tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post6230839652212057429..comments2024-03-27T03:19:11.216-04:00Comments on Assistant Village Idiot: 1491Assistant Village Idiothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01978011985085795099noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-17572432936363608092013-02-18T12:29:14.472-05:002013-02-18T12:29:14.472-05:00For many years, I followed a newsletter put out by...For many years, I followed a newsletter put out by one man, William Corliss, called "Science Frontiers." I would be doing it still, but he died at an advanced age about a year ago. He was a dedicated anti-dogmatist and devoted his energies to keeping people aware of how shaky a lot of widely accepted theory is. What gave him some weight was that all the sources he cited were from the mainstream science literature.<br /><br />The whole pre-Clovis controversy was one of his staples, along with unconventional cosmologies, non-standard variations on evolutionary theory, you name it.<br /><br />If you google "William Corliss" and "Science Frontiers," you'll quickly get to his old web site, which has lots of back issues posted.Earl Wajenberghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03972213104063301125noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-52593574247865153292013-02-17T23:53:13.343-05:002013-02-17T23:53:13.343-05:00It's hard to get as excited about the disputes...It's hard to get as excited about the disputes when you've lived long enough to see several elaborate structures crumble -- in anthropology as well as physics, not to mention medicine, biology, and geology. When I was a kid we didn't even have plate tectonics. Remember when all respectable doctors knew that ulcers were caused by stress?Texan99https://www.blogger.com/profile/10479561573903660086noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-26442639753181710442013-02-17T20:24:23.400-05:002013-02-17T20:24:23.400-05:00My theory is that anthropology has a bad case of s...My theory is that anthropology has a bad case of science-envy. (Also the case with sociology.) Physicists do enough eye-rolling, but that isn't the primary mechanism of progress in scientific fields.<br /><br />In fields like anthro - which aren't scientific in the modern sense: they're observation and interpretation, despite much protest that we are, too, scientific! we are!!! - the final backstop of experimentation and demonstration isn't available in these fields of study. Accordingly, status markers assume much more importance and a lot of effort is devoted to showing that so-and-so has high status, is suspected of being a racist, has been recognized as the foremost in the field, "has been discredited", etc., etc. as a way of supporting or undercutting so-and-so's research. (Physicists rant about each other also, but no one thinks this says anything about the quality of their research, and the ranting tends to take place in private because everyone recognizes that it's not part of the physics. Anthro, not so much.)jaedhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03328666344764784829noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-63277635653103920172013-02-17T06:41:13.390-05:002013-02-17T06:41:13.390-05:00First, 1493 is not as good as 1491.
As to the pos...First, 1493 is not as good as 1491.<br /><br />As to the possibilities that the Solutreans made it to American, Evo and Proud points out that there would have a continuous tundra from southwestern France all the way to Alaska with much the same flora and fauna. They just had to walk, and it might have taken a few thousand years.<br /><br />And there were caucasians in western China few thousand years ago.sykes.1https://www.blogger.com/profile/10954672321945289871noreply@blogger.com