# Change in species **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [August 10, 2026, 9:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/change-in-species/1032282 "2026-08-10T21:16:45Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 11
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2026, 5:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/change-in-species/1032282/201 "2026-08-17T17:55:44Z")
> [@cladking](#): > > I wager you could put this post into your own AI and get a good translation but people don’t want to bother and don’t want to question their premises and definitions. Hey, I bothered! I asked ChatGPT to read this thread and give its opinion of @cladking. The response was very long so I’ll just post the introductory paragraph, the main points without the details – though details can be provided if anyone is interested – and part of the conclusion: Emphasis is mine. > My candid opinion: I don’t think “delusional” is the most useful description, at least not in the clinical sense. But as an argument about biology, **what he’s saying is profoundly wrong, and the pattern of reasoning is unusually resistant to correction**. The latter is probably what gives readers the impression of delusion. > > 1. He has constructed a private definition of evolution > 2. His wolf → dog example doesn’t demonstrate what he thinks it demonstrates > 3. He’s repeatedly making an argument from appearance of suddenness > 4. There’s an enormous epistemological problem with his theory > 5. **There is also a remarkable disconnect between his confidence and his knowledge** And it concludes as follows: > He has developed a highly idiosyncratic explanatory framework and become extremely committed to it, while **lacking enough grounding in the relevant scientific literature to recognize where his framework conflicts with established results**. > > **There’s also a strong Dunning–Kruger-like component** , although I wouldn’t diagnose him with Dunning–Kruger either. What’s striking is the combination of: > > - very high confidence; > - very broad claims; > - unconventional terminology; > - rejection of established terminology as fundamentally mistaken; > - selective interpretation of evidence; > - continual expansion of the theory to encompass apparently contradictory evidence; > - and an apparent inability to identify an observation that would make him abandon it. > > And that last one is the killer. ---
**Author:** ![cladking](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/4af34b/32.png) [@cladking](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cladking)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2026, 6:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/change-in-species/1032282/202 "2026-08-17T18:06:58Z")
> [@crowmanyclouds](#): > > And your evidence for this “first” human language is??? This is empirical evidence predicted by my theory; All you have to do is copy and paste the words in this link; > **[The Pyramid Texts: The Pyramid Texts: 22. A Miscellaneous... | Internet...](https://sacred-texts.com/egy/pyt/pyt25.htm)** > > Ancient Egypt: 844b. put on thee the eye of Horus, take it to thyself, …into this analyzer; [Zipf's Law Visualizer](https://humanturtleduck.org/zipf-visualizer.html) The simple fact is that only procedural languages break Zipf’s Law which proves there was once a language that was procedural. This is the language people spoke when they coaxed the dogs from wolves. This is the language we can’t even see because we think there’s only one way to communicate or think. This is the language like the Waggle Dance spoken by humans until it started to become too complex around 3200 BC so they invented writing just to communicate with people who couldn’t speak it. We use new symbolic, abstract, analog, categorical language that is confused because each person parses it differently. Deal with it! Procedural language has one meaning that is either understood or it sounds like word soup. Science isn’t “wrong”, it simply can’t see where its maps diverge from the terrain. Deal with it. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2026, 6:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/change-in-species/1032282/203 "2026-08-17T18:08:42Z")
I for one cannot doubt the wisdom of humanturtleduck dot org. ---
**Author:** ![crowmanyclouds](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crowmanyclouds/32/19884_2.png) [@crowmanyclouds](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/crowmanyclouds)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2026, 6:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/change-in-species/1032282/204 "2026-08-17T18:14:16Z")
> [@cladking](#): > > Procedural language has one meaning that is either understood or it sounds like word soup. Does the word soup come with your word salad or is it à la carte? Also, are you seriously suggesting that ancient Egyptian was the “first” human language? And also, why are you using an English translation of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs? ---
**Author:** ![cladking](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/4af34b/32.png) [@cladking](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cladking)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2026, 6:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/change-in-species/1032282/205 "2026-08-17T18:16:48Z")
> [@wolfpup](#): > > So, to summarize all your posts in this thread – and it’s amazing how so much insight can be summarized in so few words – reality is comprised of patterns that only you can see. No! Not even vaguely close. Life is consciousness and consciousness is pattern recognition. All other life than _homo circularis rationatio_ compares input to its models of reality as defined by experience and DNA but we compare inputs to the categories we’ve built and call it thinking and inductive reasoning. Other life checks its thinking against reality itself and we check it against what we believe. ---
**Author:** ![cladking](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/4af34b/32.png) [@cladking](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cladking)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2026, 6:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/change-in-species/1032282/206 "2026-08-17T18:17:37Z")
> [@octopus](#): > > Are you saying that categorization inhibits full understanding by flattening the dimensionality of a concept and when attempting to communicate an idea that language itself distorts mutual understanding? Yes! Exactly. ---
**Author:** ![octopus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/octopus/32/3716_2.png) [@octopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/octopus)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2026, 6:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/change-in-species/1032282/207 "2026-08-17T18:22:30Z")
Problem is you are communicating via analogy when you may need to break down some of the concepts into their fundamentals. Other readers are nitpicking your categorization and not seeing that the categorization is an example. Like, why is species problematic as a concept? It’s not that species doesn’t have utility it’s that in a mind species occupies the thinking region that the complete set should occupy but due to limits of cognition and communication can’t. So when flattening the concept into the word species you do actually lose useful information and for many that information being lost due to the utilization of the word may as well have never existed. ---
**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2026, 6:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/change-in-species/1032282/208 "2026-08-17T18:31:50Z")
🍿 Discourse ---
**Author:** ![cladking](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/4af34b/32.png) [@cladking](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cladking)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2026, 6:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/change-in-species/1032282/209 "2026-08-17T18:34:41Z")
> [@crowmanyclouds](#): > > Also, are you seriously suggesting that ancient Egyptian was the “first” human language? > And also, why are you using an English translation of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs? There was a single complex Ancient Language that probably arose in a mutation 80,000 years ago. This mutation was in the connectivity of the arcuate fasciculus that allowed the individual to think about language. Previously it was simply an aspect of DNA or what we misunderstand as “instinct”. This new complexity allowed the accumulation of complex knowledge over generations and the increasing complexity of the language. But it was one single human language that was merely an elaboration of the language encoded in our DNA. This language had numerous mutually intelligible dialects and so few words that even people from far flung corners could establish communication quickly. The Pyramid Texts is merely a silly little book of ritual that were recited to people who attended the funeral of the Egyptian king where he was converted from a mummy to a mere mnemonic by being cremated. It’s all the same language because it was all the same kind of cognition but now we have an entirely different type of cognition that relies not on reality but our beliefs in religion or experiment. I’m well aware people not only can’t embrace this but they can’t even see it! It checks with reality, it checks with experiment, and God help us all, it even kindda checks with religion because everyone has always made sense either in terms of his premises, or in terms of reality. This is LIFE. This is the nature of LIFE. ---
**Author:** ![cladking](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/4af34b/32.png) [@cladking](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cladking)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2026, 6:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/change-in-species/1032282/210 "2026-08-17T18:40:47Z")
> [@octopus](#): > > Problem is you are communicating via analogy when you may need to break down some of the concepts into their fundamentals. Other readers are nitpicking your categorization and not seeing that the categorization is an example. Like, why is species problematic as a concept? It’s not that species doesn’t have utility it’s that in a mind species occupies the thinking region that the complete set should occupy but due to limits of cognition and communication can’t. So when flattening the concept into the word species you do actually lose useful information and for many that information being lost due to the utilization of the word may as well have never existed. _Yes, that’s exactly the issue. I’m not communicating by analogy; I’m communicating procedurally. When I use a category like “species,” I’m not treating it as a fixed box. I’m using it as a placeholder for a much larger set of interacting constraints: behavior, population structure, bottlenecks, selection pressures, and time._ _Symbolic thinkers tend to treat the category itself as the thing. So when I say “species is a problematic concept,” I’m not saying it has no utility. I’m saying that the word compresses a huge amount of structure into a single label, and that compression hides the dynamics I’m talking about._ _For many people, once the concept is flattened into the word, the lost information might as well never have existed. That’s why they nitpick the label instead of the mechanism._ _My frame is procedural: I’m describing how constraints interact over time. Their frame is categorical: they’re defending the boundaries of the word. We’re not disagreeing about biology, we’re using different cognitive formats, and the translation between them is where the friction comes from._ -the above was written by Copilot because it’s difficult for me to communicate. From my perspective it answered exactly correctly. ---
**Author:** ![Q.Q.Switcheroo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/q.q.switcheroo/32/5713_2.png) [@Q.Q.Switcheroo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Q.Q.Switcheroo)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2026, 6:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/change-in-species/1032282/211 "2026-08-17T18:55:42Z")
> [@cladking](#): > > When I use a category like “species,” I’m not > treating it as a fixed box. I’m using it as a placeholder for a much larger > set of interacting constraints: behavior, population structure, bottlenecks, > selection pressures, and time. ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you _can_ make words mean so many different things.’ ---
**Author:** ![Irishman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/b487fb/32.png) [@Irishman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Irishman)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2026, 7:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/change-in-species/1032282/212 "2026-08-17T19:00:14Z")
> [@cladking](#): > > No I’m saying no one ever convinces anyone of anything. We each reason from our own premises. _Homo circularis rationatio_. So what you’re saying is you won’t convince anyone of anything because it’s impossible, but you still want to tell us all how wrong we are so we get fed up and leave so you can declare yourself the “winner”? But the definition of “winning an argument” is convincing someone of something. You can’t be the winner, because no one ever convinces someone of anything. So that makes you a loser. So congrats! By your philosophy, the _best_ you can hope for is to be a wrong as everybody else, and it goes downhill from there. I suppose I should feel flattered, though, that you chose my post to bring you back to the discussion. > [@cladking](#): > > It’s not only life that doesn’t fit our neat little categories but reality itself. Reality is binary not analog. Forces of nature are constraints not categories. That first line I agree with. This discussion was about biology, but reality is not forced to conform to consistent, easy to separate, human-defined categories and divisions and rules. Humans find it easier to understand that way, so we seek out ways to group and separate items, information, etc. But I don’t understand “reality is binary”. Wouldn’t that make it _easier_ to sort and categorize? It’s either 1 or 0, yes or no, up or down. Being analog would mean that it is continuous and uninterrupted, and any divisions are ultimately arbitrary. Binary is a clean line. And I don’t understand “forces of nature are constraints not categories.” What’s that supposed to even mean? Can you excision what you mean by the idea that they are categories? > [@cladking](#): > > Man once thought just like every other species but language became too complex so the broccas area and arcuate fasciculus made it possible to think in a new way. Instead of seeing reality procedurally like a fish or AI we see it categorically in invented categories that don’t map to reality,. That description sounds Lamarckian. Thinking got too complex so the Broca’s area had to develop? That seems bass-ackwards. “Seeing reality procedurally”? Can you explain what that means in contrast to categorically? > [@cladking](#): > > NO! Species change when a bottleneck selects unusual behavior. The invention of dogs was an artificial bottleneck caused by another species that was our ancestor species’ _homo sapiens_. You’re saying the same thing with different words used weirdly and then saying I’m wrong and you’re right. Change in species occurs when some environmental factor changes that affects survivability. Without a change in circumstances, there’s no selection differentiation to drive species change in any specific direction, so gene frequency might fluctuate but there’s little significant change to the species. A pressure comes along - say a hominid species comes along that leaves piles of refuse that attracts wolves - and then there’s a sorting by behavior that allows different survival success. Some wolves interact with the hominids and gain genetic advantage. Then those hominids begin cultivating those particular wolves, and both species adapt to the new cooperation. Since hominids had better thought processes, they began actively shaping the direction of change in those canines that became dogs. Other wolves didn’t gain that advantage and didn’t interact or avoided contact and they stayed wolves. I’m not sure where you think a “bottleneck” was involved. Also, if the only change mechanism for species is bottlenecks, then species change can never lead to new traits, only eliminate some. That would ultimately lead to less robust variants. ---
**Author:** ![octopus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/octopus/32/3716_2.png) [@octopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/octopus)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2026, 7:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/change-in-species/1032282/213 "2026-08-17T19:04:32Z")
I don’t think species is the actual topic. I think species is an example. I think the actual topic is perception of a concept and communication of said concept. He’s bogged down in examples and so is the thread. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2026, 7:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/change-in-species/1032282/214 "2026-08-17T19:04:46Z")
> [@cladking](#): > > The irony is sublime. > > Right off the bat it tells us that real world “natural selection” is based on behavior and every experiment and observation confirm this. And the deliberate stupidity on your part staggers the mind. “Right off the bat it tells us…” What the flying fuck are you referring to by “it”? ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2026, 7:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/change-in-species/1032282/215 "2026-08-17T19:07:32Z")
> [@cladking](#): > > The only arguments I’ve ever won is by wearing down my opponent to the point they agree to shut me up. I believe I have a far better track record winning arguments than most people. People telling you to shut the fuck up because you are full of shit is a “win”?? ---
**Author:** ![Great\_Antibob](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e47c2d/32.png) [@Great\_Antibob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Great_Antibob)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2026, 7:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/change-in-species/1032282/216 "2026-08-17T19:10:52Z")
Sure, winning in the “deck of an aircraft carrier with a large banner behind you” sense ---
**Author:** ![crowmanyclouds](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crowmanyclouds/32/19884_2.png) [@crowmanyclouds](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/crowmanyclouds)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2026, 7:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/change-in-species/1032282/217 "2026-08-17T19:18:11Z")
> [@octopus](#): > > I don’t think species is the actual topic. Hence the thread’s title! ---
**Author:** ![octopus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/octopus/32/3716_2.png) [@octopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/octopus)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2026, 7:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/change-in-species/1032282/218 "2026-08-17T19:18:58Z")
We can all agree that cladking’s communication style could use a little refinement I hope? ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2026, 7:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/change-in-species/1032282/219 "2026-08-17T19:21:17Z")
Like dropping the bullshit and adding 35 IQ points? ---
**Author:** ![Great\_Antibob](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e47c2d/32.png) [@Great\_Antibob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Great_Antibob)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2026, 7:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/change-in-species/1032282/220 "2026-08-17T19:25:14Z")
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