Prehistory is about to change!

[Digit]

And going by the current investigations into the climate research group at Norwich Uni RS even scientists may not be immune to such traits either it seems.

Roy.

[uniface]

What apparently no one has noticed in this -- perhaps what no one cares to notice -- is that the One Trunk notion is a categorical imperative of the thought system within which the argument proceeds.

Mechanistic-reductionalism requires that all parts be interchangeable, just as they are on the assembly lines that are one practical expression of it in action. Whether these parts are numbers, concepts (like inertia and momentum) or two-legged machines (people -- vide job qualifications determined by the completion of standardised educational programmes at standardised programming centres), everything is envisioned as a mechanical undertaking within a larger machine that is, in turn, subsumed within the giant machine called "civilisation." This is the unspoken assumption which governs nearly all of current thinking (of the analytical sort). (As we are seeing). Plants, animals and people must be, in the final analysis, organic machines responding to stimuli. The key term (and concept) being "machine."

There must be only one trunk because human variation must be (by definition) only in insignificant details which, while they may be germane to a particular situation, ultimately reduce to trivialities in the big picture. This, in turn, requires people to have once been "blank slates" upon which random chance and their environments have scribbled differently but meaninglessly.

We must all have come from one source, along one line, because we must all be "the same" because, from the mechanistic-reductionalist perspective, a consumer is a consumer.

qed.

Begin at the other end, though, from considering actual living creatures, and the absurdity of this is palpable. It fails -- not because it doesn't make a kind of perverse sense in its own terms, but because it can only stand by sweeping-away everything in experience that contradicts it. It does not describe anything but itself.

The root of the matter in principle : The inorganic can be successfully reduced to manipulable abstractions -- quantum physics being perhaps the ultimate accomplishment along this line of procedure.

But when this is done in the organic realm -- and with human life and values in particular -- everything inverts, every abstraction becoming its own antithesis in practice. It is thus, as an example, that the quest for "fairness" becomes, when put into practice, "affirmative action" -- palpable injustice.

It is useless to point out to a mechanist-reductionalist that even French people and English people differ down to their toenails. As do border collies from poodles. Having already sworn fealty to larger lies than are involved in disputing this, such as denying that there is a racial aspect to intelligence (because there cannot be one, or else his model comes apart at the seams), he can only manipulate the abstractions he has concocted his definition of "race" from to the appearance of self-negation, thus concluding (insisting) that because his definition of it can be argued-away, so can the fact it describes -- the baby along with the bathwater.

And for some reason, this is not recognised as a straw-man argument.

Only by presuming that people in ages past were less intelligent than we are (and this in the face of clear evidence to the contrary) can anyone do away with such primary recognitions of fact, inherited from them, as that figs are not gathered from thorn trees.

The root of the matter in practice : there is no new thing under the sun. The insistence that all people are from one source (whether a trunk, a limb or a stem) and thus "the same" ("equal") is found throughout history -- enforced at swordpoint -- everywhere the Usury Finance racket has managed to overcome and co-opt resistance to it. It was thus in Carthage as it was in Rome as it was in Byzantium as it was in Mecca (before Mohammed) as it was in 17th Century Amsterdam and the City of London as it is today everywhere. The "free flow of money and trade" must not be impeded by local "prejudices" and, by damn, it will not be. If necessary, by making "criminals" of those who resist it.

The sum and substance of the argument : A consumer is, after all, a consumer, and "embracing diversity," that great eraser of cultures and cultural values, a commercial necessity.

[Minimalist]

On top of that, Nat Geo are known to be rabid Darwinismists

I sense a bit of an "us versus them" attitude there, Ish.

In any case, some guy popping out a web site can be equally speculative, if not more so. At least the names of the scientists were displayed, along with their universities, and can be researched further if one so desires.

(I also doubt if there was much of a "mass-marketing" decision behind the production of this one. I suspect that the vast majority of the population of the planet could not understand a word of it.)