That article really was good -- it's nice to a see a long-form piece that rings true because it doesn't seem to be politicized or have been written primarily to score points somewhere. Proof: both of the feuding paleontologists seem like obsessed jerks you definitely wouldn't want to have a beer with.
Agree, and it points out something useful that I don’t think most people take into consideration enough - namely, accomplished people often have massive egos and are just as prone to shading things to heighten their standing as anyone else. So appeals to authority on virtually any issue need to be taken with a healthy dose of salt because it’s human nature to have an agenda of one kind or another.
Three thoughts: 1) Steve gives the public too much credit about their sophistication about science. Most people treat science like religion as coming down from heaven, if it’s the right religion of course. And yes science is still burdened by Newton 300 years later. Science has never been and never will be so clean ever again as this article kinda of shows.
2) our scientists are truly amazing in their ability to explain the world given how little information we truly have.
3) I miss reading newspapers. I know there is great information in publications like the New York Times or the Guardian but there ridiculous bias turns me off. I despise the NYT putting their editorial on the front page while calling it analyses. I guess that is my failing with my inability to ignore the propaganda. Steve, How do you manage it?
I don't know enough to know if this is true, but Marc Verhaegen has suggested that part of the paucity of fossil ape finds is the fact that if you find a (say) 5 million year old fossil that looks a bit apey / humany and you say "I found a chimpanzee ancestor" nobody cares outside of a small group of specialized paleontologists but if you say "I found a human ancestor" your name is in all the papers without your having had to run over any of your neighbors
It's a good point. When Lee Berger discovered Australopithecus sediba he presented it to the world as a likely human ancestor. It almost certainly isn't but from what I recall he got a lucrative documentary deal from a company that would have been less interested if it were 'only' a side branch of the human lineage. And he needed the research dollars so good luck to him.
It is certainly odd that, for the period 2 million - 8 million years ago, there are 14 different species of the human lineage and 0 for the chimps and gorillas.
I think the most likely explanation is that some of those 14 species actually are from the chimp/gorilla lineages, but are placed in the human column because of the belief that human bipedalism is unique. So a genus such as paranthropus, which clearly has a gorilla's skull, is classified as a human relative because it walked on two legs.
In 2006 the geneticist David Reich published a study which estimated the final human/chimp divergence at 5.4 Mya after a period of hybridization. This freaked out the paleoanthropologists because there were three bipedal ape species (including Toumai) that pre-dated that. Most of them never accepted Reich's work: "If the earliest hominids are bipedal, it's hard to think of them interbreeding with the knuckle-walking chimps - it's not what we had in mind" (Daniel E. Liberman, Harvard).
But maybe knuckle-walking chimps and gorillas only evolved in the last 3 million years ?. It has been found that they evolved knuckle-walking independently which suggests their common ancestor moved around in another way.
"(By the way, that doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.)"
Really. Does it also seem "reasonable" to you that redheads are a separate species? After all, they look different. It has by now become clear that the Endangered Species Act was simply a massive seizure of private property, and the more "species" it recognized, the more property it seized.
"Dr. Hawks, who is immensely sane"
So he agrees with you about something?
Nah, I just met him a long time ago and he's an impressive guy.
That article really was good -- it's nice to a see a long-form piece that rings true because it doesn't seem to be politicized or have been written primarily to score points somewhere. Proof: both of the feuding paleontologists seem like obsessed jerks you definitely wouldn't want to have a beer with.
Agree, and it points out something useful that I don’t think most people take into consideration enough - namely, accomplished people often have massive egos and are just as prone to shading things to heighten their standing as anyone else. So appeals to authority on virtually any issue need to be taken with a healthy dose of salt because it’s human nature to have an agenda of one kind or another.
Three thoughts: 1) Steve gives the public too much credit about their sophistication about science. Most people treat science like religion as coming down from heaven, if it’s the right religion of course. And yes science is still burdened by Newton 300 years later. Science has never been and never will be so clean ever again as this article kinda of shows.
2) our scientists are truly amazing in their ability to explain the world given how little information we truly have.
3) I miss reading newspapers. I know there is great information in publications like the New York Times or the Guardian but there ridiculous bias turns me off. I despise the NYT putting their editorial on the front page while calling it analyses. I guess that is my failing with my inability to ignore the propaganda. Steve, How do you manage it?
I don't know enough to know if this is true, but Marc Verhaegen has suggested that part of the paucity of fossil ape finds is the fact that if you find a (say) 5 million year old fossil that looks a bit apey / humany and you say "I found a chimpanzee ancestor" nobody cares outside of a small group of specialized paleontologists but if you say "I found a human ancestor" your name is in all the papers without your having had to run over any of your neighbors
Sounds plausible.
It's a good point. When Lee Berger discovered Australopithecus sediba he presented it to the world as a likely human ancestor. It almost certainly isn't but from what I recall he got a lucrative documentary deal from a company that would have been less interested if it were 'only' a side branch of the human lineage. And he needed the research dollars so good luck to him.
It is certainly odd that, for the period 2 million - 8 million years ago, there are 14 different species of the human lineage and 0 for the chimps and gorillas.
I think the most likely explanation is that some of those 14 species actually are from the chimp/gorilla lineages, but are placed in the human column because of the belief that human bipedalism is unique. So a genus such as paranthropus, which clearly has a gorilla's skull, is classified as a human relative because it walked on two legs.
In 2006 the geneticist David Reich published a study which estimated the final human/chimp divergence at 5.4 Mya after a period of hybridization. This freaked out the paleoanthropologists because there were three bipedal ape species (including Toumai) that pre-dated that. Most of them never accepted Reich's work: "If the earliest hominids are bipedal, it's hard to think of them interbreeding with the knuckle-walking chimps - it's not what we had in mind" (Daniel E. Liberman, Harvard).
But maybe knuckle-walking chimps and gorillas only evolved in the last 3 million years ?. It has been found that they evolved knuckle-walking independently which suggests their common ancestor moved around in another way.
Thanks.
These contemporary hominids are far more interesting.
"(By the way, that doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.)"
Really. Does it also seem "reasonable" to you that redheads are a separate species? After all, they look different. It has by now become clear that the Endangered Species Act was simply a massive seizure of private property, and the more "species" it recognized, the more property it seized.