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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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A correspondent has sent me an International Herald Tribune treatment of the current genetic state of play which seems to me the best single treatment of the controversy thus far.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/05/
news/web.0305BRITS.full.php?page=1
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| This new population, which lived by hunting and gathering, survived a sharp cold spell called the Younger Dryas that lasted from 12,300 to 11,000 years ago |
This cold "spell" lasted 700 years or more. I don't understand why, if the population could survive the Younger Dryas, they wouldn't have survived an earlier cold spell instead of migrating south.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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If you watched The Great Global Warming Swindle on telly this week, you'd be very chary of accepting any expert opinion on global temperatures, causes or effects.
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pennydrop
In: Wookey Marsh
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | If you watched The Great Global Warming Swindle on telly this week, you'd be very chary of accepting any expert opinion on global temperatures, causes or effects. |
I didn't, but I do think there is some merit in listening to expert opinion.
_________________
Creator of the Wuh Lax series of books.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Dear Ms Drop
Could you tell me which set of experts I should be listening to? They appear to be saying opposite things from the same set of data.
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Duncan
In: Yorkshire
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A recent posting on C4's Time Team forum discussing THOBR:
| I was afraid that you would tell me that Harper was being serious. I am afraid that I really found it such a load of twaddle that I really do not wish to waste any more time on it. I was going to look up a few of the issues you mentioned in it, but it is such a rambling rant that there is little in the way of structure to it. Yes, I have read it and after the first twenty odd pages (and the other pages were pretty odd too) it became painful. It was like being trapped in a lift with a drunken Discovery Channel addict who had a theory about it all. |
I'm afraid this could be the very attitude. Why do people refuse to take this book seriously? This same fella said he would entertain Oppenheimer's ideas but not Mick Harper's. The difference? An Oxford University tenured post and a bit less hair.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Of course Oppenheimer is only tenured in Tropical Medicine whereas I have an "O" level in history (Grade C) so I'm way ahead academically. Also my hair is rapidly thinning. But you must be fair to the Time Team poster, THOBR is a rant. And extremely odd.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Duncan wrote: | | Why do people refuse to take this book seriously? |
Reason and rationality rarely impact academic practice. Understanding this phenomenon is the second concern of Applied Epistemology. Ignoring it is the first.
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To Mike:
I enjoyed most of your book and hope to god "further research" proves you right. I am not a linguist nor historian, at best amateur in both. The most satisfying thing about what you've done was the application of general logic and common sense to a field where, as you show, axioms hide absence of data or unproven conjectures. A useful gadget of an "expert" failing to answer your blunt questions is a useful and entertaining rhetorical tool - nothing wrong with that.
Alas, the need to stop your opponents from ever resorting to extinct ancestors drove to you to pulling biological evolution into your range of attack... That was a bad mistake, I wish you left biology alone. In fact, evolutional and developmental biology are not operating as the history and linguistic fields you describe, rather like mathematics you use as an example early in the book. The data are painstakingly analyzed and no evolution biologist would act as that ridiculous fall guy you painted, using as argument the fact that he was taught an axiom or forgetting that data is incomplete.
You probably don't know how well documented is the greatest - if unplanned - evolutionary experiment ever conducted by man since 1940: evolution of bacteria under the deadly press of antibiotics. Each one of us is the play ground for evolving newer and more resistent species of bacteria. The question that you ask the poor sod on whether living species may have evolved from other living species - why, what's the problem? why not? Alas, if they continue to live geographically together, they interbreed and the original species simply keeps evolving, without a new species forming; if they happen to be separated geographically by a natural phenomenon, they continue evolving and after some time - evolution does take time - they get different and the common species they left behind becomes that extinct ancestor you wish to get rid of.
The fact that you use such naive arguments does taint your attack on the linguistic and history aspects of the issues at hand. Is it possible for you to drop the evolution link in your chain of arguments and still have a watertight case?
Vitaly
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| The data are painstakingly analyzed and no evolution biologist would act as that ridiculous fall guy you painted, using as argument the fact that he was taught an axiom or forgetting that data is incomplete. |
Well...um...everyone I've tried it on has done....as have others reported to me. It is not clear from your remarks whether you have tried the experiment with a real life biologist or whether your trust in real live biologists simply leads you to make the assertion. But it doesn't matter. All you have to do is write down here the name of two living species, one of which is ancestral to the other, and you (and evolutionary biology) wins the argument. Go on....just two words...and the matter is closed...for ever....
| You probably don't know how well documented is the greatest - if unplanned - evolutionary experiment ever conducted by man since 1940: evolution of bacteria under the deadly press of antibiotics. |
I probably do. Everybody does. It is, as you say, the single most important fact in medicine today. In every single case thus far (unless you know different) we do not know whether the 'new' strain is an evolved form of the existing one or whether it is a pre-existing species that has flourished now that the competition has been artificially removed by antibiotics.
| Each one of us is the playing ground for evolving newer and more resistent species of bacteria. |
No, that's not been demonstrated. Not a single example. But as I say, you have only to produce such an example and you win the argument.
| The question that you ask the poor sod on whether living species may have evolved from other living species - why, what's the problem? why not? Alas, if they continue to live geographically together, they interbreed and the original species simply keeps evolving, without a new species forming; if they happen to be separated geographically by a natural phenomenon, they continue evolving and after some time - evolution does take time - they get different and the common species they left behind becomes that extinct ancestor you wish to get rid of. |
Precisely so. And of course this applies at all times and for all species. So there are certainly hundreds of thousands of species for you to choose from. Now give us an example. Just one.
| The fact that you use such naive arguments does taint your attack on the linguistic and history aspects of the issues at hand. Is it possible for you to drop the evolution link in your chain of arguments and still have a watertight case? |
I will, Vitaly, as soon as you give me those two little words. The name of the living ancestral species and the name of the living evolved species.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| vitalyki wrote: | The question that you ask the poor sod on whether living species may have evolved from other living species - why, what's the problem? why not? Alas, if they continue to live geographically together, they interbreed and the original species simply keeps evolving, without a new species forming; if they happen to be separated geographically by a natural phenomenon, they continue evolving and after some time...they get different and the common species they left behind becomes that extinct ancestor you wish to get rid of.
(emphasis added) |
Vitaly here presents the theoretical version of evolutionary theory. The version which has it that evolution is the natural product of small changes over time -- small changes (propositionally produced by mutation) which occur at a more-or-less constant rate. By this model, regardless of population size or any other factor, change is the natural order of the day for any and every species: all species constantly evolve at a more-or-less constant rate of change.
This version of evolutionary theory is more or less as Darwin originally proposed it.
But theoretical evolutionary theory has never matched up with the observable world. All the data that's come in subsequent to Darwin's voyage on the Beagle is inconsistent with the constant-change model. For species tend not to change at all.
This realization has led to the formulation of, what I might call, practical evolutionary theory. This version is more popularly known as "punctuated equilibrium" (the model's proponents include Richard Dawkins). Punctuated equilibrium recognises that most species, most of the time, don't change very much at all -- if at all. So at least most of the time, "A rose is a rose is a rose."
I refer to this version of evolutionary theory "practical evolution" because it is the only model of evolutionary theory that can as yet hope to survive an encounter with the real world.
By this "punctuated" model, some sub-groups of existing species very rarely, but occasionally, evolve into new species when subject to certain unspecified and thus far unpredictable condtions. The parent species is unaffected. It may continue in its essentially unchanging state or it may die out at some point.
But this last point and its implications, as Mick points out, tend to get ignored (I suspect that's because everyone is still very much wedded to Darwin's theoretical model, despite making the practical adjustments necessary to reconcile it with observations).
One of these implications (of punctuated equilibrium) is that, not only might ancestral species continue to live unchanged, in parallel to their descendant species, they may in fact out-live them. The new species may die out long before the old, making the living species the ancestor to the extinct species.
Now, in the whole history of the Earth, there is sure to have been quite a large number of long-extinct species that actually evolved from species still alive today -- that's a necessary implication of the modern understanding of evolutionary processes. Yet no tree-of-life has ever yet been assembled wherein any surviving parent out-lives its children.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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"The baboon can not see his own red bottom."
| I am not a linguist nor historian, at best amateur in both. |
Right off the bat, Vitaly devalues his own judgement on the matter. I knew a student who quickly gave up a philosophy course saying "I don't see why their opinion should count for more than mine"... and I felt he was giving in too easily, missing out on something. Now, I admire his courage... and it took me until reading THOBR -- and the practice at dissecting the issues that followed from it -- to realise that my judgement on matters of logic, structure, deduction, evidence... are at least as strong as those who happen to be paid for it.
Part of the function of the compartmentalised Establishment is to reinforce the compartmentalisation and convince everyone that insiders know best while outsiders know nothing. We have seen this time and time again.
| Alas, the need to stop your opponents from ever resorting to extinct ancestors drove to you to pulling biological evolution into your range of attack... That was a bad mistake, I wish you left biology alone. |
Vitaly is a biologist then, either 'at heart' or 'at work'.
| In fact, X is not operating as the Y you describe... |
Classic.
Ah, mathematics... physics... engineering... Their chief characteristic is that they are so general, so frequently and widely tested, so mission-critical: life or death. Academia is, on the whole, self-serving and not answerable to anyone else and that is one of the themes of THOBR. Engineers are answerable to bean counters and lawyers and many others and that industry works in a different way.
In a sense, engineering is not science and paradigm-dependence is less of an issue than practical results. There's a sky-scraper in San Francisco, I think, with the supporting columns at the sides instead of the corners. The designer used it as a case study in teaching architecture, stress calculations and wotnot. One day a student put up his hand and said "yeah, but what if the wind blows steadily at one corner instead of one side?"... the designer thought for a bit... and rushed off to spend billions of dollars reinforcing the structure before it was blown down. I can't imagine a challenge to authority being embraced like that in any other discipline.
But physics and maths certainly are paradigm-dependent: more so than everything else. That is, they are the basic tools of logic, common sense and presumptions of rationality, causation, etc. Some things have to go unchallenged: for a long time anyway. We can't conceive of them being different because they really are at the root of how we think.
That's the lowest end of the paradigm spectrum. Physics and maths span the other extreme: more technical, more abstract, more untested, more dependent on training and jargon and, by definition, more cosmic than anything else: more prone to paradigm errors and more blind to the possibility. (OK, be fair: mathematics, no matter how highfalutin, works on rigour: but it is also synthetic and non-scientific. Applying it to a practical problem means deciding how to fit it to a paradigm model.)
| The data are painstakingly analyzed and no X-ist would act as that ridiculous fall guy you painted, using as argument the fact that he was taught an axiom or forgetting that data is incomplete. |
Facts are theory-laden, Vitaly. And you do not know that you have a red bottom.
| You probably don't know how well documented is the greatest - if unplanned - evolutionary experiment ever conducted by man since 1940: evolution of bacteria under the deadly press of antibiotics. |
An interesting emphasis on documentation, the academic's lifeblood. But documentation is dead unless you do something with it. And what you do -- to produce it and to make use of it -- is what you are trained to do.
But the purpose of academic documentation is to convert data into information; the difference being meaning, which entails a paradigm.
| Each one of us is the playing ground for evolving newer and more resistent species of bacteria... if they continue to live geographically together, they interbreed and the original species simply keeps evolving, without a new species forming... |
These are premises, not conclusions.
And you can tell they are, Vitaly, because you trotted out the bit about interbreeding, which does not happen in bacteria!
| ...and the common species they left behind becomes that extinct ancestor you wish to get rid of. |
THERE IT IS. EXACTLY the (bogus) logic that THOBR says is employed.
Why do you assume that two new species continue while an old one dies off, rather than that one old species can live alongside a new one?
Vitaly, you set out to say biologists don't work like this.
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Duncan
In: Yorkshire
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Interesting that Vitaly should pick up on what I had considered to be simply a rhetorical tool employed by THOBR in pursuit of its purposes. I had always thought the discussion on evolution was tangential to the thrust of the argument. Not that it didn't leave me feeling a little uneasy. Perhaps now is the time to clarify the AE position on evolution.
Ishmael wrote:
| By this "punctuated" model, some sub-groups of existing species very rarely, but occasionally, evolve into new species when subject to certain unspecified and thus far unpredictable condtions. |
Is this model the one favoured by THOBR? I had always thought that Darwin's position, as developed by Gregor Mendel, and finding modern expression in the works of Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, and Daniel Dennet was watertight.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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It's even more interesting that youse two guys should both be biological orthodoxists but history fruitcakes. The AE position is (roughly) that extreme caution should be deployed when contemplating the paradigm theories of both subjects.
The problem that AE has with Darwinism is that we have yet to provide a superior model, so we are left to snipe from the sidelines. THOBR used Darwinist models as an illustration of what goes wrong with trunk-and-branch models generally. The basic problem -- though there are others -- is that everybody proceeds on the assumption of succession when the facts of the case point clearly to co-existence. In the language field this means that ancestor-languages are always dead ones (Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse etc) when in fact it it much more likely to be French to Italian or English to French.
That's why the challenge about producing a living ancestor is so important. Darwinism insists that the two species must co-exist for a period (and sometimes indefinitely and sometimes, as Ishmael points out, the ancestor will out-survive the evolved form) and yet nobody ever recognises this.
Actually the true, if unconscious, reason is that as long as you have only dead ancestors the whole thing has to be dealt with by in-house experts (palaeontologists, palaeo-linguists). But once you concede living ancestors then everyone can join in....with possibly revealing results. You will both note, Vitaly and Dunc, that the current genetic work is essentially allowing us to use living human ancestors (in the form of our own DNA) whereas of course archaeologists and linguists stick completely with safely dead forbears.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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On the other hand, AE does recognise that biology is superior to history. In fact AE accepts a complete hierarchy in academic subjects based (mostly) on their internal methodology.
At the very lowest level there are subjects that are taught in universities, like English Literature and Art Appreciation, that shouldn't be. The problem here, as Dan's philosophy student discovered, is that it's just one man's opinion against another. It is true that the student can be trained in -- and judged by -- the ability to give a more and more sophisticated opinion but there is no question of any Pursuit of Truth. It is the modern equivalent of Rhetoric. In other words it turns out 'gentlemen', people who can be distinguished from the common herd by their ability to do a difficult but inessential thing, in this case to chat about books, art or whatever. It is undoubtedly the case there is a need for a band of people to study Nineteenth Century English Novels because of their world significance, just as there is a need for a band of people to study Nineteenth Century English Railway Locomotives because of their world significance, but not tens of thousands of our best and brightest organised in their own specialist department.
I'll deal with the next up the hierarchy as and when.
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