Re: David Attenborough reporting chimp wading (and supporting a waterside model for human evolution)

On Jun 27, 3:55 pm, Algis Kuliukas <al...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jun 27, 11:49 am, rmacfarl <rmacf...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Yes but you want to put the apes in gallery forests, surrounded by
savannah, seasonally flooded to waist depth, and apparently with no
trees along the edge. It doesn't add up. Forests that are flooded most
of the time are called "rainforests" and tend to have a continuous
canopy, which means that there is no reason for the arboreal apes to
come down and wade around in the water.

Your just-so story just isn't.

That's a misrepresentation, Ross, and you know it. I understand that
you've got to keep wilfully misunderstanding what I'm arguing because
the alternative is clearly too onerous for you - to admit you are
wrong.


No, it is not a misrepresentation. It is an accurate representation of
your own argument, as you have permitted it to evolve, even if you
don't understand it yourself. One by one you have introduced each of
these ridiculous corollaries to your cherished bipedal wading
hypothesis: waist-deep, in the gallery forest, and then with no handy
trees along the edge. Those are your corollaries, not my psychological
projections.

Gallery forests - i.e places where there are fewer tress than
rainforest (i.e. no continuous canopy with the outside edge more open
and the centre a river or lake) and places that flood, are clearly
habitats where an ancestor of ours would have to get down from the
trees regularly and, during the rainy seasons, have to move through
shallow water. They'd do so bipedally more than when they weren't
flooded.

Do you even know what the accepted definition of a gallery forest is?

http://dictionary.weather.net/dictionary/gallery%20forest
a forest growing along a watercourse in a region otherwise devoid of
trees

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallery_forest
Gallery forests are evergreen forests that form as corridors along
rivers or wetlands and project into landscapes that are otherwise only
sparsely treed such as savannas, grasslands or deserts... the boundary
between gallery forest and the surrounding woodland or grassland is
usually very abrupt, with the ecotone being only a few metres [2]


Savannahs are subject to seasonal rainfall - that;s why they're called
savannahs and not deserts. No-one is saying they flooded "most of the
time." Although, as Potts (1998) showed, there are likely to have been
cycles of high rainfall in the Pliocene where perhaps these gallery
forests were innundated for years, overall, they'd have been quite dry
most of the year. I'm not disputing that. The point is that as forests
give way to savannahs the trees do not disperse randomly but shrink
closer to permanent water courses.

This is actually EXACTLY in tune with the orthodox savannah paradigm.
John Kingdon wrote a whole book on the basis of human ancestors
evolving in East African gallery forests. No-one has a problem with
that normally but introduce the dreaded 'a' factor and all hell breaks
loose.

The reason why "all hell breaks loose" is that you try to base your
wet-ape interpretations of the putative hominids behaviour, and the
resultant direction of their evolution, on this extremely tenuous link
to seasonal flooding, and reject a priori any alternative explanation
that involves them exploiting any other obvious niche in case it
involves the dreaded "s" word.

You've been given your chance to produce something that looks like
evidence to support this wading scenario. I gave you a chance, and
wished you well with it, about 5 years ago. History and the PhD
committee at UWA have told the tale.

Gallery forests flood. It's a fact. It means that at certain
times of the year our ancestors would have been more compelled to move
bipedally than if there were no flooding. It helps. What's wrong with
that?


Our ancestors would not have been "compelled" to do any such thing at
any time of the year. Your hypothesis is a just-so story that, as I
said, just isn't.



Not it f@#$ing doesn't. Wild apes wade quadrupedally in water as
shallow as you observed at Planckendael all the time. You know this.

Because they were searching through the mud for food. If I were
searching for a coin I'd dropped in the grass I wouldn't do so
bipedally, I'd get down on my hands and knees - and I'm an obligate
biped.

Wrong.

Hohmann and Fruth, Current Anthropology, Volume 44,
Number 4, August–October 2003.
"Forage wade. During the dry season, males and females of all ages
walk quadrupedally along streambeds for up to an hour, stopping now
and then to search through the matrix of rotten leaves and soil for
insect larvae and small Crustacea..."

They were quadrupedal all the time, but were only stopping to forage
"now and then". So your hand-waving attempt to dismiss this data is
based on a false premise.


Even wet ground was one of Jane Goodall's top four behavioural
contexts for bipedalism.

What were the other 3? [Never mind, I see you answered that below...]

Unless they are specifically searching for
stuff on the ground (or under it) they're much more likely to be
bipedal in water than on dry land.

They're much more likely to be on dry land than in the water. (Even
when there's a moat.)

In WAIST deep water they have no
choice. You are just in denial.

Ooh, the irony...


Jesus H Fuckmeister, you are so predictable. You just let your
emotional attachment to the aquatic idea run away with yourself, over
and over and over again.

You're the one getting emotional here, not me, Ross. I think you have
made such an emotional commitment to proving this thing wrong - like
Jim Moore, no doubt - you've got to see it through now.

You know, this is one of your really annoying habits. Like so many
aspects of your personality, I find myself vacillating between blaming
it on deliberate trolling and your complete absence of personal
awareness.

Allow me to point out to you that, like the ad hominem stream, you
initiated the emotional invective in this thread, not me. "You believe
what the *** you want to believe", etc.You then wait for the other
person to respond ~in kind~, and then accuse them of being emotional
or making ad hominem attacks.

It's the same tactic you use to wave away, and then later ignore,
substantive criticisms of your hypothesising. It was this tendency
above all that derailed your discussion with Jason Eshleman, and
allowed you to continue your self-delusion that your arguments had
carried the day.

Well you're
going to have a very frustrating time because this waterside thing is
clearly right to a large degree. I suggest you re-evaluate your
objections, take a step back and see the bigger picture. Maybe you
should read 'Scars of evolution' - the penultimate chapter is
wonderful. Have you read it?

Yes I have read it. I have also read The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis,
Morgan's ineffectual 1997 attempt to address the substantive
criticisms she was by then encountering on sci.anthropology.paleo.
Suffice to say I am not convinced. Nor are Zihlman, Langdon, Smith et
al. But perhaps 0.37% of your paleoanthropological peer group are.

....

Even the chimps in the Attenborough doco showed that they waded
in waist deep water - all of them were moving bipedally no matter what
the depth. If you can't even accept clear cut video evidence like that
what hope is there?

It is only clear cut evidence that chimps can wade bipedally in waist-
deep water, which is hardly surprising.


Your "simple, satisfying explanation" is not simple, and satisfies ~no
one~ but you.

Clearly a lot of people are determined not to be satisfied. Like much
of the scientific comunity when Darwin published, Origins - instead of
being impressed many  were determined to find tedious objections.

1) Poster states that their hypothesis is as revolutionary as Darwin's/
Huxley's/Einstein's/Newton's/Bohr's/Pauli's /etc.'s hypothesis (pick
any famous dead scientist), but the poster cannot provide any concrete
testable predictions of their own hypothesis (+ 20 points).*

24) Favorable comparison of oneself to Galileo; claims that the
Inquisition is hard at work on ones case, etc..(+40 points)*

http://home.thegrid.net/~lllove/net-loon_index.html

Like
most anthropologists when Dart announced A africanus, rather than
accept the facts as presented they had to imagine it was something
else.

Ironic that you're now invoking the wet-apers' favourite bete noire to
try to support your case...

Like geologists when Wegener proposed continental drift, rather
than accept the parsimony of the explanation, they had to claim that
all his evidence was not really evidence, just a series of
coincidences. And so it goes on... when will people learn not to sneer
at new ideas?

When the new ideas turn out to be good ideas?


Hardy will be seen in the same light as these people one day - it's
only a matter of time. It would be comical that there are always
people like you defending the old faith right up into the last minute
when the whole facade of authority comes crumbing down - it WOULD BE,
if it were not so frustrating for people like me on the vanguard of
change.

"Vanguard of change"? You??
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/delusions+of+grandeur

....


I do not attack you individually, Ross, not like you regularly attack
me anyway.

You gutless, spineless, two-faced liar! Jesus, you've got a hide!

Don't try to hide behind some spurious excuse of "collective mindset".
This is me you're arguing with, and I can damn well think for myself.
You try and bracket me with some great collective that are all wrong,
devious and conspiratorial, then you accuse me of being wrong, devious
and conspiratorial, and I reserve the right to take it personally.

I attack your arguments individually because they're your arguments,
and they're bad arguments. I attack you personally when you behave
like an arsehole, which you do more often than your reasonable, good-
natured persona would care to admit to itself.

I attack the field of anthropology and a collective mindset
in lots of people that bizarrely seem compelled to defend authority.
It is a form of tribalism.

Paranoiac bull***.


No, the medium does not compel the bipedalism, because the bonobos do
walk bipedally out of the water, more often than in, and because if it
wasn't for the floating food they wouldn't go into the water at all.

So what? The study showed that if they lived in a flooded habitat
they'd clearly move bipedally almost all the time.

You don't have a scenario where they live in a flooded habitat "almost
all the time".


See how easy it is to make sweeping interpretations based on a few
minor facts? No? I'm not surprised.

Observations. Facts. 2% bipedal on land. 92% in water. Get over it.

Observations. Facts. 99.63% on land. 0.37% in water. Get used to it.


Because that isn't what happens, and you haven't succeeded in doing
that.

It would be what happenned [apes 100% bipedal in a tank of waist deep
water] if it was ever done. Do you deny it? What would they do? Fly?
or suddenly learn to swim? Would YOU swim in a tank of waist deep
water? Forever? See, it's the simplest point. It's undeniable and yet
you have to keep denying it.  WHY?

In the words of your great mate, repeating imbecilities doesn't make
them true.


....


See how you have to make it all binary. You tacitly accept that waist
deep water would compel bipedalism here - but not in the paragraph
above. (You've never had the honesty to concede even that much openly)
and yet in "non-waist-deep" water you somehow imagine it's suddenly
very different. You cling to your precious citation reporting that
bonobos searching for food in mud in 20cm of water move quadrupedally
but ignore my study and others like Myers Thompson's report that shows
it is anything but binary.


What's binary is trying to create a false dilemma that says "if I can
prove that apes waded bipedally, I can prove that's how bipedalism
first evolved." You try to build up an umbrella hypothesis that arises
from a single premise. But there are a whole lot of points at which
this hypothesis doesn't stand up to scrutiny. (I could point out that
there is a logical fallacy called a "slippery slope", but that would
just send you off on another tangent.)

Suffice it to make these points:

- You haven't made the case that the apes ever needed to go in the
water.
- Even if you could place apes in the water, you can't make them walk
bipedally.
- Even if you could make them walk bipedally in the water, you don't
create a viable niche for them there, or a reason why they evolved
~obligate~ bipedalism.

- And last but definitely not least, even if you could make the case
for a bipedal wader, you haven't made the case for your treasured
aquatic ape, and you certainly haven't made any of the pseudoscience
of swimming, diving, hairless, fat-insulated, buoyant, dense-boned,
snorkel-nosed cliff diving nonsense into a viable alternative to a
(non-existent) paleoanthropological "orthodoxy".

You think there is a "distinction" when there isn't really. It's a
continuum. In neck deep water - 100% bipedalism. In chest deep water -
100% bipedalism, in wasit deep water - 100% bipedalism.

The distinction is in the ability to create a viable niche from the
behaviour.

In hip deep
water - what then? 100% quadrupedalism? d'ya reckon? and at all depths
below that - 100% quadrupedalism? You've got to be kidding. In
shallower depths clearly the compulsion to move bipedally is not
absolute - but it's still far MORE than on dry land.

Only in your biased, selective interpretation of the evidence.


I remind you, again, (and maybe you won't snip it out this time)
Goodall's pioneering study even listed WET GROUND as one of her top
THREE (I was wrong, not four - see citation below) behavioural
contexts for bipedalism. If they are more likely to move bipedally on
wet ground than on dry ground don't you think it's kind of bleeding
obvious that they'd be even more likely to move bipedally in a shallow
stream.

Yeah, well I deliberately slid over this particular throwaway because
it is yet another of your red herring arguments.

Firstly, wet ground is not waist-deep water. So this random fact does
nothing to support your purported evolutionary mechanism.

Secondly, you provide no information as to what the chimps were doing
when they stood up (in the same way that you ignore what the
Planckendael bonobos were doing when they went in the water).

Thirdly, you don't consider whether the other 2 top reasons that
chimps stand upright could furnish evidence in favour of alternative
hypotheses for the origin of bipedalism. All you see is the word
"wet".


“Chimpanzees frequently stand upright in order to look over long grass
or other vegetation. Sometimes a branch or tree trunk is held with one
hand, but often both arms hang down at the animal's sides. These apes
frequently walk bipedally for short distances: (i) whilst moving
through long grass when looking for an unusual object of searching for
a companion,

Isn't there a hypothesis among the "30 odd published so-called
Darwinist ideas of hominin bipedal origins" that relates to standing
up to see over the grass, for example to spot predators?

(ii) when it is raining hard and the ground is wet and

.... which doesn't sound like "waist-deep wading" to me...

(iii) when carrying food in one or both hands.” Van Lawick-Goodall
(1968:177)

Hmm, food-carrying - anyone ever suggested that as a bipedalism
hypothesis?


Van Lawick-Goodall, J (1968). The Behaviour of Free-living Chimpanzees
in the Gombe Stream Reserve. Animal Behaviour Monographs Vol:1(3)
Pages:161-311

Hypocrisy noted. You were the one who started the ad hominems in this
thread, as you are 92% of the time when you're talking to me. Self-
delusion also noted.

When have I ever given a personal attack on this thread since my
return a few weeks ago? I have been determined not to slip into that
kind of behaviour. You, in contrast, have attacked me personally in
practically every posting.

As noted above, you hand out back-handed ad hominems indiscriminately.
I can live with that. What I can't live with is you denying that I
should construe these as anything other than an attack on me when you
explicitly trot them out in response to my criticisms of your
"hypothesis". And I reserve the right to give as good as I get.

You trot out the ad hominems as fast as just about anyone. You just
choose the coward's way to do it.


My comment was in response to the ridiculous claim, which you snipped,
that your hypothesis is the "only only one that maps, almost exactly
onto human walking". That statement does not qualify as a "simple,
observable, repeatable fact", so your accusation is an ad hominem lie.
Shame.

So you think the idea that wading maps almost exactly onto human
walking  is a "ridiculous claim", do you? Really? Why's that? If
wading doesn't map onto walking , what form of locomotion does?
Wading, in very shallow water IS walking.

See? Now you're lying again, you weasel. Your scenario is not about
wading "in very shallow water", it's about "waist-deep" water, which
as you know does not map "almost exactly onto human walking".

Shallow water does not guarantee bipedalism, and is in any case no
different to terrestrial bipedalism.


"an ad hominem lie"?  - please, Ross, calm down and get real for a
minute.

A lie it was (deliberate or otherwise), which you have now compounded.
And since you followed it up with the accusation that I "clearly just
don't like being wrong", an ad hominem it was too...

Ross Macfarlane
.

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