Why don't anthropologists mention the AAT/H much?
One of the questions people often
ask is why the anthropologists who deal with human evolution don't deal
with the AAT/H in their writings.
First of all, we have to note that they
do sometimes, but also that there are a couple of very good reasons why
they don't spend more time on it.
One can be seen by looking at the quality of the evidence used to support the AAT/H.
The web site so far corrects only some
of the bogus info and false "facts" used as support for the AAT/H.
If the proponents can't come up with better information than false "facts" like
"rhinos are predominately aquatic" or "only marine reptiles and birds have
salt glands", "only humans and aquatic mammals have hymens", etc. etc.,
what hope should they have of having their theory taken seriously?
The style of argument used
for the AAT/H typically boils down to: "I'm saying this without good evidence;
accept it or prove me wrong".
This leaves the critic with the task of proving
a negative, and of assembling all the evidence, including the evidence
that the proponents should've gotten together in the first place.
This is an unattractive prospect.
(I hate to tell you how many hours I had to spend digging out the real facts about the AAT/H.)
This problem can perhaps be
most easily understood by looking at the history of Fred Hoyle's claims
about Archaeopteryx.
Hoyle and Archaeopteryx
Fred Hoyle was (he died in August of 2001) an eminent British
astronomer who took it upon himself to claim that the Archaeopteryx fossils
which showed feather imprints along with skeletal details were either frauds
or mistaken identity.
These claims were widely publicized due to Hoyle's
stature as a scientist.
The fact that he's an astronomer with no training,
study, or other experience in paleontology, ornithology, or indeed anything
remotely connected to the subject didn't deter him from making this claim,
nor did it deter the media from uncritically reporting it ("he's a 'scientist',
right?").
To refute this claim, researchers
were forced to spend several months going over old research, and repeating
already-done research, in order to publish a scientific refutation of Hoyle's
claims.
This added no new information to science, it simply wasted time
and money better spent elsewhere.
Someone had to use up months of their
research life just to refute an exceedingly poorly thought-out and completely
bogus claim.
(There's a link to a more detailed account of this affair on my links page.)
This example brings out the
basic reason anthropologists don't spend time refuting the AAT/H, and Elaine
Morgan in particular.
The theory isn't worth their time and (generally meager) research money.
Morgan's work entails writing up a strawman version of human evolution, then kicking
it down while demanding that people defend that or accept her version.
Meanwhile, her version of human evolution is chock full of false "facts".
The AAT/H theorists have also
gone in for a classic technique among marginal theories, the shifting target.
Specifically, the "aquatic apes" have become less and less aquatic over
the years, from being fully acclimated to sea life, diving, etc., to seashore-dwelling
waders, to denizens of the shores of streams and inland lakes.
This change wipes out some of their arguments (which unfortunately weren't good
to begin with) but even so these arguments continue to be made.
For instance, the (false) claim that human sweating and tears are a marine
adaptation to excrete salt doesn't work at all in a freshwater environment,
yet even after moving their ape evolution scenario to fresh water, they often
keep the salt argument.
Another (false) claim is that bipedal locomotion
could not have been successful without the support of water, yet even after
the scenario moves to an ape wading along the shallows of the shoreline,
the argument stays.
The same goes for hair loss and hair alignment, fat, and other features.
There are other problems with
the AAT/H that experienced researchers see immediately.
The first is
the remarkable lack of fossils for the time period involved. This is to
be expected if the early hominids and proto-hominids were living in wet,
forested areas, as these are not conducive to fossilization.
If they lived on shorelines, however, as the AAT/H requires, the situation is far
different.
Shorelines are great places to get fossilized.
Present-day
shorelines are not often great places to find fossils, as water action
breaks them up, grinds them down, and erodes them smooth.
But present-day shorelines are generally not the shorelines of the past.
Getting fossilized usually starts with getting covered, and you can hardly beat a shoreline
for this.
If our ancestors were indeed commonly wading along the
shores, we would expect to find them fossilized right and left.
We don't.
Another immediately apparent
problem with this wading, diving, etc. business is that of predators. In
open forest or savannah, upright hominids would have little problem spotting
predators.
Predators in the shallow shoreline waters, on the other hand,
are even today a big problem.
The biggest culprits are sharks (mostly in
salt water but also in rivers) and crocodiles (which can be found in both
fresh and salt water).
Rather than being the protective medium that AAT/H
proponents imagine, shallow water is, for humans, one of the most dangerous
places in the natural world.
The AAT/H prefers to sidestep this issue or pretend that it doesn't exist.
Why don't professionals spend their time refuting
the AAT/H?
There are a few other points I
want to make about the problems of scientists dealing with refuting poorly
thought-out theories, which also relate to why anthropologists don't spend
a lot of time critiquing poorly drawn theories supported by bogus information,
such as the AAT/H.
Even among scientists, as we've
seen with Hoyle, there are times when assertions are put forth which are
poorly drawn, yet, because they strike a chord, often of wishful thinking,
they catch on and are repeated.
Yet refuting them can be an exercise in futility.
A good scientific review and critique is a lot of work, and takes
a lot of time.
But it's far easier to pop off with a theory that's poorly
researched than it is to accurately go over all the things that the original
theorist should've, and to provide a point by point refutation.
Then, generally, you can count on several things happening.
First, the original writer
can write several articles or papers in the time it takes the reviewer
to write one good refutation, because the original writer isn't doing the
work they should (which would've shown them the holes in their presentation
if they'd done so).
So that writer has many more publications to show for
their time, and their work tends to be viewed as "original", while the
refuter's work, arguably more important, is "review/critique" stuff, and
hence "unoriginal".
This publication imbalance affects their careers, and
although it shouldn't be that way, the original writer gets more credit
-- after all, they did "original" work, and more of it, too.
Second, by the time the refutation
is done, the original writer often has several new articles out.
The refuter can never catch up; in fact, they must inevitably fall further and further
behind, as well as running the risk of seeming to have no career or original
thoughts of their own, being perpetually on the coattails of the original
writer.
Then, assuming that the refuter
does eventually deal with all the original writer's various articles, that
writer can simply say, "but that's old news; we're way beyond that."
The original writer can also,
at any time, easily shift the essence of their claim (as in "less and less
aquatic"), then claim that the refuters are misrepresenting the original
writer's work.
This makes chasing such claims
very unattractive, especially when the original writer is simply presenting
their stuff in popular formats, without the rigor of pre-publication professional
critique (as is done with articles via peer review, and books via sending
them out to the pros and getting feedback).
Did Morgan at least break new ground regarding the role of females during our evolution?
Last is an oft-stated claim that,
whatever the flaws in her theorizing, Morgan at least was the first to
emphasize the importance of women and children, and the roles of mothers
and offspring, in human evolution.
If this claim were true, it might be
at least a point for her, despite the fact that her theory is all wet,
but this claim is in fact also not true.
Morgan didn't break new ground
in her treatment of women and children (and in fact her treatment seems
rather a lot like Desmond Morris's own poorly drawn The Naked Ape,
which she has stated was her source for her interest in the "aquatic ape" idea).
That ground had already broken during the 60s by researchers such
as Thelma Rowell and Jane Lancaster (and also in a great deal of the excellent
work on Japanese macaques by many, mostly Japanese, researchers), and perhaps
most directly by Sally Linton in a paper ("Woman the Gatherer") which drew
on the work of Richard Lee among the !Kung. Linton's work provided much
of the inspiration for the later influential work of Nancy Tanner and Adrienne
Zihlman.
It's a shame that Morgan's supporters ignore the incredibly
important and influential work of these pioneering women.
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