Evolution: a different view; Ian Tattersall (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, June 19, 2015, 18:04 (3226 days ago) @ David Turell

Another review of his book, The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack, discussing the bushiness of the path of human evolution, and how the paleontologists have been too limited in their thinking:-http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-bone-to-pick-1434667925-"One of paleoanthropology's problems, as Mr. Tattersall sees it, has been professional isolation from other sciences. From its beginnings in the 19th century, the subject was dominated by anatomists who paid minute attention to bone shapes and little to taxonomy or other relevant biological disciplines. These anatomists would make oracular pronouncements, which were basically intuitions beyond the reach of scientific analysis. One advised the young Mr. Tattersall that if he stared at the fossils for long enough, the bones would speak to him. 
 
"A further source of disorder has been that those lucky enough to find new skulls get to speak the loudest. The importance of acquiring human fossils makes paleoanthropology sound, in Mr. Tattersall's telling, more like a contact sport than a science. There are few good locales for human fossil hunting, and many of them are in Ethiopia. Denouncing your competitors to the Ethiopian government can be an expedient route to opening up claims and making big fossil finds. With a new skull in hand, you declare it to be a missing link that lies on the main branch of human evolution, while claiming those of your rivals belong to side branches. You then lock up your skull on the pretense that you need to study it further, while denying competitors the chance to challenge your assertions.-****
"Mr. Tattersall is unsparingly critical of the mental habits of his fellow paleoanthropologists. He describes the profession as one “whose practitioners are often slow to change their minds, even in the face of compelling evidence.” For years they resisted the assertions of molecular biologists that hominid fossils must be far younger than assumed. Until the arrival of cladistics, a more rigorous form of biological classification, debates among paleoanthropologists about how one hominid species was related to another were far from scientific, and “salesmanship was at a greater premium than rigorous reasoning was.” -"Bad scientific habits, Mr. Tattersall believes, have been so pervasive that to the present day they distort knowledge of the human past. “If the entire hominid fossil record were to be rediscovered tomorrow and analyzed by paleontologists with no horses already in the race, it is pretty certain that we would emerge with a picture of human evolution very different from the one we have inherited,” he writes. -"The author concedes that not all his colleagues will agree with everything he says. Still, he has presented a scalding indictment of a scholarly community and shown how easily nonscientific motives can influence supposedly scientific conclusions. Fraud in science is all too common, but failings in objectivity, especially when part of a community groupthink, are harder to detect and far more corrosive."