Lee Olsen Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Duncan Craig Wrote:
> -------------------------------------------------------
> > Hello Lee,
> > What has Heyerdahls racism to do with the
> genomic
> > evidence?
>
> Hi Duncan,
> OK, maybe racism is too severe an accusation for
> those living in his era. Anthropology was just a
> beginning field then...many professional scholars
> and laypeople alike didn't know at the time what
> they were doing wrong (before Stephen Gould came
> along). Can we change racism to Eurocentrism
> then?

Why do we have to change it to anything? Why can't we put 'presentism' the idea of judging people's past actions by today's standards to one side and test his hypothesis, methods, and accomplisments. So he wasn't perfect. He isn't a candidate for sainthood, nobody is.

> Also, I just picked the reference above because
> it contained many references, something Thor
> didn't do very often which correctly brands him
> as a crank from the viewpoint of an editor of a
> peer-reviewed science journal. No unjust bias
> involved IMO.

Again who cares? Thor was a pioneer, he pushed the envelope of anthropology in a new direction. He didn't speculate he got off his butt put together a raft and made it across the pacific ocean in one piece. It's called 'proof of concept' and is one of the cornerstones of research. In addition to that his crew consisted of engineers, and they collected new data on the middle of the Pacific that nobody knew about at the time.

> [documents.saa.org]
> Why do you think Thor was unable to comply with
> the simplest of instructions? Try illiteracy for a
> start. So Thor played the blame-game rather than
> comply because he couldn't.

That's the problem with pioneers they don't comply with the rules, they don't stay in their own lane. That's how they advance knowledge they just haul off and do it. Do you think Bill Gates and Paul Allen checked the references on how to build a company? Nope they just did it. Steve Jobs was a first class ay-hole by all accounts, but did he advance the world of electronics. What did Elon Musk know about the car industry? He started Space X because the Russians tried to screw him on the sale of an obsolete ICBM. He got tired of being stuck in L.A. traffic and started "The Boring Company". How much did he know about geology? Not much but he's building tunnels all over the world, relieving the stress on infrastructure. Oh yeah and not to leave women out but there was Barbara McClintock, she was trained as a botanist, but moved into genetics and made revolutionary discoveries about 'jumping genes'. What did the 'non-biased', 'objective scientific establishment do? They blasted her work so severely that she quit publishing. FWICS she was floating in the backwaters until she won the Nobel prize. God only knows what other discoveries she made but carried to the grave because she refused to 'follow the instructions'.
>
> "The attitude towards Heyerdahl has been
> overwhelmingly condescending and paternalistic, as
> if he was an eccentric doddering old uncle. " Why
> does the new Nature paper contain references and
> Heyerdahl's works are exempt?
> AFAIK, Thor didn't get much right, if anything, as
> far as the scientific method is concerned;
> Eurocentrism was just one example. The Kon Tiki
> experiment was a 50% failure because the craft
> couldn't get back to where it came from, in fact
> without a navy tug (with a motor) it couldn't get
> off the coast. Yet at the same time this ship
> could go upwind, downwind, and against the
> current:
> [upload.wikimedia.org]
> The problem with this ship is one can't make
> ke millions of dollars on movies and books made
> about it, actual science and technology just
> doesn't sell as well...too boring.
> Hind sight is 20/20. If Thor didn't get the
> peopling of the Americas correct, why would
> anyone think anything he got right was anything
> other than luck, at least without hard evidence?

Ah and now we get to the crux of the matter. He turned his pioneering research into an empire and became wealthy. Good for him.

But turning to what did he accomplish? Well he showed that man could make it around the Pacific in rather unsophisticated equipment. Which could explain why of all the Apes only the hominids keep showing up in places offshore (Like the Phillipines). Which begs the question of how did the genus Homo make it all over the Pacific, when the closely related Chimps couldn't make it across the river? Maybe the hominids built rafts and took off around the world. While the chimps looked at their fellow chimps across the river, as they slowly evolved into Bonobos.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/10/2020 12:44PM by Rick Baudé.