More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
we began breeding them selectively to our own sick tastes and mad purposes; we gave them squashed faces and curly tails and sawed-off legs, brain damage and hip dysplasia and hemophilia, permanent psychological infantilism; we generally brought out the worst in them. Among other particulars, we perfected the bark.
Sixty million Canis familiaris: as many dogs, now, as we once had bison.
primitive:
Not a fan of this term, implies evolution is directional or has a goal/endpoint in mind.
Then in 1987 he published a book titled The Red Ape: Orang-utans and Human Origins, which presents the idea at much greater (sometimes tedious) length.
Was the out-of-Africa hypothesis established by this point? How does his timeline/phylogeny fit in with other branches of human evolution? He says molecular evidence is inconclusive, but wouldn't anatomical evidence be more so? Form follows function. I've heard of convergent evolution, but doesn't that more readily apply to anatomy than chemistry?
Update: yeah, google says Orangs branched off way earlier than gorillas and chimps. The prevailing theory is not always the right one, but in this case current science confirms earlier beliefs.
The rest of his contribution, by contrast, is intensely disputable.
Further update: the book had a new edition released in 2005 and it sounds like he kept doubling down. The one negative review actually looked into the author's background and found he contributes to shit like creation.org, so maybe not the most un-biased researcher out there. I'm open to new ideas, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Will this end up like the spotted hyena and male peacock which appear to buck evolution by natural selection due to their weird reproductive/mating rituals? Yeah, having a pseudo-penis or enormous tail are not the most advantageous for surviving child birth and escaping predators, but they do actually help propagate genetic material, which is the real name of the game. On its surface, onvergent evolution may seem counterintuitive, (looking at you, octopus eyes), but it's really not that complicated when you take a hot second to think about it.
“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”
Why can’t it be extirpated, not even in an age as relentlessly analytical as our own? Because the romantic imagination of mankind is itself a hidden animal, a wondrous and inextinguishable beast.
Because the human brain loves heuristics and pattern recognition, and we don't teach critical thinking in schools. I wonder if regions with better critical thinking curricula (philosophy etc.) are more skeptical? Are they less superstitious, religious etc.? Is Europe doing anything special? And how might culture fit into it?
