Re: Jane Goodall notes

On Mar 20, 1:32 pm, claudiusd...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Mar 18, 9:13 pm, "caldervang...@xxxxxxxxx"





<caldervang...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mar 16, 2:34 pm, claudiusd...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Mar 13, 7:54 pm, "caldervang...@xxxxxxxxx"
<caldervang...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mar 13, 10:38 am, claudiusd...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

On Mar 11, 7:31 pm, "caldervang...@xxxxxxxxx"

<caldervang...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Saw Jane Goodall speak last Saturday night in Washington DC to a group
of educators, mostly about her program called Roots and Shoots.

I find her to be sweet, humble, smart.  A great lady & all women
scientists owe her some gratitude.

Her speech was grand.  Impassioned.  Entertaining.  Touching.
Factual.  It is probably somewhat of a "canned" speech, but so what?
I had not heard it yet....

I took notes.  I only have one line that is a direct quote, but here
goes:

Her mother was with her in the first 4 months of her work in Gombi, in
1960.  Louis Leakey helped get her started, and the both of them were
considered "crazy" at the time to send a woman off into the forest on
her own.

she saw chimps buiding nests in groups and on their own.

Dinosaurs and birds build nests.  So this is no great revelation..

I agree.  However, compare and contrast that with gorilla nest
building....

And what . . . ?

no time to respond to this one... i have to be up in a few hours and
am not yet sleeping... perhaps it would be a good new thread.  would
still like to get a thread going about language...we haven't had one
of those in a while.

She (of
course... all of us in sap know this) saw chimps using tools....

Lots of animals use tools in one respect or another.  It's silly to
suggest that chimpanzee tool usage tells us anything about how chimps
evolved in to humans.

I don't quite follow your reasoning here.  

But you do concede that you have no dispute with the veracity of my
assertion.  Right?

well, right.  

Good.

However, you and Paul should love this one.  A well-
documented case of "standard PA" getting its' *** kicked.  Today, it
sin't about the tool usage, per se, but about the idea that Goodall's
observation shook things up a bit.  

You keep repeating this over and over again.

(but remember:  we did NOT evolve
from chimps.)

Semantics.







Meanwhile, humans did not
evolve from chimps.  We evolved from a common ancestor.  Small words;
big difference.

Irrelevant semantics.

not irrelevant to those many many hours that PA people have spent
challenging the creationists about "evolving from a monkey."  We share
a common ancestor with the chimps, and that LCA may or may not have
been similar to a modern day chimp.  I have often thought, by the way,
that we have a lot in common with bonobos, to whom we are equi-
distantly related with the other chimp species.

Goodall gets credit for "shaking up" what you and Paul would call
"standard PA."  This was no small feat, and she did it quite
scientifically.  Clear and thorough field notes.  Astute
observation.

I suppose.

even
stripping the leaves off twigs & to use that twig to fish out
termites.  This observation revolutionized our place in nature..... we
were at that time defined as humans at least in part by our ability to
use tools.

chimps have a whole series of gestures, and use them in the same
way(s) that humans do.

Chimps have their first child at about 13 years old, and then another
one every 5 or 6 years.  The bond between the mother and child gets
even stronger after the younger sibling is born.  A long childhood is
important to social learning -- like us -- and a young chimpanzee will
pay careful attention to to the behaviour of an adult IF he is
interested in the behaviour.

"our brain has had an explosion."  .... what caused our explosion?
She thinks it is
"this sophisticated language."

She's largely correct about this.  It's our ability to conceptualize
and understand the long-term value of resources so that we can work in
concert to maintain these resources and survive the dry season and its
very dramatic predatory/competitive factors.

Isn't there a long period, from 6 mya to 3 mya, when our presumptive
ancestors did not have a large brain?

Yes.  And it might have even been longer.  (However cranio endo-casts
suggest an expanded neocortex for A'pith which is consistent with the
existence of social behaviors.)

yes, right.  and social behaviors are quite widespread in the
mammals.

Hominids are the most communal and communally territorialistic species
ever known to exist.

heck.  Bees are social.

Yeah, so?

I do hear you though about your
scenario requiring a group effort to fend off predators.

Like everybody else you only hear what you want to hear.  My scenario
does not propose the dimwitted notion that hominids evolved as part of
a "group effort to fend off predators."  In fact such a strategy would
have been perfectly worthless against the large, social predators
indicated in my hypothesis.  My scenario involves them using a group
effort to maintain resources on a daily basis in their communal
territory (see my hypothesis for details).  Their main opponents were
other large food competitors.  By doing this the avoided the dry-
season predatory siege/massacres that I theorized were a regular part
of the ecology in their monsoon/savanna climate/environment.

Jim it can be a bit exasperating to converse with you, but that's
okay. I am equally obtuse when I am tired or in a hurry, which,
unfortunately, is most of the teeny bit of time that I get to read
sap.

I am "hearing" what you are saying. I don't "hear" much difference
between being territorial and fending off predators? or, being
territorial and preserving resources as a community? The semantics
ARE important, at least in the scientific community, where exact words
and descriptions are the very things that we seek. In fact, that is
the beauty of math, which is integral to most science. It can be
precisely measured and repeated.

I have read large portions of your scenario. a few summary words
would be:
dry season
migrations
invaded territories
massacres
loss of resources to in-migration
new predators
LCA becomes prey
prey becomes territorial
group defense


and, so pardon me on this one, but I thought you MEANT to say
something like
" the dimwitted notion that hominids evolved as part of
a "group effort to fend off predators." "

I am one of the few people in sap that freely admits to NOT having a
scenario, or agenda to push. I ADMIT that I don't know how we
"evolved from the monkeys."
<smile> I want to learn and therefore, for some dimwitted reason, I
read sap.
--calder




(although it could be argued
that we were smart without the added grey matter from 3 mya to the
present, but then what purpose does the added grey matter have?).

Yes.  You are absolutely right.  This is the right question.

the flores discoveries shed a little light on this too.  small brains
with human behavior.  humans.

No it didn't.





I guess what i don't understand, have never understood about, your
scenario, is the interaction between climate change, brain growth and
the known fossil record.  Do all these factors actually add up?

I concur that my scenario does not explain the emergence of the
hominid cultural behaviors and their associated grey matter.  It does,
however, set the stage for such an explanation.

Although I've discussed it before in this forum, this part of my
theoretical thinking is so complicated and so potentially
controversial that I am avoiding it now.

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