Re: Date limit set on first Americans

On Fri, 29 Aug 2003 11:27:57 GMT, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (John
Wilkins) wrote:


>In my own thesis I find not only that the history of the species cocnept
>is false as usually presented, but that the "same" solutions and ideas
>are continuously reinvented or recycled endlessly, it seems, from
>Epicurus and Aristotle onwards. Yet when I talk to specialists about
>this, they are entirely unaware that the idea of a species as an
>individual, for example, was invented in the 14th C, or that species
>were considered to be distributional types throughout the middle ages.

I was going to mention species also, because a number of
papers have come out saying this or that hominid could not
have been a species. But this blanket denial is a denial of
speciation, again this goes back to uncertainty as a
consideration in evolution. While you can statistically show
that species form after some long period of time. Apriori
sitting down and watching two closely related species you
don't know (without much deeper analysis)

1. When they formed
2. And when the next round of the process will occur.

So a statistical generality is not an answer, the fact that
speciation occurs means that most of the time a grouping of
animals is a species, but at some point in time they stop
being a species and become 2 or more species. If you check
out the paleoanthropology literature for the past 5 years
you can find at least 3 papers that appear totally ignorant
of this. 

><snip personal anecdotes, with the caveat that the singular of "data" is
>*not* "anecdote" even in the social sciences>

But these instances are still popping up. 

>> The power of the machine is when everyone gets onto the same
>> page and pushes forward. When people drag their feet in
>> old-thinking and with closed minds then science can drag of
>> for years for the simplist problems. And outsiders and
>> unproffessionals start reaching better conclusions than they
>> do, this is where science gets in trouble. Molecular
>> Anthropology is a very troubled feild, there are some signs
>> that it is coming around, but the real hang ups are in
>> applying the basic consequences of evolution (just as in the
>> biology paper) that were outlined 50 to 150 years ago. 
>
>Well, my supervisor has said that molecular systematics is revisiting
>the ultimately fruitless ideas of biogeography of 50 years ago, looking
>for ancestors and centres of origin, too. Perhaps you are right, but in
>the end it is use (and contrariwise, disuse) of scientific ideas that
>counts...

In a way, yes, and in a way no, from the position of
autoimmunity we want to know why one combination of alleles
in one population causes disease, and the same combination
in another does not. Whereas in the second population
another combination causes diseases. With certain haplotypes
I have seen p values drop to 1 x -10^8 in one population,
skip all the way across the world and see the same p value
in a seemingly unrelated population. However when I dug
deeper, the two unrelated populations were not unrelated. 
  The issue then becomes how they were once related, and
what is key about that ancestral relationship to a
particular disease.