Re: Look humans really are aquatic!

From: Jason Eshleman (jae_at_vidi.ucdavis.edu)
Date: 12/28/04 

Date: Tue, 28 Dec 2004 17:45:50 +0000 (UTC)

In article <1104246816.110822.186020@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>,
Algis Kuliukas <algis@RiverApes.com> wrote:
>
>Su Solomon wrote:

[snip]
>> You are an obsessive in search of a holy grail that does not exist.
>
>I'm obsessive only in seeing that this perfectly plausible idea gets
>treated with some scientific rigour instead of being subject to a
>diatribe childish, sneering ridicule by people who couldn't even tell
>you what the damned thing is.

You do not appear to be imposing the scientific rigour you are paying lip
service to. The "damned thing" still isn't a coherant hypothesis, at
least not as you've phrased it and its proponents have allowed it to be
such a mess for a long time now, content instead to sell books and argue
prejudice.

>Did you get to see the text of my ASHB talk yet? It won first prize, so
>I don't think they understood it as pseudoscience, Su. Have you
>considered that, maybe, you're just wrong about this? Or have you just
>decided that anything that supports the AAH just *must* be a load of
>crap?

"The AAH" as you present it doesn't exist because it's not a hypothesis.
You continue to present a series of disjointed hypotheses (of various
degrees of merit) and insist upon some unity because of some involvement
of water. The general statement that "water acted as an agency of
selection" doesn't directly suggest anything in particular and the
particulars do not make the general statement any more universal to other
problems. The urge to unite so much under the single umbrella of water,
events that may well have occurred millions of years appart and, if
influenced by water, involved rather different interactions with it is a
mania, not science. It's the insistence that wading for bipedalism and
swimming "better" to cause hairlessness are somehow part of a grand
hypothesis ("water did it") that makes it pseudoscience.

You've gotten wholly bent out of shape that texts generally ignore it, but
since you're still completely hung up on the notion that there's an AAH
(despite the fact that the grand gurus of the field never bothered to
actually define it, you seem to want special treatment where undercooked
vague notions never defined get to go in texts long before they're
adequately spelled out. That makes what you're doing appear to be
pseudoscience. You pass out blame readily, claiming that somehow the
academic in-crowd was responsible because they ignored a piece in a
popular magazine and ignored what was a ridiculous vision of mer-apes in
Morgan's original presentation.

>I bet you don't even know what it is.

It isn't anything, at least not as you've presented it. It's an umbrella
of things not necessarily united where confirming one does not confirm the
others and thus aren't part of the same hypothesis.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: A critique of the BBC aquatic ape programme and the transcript.
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