Venus of Willendorf
Can you say “breast implants”? Standard of beauty same as 30,000 years ago. That is more than 1,000 generations of NO “evolution”!
When no one can address their “fitness” function – because there is no such thing as a “fitness” function – it’s clear that “evolution” is dead in the water and nothing more needs to be added to disprove the failed hypothesis. And yet proponents never learn. Still, shooting the Darwinist fish in a barrel is fun. Enjoy.
- Sexual selection tries to explain sexual dimorphism and more. According to the theory, certain conspicuous physical traits, such as pronounced coloration, increased size, or striking adornments have “evolved” through sexual selection. The selecting sex often displays similar but subdued ornaments, indicating a sort of sexual selection leak from the selected to the selecting if the theory is true. Sexual selection is independent and often in conflict with “natural selection” when the sexually selected traits appear detrimental to general survival of the species. The extinct Irish Elk Deer is the standard example of detrimental sexual selection.
- At least two incompatible mating behaviors have been randomly grouped under “sexual selection”. One is “select the display”, while the other is “fight for mating rights”. The first one looks somewhat like selection. In the second case the dominant male mates indiscriminately, so there is no selection of the female and the female cannot turn down the dominant male, so there is no selection there either. Other schemes are “save the sperm” and “adopt a male”, both of which are not associated with any selection.
- Sexual selection would be just “natural selection” if such thing existed, contrary to Darwin’s contrived distinction. Fighting males for instance do not give females any choice. The “better fit” simply has more offspring by force. The female, predator, pray, parasites, community, and the environment in general, they all “select” the “best fit” whatever that means. If sexual selection were true, then there were also be predator selection as well as pray, parasite, community, kin, and so on ad infinitum selection, all conflicting with each other. Or to sum, no “natural selection”. No wonder Alfred Russel Wallace thought the idea of sexual selection as a driving force in “evolution” crazy.
- There is no sexual selection distinct from ‘Attraction to Universal Beauty’. Our tastes differ from bugs to humans in large part due to sensory limitations. But otherwise we all have the same standards of beauty. All organisms are intrigued by shapes, colors, contrasts, movements, sounds. We like other beautiful organism and inanimate objects. The cat likes the mouse and the mouse appreciates the cat’s beauty. Just as humans like both the dangerous lion and the cute, tasty pig. And everyone finds everyone’s babies more attractive. What animals like in one another is hard to tease due to their limited communication, but humans like the peacock as the peahen does, the lion as the lioness, the butterfly, the puppy, kitten, dragonfly, cricket, pup seal, cub bear, and many, many more as their own kind do. We can’t even get enough of the ugliest – pug dog, sphynx cat, lizards, snakes, vultures, and more – devoting much to bring them near us. And if we humans like them all, they would probably appreciate each other too across all species, were it not for fear, sensory and intelligence limitations. ”At least humans are not sexually attracted to animals” would be the counterargument. Would any human have sex with a peacock? A rabbit?? A cat, bat, fish (well, mermaid)??? Oh no, they would… as erotic animal costumes show. What a shame!
- Contrary to sexual selection that is expected to drift randomly, the standards of beauty remain essentially unchanged. Consider an “evolutionary” proto-bird. Million of years later, suppose the proto-bird split due to random events and various environments into the many bird species we see today. Then – to take one example – the current beautiful peacock is just the product of a series of random events and of its own female’s search for beauty. There is nothing in its current environment that demands that particular look. And why exactly is the peahen so desperate for that particular look? She isn’t. There is nothing in her little skull, genes, environment, or anywhere else that demands that particular look. She is only intrigued by beauty like the rest of us. Any beauty, not just the standard peacock beauty. If some peacock decides to build a beautiful bower (not suddenly, just amassing shiny objects in a first gen) or another peacock finds his voice, another becomes more protective, or goes for a modern look, she’s liable to fall for that new fellow and change the course of peafowl history. Which in the end turns out to be no different than random. So why does the peacock look the way he does? Just random. Why do all dimorphic birds look and behave as they do? Just random. Why the lion’s mane, the woman’s breasts and on and on? Random again and again. Yet the “just random” Darwinist reply does not work as “easy come, easy go” – “random come, random go” whereas the standards of beauty remain essentially unchanged. As Venus of Willendorf shows, the human standard of beauty has not changed in at least 30,000 years or 1,000 generations, these days aided by breast and buttock implants. A hypothesized trend (“evolution”) that doesn’t budge for that long cannot be a real trend.
- Whatever happens to organisms is outside their control, hence sexual selection cannot shape organisms as Darwin imagined. The peahen is not responsible in the slightest for the peacock’s plumage. Even if it had an objective, the “selecting” sex has no means to get to that objective. The best example of what selection can do and cannot do is breeding. Human breeders indeed have the long term targets and the best technology available. Yet all they can do is fragile deformed variants of the wild that require a lot to survive and propagate and that under no circumstance will “diverge” into new “species”. Contrast that with the “selecting” bird. Why is she having sex? She doesn’t know. What is she looking for? She doesn’t know… whatever her beauty instinct tells her. She doesn’t read, write, or talk. Cannot correlate the beauty seen to underlying health of her peer. Doesn’t know she will have offspring, let alone how to improve their lot… if she even cares. We know all these because we, the humans, are also automatons with regard to our descendants. We know very little and can influence almost nothing. Countless number of parents hope for more from their children, yet are badly disappointed. Where are the descendants of famous rulers, scientists, artists, and athletes? Nowhere in particular. They all regressed to the mean. And it is even worse for some of those afflicted by “reason” as they decide to “save the planet” by not even having any offspring at all.
- Incorrect assumptions drive the confused “evolution through sexual selection” narrative: that the selection has a direction – without a direction, there is no output different than random; that the selected passes most of his characteristics to the progeny – this disregards regression to the mean as well as the contribution of the other parent, meaning the selector; that the phenotype is entirely encoded in the genotype – if this were the case, we would be able to control 100% of the phenotype by changing the genome, but it’s clear that’s not possible even theoretically; that successive mutations can accomplish anything as long as sexual selection guides the output – this is clearly false as breeding shows when comparing the robustness of crossbreeds with the feebleness of purebreds. Of course Darwin was clueless about genetics. But even with our current best knowledge of genetics – knowledge that the selecting sex completely lacks – it is not clear what sexual selection accomplishes, given that the Y chromosome is just a very small percentage of the genome. After all, offspring inherit both lineages regardless of sex. So if the male progeny is attractive like the male parent (a positive), that may be offset by both the male and female offspring becoming more attractive to the predator too (two negatives). For instance, in some peafowl, even the peahen has some conspicuous blue streaks that cannot help her camouflage.
- In conclusion, “evolution” by sexual selection is one confused mess because:
- The distinction between sexual selection and “natural selection” (if such thing existed) is contrived
- Incompatible mating behaviors are incorrectly grouped under the same banner
- Attraction to Universal Beauty is what is incorrectly interpreted as sexual selection
- The standard of beauty is essentially unchanged contrary to the Darwinist narrative
- Whatever happens to organisms is outside their control, hence sexual selection cannot shape organisms as Darwin imagined
- Darwin’s sexual selection hypothesis is based on a number of incorrect and ignorant assumptions
Links:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/224257/the-evolution-of-beauty-by-richard-o-prum/
https://www.britannica.com/science/sexual-selection
https://www.treehugger.com/ugliest-animals-on-the-planet-4869328
https://www.amazon.com/peacock-costumes-women/s?k=peacock+costumes+for+women
https://www.amiclubwear.com/costume-animal.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_chromosome
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Willendorf#/media/File:Venus_of_Willendorf_-_All_sides.jpg
You don’t half spend a lot of time on things you believe are wrong. All your talk here is about evolution, all your site is about evolution. Why don’t you spend more time on whatever your alternative is? Do some experiments, write a paper?
The reality is people prefer a faulty explanation to none at all.
After all, faults can be corrected. Explanations can improve.
Whereas the trouble with nothing is that it is always nothing and never can improve. Zero plus Zero remains Zero.
And that’s what you’ve offered as an alternative to Evolution. Nothing.
So unless and until you proffer an alternative then Evolution will be the default.
So why does the peacock look the way he does?
nonlin don’t know.
Why do all dimorphic birds look and behave as they do?
nonlin can’t say.
Keep asking your questions. Eventually the lack of answers your position provides will be noticed, even by you.
Still waiting for that alternative to Evolution……
OP boils down to “I don’t like the idea of sexual selection”. Fair enough but then, as OM says, offer a better explanation for what we observe. Let’s see a model that fits the facts more accurately.
But I seem to recall that nonlin has decided on the “poof” theory for everything, from evolution to creation to cosmology to math. And you gotta admit, it’s an efficient theory – it explains everything, it’s fully satisfactory, it can never be demonstrated to be wrong. And you can close your eyes, spin three times, point at random, and you will ALWAYS be pointing at something that was poofed. There is certainly no shortage of evidence.
And you can’t even argue that there’s no way to test it, since the poof theory is tested not by observation or any sort of instrumentation, but by sheer consensus among believers. It’s an impressive theory, truly compatible with the time-honored “Making Shit Up”.
Hey Alan,
I don’t recall a question mark in the title. Better check with me next time. Also, I wrote the intro specifically for the front page. I wonder why you chose to hide it…
1. Not really. 2. Done. 3. And done. Was even discussed here, at TSZ.
As if there was nothing before and after “evolution”. A quick glance at the history book can cure that ignorance.
Whereas you do know and can say?!? Go on. I’m listening.
It’s not about more or less accurate. It’s about a demonstrably bad model (“evolution”). There’s no justification for holding on to something known to be false.
Quoting the OP
I actually agree with this. Natural, artificial, and sexual selection are all the same process. They are all selection with respect to the niche and the only difference is the niche environment.
PS and nothing prevents all aspects of selection acting in parallel.
Happy to discuss moderation issues in the appropriate thread.
Nonsense. Scientific models are all wrong but some are useful. The degree of accuracy is what matters. If a model makes useful predictions it will continue to be used. Newton’s laws of motion still work in most situations.
And there I was, imagining that we’ve finally got rid of this … “contributor.”
And here I am, noticing that the “contributor” doesn’t learn from mistakes. Well, cannot realize that they’re mistakes, like something I read recently, what was that?
Ah! Found it.
Amazing how well this applies to the writer of the OP. Though “criminal” and “criminally” should be substituted for something else … right?
Ugh! I gave this OP a superficial look, and it’s as wrong as any other OP by the same author. Why am I even surprised that the author claims that sexual selection is wrong because the organisms have no control over what happens to them? A more convolutedly wrong concept of sexual selection cannot be imagined, but you can find it if you read further into this OP.
Seriously!
P.S. As usual, I don’t expect the author to clarify anything, since the poor lad thinks that everything he writes is superb and clear as water, though he later forgets what he wrote and starts contradicting his own OPs.
I disagree. I think this is some of his best stuff yet. The bit about universal beauty — “the mouse appreciates the cat’s beauty” reaches new depths of wrongness not previously plumbed.
Appreciate the multiple layers of wrongness laid down there, man.
“Of course Darwin was clueless about genetics”.
Not the only one, Sonny Jim.
I get the feeling Nonlin has never been sexually selected. By anybody.
Alan Fox,
Jews in Germany. Very unfit!
Alan, changing people’s posts without telling them (or the reader) is not moderation. No one here (except perhaps you and Jock) believe that the admin has the authority to selectively edit people’s posts. I realize you will do anything you want, no matter how unethical, but don’t call it moderation.
Don’t forget Adapa. Alan, Jock, and Adapa. A clear majority. Neil, as usual, is irrelevant.
Irish Elk!
Newton is inaccurate sometimes. “evolution” is false. Always. Big difference. You still hold on to phrenology, astrology, and humor balancing?
DNA_Jock,
Allan Miller,
I see the outrage (expected) but no counter arguments. Can you do better?
He’s still one notch better than Swamid ass. Which is not much consolation.
Mung,
Glad to see everyone is still alive in this sleepy town.
A waste of time I know, but… Anyway, Newton is ALWAYS wrong, but still close enough to produce adequate approximations for most purposes. Evolution is also surely wrong (and surely incomplete), but it still produces useful predictions. The best that can be asked of any scientific theory is to produce useful predictions.
Phrenology and astrology would still be regarded as valuable science if their predictions were better than random guessing, and if their underlying theoretical support were consilient with related fields of research. These disciplines didn’t fall out of favor for political or religious reasons, but because they had no discernable connection to reality (and therefore couldn’t be improved, while evolutionary theory is being improved all the time.)
Nonlin.org,
Outrage? Chortle. Yeah, Nonlin, I’m furious. Grrrrf.
I can’t teach you genetics, no. God knows I’ve tried.
Something stirs in the reptilian core of my brain, though. I feel an OP coming on
Yeah, that’s my favourite bit too. Especially the part that universal beauty is supported by the fact that humans will have sex with each other wearing animal costumes.There are even two links to webshops in the references! ROFLMAO!
We may be learning a little more about Nonlin than we want to know.
Corneel,
The implication that Nonlin would love to have sex with animals, yet ends with “What a shame!” is beautifully incoherent.
Corneel,
I’ve got some of my best action dressed as a scale insect. OK, now you’re learning too much about me…
Allan Miller,
I got some of my best action in drag…
TMI
Our instruments always round. Hence Newton is almost always right, like I said.
Name one useful prediction of “evolution”. I see none whatsoever.
Take this topic, sexual selection. Name one improvement since Darwin. There’s none. Did you read Prum’s book (see link)? I did (well, skimmed). Nothing but mindless fluff. Certainly no improvement over Darwin’s crazy idea.
But you can’t point to an error in this OP, can you? Genetics or other kind.
Btw, I make my cells divide because I’m a master of genetics. Can you make your cells divide any better? I didn’t think so.
1. You do like cats and dogs. Especially puppies and kittens. Everyone does.
2. You do not believe in human exceptionalism.
Put 1. and 2. together and you can insinuate some childish nonsense, but can’t disprove anything I said.
In fact, is anyone still trying? No? Then everyone agrees with this OP from the beginning to the end?!? That was easy!
Indeed I can. The problem is, I can’t point it out to you. It’s a repeat of your paraded ignorance on various other topics. Has anyone ever persuaded you of anything? Is it worth anyone’s while trying?
So yeah, you’re a genius; evolution is destroyed and we can all go home. Happy?
I am. Still, this is a public forum. So if you had anything to say, you would. At least for the benefit of others.
For the benefit of others, I would recommend they avoid your nonsense. It takes a certain amount of effort to compose a response. I get so far, then think “oh, what’s the fucking point?”. Anyway, take the Fridge-o-matic challenge! It’ll be fun!
Nah. Your problems are so evident that it’s enough to point at them and laugh, as we’ve been doing.
Only you need explanations to figure out the problems with your OP, which start from the very first sentence. I’d explain, but experience shows that you’re too incompetent to understand.
—————
ETA:
You keep ignoring my always devastating comments, for obvious reasons: you’re too afraid because you always ridicule yourself when attempting to answer. But you should not worry about it, you ridicule yourself every single time you comment or write an OP anyway.
So, for fun, let’s give potential readers an example of your incapacity to correct mistakes:
There’s no breast implants in the figurine. It seems like you’re mistaking the figurine’s arms for some covering of the breasts, and, even then, that would be a covering, not an implant. Implants, by definition, go inside.
This seems more like a figurine showing a female that already had offspring, that means babies, I always forget your limited vocabulary, with large breasts, perhaps, only perhaps, because of lactation. However, the breasts are not the one and only feature of the figurine. Thus, if this was meant as a representation of beauty, then the whole body would be what the sculptor liked. Not just the breasts.
Maybe you have such an obsession with breasts that you didn’t notice that the figurine consists of more than just the breasts, but that would be a reflexion of your obsessions, not a reflexion of what everybody finds attractive. Still, the figurine wasn’t necessarily made by a male, and the figurine wasn’t necessarily meant to represent a standard of beauty.
Have you heard of the fallacy called “affirming the consequent”? 🤣😂
You seem to think that if standards didn’t change, which you failed to demonstrate either way, then there wasn’t any evolution, as if “standards” would have to change for evolution to happen. But there’s no such need. Even “pursuing” a far away, single, unique, ideal, “standard”, would result in biases in reproductive success, thus in biases in allele frequencies with every generation, at least until the “standard” was achieved and prevalent.
I suspect you know that things are a bit more complicated than that, and that such is the reason you chose to talk about the breasts alone. That single feature you thought was “universal beauty”, and thus you avoided the rest of that figurine. It wasn’t just your obsession with breasts, you knew you were wrong all along.
Do you see the common theme here? Let me spell it out: you’re wrong at every level! Not just about “universal standards of beauty”, but also about whether that would be an impediment for evolution. The many-layers-of-wrongness theme prevails in everything you write. It’s your distinctive characteristic. This makes is very very hard to try and choose what to try and explain, but you miss every point, every time. So, wrong from every angle, and incompetent to learn from your mistakes. Sad combination Nonlin, but that’s you.
And of course, you are right. You would compose something flimsy that will be shut down instantly. It’s not your fault. “Evolution” by sexual selection is indefensible. Even Wallace caught on to that. So better let the barking monkey make a fool of himself – like this:
“There’s no breast implants in the figurine. It seems like you’re mistaking the figurine’s arms for some covering of the breasts, and, even then, that would be a covering, not an implant. Implants, by definition, go inside.”
What a stupid thing to say! No implants 30,000 years ago? You think?!?
And “Implants, by definition, go inside.”? Really?!?
No dummy, it’s the size of those breasts. And the size of those buttocks. Like I wrote:
“As Venus of Willendorf shows, the human standard of beauty has not changed in at least 30,000 years or 1,000 generations, these days aided by breast and buttock implants. “
But why go beyond the coloring book when your brain won’t help you, and there may not even be any grape at the end of that ordeal (reading and trying to understand with your inadequate little brain)?
I’d love to demolish “evolution” prediction of genetics. Too bad there’s nothing there …aside from the “gemmules” and “blended inheritance” that was stupid in its own time.
Perhaps I’ll write about how “evolution” got caught off-guard by every single development in genetics. By Mendel, the exquisite structure of the cell, the demise of the “warm little pond”, HGT, epigenetics, “junk” DNA that is not junk, the DNA code, how the genome is too small to explain the body structure (evo still has to catch on to this one which is hilarious to see every time), the dreams about CRISPR/CAS9 potential and the sore disappointment that will follow when the human-monkey chimera won’t happen.
I already wrote about some of these, but an extended review of genetics as the enemy of “evolution” is a fun project. Thanks for the idea.
Actually, the figurine seems to have way more belly than buttocks, which is not part of the current (Western anyway) common standard of female beauty. (And even in a particular time and culture, individual preferences vary.)
But back to the OP:
How about some quick counterexamples:
• Female white bellbirds are attracted to the males that scream the loudest.
• Male Australian jewel beetles are attracted to, and attempt to mate with, discarded beer bottles.
• Ditto for male turkeys and the severed, taxidermied heads of female turkeys
• And… I’ll just leave this here.
Nonlin.org,
Indeed, I don’t blame myself for your persistent failure to grasp anything of actual genetics. That is the fundamental problem. The task of the interlocutor is to explain to this bizarrely and unjustifiably overconfident individual why their overconfidence is misplaced. It’s rooted in a crap grasp of genetics, but how would they know? Perfectly rational objections would be seen by such a delusional as ‘flimsy’.
But how does one teach a subject to someone too obtuse to learn it, nonlin? Gizza clue. Try the fridge-o-matic! It’s all about genetics.
Aha, your target is Darwin’s understanding of genetics. That should be good for a few pages. He died a bit back, you know.
Mendel is now firmly rooted in evolutionary theory. Obviously it wasn’t known about before it’s rediscovery, but it’s hardly an embarrassment to evolutionary theory. In fact, it was just the job to deal with blending inheritance.
Not sure why that’s an example of evolution being caught off-guard by a development in genetics.
Absolutely fuck all to do with either evolution or genetics.
Haha. HGT only has meaning in an evolutionary scenario. It can only be detected on evolutionary assumptions.
The elements of epigenetic control are all simply genetic.
…is no more a problem for evolution than any other DNA that is not junk.
How is a common code evidence against common descent?
How big should the genome be for evolution to remain viable?
If it’s all about a universal standard of beauty, what do we make of unions between male and female Plasmodium falciparum? Or ticks, or tardigrades?
There is a not-so-subtle difference between “like” and “will have sexual intercourse with”. You are basically arguing that everybody is a bestialist at heart. I really hope you realize this is a ridiculous claim.
In the hope that through sheer repetition someone will eventually get through to you: Your OP is completely, utterly and hilariously wrong and only goes to demonstrate that your knowledge of biology in general, and genetics in particular, is abysmal. Your triumphalism is completely misplaced and makes you look ludicrous.
I apologize for being so blunt about it, but I don’t believe subtle gets through.
It is a real shame that this intriguing topic got completely butchered. For those interested: here is the paper with the now classic experiment on female choice by Malte Andersson.
He demonstrated that mating success in male widow birds was correlated with tail length by cutting and pasting the tails of male widowbirds to elongate or shorten them and measuring the resulting number of nests in their territory. The results supported the idea that the long ornamental tail evolved through female choice. Evolutionary biologists do not shy away from empiricism.
Corneel,
Remember reading about this study in one of Dawkins popular books. Nice to get all the details in the paper.
I was going to be charitable about the phrase “And everyone finds everyone’s babies more attractive.”, but nonlin does his best to undermine one’s charitable instincts.
Against my better instincts – let’s say it’s ‘for onlookers’, I’ll just pick up one point:
This makes the fundamental error of believing that everything about maleness is ‘encoded’ in the Y chromosome (which of course is a mammalian feature anyway; for birds like peacocks, males are actually the homogametic sex, their ZZ being equivalent to our XX females and the W of ZW females being a Y-like microchromosome).
Sticking with mammals, the Y effectively acts principally as a switch. Under its influence on autosomal gene expression, on chromosomes inherited by both sexes, testes form, testosterone is generated and this in turn generates cascading downstream effects for many genes, not merely those on the Y (or X, Z or W).
A mother passes her genes ‘for’ her various gender-specific characteristics to both her sons and her daughters, where autosomal. They are silent in sons, expressed in daughters. Likewise for fathers, whose sexual-characteristic genes are silent in daughters and expressed in sons. So we can get the interesting situation that the preference for tail length (if genetically based) and the preferred tail length both co-occur in the genomes of both sexes.
There is nothing particularly special going on here in relation to fitness, except that a gene involved in a particular gender-specific character only exerts a phenotypic effect in 50% of the bodies it resides in, and hence is invisible to selection half the time. This is little different from a recessive characteristic, only visible to selection when it meets itself.
Evolution does not demand that a phenotype exist in every bearer of a genotype for it to be capable of selection.
Darwin was unaware of the underlying genetics we now know in detail. But his instincts were spot on.
From the first link in the op:
“A major reimagining of how evolutionary forces work, revealing how mating preferences—what Darwin termed “the taste for the beautiful”—create the extraordinary range of ornament in the animal world.”
Notice that the “extraordinary range” is between species and not between individuals of a species. For example, although very beautiful, all peacocks have essentially the same pattern and form of tail. The males of the species have a particular, regular standard to be aimed at.
This does not hold for humans.
Compare animals such as birds of paradise with our species for whom it is all about individual preferences. Some people prefer to be single but those who don’t choose their partners on a wide variety of personal tastes. No matter what our gender, we all have different tastes in looks, gender preferences, personality, and a very wide spectrum of sex drive. We even alter the features of other species to cater for our individual preferences and tastes, dogs being the prime example.
The different standards between species in animals has progressed to individual standards in humans.
Sexual selection highlights the difference between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom.
Evolution is a path leading to individuality and being able to consciously express that individuality.
What a stupid “answer” to write. Of course no breast implant 30,000 years ago Nonlin. They didn’t have the slightest technology for something like that.
Since you say below that this wasn’t about implants in the figurine, why did you make such a fool out of yourself? This could be taken to mean that you truly thought these were implants, Why add stupidity gratuitously to your “answer”? Why imagine there was breast implants 30,000 years ago, with no evidence whatsoever? As I said, you’re many-layers wrong, and you seem to enjoy adding to those layers.
If you only looked carefully at the word you’d know. In some words, starting with “in” is meant to imply something goes inside. In this case the “in” changes to “im” because of gramatical, and phonetical, rules disallowing “n” before “p”, the “n” changes to “m.” The “im” particle is followed by “plant” meaning something gets placed, or planted. So, something is placed inside. Dental implants are called that because something goes inside, an artificial root, to keep the tooth in place.
I suspected as much. But that wasn’t everything I wrote. Did you even notice?
The purpose of starting with something that could be a misinterpretation on my part, was to show your incapacity to read carefully, dummy, and the fact that you did not read further demonstrated my point. I knew that if I left it that way, you’d focus on that and leave everything else out. Lo and behold, you left everything else out.
However, not in my wildest dreams did I think you’d insist that there was breast implants 30,000 years ago. I thought you’d say something about it being about the size and then ignore everything else. You decided to make a fool out of yourself much more, but you still ignored everything else.
Adding the buttocks doesn’t help. The figurine has more than breasts and buttocks, and as I said, you poor illiterate fool:
In other words, the figurine could be about many things, not necessarily about making a display of the ancient “standards of beauty.” It could be about motherhood, it could be about fertility, it could be a self-portrait, as some have suggested, etc. You’re affirming the consequent.
Even worse, if the figurine was about beauty, it would prove you wrong! Most would never think of that as representative of what is considered beautiful today.
Right back at you, you poor, irony-deaf, illiterate, incompetent, buffoon. You failed to read quite a bit. Let me give you everything else back, so that you won’t have to scroll back too much and hurt your already addled brain:
They all look the same to Charlie, I guess. 🙂
So you say. I disagree. Clear skin and slightly asymmetrical features come to mind.
Reading what Nonlin wrote, I would take that to mean some modern people resort to plastic surgery to try to emulate the curves that are seen in these figurines, not that ancient people were performing breast or buttock implantations. That seems to be something you read into it.
CharlieM,
Widowbirds!
Well I don’t think that personality has much to do with peahens choosing a mate.
Clear dark skin, clear milky white skin, which? Could it be that some women prefer men with craggy, lived in faces and they don’t mind the odd scar? Do some individuals go for certain kinds of look while others see the person underneath regardless of their looks? By your reasoning a person who lacks the full compliment of limbs will have a very difficult task in finding a partner.
There are certain people that nobody would consider to have classically good looks but they are generally considered to have sex appeal.
As Gladys the peahen said to Edna the peahen, “He may have a stunted tail and a few feathers missing, when he did his funny walk and his ostrich impersonation i just couldn’t resist him.” 🙂
I know. Apparently it’s indeed something I misunderstood. I said as much. But you missed the first part of Nonlin’s “answer” (even though you quoted it):
That means that Nonlin imagines that people were performing breast implants 30,000 years ago. So I said, and you quoted:
Please read carefully.
At the local meeting of the WRI (Widowbird’s Royal Institute) Wendy was telling the crowd about the bird of her dreams:
. “You know how us girls have spent millennia watching the same old displays, all that leaping up and down trying to impress us. Well this hunk of a widowbird came along and I’ve never seen anything like it. He found a clear area of hardened ground and then proceeded to perform what he called his Michael Flately tribute. I was really impressed, They say that when it comes to tails size matters, Well not any more as far as I’m concerned. I can tell you! I laid an egg just watching him. He can ruffle my feathers any time” 🙂
Obviously, back then you couldn’t get one without the other. That’s why [most] westerners are asexuate herbivores suicidal degenerates on a straight road to extinction. Count them out.
How are those “counterexamples”? They’re not.
That may be. But it is not about “evolution”.
Has anything changed? I hear so but don’t see so.
Haha.
Exquisite Design. Get it?
Stop infringing. Anyway, it is a problem because you have to come up with stupider stories than the original stupid story. Same as “convergent evolution”. Sooo funny.
Against “evolution”. First off, code doesn’t write itself. Second, it refuses to “evolve”.
Not related. “Evolution” has other terminal problems.
But for the genome to originate the body (which you think it does given you put so much hope in the genome), you’d need way more data. You can ask Boeing and Toyota for their documentation. It’s huge, yet barely enough to make a product way inferior to the simplest cell. Get it?
Are those examples of “sexual selection” in the Darwinist book?!? Try to re-read paragraph 2.
You overreach. But of course I cannot speak for your particular case.
No worries. Too bad your declarations sound hollow for as long as you cannot (dis)prove anything. See above. At least Allan is timidly trying. Finally… Take a page.
In full accordance with what I wrote.
This doesn’t follow. As I explained in 4. and 6. specifically.
I don’t know about you two… Please don’t explain. Probably something disgusting… And why expose yourselves so shamelessly in public?
CharlieM,
ROFL
They all look the same to Charlie.