Elaine Morgan - The way it was, or wishful thinking?

[mintogrubb]

Back in the good ol' days , when I was young, a woman called Elaine Morgan wrote a book challenging the scientific establishment of the day. She suggested that rather than being driven by the male's hunting behaviour, it was an existence on the sea shore that shaped our anatomy and behaviour as humans, and that female needs and drives had as much

Comments

[hortensio]

Please, you and everyone:

Homo sapiens.

That's capital H, lowercase s, and [though I don't go quite as crazy about this one] italicised, underlined, or otherwise set off from the body text.

No, really. You're not going to criticise the scientific establishment if you don't know the scientific establishment's name for your own species.

So far as I recall, no one ever came out and challenged this radical theory, it was simply ignored by the scientific establishment.

That would be because it's crap.

[moonlitdorian]

Aren't we technically a subspecies, "Homo sapiens sapiens?"

[hortensio]

No: the species to which man belongs is Homo sapiens. There's some fringe dispute about whether the Neandertals are also H. sapiens, in which case they would be subspecies H. sapiens neanderthalensis and we'd be H. sapiens sapiens. There's some dispute, also, about whether certain fossils typically labelled 'H. sapiens Grade I' or 'early anatomically modern H. sapiens' [there's some regional difference here] warrant classification in their own subspecies, in which case, again, the notion of insisting that we're H. sapiens sapiens makes sense.

In general parlance about humans, though, Homo sapiens is sufficient. [And consensus -mostly- has it that the Neandertals are Homo neanderthalensis, and that anatomically modern Homo sapiens specimens that crop up in the fossil record need no further splitting.]

...grah, my bottom line is that 'subspecies' requires 'species'; ours is H. sapiens.

[hortensio]

Ah, well, I forgot to mention that on the fringes there occasionally crops up someone who wants chimpanzees to be Homo troglodytes.

Actually Linnaeus called the chimpanzee Homo troglodytes. Early lay accounts of chimpanzees by Euro explorers call them, ahem, Negroes. Isn't taxonomy funz?

morning coffee kicks in.

[hortensio]

And of course calling chimpanzees a -species- of genus Homo has no bearing on subspecies, and hence, no relevance here. I lose.

[moonlitdorian]

I know we belong to the species Homo sapiens. I was just taught in biology classes that if you want to refer to us (and our direct ancestors) specifically, you need to go to the subspecies level of classification.

[hortensio]

I know we belong to the species Homo sapiens.

Sorry -- I know; didn't mean to come off as patronising.

if you want to refer to us (and our direct ancestors) specifically, you need to go to the subspecies level of classification

Not unless you want to distinguish us from other subspecies, and the claim that there are subspecies of Homo sapiens is (a) pretty strong, and (b) much disputed. When were these biology classes? Consensus on the Neandertals in particular tends to wobble. Or your instructors might have been teaching from a conviction that something else besides us is part of the species. ?

It's not wrong; I'm just curious now to hear what you were supposed to distinguish Homo sapiens sapiens from.

[mintogrubb]

Er, I thought you said wasn't gonna get involved.

Mind you, I am not complaining. I did post this to learn something, and I already have...

[hortensio]

Er, I thought you said wasn't gonna get involved.

I changed my mind, primarily because Puf decided to post something about fat and insulation, which sounds good, but is actually not.

[mintogrubb]

That would be because it's crap.,/i>

As I have said before, I don't mind debating with anyone who is going to show me something.

Fair play to you, you disagree and you make valid points, but to simply ignore something is not gonna make it go away. The qualified science guys are just not gonna take me with 'em if they refuse to make a case.

But thank you for taking the trouble to critique the whole thing properly over here.

[hortensio]

you disagree and you make valid points, but to simply ignore something is not gonna make it go away.

It depends on how responsive the something is to your ignoring it. Well, after a certain meaning of 'going away'. A lot of scientific crack -does- 'go away', kinda, because it's ignored, simply because the proponents don't get up in arms to defend it, take the fight to the public, etc. This is also sometimes true of decent, real scientific evidence -- unfortunately. Maybe it gets 'rediscovered' sometimes, but what if it doesn't?

The qualified science guys are just not gonna take me with 'em if they refuse to make a case.

Yeah, see my response below. The even sadder thing is that some scientists who -do- take the time to write popular critiques of such things are frowned at by other scientists as being engaged in activities unworthy of their time.

[mintogrubb]

So who is 'science', or even 'feminism' for

[hortensio]

I'm not going to try to make sense of all that right now. Cheers.