i said it wasn't self correcting.
i didn't say it doesn't work.
the evidence presented by suzanne has not been refuted but i assure you, it will not be mentioned in any school book.
For the alternative theorists:
- Thread starter paddoboy
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i didn't say it doesn't work.
the evidence presented by suzanne has not been refuted but i assure you, it will not be mentioned in any school book.
I read it, in its entirety, the last time Leopold raised this particular instance.
Probably correct in regards to what no scientist should put up with....But as they say, One swallow, does not a Summer make.....
One incident does not detract from the overall "self correcting" methodology that peer review and the scientific method entails.
It's a proven system, it's been shown to have worked tremendously well, and it's the best we have got.
exactly.
so, where does that leave us in regards to suzanne and her anomaly?
the only thing i can conclude is things aren't what they seem to be.
That scientists can sometimes miss things. And?
You recommend that instead of trying to investigate things, we instead just assume that some deity of your particular preference did things? And somehow you and others are immune to the kind of things that made one group of scientists over-react to an anomaly?
you know . . . nevermind.
this isn't some minor thing.
this throws into question the timeline of the inhabitation of north america.
the evidence is real.
I would say concluding that there were people in Mexico 250,000 years ago is absurd. All other evidence indicates that people have only been in the Americas for few 10s of thousands of years at the most. The scientist are absolutely right to be very dubious of this anomoly, because an anomoly is exactly what it is. lt is possible (I doubt it) that man has been here for 1/4 million years, but until there is further evidence it is exactly the right call to assume there is a problem with the analysis or some reason for this anomoly that makes the site give the false indication that people were around at that time.
The idea that people were in the Americas more than 200,000 years before the time that all the evidence gathered over the last 100 years indicates, is an extraodinary claim. The evidence needs to be extraodinary or at least rock solid conclusive. Her evidence does not rise to that level. In the end it may turn out she is right (I doubt it) in which case she will be the toast of the town.
being absurd is irrelevant.
the fact of the matter is the evidence is there, absurd or not.
what if another dig turns up something similar?
after seeing what happened to suzanne, i doubt if many would report it.
all that you know of, see above.
i agree, but not to ridicule this woman practically out of her career.
what could be the motive for such actions?
it isn't a claim, she dug up the irrefuted evidence that proves it.
I said nothing about it being minor.
I also remember some isolated evidence pointing to the fact that Australia was in inhabited more then 75,000 ago, as against the generally accepted 30,000 years.
Let me say, though that time will tell.
That still doesn't detract from the overall fact that the scientific method and peer review is self correcting, and a proven system that works well and is the best we have.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
The evidence is real, but it is indeed "some minor thing" (for the purposes of this discussion), and it does NOT bring the timeline of the habitation of North America into question.
Every now and then an archeological team finds evidence of a small human colony in the Western Hemisphere that predates the Paleoindians. In every case, there is no evidence of long-term survival. Whoever these various adventurous humans were (we'll never know since it's generally impossible to capture DNA from fossils that old), there is no trace of their extraneous DNA in the Native Americans. Native American culture is, indeed, no more than 12-15 thousand years old--and the Eskimo-Aleuts are considerably more recent than that. There was no "previous population" in North America, comparable to the Cro-Magnon who populated Europe before the Indo-Europeans moved in with their Bronze Age technology and marginalized them.
The oldest failed colonies that survived long enough to leave useful archeological evidence were the Solutreans, an adventurous band of Cro-Magnon people who sailed across the Atlantic around 20KYA and established a beachhead on the northeastern coast of the USA. Since this was an ice age, sea level was much lower than today so their settlements are 25 miles out to sea under 100 feet of water (figures approximate). It's amazing that anyone found them! But they were dead and forgotten long before the successful migrations to the other side of North America from Asia.
Dr. Cavalli-Sforza has done a magnificent job of using DNA analysis to trace the migrations of our ancient ancestors and figure out who was in what place in what era.
Irrefutable? Are you kidding? Did you read the write up? It was written to try and vindicate the participants and still they pointed out the errors and screwed up dating. This all happened in the 1960s into the early 1970's. It was a mess. The site still exists you know, right? There are excavations going on in that area and they are not finding these crazy dates. It was a screw up and it has been buried - digging it up was not worth it.
excuse me?
the abstract specifically states "there were no irregularities in the teams methods and the site was guarded to prevent tampering."
I still haven't understood what is on your mind. Who is Susanne Clark, what are her qualifications and who is disputing her, and why? What makes you think she is right? You just dropped her name without stating the case. What evidence is there on her side and what evidence is against her? Until then I'm assuming she has done nothing worth putting in a school book (what kind of book/what subject?) otherwise she probably would be in a school book. (Although a lot of people who did hugely important things are not in school books either . . . so this may be highly speculative even if she is someone who did something outstanding.)
The PDF DMOE linked to details many of the specifics.
If that's the paper leopold is talking about, it doesn't match his set of complaints. He said Susan Clark was a scientist who was not given credence for something not yet explained, resulting in her being barred from the school books (?). I see in the paper Suzanne Clark is a co-author, not one of the principal investigators, and she doesn't appear to be scientist at all (she is on the faculty of a Dept of Philosophy). There is some questionable evidence that came under dispute in 1967, possibly leaving the primary investigator with a case of sour grapes, and a second investigator around 1980 who may have found herself in a similar position. As far as I can tell, both of them were simply wrong. There is no smoking gun, unless I missed it. This may be why PhysBang suggested leopold may have his Susan Clarks mixed up. There is a journalist Susan Clark who I think the creationists feel has been victimized (not sure of the details). So maybe leopold has mixed the two stories.
At this point I'm just wondering if leopold can clarify what the real issue is, as he sees it. I don't see any issue yet. People make mistakes all the time. I think that's all this is. A big mistake, granted, although it's nearly 50 yrs old, when the dating of indigenous American sites was not as settled as today. It looks like leopold wants the bad result to be true, though I'm not sure why. I certainly see no reason to rely on philosopher Susan Clark for her opinion of the matter since it requires an expert in dating methods to give rebuttal. And in fact I think that's all that happened. I'm sure a lots of philosophy depts in the US in 1967 were skeptical of the
military-industrial complex. And that was probably healthy. But probably not good science--not in this case, as far as I can tell.
i'm sorry, i got the names confused.
the team consisted:
dr. cynthia irwin-williams. archaeology
prof. juan camacho. archaeology.
dr. virginia steen-mcintyre. tephrochronology.
dr. harold malde. geology.
dr. clayton ray. palaentology.
dr. dwight. malacology.
r. b. taylor and dr. gordon goles. neutron activation analysis.
dr. mario pichardo. palaentology.
read the linked to PDF for the story and how these scientists were treated for presenting their evidence.
Irwin-Williams one of the 2 lead archeologists wrote a letter about the announcment of the dating of the site which in part said, "...on the situation (expletive deleted) is that this is one of the most irresponsible public announcements with which it has every been my misfortune to become involved with."
So lets look at the methods for dating that were outlined in the PDF:
1. The Uranium dating method should be used for the time frame of 1 million to 4.5 billion years, not 20,000 year old material!! Of course they got strange results.
2. The fission track method should be used for the time frame of 100,000 to 2 billion years. So again using this method to date 20,000 year old material will give bad results.
3. The Uranium series method has severe reliability problems when used on bone due the solubility of the bone (it is not a closed system) to uranium. These issues were know and studies starting in 1963 documented the unreliability in systems that were not closed (such as bone and teeth).
In short the evidence is far from irrefutable, the evidence is almost worhtless. Based on the letter written by Irwin-Williams the problems with the dating was realized and some team memebers tried to distance themselves from the fiasco.
This acutally is a good cautionary tale on the dangers of rushing to publication when an anomoly is found.
Contrast the plight of these poor peoples to that of the team that reported that they had found superluminal neutrinos. The team shared their data explicitly stating it was suspect and asking for help in refuting their findings or supporting them. No careers were ruined there. If the team had proclaimed "Einstein wrong FTL is proven", there would have been a much different result.