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New hominid discovery unconvincing
John Noble Wilford’s article in The New York Times about the supposedly seven million year old supposed hominid skull found in central Africa seems to me a typical example of the long-term decline in the standards of science writing at the Times—as well as in the standards of the world of science and of the intellectual culture generally. The story is interesting, but to the mind of this non-scientific reader it keeps inadvertently offering hints that the conclusions it reports are a lot of hooey. To start with, the creature’s brain case is the size of a chimp’s, and the paleontologists have no idea whether it walked upright, a defining characteristic of hominids. Nevertheless, they’re calling it a hominid, solely on the basis that its face appears to be human-like. So this whole part of the “discovery” seems rather mushy and unconvincing. Secondly, as the Times tells it, the immense age of the fossil turns out to be less than definite. Since there were no ashes at the site to get the definite age, the scientists are just guessing the age through comparisons with other sites. Yet on such an apparently flimsy basis, they’re stating definitively that the fossil is seven million years old, all of which makes this reader suspicious of the age claim. Then there’s the inappropriate and silly name they’ve coined for the newly “discovered” species that this fossil supposedly belonged to: Sahelanthropus tchadensis, meaning man from the region of Sahel in Chad. How can they state so definitively that it’s “anthropos”—i.e. man—when there’s so little to go on? Even Lucy, 4 million years younger than Sahelanthropus, is called Australopithecus—southern ape or southern ape man, not “man.” How could “man” be four million years older than “ape-man”? Is it a PC desire to say there’s really no difference between man and other, lower species? Then there’s the fact that the name of this new species is unpronounceable. This fits the current pattern of science and of other intellectual disciplines abandoning memorable clear terminology for obscure, hard-to-remember, Third-World, or ugly-sounding terminology. It also, by the way, fits with the paradigm of multicultural education. As Sandra Stotsky tells in her valuable book, Losing Our Language, today’s multicultural readers contain many short stories that feature unpronounceable foreign names, without even a pronunciation guide. My theory is that this pedagogical approach has nothing to do with inculcating familiarity with other cultures, but with inculcating the idea that the world, specifically the world of other cultures, is unknowable, and therefore that there’s no point in trying to know it. Children absorb the non-verbal message that they must simply accept and tolerate and abase themselves before the Other and the elites who speak in the name of the Other, without any attempt to understand or criticize the Other and his claims. Is there not a similar obfuscatory impulse at work in contemporary science, with its increasing political correctness and its “revolutionary” findings which, we are constantly being told in breathless tones, have “overturned” all previous theories in a field—theories that were themselves considered “revolutionary” just a year or two ago? All of which would lead the public to believe that there is no stable and intelligible body of scientific knowledge at all. (Wilford himself is a leading practitioner of this nihilistic, “revolutionary-discovery-of-the-week” style of science writing.)
Returning to the fossil story, I found only one cogent idea in Wilford’s article, having to do with how the new discovery affects the established view of human evolution. This creature, whose nickname is Toumai, has a human-type face. Lucy, four million years younger, has a more chimp-like face. Such reversals in evolutionary direction are unheard of, which, Wilford writes, suggests that Toumai is the real ancestor of Homo and that Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis, is an evolutionary side line that did not lead to Homo. But, once again, this provocative notion depends on the insufficiently supported assumption that Toumai is really seven million years old. Email entry |