CEngelbrecht
Registered Senior Member
False association.
I believe in the aquatic ape hypothesis and people persecute me for it.
- Thread starter CEngelbrecht
- Start date
False association.
CEngelbrecht
Registered Senior Member
So far we've seen two:
1) The Einstein gambit. This gambit is perhaps the most popular attempt that cranks use to justify their woo. "Sure, they're laughing at me, but they laughed at Einstein too, you know!" By equating his situation to that of Einstein, the crank hopes to make it seem that his intelligence is akin to Einstein's - thus granting more validity to his woo.
15) As seen on TV! Links to Youtube videos are one of the hallmarks of cranks. Whether this is due to cranks getting most of their information from videos, or whether it is due to the fondness of conspiracy theorists for Youtube, posts consisting of Youtube links are one of the most common signs of the crank.
Can we have a third please!
Yep. Aside from the two clear ones - the Einstein Gambit and As Seen On TV - we have the usual clinging to a theory by an adherent who believes himself to be an honored warrior of truth, taking comfort from the fact that only he has risen above all the other sheeple who believe what X wants them to believe. ("X" being the government, the establishment, mainstream media or whatever other "they" is most popular.)
CEngelbrecht
Registered Senior Member
Endless repitition doesn't make it less false.
I just gave you the thirty year old kill argument on the savannah hypotheses. 64 years in, not a single individual has come up with the kill argument on the waterside ones. It sure feels like it's just not out there.
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And endless repetition of the debunked aquatic ape theory doesn't make it true.
But I suspect you will keep repeating it anyway. You and Trump have that in common at least; he figures if he repeats a mistruth often enough, it becomes true.
CEngelbrecht
Registered Senior Member
That's the strange thing on this one. It was never debunked. John Langdon's umbrella hypothesis was supposed to be it. And that was really piss weak, when you conforming hypocrites cheer on all the other sanctioned umbrella hypotheses from Galileo to Einstein.
Look in the mirror.
CEngelbrecht
Registered Senior Member
Again, just not enough for you before your supersized brain. It's not difficult to understand.
Now you're just flat out denying the reality of the semi-arid savannah. While also denying the complete lack of fossil evidence to support those sacred savannah hypotheses. Paleoanthropology just decided implicitly to never actually look for this evidence until Tobias finally called it out in the mid 1990s. 'Cause the entire field came out of the Eurasian steppes and lazily just assumed going down to Africa.
That's exactly what you are. You have those scars of evolution too. All eight billion of you.
You're talking to the mirror.
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DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
CE: "But my Good Book said...!"
CEngelbrecht
Registered Senior Member
Art historians actually read Dan Brown. You will not read even a single paragraph of Elaine Morgan's. You're no f'ing different from the evangelical nutjobs.
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
And we're back to ranting.
CEngelbrecht
Registered Senior Member
Yeah, you abandoned reality six pages ago.
CEngelbrecht
Registered Senior Member
Yeah, archeology, what good is that, when it proves you guys wrong? Suddenly you're like W., you will not suffer science and the truth.
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
Where did I lose you? When I logiced and scienced instead of ranting and cursing?
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CEngelbrecht
Registered Senior Member
Joke's over, mate.
CEngelbrecht
Registered Senior Member
So, anybody got a legit kill argument? I've been desperately looking for one meself for thirty f'ing years already. Why are Hardy and Morgan's oyster shucking beach apes so plain and obvious pseudoscience and obviously crazy? In a world where the savannah cannot have been the actual cradle of man? In a world with a big pile of poor John Langdon's umbrellas? 'Cause it sure as hell ain't all that plain to see, and 16 pages in, you're still not helping.
Take a long bath to really think about it and get back to me, sapientes. Use that big brain of yours that has been slowly shrinking for 40,000 years now.
Take a long bath to really think about it and get back to me, sapientes. Use that big brain of yours that has been slowly shrinking for 40,000 years now.
exchemist
Valued Senior Member
There’s often no real “kill” argument in science, and in this case it seems to be more a question of what the preponderance of evidence suggests, as in so many cases. Plenty of people argue for minority hypotheses in science, e.g. MOND instead of Dark Matter.
But it is actually far from clear what hypothesis exactly you claim to be defending. Is it just apes living by rivers or seas? If so, that doesn’t necessarily imply a great deal of swimming. Even if there were a lot of swimming it is far from clear that losing body hair would be an evolutionary advantage.
Or is it the full monty, with babies swimming and even breast feeding underwater, as suggested by some of the images you have posted? If so, what is the evidence for that?
You don’t argue coherently, that’s the problem. Reading your posts is like listening to a tirade from an angry drunk just before closing time. And you seem to have been obsessed with this stuff for around a decade now, without improving your arguments or the evidence you present. Most of the pictures you post are the same ones as a decade ago.
I’m afraid I have come to the conclusion that you are mad: a psychiatric case. Monomania, or idée fixe. I just don’t think there is any point in engaging you on the science.
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
Who said there is a kill argument?
Who said it is obviously crazy?
These seem like straw men. Or paranoia; hard to tell which.
Perhaps you should ask yourself if maybe your questions are malformed (see above).
I did not put exchemist up to this:
You're being told by multiple people why you're not being taken seriously. Why would anybody choose to engage in this kind of rambling, low signal-to-noise-ratio, curse-filled abuse?
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Where does the passion for classic AAT come from? Even the feminist anthropology angle is kind of atavistic (i.e., better "breakthroughs" surpassed AAT in terms of a flag-waving activist banner).
There was a modified or mitigated version of AAT that was introduced in the 2000s (1st item below, and arguably indirectly referenced in items #2 and #3). That's the best that one could hang a hat on. Yet it doesn't seem to carry much weight in terms of shallow water foraging slash wading radically directing human body form.
Item #4 hints at how much -- in this politically charged era -- the socioeconomic beliefs of the humanities are encroaching on and influencing or even institutionally reshaping the social sciences. The "I hope she wouldn't have to choose" if it had been in this period of the West's academic moral rehabilitation.
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- A new aquatic ape theory
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/a-new-aquatic-ape-theory-67868308/
EXCERPTS: The aquatic ape theory, now largely dismissed, tries to explain the origins of many of humankind’s unique traits. [...] But that doesn’t mean aquatic habitats didn’t play some kind of role in our ancestors’ lives.
[...] Wrangham’s team argues that even in this inhospitable environment there were oases: wetlands and lake shores. In these aquatic habitats, water lilies, cattails, herbs and other plants would have had edible, nutritious underground parts—roots and tubers—that would have been available year-round. These “fallback” foods would have gotten hominids through the lean times.
[...] The fossil record also hints at the importance of aquatic environments. ... the geologic and fossil evidence suggests that hominids were living in areas with lakes or flooded grasslands. South African sites tended to be drier but were still located near streams.
[...] Today, chimpanzees and gorillas occasionally venture into shallow bodies of water, and when they do, they wade on two legs. It makes sense. Wading bipedally allows the apes to keep their heads above water. As our earliest ancestors spent longer and longer periods of time wading upright, it became beneficial to evolve specialized anatomy for two-legged walking.
Wrangham and his colleagues acknowledge that their case rests on circumstantial evidence...
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- Sorry David Attenborough, we didn’t evolve from ‘aquatic apes’ – here’s why
https://theconversation.com/sorry-d...idnt-evolve-from-aquatic-apes-heres-why-65570
EXCERPTS: Occasionally in science there are theories that refuse to die despite the overwhelming evidence against them. The “aquatic ape hypothesis” is one of these, now championed by Sir David Attenborough in his recent BBC Radio 4 series The Waterside Ape.
[...] Recent proponents of the aquatic ape hypothesis have pointed to much later watery adaptations, including early archaeological sites where humans have been shown to be exploiting coastal resources. But these don’t have much to say about the origins of bipedalism, more than 6m years before – they just demonstrate the behavioural flexibility of later hominins.
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- Why anthropologists rejected the aquatic ape theory
https://johnhawks.net/weblog/why-anthropologists-dont-accept-the-aquatic-ape-theory/
EXCERPTS: The aquatic ape theory was a potent reaction to the male-centric nature of paleoanthropology as a science. In The Descent of Woman, Elaine Morgan had strongly criticized what she derided as the “Tarzanist” theory of human origins for ignoring the importance of women in ancient societies. [...] The book followed a new approach toward the roles of women in evolution.
[...] A new generation of researchers were in a position to compare new data coming from field observations of primate social behavior with ethnographic studies of small-scale human populations. Many of them brought a feminist perspective to questions about human evolution.
[...] Such ideas helped to recenter scientists' ideas about how human social behavior had evolved. This new way of thinking can be seen in the 1981 volume Woman the Gatherer, edited by Frances Dahlberg, which went far beyond the stereotype of women gathering plant foods and looked at the diversity of female economic and social life.
This feminist strain of anthropology led to better science, as researchers collected more precise data... [...] From the 1990s onward, archaeologists began to reveal more ancient evidence of fish and shellfish consumption ... Much earlier members of Homo also relied on fish and shellfish where they were abundant.
[...] Still, evidence for fish or shellfish consumption in Pleistocene sites is mostly localized to coastal or riverside locations. Many populations, both modern and ancient, have lived far from coastlines and relied upon terrestrial foods.
[...] In 1997 the anthropologist John Langdon reviewed the evidence with which aquatic ape adherents had supported their ideas. He observed that the traits proposed as aquatic adaptations in humans appear in the fossil record at radically different times ... He argued that the aquatic model is appealing on the surface because it seems to provide a simple, concise explanation for many traits that otherwise seem disconnected. But in this case the traits really are disconnected: they evolved at different times in different species. No aquatic phase can explain bipedal locomotion, brain size, facial morphology, or other hard-tissue characters of human evolution.
[...] None of this means that rivers, lakes, or sea coastlines were unimportant to human origins. In fact, observations of living great apes and other primates show that that they make extensive use of wetlands in their habitats.
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- AAT tells us more about the fraught relationship between feminism and science than it does human evolution
https://www.theguardian.com/science/the-h-word/2013/may/13/aquatic-ape-elaine-morgan-history-science
EXCERPT: . . . Reviewers of Descent of Woman typically lauded her feminist critique of the Tarzanists but lamented Morgan's advocacy of what became known as the "aquatic ape" theory...
When presented with such mixed reviews, Morgan chose science over politics. In rewriting her material for The Aquatic Ape (1982), she stripped her prose of wit and added diagrams and new data, effectively refashioning the text into a more canonical form of scientific publication. In this new packaging, her marine musings began to receive more attention.
Of course, not all attention is good attention. As last week's excitement on Twitter and in these pages demonstrated, the aquatic ape theory is far from acceptable mainstream science. Yet even these debates – framed in terms of the theory's plausibility – are a sign of Morgan's success in transforming the reception of her ideas. But at what cost?
Morgan believed that in order for her theories to receive a scientific hearing, they had to be separated from her lambasting of the savannah theory. Historians are often fascinated by how scientists strive to cleanly differentiate between legitimate scientific inquiry, on the one hand, and "pseudo", "pathological", or just plain "bad" science, on the other.
That Morgan felt she had to choose between science and feminism highlights how, in addition to such questions of hard demarcation, her critics used the label "feminist" science as a means of what I have come to call "soft demarcation". By describing her original book as "women's lib prehistory", they evaded the force of her critique and simultaneously used the aquatic ape (by means of guilty association) to question whether feminism could play any valid role in science.
If the idea of a human watery past does have merit, then, it may be in the form of a cautionary tale. By uncoupling her feminism from her science, Morgan gained a wider audience but lost her theory's scholarly heft. Were Morgan first publishing today, I hope she wouldn't have to choose.
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exchemist
Valued Senior Member
Very helpful review of the background to the issues, thanks. Two points seem especially pertinent:
1) The various traits cited to support the AAH seem to have evolved at different times, making it hard to see how they could have been adaptations driven by a waterside existence.
2) Fossils are found mostly far from waterside habitats.
It may be that Morgan, as a non-scientist herself, achieved something useful by drawing attention to male-dominated assumptions in the science - what she called the “Tarzan” school of thought. And it may be that there were colonies of apes living beside the water, and that one should not simply assume a savannah habitat for them all. But, regarding the last piece you quote, it seems to me just as vital as it ever was to separate science from politics, and that includes the identity politics of feminism.