Re: Darwin and Modern PA

"Jim McGinn" <jimmcginn@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1119591938.415036.268330@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

> > Weapon and tool use is a cultural or
> > communal thing, inseparable from the
> > overall culture, the social structure
> > and politics.
>
> Rattling of sabres.

I don't know what you mean by this, but
'tool use' (i.e. attitudes towards technology
and the manner in which it employed)
vary enormously among modern nations
(e.g. Americans, Brits, Germans, Japanese
all have {and had} significantly different
styles and ways of thinking about it).
Comparable differences over the millions
of years of hominid evolution must have
been huge.

> The loss of large
> > canines is very easy to explain:
> > (a) they were expensive;
>
> They're overhead cost is cheap.

This is nonsense. You are suffering from
some infection of modern-PA-dopiness.
As I wrote before:

> > > Teeth are,
> > > in themselves, always fairly 'expensive'.
> > > Large canines (in say, chimps) are
> > > hugely so. They are the animal's
> > > principal weaponry. (The size of the
> > > defence budget of any nation aiming
> > > to be a world-power is a good guide
> > > here.) The loss of a large canine in
> > > those male mammals which have them,
> > > usually means rapid death, and is
> > > certainly the end of any breeding
> > > prospects.

> It's their social implications that are expensive.
>
> > (b) they weren't needed, to any real
> > extent, as soon as the hominids had
> > weapons. So they went -- fast.
>
> Those who had canines were considered a threat to the other members of
> the society and they were banished as a result.

This is an absurd fantasy. Males in all H/G
societies, and those in most historical
civilisations, are (and nearly always have
been) very well armed. The dominant social
pressures pushed them to possess the most
powerful weapons available and flaunt them
conspicuously. It is, and was, virtually
unknown for anyone to be banished for
having lethal weaponry. They might have
been banished for using it (or threatening
to use it) against a high-status member of
the society.

> > > I still see your scenario as tail wagging the dog. Your objection to
> > > climate/environmental forcing seems strange to me. I can't even begin
> > > to make sense of this. It (climate/environmental forcing) seems so
> > > obvious to me.
> >
> > Climate change happens too fast to
> > allow for any possibility of evolutionary
> > adaptation.
>
> Surreal.

You've initiated a drastic form of the
'McGinnian Death Spiral' very early.
It's not easy to get much smaller than
seven-letter word.

Of course, I've made this point before
with no response from you. I suppose
the spiral gets faster over time.

> The reason I call your thinking tails wagging the dog is that there is
> nothing about it that indicates why it couldn't have happened anywhere
> from 20 to 3 mya.

It needed reasonably advanced 'chimps'
They were probably not around until
at least 10 mya. Then it required a happy
coincidence of circumstances and a lot of
trial and error. We'd expect one or two
million years; and ten or twenty might
not be surprising. Three or four million
years seems to me about right for that.

> There is no greater cause with your scenario.

There does not need to be.

> You'd
> just have us believe that, suddenly, they started acting more human.

They got isolated on an island, through
a rise in eustatic sea levels, in large
enough numbers for a healthy population,
but where the island was too small for
large predators, and they started using
tools and weapons, in a manner not
unlike that of modern chimps, but in much
more favourable circumstances.

> You make little or no effort to link it to a greater cause.

There's no need to do so whatsoever.
Are you thinking there should be
something like Alien Invasions?
Or the Hand of God?

> In my
> scenario the greater cause is dry season of monsoon habitat that
> emerged very suddently at 8.1 mya and continues to this day with
> hominids thriving in exactly the locations predicted by this model,
> India, and south China.

Bad thinking. What happens to any
population of medium-large mammals
when the weather changes?

Your answer -- and that of standard-PA :
"It takes at least 10,000 years (and 500
generations) to adapt to the change".


Paul.


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