Re: The Question Gerrit Won't Answer

"Paul Crowley" <slkwuoiutiuytciuyik@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

There is a huge problem of ignorance in
the profession and most of it comes from
sets of quite unexamined, semi-crazy beliefs
(which nearly all practitioners regard as
'knowledge')

There you go again, throwing your own preconceptions around as if they
are the truth.

The OED defines 'preconception' as

"a conception or opinion formed and entertained
prior to actual knowledge; a prepossession,
a prejudice; an anticipation."

Exactly.

My arguments are manifestly far from this.
They are conclusions slowly arrived at,
after years of careful study and thought

Careful study? You haven't even gotten to the basics. You can't even
tell an upper molar from a lower one. You don't know your study
object.
Thought? Yes, from an ivory tower without a view of what's actually
going on "down there" in the field.

Utter nonsense. When was PA ever
of real use -- producing results of value?
When did you last see a scientific
prediction made in PA journal? What
article can you reference which is not
purely descriptive? When did you
last see anything theoretical -- which
was not transparent rubbish.

When was the last time you read a PA journal and compared it to
journals in other disciplines?
Tell me the difference between JVP
http://www.bioone.org/perlserv/?request=get-archive&issn=0272-4634&volume=27
and JHE http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00472484, in
particular why the latter would be so much worse (i.e. unscientific)
than the former.

You are easily fooled. You could readily
get articles from the 'learned journals' of
any of the fake 'sciences' and ask the
same sort of question. (I trust that you
do accept that there are fake sciences?)

If it's fake then it's not science.

The whole point of such exercises is
that they adopt the FORM of genuine
sciences, and their aim is to fool. (The
practitioners of these fake sciences are,
of course, the most fooled.)

In PA (as is common in fake sciences)
the strategy is to focus in on detailed
factual issues or on some 'experiments'.
No wider question is ever discussed.
The 'experiments' are carried on, the
detail is 'investigated' but no one ever
asks why. There is never any attempt
to fit the work into a wider context.

Other than that of human evolution?

There is never any deep or radical criticism
of the activity (or any part of it) -- as there
must be in all real sciences. No one ever
asks "Are we on the right track?" or
"Is the entire direction of this research
misconceived?".

In fake sciences such questions are the
'elephant in the room' and can never be
raised. The practictioners are invariably
quite unaware of this, and those
questions would not occur to them.

The notion that there could be a Nobel
prize (or something roughly equivalent)
in such 'sciences' is inconceivable.
There never are any discoveries, or
anything that could change the way
in which we look at the world. There
has been nothing of that nature in
PA since Darwin.

Then you must be completely unaware of what has happened since Darwin
with, for example, the fossil record of human evolution.
But say we've got a Nobel prize to give away in paleontology. What
kind of discovery would be worthy of that prize? (something comparable
to Wilson and Penzias' discovery of the 3K CMB radiation in relation
to cosmology).

I suppose that it's theoretically possible
that there were HE equivalents of the Kung
San -- although it's not a case I'd like to
argue. They might have had fire, dogs,
bows and poisoned arrows, the ability to
cut stakes and bushes and make palisaded
enclosures, or something similar. But even
then, their numbers and density would have
been low (with little or no need of language).

Since when is language something that was needed?

The selective advantages of better
language development needs to be
explained.

(Language was no more needed than wings in birds)

Your humour here escapes me.

Actually, it's dead serious.
Nonavian feathered dinosaurs were not in need of wings so that they
could fly. Wings is what happened to them. No teleology allowed.
The selection of feathered forelimbs for flight is entirely a
posteriori. The same goes for language. Humans didn't evolve language
so that they could communicate, protolanguage was coöpted for
communication.

They could not be seen as the ancestors of
all later hominids.

I don't see why not.

In the first place, they would have
needed to exist (and I have yet to
see a case arguing for that).
Secondly, they are too specialist,
and an evolutionary dead-end.
Those who got better at 'endurance
hunting' could only try to find more
desert and semi-desert to practise in.
Also, as I mentioned before, there
is no scope for more advanced
social structure, language or other
social institions.

I see enough opportunity here for coöperation and coördination that
would make the hunt more efficient, things you can do better in a
social context.

The only reason they are chosen
as the model for ancestral hominids
is that PA people can think of
nothing else.

"Wahrheit ist die Art von Irrtum, ohne welche eine bestimmte Art von
lebendigen Wesen nicht leben könnte. Der Wert für das Leben
entscheidet zuletzt." Friedrich Nietzsche

Sorry, but my German is not up to that.

"Truth is the kind of error without which a certain kind of living
beings could not exist. Ultimately the value for life is decisive."

I don't get ' . the kind of error . . '.

Too bad.

Gerrit
.

Relevant Pages

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