On Friday, May 26, 2017 at 10:29:57 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> On 5/26/17 6:59 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> > On Friday, May 26, 2017 at 10:19:53 AM UTC-4, The Incredibly Lucky JTEM wrote:
> >> Peter Nyikos wrote:
> >>
> >>> So I am here to tell you: the insistence on formulations like
> >>> "men are apes" and "birds are dinosaurs" as opposed to
> >>> "...descended from..." is pure ideology
> >>
> >> I explained it all here:
> >>
> >>
http://jtem.tumblr.com/post/962773160
> >
> > It's cute, but Harshman is almost completely satire-proof.
> Yep, those creationists sure can come up with the knee-slappers.
What creationists? JTEM denies being one, and you have yet to
produce evidence that he is one, or even to reply to his post
where he denied being one -- in direct reply to you, no less.
Now, if I were to do a satire on you, I'd go the whole hog,
e.g. "Harshman is an ocean of prebiotic soup consisting of
a variety of organic compounds, including amino acids and nucleotides."
Or: "Harshman, by his own standards, is a protocell using mostly
nucleotide-chain enzymes rather than protein enzymes, whereas
I am a human descended from such protocells and, much more
recently, from apes."
Now those are REAL knee-slappers. :-)
> > He's quite happy with saying birds are fish, and humans
> > are fish. He even said he's looking forward to the day when
> > children watching "The Incredible Mr. Limpet" will be either
> > puzzled or amused when the main character (played by Don Knotts,
> > perhaps best know for his "Barney Fife" role) says, "More than
> > anything else, I wish I were a fish."
> > The amused ones will "know" that Barney is only wanting to
> > become a non-tetrapod fish. Some budding paleontologists
> > among them would even figure out that he really wanted
> > to be a non-Sarcopterygian fish, after seeing the kind of
> > fish he became.
>
> He wanted to be an Actinopterygian. Is that so hard to say?
Are you sure he didn't become a stem Osteichthyan? What sorts of
apomorphies of Actinopterygii did the transformed Mr. Limpet have?
<snip digression about Beetle Bailey>
> >> Actually, if you really think about it we've got
> >> it backwards. It makes far more sense to begin
> >> here, in the present, and project backwards in time.
> >>
> >> For example...
> >>
> >> You're a human, so your great great great
> >> grandfathers were humans as well. And their
> >> great great great great grandfathers were human...
> >> as were their great great great great grandfathers...
> >>
> >> On & on & on.
> >>
> >> Why not claim that, as we are human, everyone &
> >> everything in our line -- as far back as we can
> >> possibly go (including the fossil record) -- is
> >> also human?
> >
> > Bite your tongue, JTEM! You're sounding like a creationist. :-)
>
> Comes the dawn.
Quite the seasoned propagandist, aren't you? Your wording is designed
to lull the skeptical faculties of your readers to sleep where the
straightforward "Actually he IS a creationist" would almost invite
a request for evidence.
Anyway, please take this as a request for evidence or at least for
a direct reply to JTEM's post where he issued his denial.
> >> The online fakers honestly don't know the difference
> >> between "Fact" and "Convention." Is it any wonder
> >> that the same "People" can't move past a headline &
> >> into the details of a story?
> >
> >>
http://jtem.tumblr.com/post/962773160
> >
> > In a more slightly more serious vein, did you see the quotes that
> > show these PlosOne reseachers are on our side? Especially this one:
>
> What do you mean "our side"? JTEM is a creationist.
As if you didn't know that "our side" is on the issue of "humans are apes"
vs. "humans are descended from apes."
> > "Graecopithecus is not an ape. He is a member of the tribe of
> > hominins and the direct ancestor of homo."
> > [attributed to Professor Nikolai Spassov, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences]
>
> Elsewhere you have noticed that science journalism isn't the most
> accurate source of quotes. Who knows if that's what Spassov actually said?
It makes little difference, because the four-author paper he
co-authored in PlosOne has passages such as the following:
The inter-genus variability among extant great apes is low, but large
between great apes and humans.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0177127
> > Now that I've seen that the PlosOne paper uses "hominins" in the same
> > way, and that many if most other paleoanthropologists use it in the
> > same way, I no longer doubt the authenticity of the quote.
>
> What do you mean by "the same way"?
As meaning what is unambiguously defined as "stem Homo".
> > I wonder
> > whether Harshman will stick to his guns and say, "He's wrong,
> > Graecopithecus IS an ape and so are we."
>
> Of course I will. Why shouldn't I?
Fancy that: earlier you were accusing me of "hijacking this thread"
by bringing up this very issue, only wrt John Hawks instead of
Spassov. And now you are enthusiastically going along with this
re-hijacking while ignoring the latest post I did on the original
topic of the thread.
Was that earlier accusation anything more than polemical opportunism?
> Note, by the way, that the
> creationists are pushing for the paraphyletic meaning, rather than the
> cladistic one you would prefer.
What creationists? You haven't even made a case for JTEM being one,
nor have you even hinted at who any others might be.
And where do you get off using "you would prefer"? The cladistic meaning
has "apes are humans," which I do NOT prefer.
> That's because it's cladistic
> definitions, not the paraphyletic ones, that actually point up
> evolution, the reverse of your beliefs.
Have you gone bananas? "Humans are descended from apes" explicitly
points up evolution, as does the very meaning of "paraphyletic".
OTOH "Humans are apes" is like saying "Humans are mammals," and laymen
think of the latter as being a matter of shared characters. And so
they can take the former as being that kind of statement too.
As for your so-called "phylogenetic trees," you had to go to tortuous
lengths to attempt to disqualify mountains from being the subject of
phylogenetic trees despite there being no evolutionary history
behind such phylogenetic trees.
And nobody but you thinks your efforts at disqualification were
successful, AFAIK. I certainly do not.
Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Math. -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos/