>> I'm glad you read the book. In return, why don't you recommend to me
>> your current favorite book on the subject? Mine right now, as you
>> know, is The Fossil Trail by Ian Tattersall.
I accept Tattersall as an authority, and I think that's an excellent
book, so let's use it (I just got it out of the library).
Another good one is Trinkaus and Shipman's "The Neandertals", 1992. A
terrific book about Homo erectus that is just out (haven't finished it
yet) is Walker and Shipman's "Wisdom of the Bones".
>> On Goodman's claim that modern man's brain is a great leap forward over
>> Neanderthal, you write:
>> <<This is news to me. It is true that, for unknown reasons,
>> Neandertal culture does not display all the refinements of the Cro-
>> Magnons, but the same is true of many early modern humans and
>> archaic forms of Homo sapiens. While many have suggested that they
>> may have differed behaviorally from us, I doubt any modern
>> scientist claims that the Neandertal brain is visibly any different
>> from ours.>>
>> First of all, the complete Goodman quote goes on to relate linguistic
>> capacity (see page 19) to the debate,
It says that linguistic capacity is only *one* of modern man's
distinctive capabilities. Right before that, Goodman says (p17) that
"most experts acknowledge that [modern man's brain] represents a great
leap forward in its improved organization and its infinitely wider
range of abilities"
>> because size alone tells us NOTHING. As we'll see, that's crucial.
Size does indeed tell us nothing. Goodman, Tattersall, you and I can
all agree there.
>> But first I want to point to your contention that you doubt any
>> modern scientist claims the Neanderthal brain is "visibly" any
>> different. That's really a non-issue. In fact, Goodman doesn't make
>> this claim at all, but the very opposite, and right in the quotation
>> you used: "[W]hile modern man's brain is not particularly larger than
>> that of his immediate predecessor, Neanderthal man..." Goodman then
>> goes on to the cruciality of linguistic capacity.
Following the quote you give here, the rest of the sentence is the quote
I give two paras up. How can *anyone* possibly interpret that as saying
that modern and Neandertal brains are not different???
Later, Goodman says
While modern man's skull on the average is not particularly larger
than Neanderthal man's, it has undergone great reorganization. Its
new and distinctive high-foreheaded shape packages an even more
radical evolutionary departure: the expanded frontal section of the
brain, which controls nearly every distinctively human
activity. (p185)
and on p 187 he refers to
"Homo sapiens sapiens's increased mental and physical abilities"
"Changes in the brain combined with changes in the vocal tract..."
and don't forget p17:
"improved organization, and it's infinitely wider range of abilities"
What are these mental and physical abilities? What are the changes in
the brain, if, as you say, Goodman agrees that the modern human brain is
no different from the modern human brain. How were these differences
detected?
As I said in my last post, Trinkaus says Neandertals had:
a skeletal arrangement identical to ours, brains as large as ours, and
- to the best of our knowledge - the capability to perform any act
normally within the ability of a modern human." (p412)
That statement is in flat contradiction to Goodman, and Trinkaus is a
world expert on Neandertals.
(As an aside, N'tal and modern human brains did have a slightly
different overall shape, but that's because they're stored in
different-shaped containers. I don't think anyone has ever claimed that
this difference has any significance.)
>> Our old friend Ian Tattersall in The Fossil Trail, page 211, goes
>> right along with Goodman on this: "[N]either size nor the external
>> appearance of the brain is of much use here: there is simply no way
>> of reading function with adequate precision from the bumps and
>> fissures on the outside of the brain (and still less from brain
>> casts)."
No, Goodman is talking about all these dramatic differences, and
Tattersall is telling us that we can tell *almost nothing* about the
capabilities of the brain by looking at the outside of it, or at a cast.
As far as I can tell, Tattersall is contradicting Goodman's claims, not
supporting them. So is Trinkaus. How does Goodman know that modern
humans were so superior to Neandertals?
>> Tattersall then relates--guess what?--linguistic capacity!
Yes, but unlike Goodman, he doesn't write as if Neandertals were known
to be deficient in speech compared to us, which Goodman does. He
certainly isn't saying that Neandertals couldn't talk. And Trinkaus is
quite a bit more skeptical of these claims (rightly so, I think) about
the Neandertal vocal tract than Tattersall is.
>> It would seem that if Goodman's claims here are "without merit" or
>> "rubbish," the same would have to be said for Tattersall. But you
>> yourself recognize Tattersall as an expert. This is one example of
>> why I think you've overstated the case against Goodman.
As I said, I'm at a loss to imagine how Tattersall supports Goodman.
Perhaps you could tell us more exactly what you think Goodman is
claiming, and then what Tattersall says that supports it.
>> <<A similar graph taken from a book by Birdsell is similarly claimed
>> by Goodman to show separate cranial ranges. Instead, it seems to be
>> a graph plotting *average* brainsize against time for various
>> species. The fact that these average values are separate tells us
>> nothing about widely they were spread about the mean. For example,
>> the lowest point of Birdsell's line for Homo erectus is about 900cc,
>> even though many H. erectus skulls are known with values smaller than
>> that.>>
>> Goodman quotes Birdsell himself, from his college text. Birdsell said,
>> "Nowhere can it be demonstrated that men of the Homo erectus grade did evolve
>> into modern populations." [pg. 182] His conclusion on this point is exactly
>> the same as Goodman's. Is Birdsell "without merit"? Tattersall believes the
>> same thing [pg. 234]. So there IS merit to this contention.
I am curious about the Birdsell quote, but I can't comment without the
book handy. I assume the book in question is "Human evolution : an
introduction to the new physical anthropology / J. B. Birdsell", in
which case I can look it up later.
My copy of Tattersall has almost no text on p234, but a tree diagram of
human evolution which shows a line going from H.ergaster (the African
H.erectus fossils) to modern humans, with H.heidelbergensis (the
"archaic" H.sapiens fossils) sitting on that line. That seems like a
very strange way to support Jim Bell's claim that Tattersall agrees with
the following statement:
>> << Goodman: "Needless to say, there is no evidence of this transition
>> [from H.erectus to H.sapiens sapiens] in the fossil record to
>> date." (p137)
It is very clear in another book by Tattersall, "The Human Odyssey",
where fossils such as Arago, Petralona, Rhodesian Man are discussed in a
chapter entitled "Towards Modern Humans", that he thinks they are
intermediates between H.erectus and modern H.sapiens.
(Strictly speaking, Tattersall does not believe there are intermediates
between erectus and sapiens, because he uses "erectus" to refer to the
Asian fossils (Peking Man, Java Man). But he obviously thinks that the
African fossils that most people still put in H. erectus are human
ancestors (Tattersall calls them H.ergaster), and that there are
intermediate fossils between them and us.)
>> <<A similar graph taken from a book by Birdsell is similarly claimed
>> by Goodman to show separate cranial ranges. Instead, it seems to
>> be a graph plotting *average* brainsize against time for various
>> species. >>
>> You may have a point about the graph. I don't think Goodman's
>> argument against overlap was developed enough. There should be
>> more.
Goodman's claim is just plain wrong. This can be better illustrated by
referring to his use of Cronin et al's paper, since I have it, and it
contains the data points used to construct it.
Cronin's graph contains the following ranges for brain size (in cc):
low mean high
H.erectus 800 930 1060
H.sapiens 1070 1400 1800
(The figures are not given explicitly; I read them off the graph, so
they're approximate). Goodman says this shows no overlap between
erectus and sapiens. But the text underneath the graph says the range
for erectus is only 1sd either side of mean. For H.sapiens, it is an
"observed range" taken from another paper. But obviously, some erectus
skulls will be greater than 1sd from mean, and one of them is listed in
the graph's data: CKT X, at 1225 cc. Similarly, modern human skulls go
down below 900 cc in extreme cases, so neither of those limits is valid.
Although he implies that H.erectus tops out at 1060 cc, he claims that
the Rhodesian Man skull is a H.erectus, even though it's 1280 cc, well
within the modern human range. Does that sound a teeny bit
contradictory? (and, for the record, I've never seen Rhodesian man
assigned to anything except H.sapiens, albeit an archaic one, because
it's still noticeably different from fully modern humans)
Goodman doesn't even seem to understand that he's misread the graph he's
citing contradicts, that he is contradicted by some of the graph's data,
and by other fossils that *he* cites later on. This is just amazingly
shoddy scholarship.
>> Graphs like these are always open to differing interpretations,
>> so Goodman should have spent more time on it.
No amount of time or development would save Goodman's argument that
there's no overlap.
>> I think the real problem for you, however, is Goodman's mention of
>> "interventionism." When you first read that, you say you feared a
>> religious agenda, or that Goodman was a "nut." This is telling. Why
>> should someone who believes in a supernatural option be, ipso facto,
>> nutty? Why such a reaction? It may be because the assumption of
>> naturalism is so strong that the alternative, a supernatural
>> possibility, puts someone automatically in the nut zone. I think this
>> reaction is ill founded, and ought to be examined.
Uh, no, I guessed (Nov 8, 1995), based on the scanty information I then
had available, that he might have a religious agenda, OR be a
space-alien nut. If you look at those alternatives, you'll notice that
the "nut" tag is associated with the *naturalistic* alternative, not the
religious one. But Jim Bell seems to have knee-jerked that I think that
"someone who believes in a supernatural option [is], ipso facto,
nutty?". To quote Jim again, "I think this reaction is ill founded, and
ought to be examined."
If you think von-Daniken-style-space-aliens is not nutty, then I guess
we'll just have to agree to disagree on that one.
>> Objective evolutionary writers, like Gordon R. Taylor, are all the
>> more convincing for their objectivity. And I would note that Taylor
>> is on Goodman's side of the fence on this one. I don't think he's
>> another closet nut. I think, in fact, he is further evidence that
>> Goodman's claims have some merit after all.
I read Taylor some years ago, and considered it worthless; an amateur in
well over his head. Since I don't want to go back and reread it to
justify that conclusion, let's just please agree to leave Taylor out of
the discussion and use Tattersall.
>> There are some good points you raise about Goodman's
>> conclusions. They can, and ought, to be debated. But I don't think
>> they are meritless, or "rubbish." Using such labels undercuts the
>> valid points you are making.
It wasn't meant to be an ad hominem; I thought that judgement was
justified based on the problems I found with the book.
I'm glad you thought I made some valid points, but I don't see that most
of them have been addressed. Is Goodman right when he says that the
coexistence of two species means one cannot have evolved from the other?
Is he right when he says that the "continuous developmental process[es]
Darwinians espouse", whatever they might be, prevent a body feature from
becoming more robust then more gracile? Is he right when he says that
the cranial capacities of hominid species don't overlap?
Most importantly, when Goodman says that in the space of 5000 years,
starting 40,000 years ago, there was more significant evolutionary
change than in the previous few million, WHAT THE HELL IS HE TALKING
ABOUT? It's nonsense even if you assume that H.sapiens sapiens evolved
from Neandertals, but most scientists don't think that, and Jim Bell
once said Goodman doesn't think that either. It's nonsense if he means
H.erectus; they were gone for at least 200K years before that. It's
nonsense, no matter what he thinks modern man evolved from, because
Goodman himself claims (correctly) that modern humans had already
appeared about 100K years ago.
Let me add that not everything in Goodman is necessarily wrong. Some of
his other claims about the achievements of Cro-Magnon such as
domestication of dogs and horses, and earlier-than-currently-accepted
humans in the Americas, etc., may have some validity and should be
judged on their merits on a case-by-case basis.
And yes, there is a "cultural explosion" that seems to occur starting
about 40,000 years ago. However it doesn't coincide with any of the
anatomical changes (which Goodman considers major, but are actually
quite minor) leading to modern humans, so we don't know whether this
explosion was caused by some undetectable neural change, an increase in
language capabilities. It could be that humans were just and smart and
creative before 40,000 yrs ago, but channelled it into activities that
do no preserve in the fossil record. It could be just an artifact of
the fossil record, since it detected at the same time that modern humans
moved into Europe. Africa has far fewer cave sites and has been
explored much less thoroughly than Europe, so it's quite possible that
the Cro-Magnon culture was in Africa before Europe, but has not been
detected. Evidence for this would be the highly sophisticated spear
heads and the like found in Zaire recently, and dated about 80-90,000
years old.
-- Jim Foley Symbios Logic, Fort Collins, COJim.Foley@symbios.com (970) 223-5100 x9765 I've got a plan so cunning you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel. -- Edmund Blackadder