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The world is littered with evolutionary just-so stories, that like a good horoscope bring all the right details together and sound just right, but are total hoo
by astazangasta 11y ago
The world is littered with evolutionary just-so stories, that like a good horoscope bring all the right details together and sound just right, but are total hooey with no evidence. The fact is we know little about how we evolved and determinations like this are nearly impossible, no matter how fun they sound. See also the Aquatic Ape theory, etc.
- dceddia 11y agoThis seems to be a trend lately (or maybe one I was unaware of before) - finding some sort of evolutionary reasoning to justify this or that. It's very pronounced in self-help literature, books about psychology, etc. But it seems to be spreading to all sorts of fields. Clearly they're pretty hard to verify in a lot of cases, and I'm starting to wonder how many of these evolutionary "we are this way because our ancestors did X and were hunted by Y" theories are mostly fluff.
- innguest 11y agoMost mainstream material that is presented to the public, even through schools and particularly through the media, is fluff. For instance in History, the pyramids were not built by slaves, Germany won the Great War in 1916 but the Entente did not accept a peace agreement, the Civil War wasn't about slavery at all, Hamilton borrowed from the French to start the national debt on purpose, etc.
- stuxnet79 11y agoThis is exactly it. A lot of these speculations are not scientifically tractable.