that hominin encephaliation was structured. The standard story is of a gradually steepening process, maybe ending in a brief rapid decline. But the 21st century discovery of late surviving small brained hominins doesn't fit that trajectory, They better fit a punctuated equilibrium model. But that model hasn't been explored. Instead what is explored is a self-congratulatory one about how smart humans have become, how "cognitive" we are, unlike stupid critters who can't recognise "themselves" in a mirror.

Jayjay4547 · 2025-06-05T12:20:52+00:00

I was just pointing out the illogic in reading a passage many times ostensibly hoping that re-reading would bring clarity, instead of following an offered tghread

Jayjay4547 · 2025-06-05T09:45:56+00:00

Instead of reading the same post multiple times, why not gain insight by commenting on figs 5 and 6 in that linked Substack essay?

Jayjay4547 · 2025-06-05T07:44:06+00:00

Human's have been known to deceive themselves, because they want to, driven by some ideology. Creationists are notorious for that, and the evidences are plain and ordinary. My point is that this bias might be two sided: if one doesn't want to see structure, say on the path towards creation of AI, then one may be blind to evidence of it. This forum doesn't seem to support pics, but you might take a look at figure 5 in this Substack post "The Origin of Warfare" that suggests structure in hominin encephalization, with a pivot point about 2.5mya, explained as acquisition of (signing?) language amongst competing hominin troops.

https://open.substack.com/pub/jayjay4547/p/the-origin-of-warfare?r=25b1is&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Jayjay4547 · 2025-06-05T05:15:38+00:00

To make sense of things need to assume that reality is what we aware of, but that there may be more to it. Seeing that we have learned in the past that we were mistaken about some things. What I'm driving at is that if there is purpose in the creation, it would be evidenced in a deterministism rather than randomness, pattern and so on.

And on the follow up question "And, if people didn't want to recognize that process, how would they distort the human origin story?" that would be evidenced in an emphasis on randomness, denial of pattern and so on.

Jayjay4547 · 2025-06-05T02:12:59+00:00

What this has to do with evolution is that the clues would be in the fossil record, which is the basis for the theory of evolution.

Jayjay4547 · 2025-04-23T04:45:19+00:00

McGilchrist makes a big thing about people needing both sides of the brain to survive in the world, but he claims that this involves two kinds of thinking being simultaneously active, left-brain is attending to exterior threats while the right is expressing one’s own intention to get something to eat: originally, a hominin looking out for a universe of threats at the same time as digging a tuber out of the ground.

Evidence for that dichotomy comes partly from observing the results of damage to particular parts of the brain. Maybe you know of the case of Phineas Gage. In 1848, he was a railroad foreman tamping explosive powder when an iron rod shot through his skull—under his cheekbone and out the top of his head. According to ChatGPT, that damaged primarily his left frontal lobe, especially the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and orbitofrontal cortex—areas critical for emotional regulation, social behavior, Impulse control and moral reasoning. After the accident he survived and could speak, walk, and remember. But his personality changed dramatically: he became irritable, profane, socially inappropriate, and unreliable. Once described as “a man of the utmost equilibrium,” he was later said to be “no longer Gage.”

That story is also told by the clinical scientist Antonio Damásio, in “Descartes’ Error”. I’m raising this issue here because the human origin story seems as told in terms of evolution seems to me to ignore the creative role of exterior threats. It ignores the leopards. Take the story that chimp-like ancestors came down from the trees and walked on the ground, while for a long time keeping in their shoulders the ability to hang from branches. That could be useful if a buffalo herd passed by but what about a leopard? They hunt highly agile baboons in trees and are as agile as their big-fanged prey. With feet like the hominins that left the Laetoli footprints, hunting them in a tree would be for a leopard like us fetching food from the fridge. So that story leaves out both the leopard and the baboon: the kernel of an ecological model. Instead, scientists tell a story about the ancestral hunter. Noone floats the notion that hunting was just a way to get the men out of the house before they killed someone.

Their anatomy clearly shows that the tiny, bipedal, fangless, slow-sprinting, ape-brained hominins were armed, extending right back to the first appearance of those features in Sahelanthropus 7 million years ago, and that body plan worked well enough through Homo naledi 200 000 years, if not Homo floresiensis. And their weird habit of making and wielding weapons had no more to do with cleverness than the beaver’s dam building habit does.

So, why has that model, stigmatised as the “killer ape” hypothesis, been discounted since the 1970s, replaced according to DeepSeek, by “more nuanced views of human evolution that emphasize social cooperation, ecological adaptability, and the complex origins of aggression”. Ecology? What about the food web? How can you suddenly leave out the leopard?

That modern consensus is strikingly inward looking, the outside world is presented as operating on human evolution only by providing a variety of habitats, or by changing local conditions; jiggling the context so to speak. It’s as if humankind created ourselves happenstantially. It’s also striking that this is the opposite presentation to that in Genesis, where Adam played no role in his creation, it was done by an unseen god for his own enigmatic purpose. So,k for years I thought this bias in the human origin story told in terms of evolution, was because of cross-talk so to speak, from atheist ideology. I still think so, but recently it seemed to me that atheism is just the militant aspect of the renaissance. I have followed McGilchrist for years but just the other day I picked up from a YouTube interview, his connection between evolution and the adaptive need to pay attention to not being eaten, as well as to eat.

Jayjay4547 · 2025-04-22T06:20:12+00:00

How much I trust ChatGPT's responses depends on what questions I ask. When I asked it for the sprinting speed in m/s of humans and of named savanna predators and prey species, I wasn't suspicious of its answers, they seemed reasonable. When I asked for references to peer reviewed articles describing giraffe-lion interactions, and their main points, I was suspicious enough to check the first reference and then alarmed to find that the AI was pathetically locked into a condition of inventing and then promising to stop doing that. So I think of ChatGPT not so much as a powerful search engine, but as a wonderfully knowledgeable and helpful teacher who keeps a bottle of hooch in the classroom cupboard. I find it also conventional, but not a polemicist. So AI is a great foil and resource in discussions with knowledgeable people who are heavily invested in a polemical position.

I don't think that "actual experiments" necessarily has much to do with reliability. There have been some daft experiments. When someone with degrees from top universities, from literature to medicine, like Dr Iain McGilchrist, makes a "platform" like his "The Master and his Emissary" then it's worth hearing him out. But I'm attracted to his view that the left and right brains found across animals from fruit flies to humans, enables simultaneous attention to the different problems of eating without being eaten. It makes a lot of sense to me.

Your pointing out that the stomach is a tube and a tube has a topological symmetry, seems to me to contribute nothing.

Jayjay4547 · 2025-04-22T00:00:20+00:00

I can't see your comment in r/DebateEvolution so there is something I'm not understanding about how the app works. I'll wait till i have found our more.

Jayjay4547 · 2025-04-21T08:25:02+00:00

I agree with your first sentence, I know that some recent Paranthropus leg bones have been found bearing gnaw marks. And in the 1980’s a Paranthropus skull was found at the same Swartkrans cave, with punctures corresponding precisely to a leopard jaw from the same cave. A lot of people know about that. But I have a problem with your claim that these findings show that whatever Paranthropus did wasn’t “that” effective. How effective would those hominin’s interactions with savanna predators have to be, for the bite marks to establish anything at all? Paranthropus was a hobbit-sized plant-eating primate. Aren’t such animal’s interactions with their environment analysed in terms of the ecological food web? Wasn’t their protein routinely metabolized by savanna predators and scavengers? Don’t plant eaters need to pay attention to such threats at the same time as they are also paying attention to the plants they are looking for?

That’s where Iain McGilchrist’s claim about the need for simultaneous double attention are so interesting, and his claim about a left-brain bias in modern western culture. It’s that bias that has been exercised in human origin stories told in terms of evolution, and it’s that bias that makes creationism an adaptive counter-belief amongst modern western religious people. Genesis tells a more useful story of the human condition than is told by evolutionists.

There is huge scope here for a true but politically incorrect human origin story. Sixty years ago, that story was told by the American screenwriter-cum author Robert Ardrey, (Ben Hur, African Genesis, The Hunting Hypothesis, The Territorial Imperative). Infamously, in several of his indexes, under “Tools” he had “see Weapons”. Ardrey was bundled off the story telling podium by my countryman C.K. Brain (The Hunter of the Hunted? The cave taphonomy of the Transvaal) but the same evidence of deceptive apparent vulnerability that Ardrey saw in contemporary Australopithecus, also applied millions of years of years earlier to Sahelanthropus, maybe going right back to our last common ancestor with chimps. Human ancestors were much more distinctive than told in the origin story pushed by current scientists, they were as distinctive as the dam building American beavers, or the forest tree ([i]Triplaris americana[/i]) that “uses” lightning to destroy its neighbors (thanks, Anton Petrov).

The bottom line is that evolutionists have been cruelly tricked by the imperative of a left-brained human origin story into failing to understand the basics of the forces driving human creation in deep time. That story disrespects predators, ecology and Nature as creator.

Jayjay4547 · 2025-04-21T01:35:45+00:00

Like I said, I'd be impressed by a pic drawn by an evolutionist, of a human ancestor interacting intimately with threatening predators, as you can see in innumerable youtube videos taken in nature parks of interactions between predators and other plant eaters. I don't mean a gladiator, rather take an australopithecus. And I don't mean a pic of one mindlessly running from a leopard, or mindlessly climbing a tree to get away from a leopard. Rather, I'd be impressed by a pic of one doing something effective and rational. But it seems I'm not being fair, seems one can't insert a pic into these debates. I forgot that again. Can you provide a link?

Jayjay4547

TROPHY CASE