Re: Elaine Morgan: 88 Years old and still head and shoulders above your typical anthropologist

On Dec 8, 10:07 am, rmacfarl <rmacf...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Dec 6, 8:38 pm, Algis <algiskuliu...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Ross! Good to read you again. Pity it seems we're not going to be able
to get any closer to agreeing about stuff though.

For the record, Cameron M Smith, since he wrote that letter during his
PhD studies, has become a noted writer of popular science books,
including The Top Ten Myths About Evolution, and various travel and
adventure tomes:http://www.cameronmsmith.com/

Gosh, that was quick rise to fame! Elaine's talk was just a couple of
weeks ago. This Cameron Smith must be a really amazing guy. I've
obviously underestimated him. Are you sure you're thinking of the
right bloke? Or perhaps Lee posted a very old letter from THE Cameron
Smith to a UCL lecture Elaine gave that I didn't know about. Or
perhaps this is a DIFFERENT Cameron Smith. Who knows. Either way, it's
full of the usual biased rubbish. Honesttly, fancy thinking he had to
write to warn those poor old gullible UCL students in case they heard
Elaine talking a bit of common sense. Whatever happened to open debate
and letting intelligent people make their own minds up?

Elaine Morgan is seemingly a very nice old lady. So is the Queen. It
doesn't mean either of their opinions on evolution are worth a
cracker.

The diffrence is Elaine Morgan has spent almost forty years studying
human evolution, she's expectionally intelligent and a very good
writer.
That you don't value Morgan's opinions on human evolution just shows
that you are intellectually impoverished.

Honestly Algis, is this the best you can do? I mean, I give you your
due... You always tried to be polite (although you cycled through
interminable "debates", pointedly refusing to understand or accept
anything that looked like a substantive critique of your pet theory -
especially with Jason Eshleman, until he was driven nearly to
distraction.)  

I'm polite to people who are polite to me. Jason didn't give in to my
view. I didn't give in to his. He refused to accept any of my
evidence, I did accept some of his but even this didn't change any
substantive part of my argument. Jason showed himself to be only
slightly more capable of understanding how waterside hypotheses might
help explain ape-human divergence - by accepting wading might provide
a way for upright posture to have evolved - but he stubbornly refused
to accept anything else. The reason he was driven to using nasty
language against me was because I implied that he was, like most
anthropologists, an intellectual coward by refusing to fully take on
board the idea that selection from moving through water might have had
a profound effect. This was unfortunate because Jason, at least, did
have the courage to come to a forum such as this and debate it openly.
I did give him credit for that but this was presumably insufficient to
heal the wounds of his damaged ego.

You took up the challenge to go & do some research on
your pet theory - but now it seems the academic world doesn't think
you've come up with anything that's worthy of publishing (which hardly
places you in the minority).

"the academic world" didn't reject my paper, a few carefully selected
"authorities" of anthropology did. Anyone who reads their comments
with an open mind can see that they had to scape the barrel so as not
to give any kind of vindication to that damned "aquatic ape". Their
arguments were basically rubbish.

So what do you do? Come back here to SAP? To what end? To troll for
arguments and rude responses, in search of some modicum of self-
validation? Will having better manners than Lee Olsen make your
hypothesis any better? Tim White is reputedly a grumpy beggar - should
you get published first because your manners are better than his?

Why are you here?

Why are YOU here? For me, it's because I enjoy a good argument. I've
had little of that the last three years. Almost all of the academics I
have come across in Australia are ignorant about waterside hypotheses
and have little or no interest in it. Maybe I just went to the wrong
university.

I admit to one other reason for returning: Anyone researching about
human evolution these days, and increasingly in the future, will use
the internet to do so. I'm determined that waterside hypotheses of
human evolution get a fair hearing here, in this very open forum,
because they certainly have not in the closed and secretive peer-
reviewed world of the scientific literature.

Algis Kuliukas
.

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