Isn't it possible to compare dna between marsupials, mammals and monotremes and figure out which is 'earlier'? The paper described depends entirely on fossils which is good but not a smoking gun.
Marsupials and placentals are more closely related than any of them is related to monotremes. This is what has been determined from the DNA comparison.
Neither marsupials nor placentals are "earlier", they both have a common ancestor. This paper is about that common ancestor, more precisely about the continent where it lived, which now appears to have been Gondwana, in contradiction with earlier suppositions.
Gondwana is the former union of Africa, South America, Antarctica, Australia, Madagascar and India. The evolution of mammals has been influenced much more by the breaking and fusion of the continents than the evolution of other animals, because for mammals travel across seas was much less likely to be successful.
I assume you mean compared to birds? Ferns, wasps and slugs don’t like ocean voyages much, either. Coconuts are adapted to them (and yet the Polynesians had to bring them along to many places they now exist).
After hurricanes, frequently giant rafts of detritus can travel across the ocean. These sometimes have all sorts of life on them. It is conceivable that would include all of those creatures?
Migration is a recurring movement behaviour or pattern, coconuts don't do that. You are probably thinking of dispersal, which is movement that results in gene flow, e.g. into a new place, permanently.
That certainly occurs but it seems likely it isn't all that common, coconuts really only needed to disperse as far as the next coral atoll or island, which tends to be as far as a planktonic coral larvae can disperse. Really remote islands probably had coconuts introduced relatively recently by early settlers.
I have a lot of respect for Professor Tim Flannery - he’s a great science communicator and hosted a heap of shows in the early 2000’s.
He fronted a parliamentary hearing on climate change some time around 2010, where a heroic Liberal minister stated something along the lines of ‘you’re a palaeontologist, not a climate scientist, so you’re argument is invalid’. It was pretty sad to see.
Even being a climate scientist back then was cause for your credentials to be brought into question, let alone one from a cognate field.
I personally won't label the Liberal party as a centre-right party or left of the US right wing when it is currently led by Peter Dutton who is a typical far right element in modern politics.
I also struggle to categorize its recent former leader Tony Abbott and his close mate Joe Hockey who was the Treasurer as "centre-right". We are talking about a priest who was famously & accurately labelled by the only female Australian Prime Minister as a misogyny - that speech was voted for the No.1 moment in Australian TV history! These two are the people who want everyone to believe that it is a life style choice when people don't buy & drive ferrari.
Oh, let's also don't forget what happened to Liberal's actual centre-right leader Malcolm Turnbull. He was replaced by a bulldozer PM who is responsible for the use of automated machines to force the most vulnerable people to fork out billions of $ to cover their non-exist debts so his federal budget can look better to his supporters. Is this centre-right?
The Liberal party, for all its recent decade plus of derangement, is still clearly a center right party on an international scope. It would, for example, be anathema to degrade the level of services we experience in this country (and the Libs did pump a lot of money into services over the last few years, even whilst favouring private schools and clawing back robotically cash from those unable to fight back)
But even in US meaning, liberals are central right. Dems are central right. There is no labor or left party in US. The closest u can find is Bernie who is a social dem.
I don't understand ur logic. Won't American say Dems are left? and non-Americans would say there is no left in America acedemically? Isn't that the opposite of what u saying?
>“left” isn’t a thing academically because there isn’t some line that actually captures the wide variety of political positions.
Well, for Europeans (and I'd guess Canadians, Latin Americans, etc.) there is a line, and the Dems never cut it. A fuzzy line (a spectrum if you will on the left) doesn't mean there isn't one, and one can be of either side. Dems are not, and have never been, even close to the fuzzy "border" part of that line, always to the right of it.
Centrist is the more accurate term for Dems (and even that's charitable).
It's basically center-right (Dems), and right-to-far-right (GOP).
Sure, for some Americans, Democrats might be called "left", but then again other Americans also considered Swedish style social democracy as "communism".
>This meme of “there is no left in America” is just a childish way of saying, “I don’t like the current majority opinion of the Democratic Party”.
No, it's more like saying "America never has had a left party, just a party more to the left than the other".
Not in any historical sense of the term as developed and still currently used in Europe, at any rate.
Giving how hard it is to find affordable housing in Stockholm, I have to wonder if Swedish style social democracy is so great after all, if it can't even solve the fundamental human need of housing by building enough for everyone.
Poverty rate in Sweden is, like in most of Western Europe, low. [1] whilst the cost of living is lower than in the USA as an example. [2] At the same time schools, university, healthcare, social services, is accessible to everyone. There is a shortage of housing, only 0.8% of rental properties are availbe for rent[3] but it isn’t necessarily only a failure of government as the housing market is largely commercial, only 19% of housing is owned by the government [4].
No I mention housing supply because it is an issue that cuts orthogonally across the popular left-right dimension.
Japan is very capitalist but builds lots of housing because landowners can build up with little zoning restrictions.
The USSR was very communist and they also built a lot of housing because the government just went in and did it.
But the USA and Europe seem to easily get stuck in NIMBY traps where nothing gets built, and then when prices go up due to lack of supply people will reach for solutions like rent control, which almost 100% of economists will tell you is bad for longterm housing supply because it discourages new construction.
I've heard Stockholm's rent control is especially stupid because while the landlord is forced to rent to the primary tenant at a low, below market rate, that primary tenant can turn around and sublet their entire unit at a much higher, market rate to a secondary tenant. So the primary lease is basically a capital asset with perpetual returns. The unit ends up renting for market rate anyway to the secondary tenant, while the primary tenant collects free money.
Those are plain old shared with bourgeois / social democracy concerns, not specifically left concerns (left is about class issues, and focuses on the economic substrate and equality, which is sees as more fundamental and where all others are mere derivatory or pale in importnace. Marx even considered these kind of things "bourgeois rights" and somewhat dismissed them.
In any case, it's not like the right is against "accessibility for the disabled".
Similarly, same-sex marriage is not about left vs right but about progressive/liberal (in the in favor of invididual rights sense) vs concervative.
An anarcho-capitalist can be all about same-sex marriage without being left (the opposite), where even communists were known to be socially conservative in several cases, or pioneering such rights in others.
There is no line, stop burying your head in the sand by pretending there is.
It’s so incredibly stupid to think that there is just one dimension driving all political views and it’s stemming from the lens of the US two-party system sucking the oxygen out of the room.
Pick all of the policies you think defines a “left” party and we can go through one-by-one and find parties in some country that are considered right-wing that will share some of the same views.
Political science is an actual subject. I would suggest everyone to take look just to learn bit. Why do u think I don't like Dems? The only thing I said is that they r not left. Which is true. I stated it like I say cold or hot. Did I ever mention I prefer which?
Political science doesn’t place everything onto a left-right single dimensional line. If you think it does you need to spend some more time actually reading.
Additionally, political science has many subfields and the ones that are closely related to political beliefs are subject to the same replication crisis as the other fields of social psychology (i.e. lots of junk science). So any of that stuff that generalizes 1 dimensional outcomes to entire lifestyles and views is likely complete trash.
I'll emphasize what kortilla said, please read about actual political science, not stuff you encounter online about this. Open a book. This online mudslinging nonsense is meaningless.
In quantitative political science, candidates and parties tend to be placed in "n-dimensional political spaces" where each issue occupies a different dimension. For example, if an election contains candidates who have publicly stated their positions on LGBT rights, free trade, and public healthcare, then you can call this a 3-dimensional political space where candidates place their attitudes on these issues on these axes.
In qualitative political science, there's many distinctions. There's "liberal rights vs substantive rights" political systems (e.g. whether the government guarantees individuals rights against their government or whether the government guarantees individuals substantive (standard of living e.g. basic healthcare) claims. There's "authoritarian vs democratic systems" (e.g. both fascist systems and Democratic Centralist ("politburo-style") socialist systems are authoritarin systems; liberal democratic, social democratic, and participatory economic systems are all democratic systems).
Even then, Europe has social democratic and communist parties that are anti-immigration. Japan has pro-labor pro-immigration parties. Politics cannot be boiled down to a "left" and a "right". When discussing "the Left" in the context of political philosophy, I've largely seen it as a reference to Hegelian Marxist thought at its strongest and a general orientation around the disenfranchisement of labor at its weakest.
Ugh, stop digging in on this lame 1 dimensional spectrum. It doesn’t adequately capture anything meaningful in the real world.
There is no “global center-right”.
What is considered a “right wing extremist” in France could still be extremely nationalistic, anti-immigration, pro state entitlements, anti free speech, and anti gun rights. That has zero overlap with any of the political parties in the US no matter where you plop the dumb pin on the 1d line.
In any other western country and most of Europe, American Democrats would be considered insane right wing extremists. They don't even support having a healthcare system or banning guns.
It isn't right, but also... in the US, parties are institutionally weak. People do not (cannot) vote for parties, but for individual representatives. Ergo, different Democrats (or Republicans) run on issues perceived to have saliency locally. From such a collection of elected individuals, it is much more difficult to craft a "party" position -- because in some districts, supporting healthcare/gun control/whatever is not a winner.
Increasing partisanship and gerrymandering are making this less true, but it is still a significant force, particularly for Senate seats.
Strong parties, that run on a policy platform and where they have much more control over their members, just isn't a thing in the US, and couldn't be, without a lot of constitutional changes.
Not sure about that. Lots of voting systems don't vote for parties directly either. And I would say the two parties in the US are extremely strong, FPTP seems to reenforce that. It might also lead to the parties accepting some level of dissidence from some members -- better for a blue party to have a slightly red-ish congressman in a red state than to cede it to the other party. But I don't think that really weakens the parties because it goes both ways.
Minor parties and coalition governments in other countries function in somewhat the same way. It's not uncommon for a party to win but not gain absolute power in the legislative branch of government, and have to compromise with others to pass laws and spending bills.
I don't see how one could read socialist literature and not come to that conclusion. Read Kropotkin, Marx, Mao, Engels, Proudhon, and you can not come away thinking that both major US parties are to the right. I think one would be hard pressed reading just economics and coming away with that conclusions. They are pro-capital, pro-imperial, pro-free trade parties. That sure sounds like a right-wing party.
Minor nit: free trade isn't right or left wing in the traditional sense, it's isolationist vs globalist. Marx was generally in favor of free trade because he thought at the time protectionism bred more industrialists:
>The question of Free Trade or Protection moves entirely within the bounds of the present system of capitalist production, and has, therefore, no direct interest for us socialists who want to do away with that system.
>Indirectly, however, it interests us inasmuch as we must desire as the present system of production to develop and expand as freely and as quickly as possible: because along with it will develop also those economic phenomena which are its necessary consequences, and which must destroy the whole system: misery of the great mass of the people, in consequence of overproduction. This overproduction engendering either periodical gluts and revulsions, accompanied by panic, or else a chronic stagnation of trade; division of society into a small class of large capitalist, and a large one of practically hereditary wage-slaves, proletarians, who, while their numbers increase constantly, are at the same time constantly being superseded by new labor-saving machinery; in short, society brought to a deadlock, out of which there is no escaping but by a complete remodeling of the economic structure which forms it basis.
From this point of view, 40 years ago Marx pronounced, in principle, in favor of Free Trade as the more progressive plan, and therefore the plan which would soonest bring capitalist society to that deadlock. But if Marx declared in favor of Free Trade on that ground, is that not a reason for every supporter of the present order of society to declare against Free Trade? If Free Trade is stated to be revolutionary, must not all good citizens vote for Protection as a conservative plan?
>If a country nowadays accepts Free Trade, it will certainly not do so to please the socialists. It will do so because Free trade has become a necessity for the industrial capitalists. But if it should reject Free Trade and stick to Protection, in order to cheat the socialists out of the expected social catastrophe, that will not hurt the prospects of socialism in the least. Protection is a plan for artificially manufacturing manufacturers, and therefore also a plan for artificially manufacturing wage laborers. You cannot breed the one without breeding the other.
First past the post voting has given the two party duopoly a death grip on American politics. People generally have a latent party, and ascribe anything that they disagree with as part of the opposing political camp. To answer your question, someone in the blue tribe (latent Democrat) will see the big-business-supreme legal regime and blame it on overwhelming right-leaning politics. Meanwhile someone in the red tribe (latent Republican) will look at the same freedom-destroying laws and their poor outcomes, but lay the blame at overwhelming leftism. In reality, the grassroots of both parties want similar things, but are herded into violent disagreement by the corporate-sponsored political machine.
(This isn't to say the two parties are the same, especially post ~2018. Just that the main dynamic is very similar)
They r central right acedemically even in US. The difference is that the public might perceive them as 'the US left'. Isn't relative definition more confusing? Isn't it easier to put everything on the same scale so that there is no confusion? To say US dem party is liberal is exactly right. Liberals are central right
There is no “scale”. What is considers “left” in Europe just looks like authoritarian nationalism from citizens of countries with a completely different set of priorities.
Politicians are subservient to the entities that fund them, and in Australia?
> "Coal is mined in every state of Australia. The largest black coal resources occur in Queensland and New South Wales. About 70% of coal mined in Australia is exported, mostly to eastern Asia, and of the balance most is used in electricity generation. In 2019-20 Australia exported 390 Mt of coal (177 Mt metallurgical coal and 213 Mt thermal coal) and was the world's largest exporter of metallurgical coal and second largest exporter of thermal coal."
The fact that Australia has been experiencing severe climate-change-related whipsaws from extreme flooding to extreme drought and fire hasn't changed this dynamic, as the Australian government cheerfully reports:
> "Coal export volumes have grown at an average annual rate of 2.5 per cent from 285 Mt in 2010–11 to 363 Mt in 2020–21... In 2020, Australia held 14 per cent of the world’s coal reserves (black and brown), ranking third behind the United States (23 per cent) and Russia (15 per cent)."
It's the same in the USA, although here we have two fossil-fuel-owned parties, Dems and Reps, but the former lie about their climate agenda while the latter are honest about it. In reality, both are owned by Wall Street interests who invest heavily in fossil fuels.
At least they could be honest about the science, instead of trying to hide the reality.
Kurzgesagt recent video was about quasi-stars, a very exotic hypothetical object described in just couple of papers with 0 proofs of existence. It’s so marginal, that even Wikipedia has a ‘no recent papers on subject’ badge on corresponding article. Still, an entire video was made, as if they were describing an established scientific concept.
Hasn't that been pretty well established for a while?
I thought it well grounded that mammals had evolved on Gondwana (the southern part of Pangea) during the process of it splitting away from Laurasia, and had settled Laurasia from Gondwana
Gondwana was composed of now South America, Africa, India, and Australia.
"Many paleontologists angrily reject the DNA findings, arguing there must be something wrong with the molecular clocks the geneticists use to date their findings. The geneticists counter that paleontologists just haven't found the right fossils yet."
And that should make clear it is not that clear cut as I (with ZERO background knowledge in either area) thought it was.
Hm; I thought that Ancient Apocalypse had been debunked here, as a collection of old myths that had been thoroughly discredited, but now presented as current issues. Just an invented-content money grab kind of thing?
Well… the whole ‘ancient apocalypse theory’ might be discredited, but the sites they visit date back extremely far into our ancient history. It also shows that pockets of architectural knowledge rapidly advanced and then receded all across the known world. One thing is for sure, the human story is far from a ladder, with periods of around 1000 years of advancements and then everything collapses for a couple generations.
I think it goes back to the OP’s original point… there are some things we cannot ever know for sure but they are fun to learn and talk about.
You're making it sound like everything advanced and then receded at the same time across the world. This hasn't been the case since the end of the last glacial period. There have been recedings of local civilizations scattered throughout history, as well as some large scale regional disruptions (e.g. late bronze age collapse, decline of the roman empire), but nothing like periods where everything collapses globally.
Oh, you're right. My objection was based on my own misinterpretation of "pockets" as referring to time periods and/or specific architectural knowledge rather than to particular locations.
> but nothing like periods where everything collapses globally.
What else but a population bottleneck could explain the lack of any genetic diversity to speak of in humans? No human alive today is more distantly related to you than 37th cousin. Any two random individuals are 99.9% identical. That's weird. For this to have occurred, something must have happened everywhere all at once.[1]
I like this idea. A long time ago, there was one amazingly attractive, irresistibly seductive, incredibly promiscuous and astoundingly prolific breeding individual and sexual athlete: the legendary Don Juan of the late Pleistocene.
Yeah I don't disagree, which was why I caveated it by saying "since the end of the last glacial period".
Before that, all bets are off, and I personally do consider the Toba catastrophe a possible explanation for the ridiculously low level of genetic diversity in modern humans outside sub-Saharan Africa.
> It also shows that pockets of architectural knowledge rapidly advanced and then receded all across the known world.
That just means that this level of architectural capability is easily discovered from scratch when circumstances happen to be somewhat right, but then not enough of a gamechanger to endure when when they are not.
You can always tell a conspiracy theory when it relies on some nebulous group of villains to prop it up. "They don't want you to know what I'm telling you". Tell me clearly who 'they' refers to.
Big archeology? Could we get some names? Maybe an interview with some of them? No, just imagine them like the illuminati but dirtier and poorer, and extremely tribal for some reason.
People just aren't as good at organising as the theories demand they are. They would 100% break ranks if there was a chance to make a major discovery and be famous for it, group loyalty be damned.
I have seen exactly what he complains about, many times.
Most recently, the very first reaction was to label him racist. Then he was "dangerous" to The Children.
The fact is, he is wrong in his interpretations, but they are based on evidence. Instead of calling him "dangerous", why not engage with the evidence? Among few places I have seen that done is the "Scientists Against Myths" YT channel, https://youtube.com/@ScientistsAgainstMyths/videos. It is rather off-putting: they forget they are addressing the audience, not the promoters of bad interpretations. You have to endure that to get to the end, each time.
Shows like Graham Hancock's evoke wonder that seems beyond scientists to match. That feeling of wonder is where the next generation of scientists comes from.
It is critically important that scientists say when they don't know something. They should seek out opportunities to mention them, instead of trying to cover them up. Hancock has been right, and historical consensus dead wrong, too many times. He was an early promoter of humans in the Americas before 15kya, and of the comet strike in North America, near (maybe after) the start of the Younger Dryas cold spell, that wiped out mammoths, mastodons, horses, camels, dire wolves, cheetahs, giant beavers, giant sloths, and the Clovis culture; and about megalithic construction dating that far back. There are lessons here on science's ability, and often failure, to self-correct. All of these had evidence "scientists" rejected outright, not because of anything about the evidence, but just because.
There is plenty of evidence that stone bowls were "turned" to grind them into shape, but the first depictions of it we know of show up thousands of years later. What is the history of "turning"? Somebody might make progress on the question someday, but only if they know there is much unknown.
The thing that drives me nuts about him and his show can be found in episode 1. He does some scanning of the temple and finds three underground chambers. He cites them as evidence and speculates that they might prove him right and they are a mere 10 meters below him.
And then he leaves.
What?! This is your whole life's work and reputation on the line and you aren't digging 10m to check? It might take a few days but that's nothing. If it's illegal, will he risk nothing for his conviction? He makes the speculation, seeds doubt and then follows through with nothing again and again.
It's the same as those tv psychics. The whole episode we watch as they get closer to a burial site and then right when they are staring out the car window at some woods with dramatic music, the credits roll. Nothing found again!
The first 80% of the episode is fascinating as he shows us these amazing sites. Then inevitably comes the wild speculation disconnected from anything actually shown. Such a frustrating end to every episode. Wake me up when you find something.
There's usually some legitimate value in fringes. Even when 95%+ of the fringe can be baseless, total conspiracy tier stuff, but calling 100% of it 'misinformation' and creating a culture of banning/discrediting it out-right and finding weak excuses (ie, accusations racist-by-association because others who are in the fringe happen to be racist, like the current western modus operandi) is dangerous and anti-progress.
He tries to stay consistent with the evidence, as he understands it. Speculations are better than suppressing evidence inconsistent with your narrative.
I think that's a pretty serious accusation to make about historians and archaeologists in general, in the context of a discussion of someone who hasn't added to the field, and indeed produces pseudoscientific crap for Netflix.
He may try to stay consistent with the evidence as he understands it in which case it becomes clear he doesn't understand it.
So no, I don't find it inspirational or evocative, any more than I have found talks by psychics, ufologists or homeopaths evocative. They all imagine their beliefs are evidenced...
An accusation richly deserved. Maybe you are unaware of how people were treated when they brought evidence for pre-Clovis Americans? We need not mention Zahi Hawass.
Our expectations for Netflix shows is low. Our expectations for behavior of historians should be higher. Making this be about Hancock would be a mistake.
Don't understand why you guys characterize these things this way. The person who brought it up would probably just say that it stimulates thought and make you think. In your response, you assume one who shares the show has "fallen for" it - like definitely believes it, without doubt.
Never heard this type of pushback about Ancient Aliens, which is even more ridiculous. I feel like the replies are going to be "but nobody took that seriously anyway." Firstly, I dunno about that. Secondly, not sure anyone's taking Ancient Apocalypse more seriously.
The show presents a theory, it's not claiming a fact. It's so bizarre that out of all the media out there that walks the line between history, science, and outlandish ideas, this one very specific show, for some reason, gets all this hateful focus. Very weird.
If someone posted about Ancient Aliens or any other pseudoscience show on here and said it's "really interesting" in a discussion about history (rather than, say, fantasy or entertainment), we'd characterize it the same way. I don't know why you think Ancient Apocalypse is being singled out when I explicitly said "History Channel type nonsense".
Ancient Apocalpse is quite entertaining horrific pseudoscience nonsense. You just have to come at it from the right perspective.
For me, it’s fodder for modern TTRPG campaigns and a Sailor Moon prequel fanfic, as well as letting me know of the existence of ancient sites I never knew about.
I watched with some interest. I was amused by their claim that lining up a structure with the sun was some sort of advanced cosmology or evidence that they had advanced science, or any science at all.
The megastructures, while large, showed no evidence of sophisticated engineering.
Just this quote immediately put me off the article. Weasel word "many" to start with (how many? Four or five? Half of them?) and followed up with emotive language (how angry were they? Perhaps they were just bored with shoddy justifications?)
> You like lock them up, sterilise them, use them for experiments.
Not withstanding that your commentary has nothing to do with the article, as an Australian I am going to request some more information on this.
Australia is by no means a perfect country, but your phrasing suggests that First Nations people are currently sterilised or used for experiments. That may have been the case, but hasn't been for many decades.
Additionally, First Nations people have access to substantial government programs, including free higher education, welfare and housing programs, and specialised medical support. So please, with less inflamatory rhetoric and more fact, how can you possibly compare Australia with District9 (which was itself more accurately a reflection of apartheid South Africa, not Australia)?
My understanding of that idiom (and how I see it most commonly used) is that the skepticism is proportional to the salt. Slightly suspect things only get a bit of salt and skepticism, hugely unproven things get a lot of salt and skepticism. Given that, an unproven but large claim would need a lot of salt and skepticism
Based on the supposed origin of the idiom, I think salt and skepticism being proportional is a bit closer to the original meaning, than them being inversely proportional, though neither is especially close. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grain_of_salt
I hate to get all ad hominem here, but the fact that it comes from an Australian journal is just a tad bit self-interested. It reminds me of the Chinese scientists who keep insisting that humans evolved in China, not Africa:
I don't know anything about the subject itself, but I don't like that the article makes hyperbolic claims like
> Together this weighty band of experts has just published a paper in the scientific literature that’s likely to be seen as landmark in our understanding of life on Earth.
I think the article made that point to counteract any questions of "who is the source, and how reliable are they on this topic?". Especially because Tim Flannery has already been the target of many "callouts" on Australian media, eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LzlEkxE-zs
So I take it you'd be equally suspicious of all the prior work from the Northern Hemisphere that claimed mammalian origins to be there? I guess that's reasonable. Western Europeans and North Americans are the default humans/scientists after all, and are completely objective about their central place in everything, even pre-human evolution.
As much as I support the sentiment you're making an odd comparison. It is fair that anything which aligns with potential self interest should definitely have a higher bar of suspicion regardless of where that is. On the other hand it's not really reasonable to say an original consensus of "not Australia" from the rest of the world held for 100s of years and a new challenging claim of "Australia" from Australia are somehow comparable potential conflicts of self-interest or that we should be asked to have equal suspicion in them at the moment. That feels more like the exact self-interest amplification suspicion than a logical concern.
The far better argument IMO would be "it's a lot easier for new discoveries to be made by and reported in the the country they occur in so it isn't necessarily surprising the initial challenge would come from and be reported in that country". The China human origin one had more problems than just initial suspicion but this one will probably sort itself out into overall consensus in time and I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up being true. However it's probably still getting more self-attention than it would if the discovery were somewhere else in the southern hemisphere than Australia and there is nothing wrong with keeping that in mind regardless where you are or what you currently think.
My comment was satire, which is all the topic deserves because it's ludicrous. The 'suspicion' you speak of has nothing to do with assessing scientific claims. They stand alone on the evidence presented, and as later tested against competing claims. Later, if the claims don't stand up, someone may well when writing fiction/biography/history/journalism choose to use the writers' background as part of their plot. But it's all irrelevant to science qua science.
The assessing motivations game has no role to play here, and no destination for that matter. You could spend the next millennium trying to determine whether this particular piece of research was published in an Australian journal for nationalistic reasons (and whose reasons?) vs whether it just so happened that a piece of Australian research got published in Australian journals (gosh!) vs whether the putative 'research must be reviewed by peers from outside the region' rule (created in an HN thread) was equally applied to default US and EU based researchers. None of it would illuminate the truth or otherwise of the proposed idea.
No need to spend a millennium on the problem, it'll be substantially peer reviewed the world over many times with additional discoveries supporting or not supporting it well before 1/100th that time. Minding motivations until that point not only plays a role but is a core component, doesn't take long for major discoveries as interesting as this, and does help illuminate the truth as time marches on. Acting like biases aren't relevant doesn't help any of that. Science isn't some absolute truth waiting to be mined it IS that process of discovery, insight, doubt, and review repeated forever. To skip part of it only makes it worse not better.
Peer review doesn't include tests of nationalism, nor biographical investigations. Bias is neither ignored by following the evidence (which is precisely what can indicate it!), nor exposed by wild claims about the nationalism of non-default US/Euro scientists.
Extensive peer review tests the evidence which in turn removes biases like the ones you listed. To not do it leaves room for those biases to remain which is what triggers reason to keep suspicion at first.
Tangential: I spent a lot of my youth wanting to be a herpetologist and traipsing around swamps catching snakes. Many many many hours hunting for snakes hiding in the underbrush.
I noticed over time that my visual system would get into this weird state where it was like I wasn't actively focusing on anything, but I could pick up any tiny motion or snake-like shape anywhere in my visual field. It's a really strange but gratifying feeling.
Yeah, same here, along with the sound of them rustling through the grass! There were many times where we would be walking on a trail, I would stop, and say "there's a snake over here" and pull a snake out from the cover of grass!
Its always made me wonder how members of indigenous tribes, that hunt and gather, perceive the world.
This article talks about something called the "Sherwin-Williams Effect", but DuckDuckGo doesn't turn up any relevant results. Does anyone know what it is?
Do you think people take into account the timeline of homo sapiens in their region when they decide whether to have "regional pride"? I suspect not. You're looking for sense where there is none to be found.
It would move the spotlight from the regions certain researchers have spent their careers and would result in some future funding opportunities being reallocated to focus on the new region
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadBut it does not tell you anything about where they came from.
Neither marsupials nor placentals are "earlier", they both have a common ancestor. This paper is about that common ancestor, more precisely about the continent where it lived, which now appears to have been Gondwana, in contradiction with earlier suppositions.
Gondwana is the former union of Africa, South America, Antarctica, Australia, Madagascar and India. The evolution of mammals has been influenced much more by the breaking and fusion of the continents than the evolution of other animals, because for mammals travel across seas was much less likely to be successful.
That certainly occurs but it seems likely it isn't all that common, coconuts really only needed to disperse as far as the next coral atoll or island, which tends to be as far as a planktonic coral larvae can disperse. Really remote islands probably had coconuts introduced relatively recently by early settlers.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3936586/
Will you tell your lord and master that Arthur from the Court of Camelot is here?
He fronted a parliamentary hearing on climate change some time around 2010, where a heroic Liberal minister stated something along the lines of ‘you’re a palaeontologist, not a climate scientist, so you’re argument is invalid’. It was pretty sad to see.
Even being a climate scientist back then was cause for your credentials to be brought into question, let alone one from a cognate field.
Not being familiar with Australian politics, is it liberal in the US meaning or the european meaning ?
I also struggle to categorize its recent former leader Tony Abbott and his close mate Joe Hockey who was the Treasurer as "centre-right". We are talking about a priest who was famously & accurately labelled by the only female Australian Prime Minister as a misogyny - that speech was voted for the No.1 moment in Australian TV history! These two are the people who want everyone to believe that it is a life style choice when people don't buy & drive ferrari.
Oh, let's also don't forget what happened to Liberal's actual centre-right leader Malcolm Turnbull. He was replaced by a bulldozer PM who is responsible for the use of automated machines to force the most vulnerable people to fork out billions of $ to cover their non-exist debts so his federal budget can look better to his supporters. Is this centre-right?
Gore Vidal
“left” isn’t a thing academically because there isn’t some line that actually captures the wide variety of political positions.
This meme of “there is no left in America” is just a childish way of saying, “I don’t like the current majority opinion of the Democratic Party”.
Well, for Europeans (and I'd guess Canadians, Latin Americans, etc.) there is a line, and the Dems never cut it. A fuzzy line (a spectrum if you will on the left) doesn't mean there isn't one, and one can be of either side. Dems are not, and have never been, even close to the fuzzy "border" part of that line, always to the right of it.
Centrist is the more accurate term for Dems (and even that's charitable).
It's basically center-right (Dems), and right-to-far-right (GOP).
Sure, for some Americans, Democrats might be called "left", but then again other Americans also considered Swedish style social democracy as "communism".
>This meme of “there is no left in America” is just a childish way of saying, “I don’t like the current majority opinion of the Democratic Party”.
No, it's more like saying "America never has had a left party, just a party more to the left than the other".
Not in any historical sense of the term as developed and still currently used in Europe, at any rate.
Poverty rate in Sweden is, like in most of Western Europe, low. [1] whilst the cost of living is lower than in the USA as an example. [2] At the same time schools, university, healthcare, social services, is accessible to everyone. There is a shortage of housing, only 0.8% of rental properties are availbe for rent[3] but it isn’t necessarily only a failure of government as the housing market is largely commercial, only 19% of housing is owned by the government [4].
[1] https://data.oecd.org/inequality/poverty-rate.htm
[2] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings_by_country.js...
[3] https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subje...
[4] https://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/11...
Japan is very capitalist but builds lots of housing because landowners can build up with little zoning restrictions.
The USSR was very communist and they also built a lot of housing because the government just went in and did it.
But the USA and Europe seem to easily get stuck in NIMBY traps where nothing gets built, and then when prices go up due to lack of supply people will reach for solutions like rent control, which almost 100% of economists will tell you is bad for longterm housing supply because it discourages new construction.
I've heard Stockholm's rent control is especially stupid because while the landlord is forced to rent to the primary tenant at a low, below market rate, that primary tenant can turn around and sublet their entire unit at a much higher, market rate to a secondary tenant. So the primary lease is basically a capital asset with perpetual returns. The unit ends up renting for market rate anyway to the secondary tenant, while the primary tenant collects free money.
This is overly simplistic. For instance, the US (left?) has been ahead of Europe on issues like accessibility for the disabled or same-sex marriage.
In any case, it's not like the right is against "accessibility for the disabled".
Similarly, same-sex marriage is not about left vs right but about progressive/liberal (in the in favor of invididual rights sense) vs concervative.
An anarcho-capitalist can be all about same-sex marriage without being left (the opposite), where even communists were known to be socially conservative in several cases, or pioneering such rights in others.
It’s so incredibly stupid to think that there is just one dimension driving all political views and it’s stemming from the lens of the US two-party system sucking the oxygen out of the room.
Pick all of the policies you think defines a “left” party and we can go through one-by-one and find parties in some country that are considered right-wing that will share some of the same views.
Additionally, political science has many subfields and the ones that are closely related to political beliefs are subject to the same replication crisis as the other fields of social psychology (i.e. lots of junk science). So any of that stuff that generalizes 1 dimensional outcomes to entire lifestyles and views is likely complete trash.
In quantitative political science, candidates and parties tend to be placed in "n-dimensional political spaces" where each issue occupies a different dimension. For example, if an election contains candidates who have publicly stated their positions on LGBT rights, free trade, and public healthcare, then you can call this a 3-dimensional political space where candidates place their attitudes on these issues on these axes.
In qualitative political science, there's many distinctions. There's "liberal rights vs substantive rights" political systems (e.g. whether the government guarantees individuals rights against their government or whether the government guarantees individuals substantive (standard of living e.g. basic healthcare) claims. There's "authoritarian vs democratic systems" (e.g. both fascist systems and Democratic Centralist ("politburo-style") socialist systems are authoritarin systems; liberal democratic, social democratic, and participatory economic systems are all democratic systems).
Even then, Europe has social democratic and communist parties that are anti-immigration. Japan has pro-labor pro-immigration parties. Politics cannot be boiled down to a "left" and a "right". When discussing "the Left" in the context of political philosophy, I've largely seen it as a reference to Hegelian Marxist thought at its strongest and a general orientation around the disenfranchisement of labor at its weakest.
Also, the majority of American citizens don't like the opinions of the democratic party. They works for the corps, not the people.
There is no “global center-right”.
What is considered a “right wing extremist” in France could still be extremely nationalistic, anti-immigration, pro state entitlements, anti free speech, and anti gun rights. That has zero overlap with any of the political parties in the US no matter where you plop the dumb pin on the 1d line.
It's almost like not all issues fit neatly on a single left/right dimension.
Also the Democrats created Obamacare which is similar to the Swiss system of mandated insurance, so they obviously do care about healthcare.
And in many states, Democrats have passed gun control at the state level.
That doesn't sound right.
> or banning guns.
In which other western country or part of Europe are guns banned?
Increasing partisanship and gerrymandering are making this less true, but it is still a significant force, particularly for Senate seats.
Strong parties, that run on a policy platform and where they have much more control over their members, just isn't a thing in the US, and couldn't be, without a lot of constitutional changes.
Minor parties and coalition governments in other countries function in somewhat the same way. It's not uncommon for a party to win but not gain absolute power in the legislative branch of government, and have to compromise with others to pass laws and spending bills.
Democrats are the ones pushing for universal healthcare: https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/achievin...
> or banning guns.
Yep, they're the ones pushing for gun control too: https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/healing-...
>The question of Free Trade or Protection moves entirely within the bounds of the present system of capitalist production, and has, therefore, no direct interest for us socialists who want to do away with that system.
>Indirectly, however, it interests us inasmuch as we must desire as the present system of production to develop and expand as freely and as quickly as possible: because along with it will develop also those economic phenomena which are its necessary consequences, and which must destroy the whole system: misery of the great mass of the people, in consequence of overproduction. This overproduction engendering either periodical gluts and revulsions, accompanied by panic, or else a chronic stagnation of trade; division of society into a small class of large capitalist, and a large one of practically hereditary wage-slaves, proletarians, who, while their numbers increase constantly, are at the same time constantly being superseded by new labor-saving machinery; in short, society brought to a deadlock, out of which there is no escaping but by a complete remodeling of the economic structure which forms it basis.
From this point of view, 40 years ago Marx pronounced, in principle, in favor of Free Trade as the more progressive plan, and therefore the plan which would soonest bring capitalist society to that deadlock. But if Marx declared in favor of Free Trade on that ground, is that not a reason for every supporter of the present order of society to declare against Free Trade? If Free Trade is stated to be revolutionary, must not all good citizens vote for Protection as a conservative plan?
>If a country nowadays accepts Free Trade, it will certainly not do so to please the socialists. It will do so because Free trade has become a necessity for the industrial capitalists. But if it should reject Free Trade and stick to Protection, in order to cheat the socialists out of the expected social catastrophe, that will not hurt the prospects of socialism in the least. Protection is a plan for artificially manufacturing manufacturers, and therefore also a plan for artificially manufacturing wage laborers. You cannot breed the one without breeding the other.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1888/free-trade/
(This isn't to say the two parties are the same, especially post ~2018. Just that the main dynamic is very similar)
In the US, different people use “liberal” to mean:
(1) Everything to the left of center of institutional power of the Republican Party, or
(2) Everything to the right of their preferred viewpoint (common among the US’s small number of actual leftists.)
(3) People who agree with their particular take on pro-capitalist econonic policy (often prefixed with “classical”.)
Among other uses.
> "Coal is mined in every state of Australia. The largest black coal resources occur in Queensland and New South Wales. About 70% of coal mined in Australia is exported, mostly to eastern Asia, and of the balance most is used in electricity generation. In 2019-20 Australia exported 390 Mt of coal (177 Mt metallurgical coal and 213 Mt thermal coal) and was the world's largest exporter of metallurgical coal and second largest exporter of thermal coal."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_Australia
The fact that Australia has been experiencing severe climate-change-related whipsaws from extreme flooding to extreme drought and fire hasn't changed this dynamic, as the Australian government cheerfully reports:
> "Coal export volumes have grown at an average annual rate of 2.5 per cent from 285 Mt in 2010–11 to 363 Mt in 2020–21... In 2020, Australia held 14 per cent of the world’s coal reserves (black and brown), ranking third behind the United States (23 per cent) and Russia (15 per cent)."
It's the same in the USA, although here we have two fossil-fuel-owned parties, Dems and Reps, but the former lie about their climate agenda while the latter are honest about it. In reality, both are owned by Wall Street interests who invest heavily in fossil fuels.
At least they could be honest about the science, instead of trying to hide the reality.
"but if they existed, they would solve one of the largest mysteries of cosmology"
Is that not enough?
This kind of thing is important with relation to some of their video topics, but what's the connection here?
I thought it well grounded that mammals had evolved on Gondwana (the southern part of Pangea) during the process of it splitting away from Laurasia, and had settled Laurasia from Gondwana
Gondwana was composed of now South America, Africa, India, and Australia.
https://archive.vn/YHs1H
"Many paleontologists angrily reject the DNA findings, arguing there must be something wrong with the molecular clocks the geneticists use to date their findings. The geneticists counter that paleontologists just haven't found the right fossils yet."
And that should make clear it is not that clear cut as I (with ZERO background knowledge in either area) thought it was.
That Ancient Apocalypse show in Netflix is really interesting along those lines.
I think it goes back to the OP’s original point… there are some things we cannot ever know for sure but they are fun to learn and talk about.
> It also shows that pockets of architectural knowledge rapidly advanced and then receded all across the known world.
as "individual pockets, all around the world, advanced and receded."
What else but a population bottleneck could explain the lack of any genetic diversity to speak of in humans? No human alive today is more distantly related to you than 37th cousin. Any two random individuals are 99.9% identical. That's weird. For this to have occurred, something must have happened everywhere all at once.[1]
[1] https://https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theor...
Before that, all bets are off, and I personally do consider the Toba catastrophe a possible explanation for the ridiculously low level of genetic diversity in modern humans outside sub-Saharan Africa.
That just means that this level of architectural capability is easily discovered from scratch when circumstances happen to be somewhat right, but then not enough of a gamechanger to endure when when they are not.
'Establishment archeologists' say it's a bunch of BS.
Mr. Hancock studied sociology for a while before switching gears to journalism.
It's fun to think about, but as far as him being the modern day Galileo, I'm not personally buying it.
Big archeology? Could we get some names? Maybe an interview with some of them? No, just imagine them like the illuminati but dirtier and poorer, and extremely tribal for some reason.
People just aren't as good at organising as the theories demand they are. They would 100% break ranks if there was a chance to make a major discovery and be famous for it, group loyalty be damned.
Most recently, the very first reaction was to label him racist. Then he was "dangerous" to The Children.
The fact is, he is wrong in his interpretations, but they are based on evidence. Instead of calling him "dangerous", why not engage with the evidence? Among few places I have seen that done is the "Scientists Against Myths" YT channel, https://youtube.com/@ScientistsAgainstMyths/videos. It is rather off-putting: they forget they are addressing the audience, not the promoters of bad interpretations. You have to endure that to get to the end, each time.
On the other side, we have Ancient Architecture, with a relentlessly empirical bent: https://youtube.com/@AncientArchitecture/videos
Shows like Graham Hancock's evoke wonder that seems beyond scientists to match. That feeling of wonder is where the next generation of scientists comes from.
It is critically important that scientists say when they don't know something. They should seek out opportunities to mention them, instead of trying to cover them up. Hancock has been right, and historical consensus dead wrong, too many times. He was an early promoter of humans in the Americas before 15kya, and of the comet strike in North America, near (maybe after) the start of the Younger Dryas cold spell, that wiped out mammoths, mastodons, horses, camels, dire wolves, cheetahs, giant beavers, giant sloths, and the Clovis culture; and about megalithic construction dating that far back. There are lessons here on science's ability, and often failure, to self-correct. All of these had evidence "scientists" rejected outright, not because of anything about the evidence, but just because.
There is plenty of evidence that stone bowls were "turned" to grind them into shape, but the first depictions of it we know of show up thousands of years later. What is the history of "turning"? Somebody might make progress on the question someday, but only if they know there is much unknown.
And then he leaves.
What?! This is your whole life's work and reputation on the line and you aren't digging 10m to check? It might take a few days but that's nothing. If it's illegal, will he risk nothing for his conviction? He makes the speculation, seeds doubt and then follows through with nothing again and again.
It's the same as those tv psychics. The whole episode we watch as they get closer to a burial site and then right when they are staring out the car window at some woods with dramatic music, the credits roll. Nothing found again!
The first 80% of the episode is fascinating as he shows us these amazing sites. Then inevitably comes the wild speculation disconnected from anything actually shown. Such a frustrating end to every episode. Wake me up when you find something.
I wish someone would take him aside and explain that Earth's rotational precession has nothing to do with solar system orbital dynamics.
Because it's not factual? If you aren't constrained by evidence you can evoke whatever wonder you feel like.
He may try to stay consistent with the evidence as he understands it in which case it becomes clear he doesn't understand it.
So no, I don't find it inspirational or evocative, any more than I have found talks by psychics, ufologists or homeopaths evocative. They all imagine their beliefs are evidenced...
Our expectations for Netflix shows is low. Our expectations for behavior of historians should be higher. Making this be about Hancock would be a mistake.
I started to watch it, then figured out that I didn't really want to.
Never heard this type of pushback about Ancient Aliens, which is even more ridiculous. I feel like the replies are going to be "but nobody took that seriously anyway." Firstly, I dunno about that. Secondly, not sure anyone's taking Ancient Apocalypse more seriously.
The show presents a theory, it's not claiming a fact. It's so bizarre that out of all the media out there that walks the line between history, science, and outlandish ideas, this one very specific show, for some reason, gets all this hateful focus. Very weird.
That's odd, because "this type of pushback" is the only context in which I've heard of "ancient aliens".
For me, it’s fodder for modern TTRPG campaigns and a Sailor Moon prequel fanfic, as well as letting me know of the existence of ancient sites I never knew about.
https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/ancient-apocalypse-pseud...
The megastructures, while large, showed no evidence of sophisticated engineering.
Just this quote immediately put me off the article. Weasel word "many" to start with (how many? Four or five? Half of them?) and followed up with emotive language (how angry were they? Perhaps they were just bored with shoddy justifications?)
How do we know Gondwana was in the Southern Hemisphere? How do we know that we didn't get the Hemispheres mixed up in the first place?[1]
[1] https://images.theconversation.com/files/162021/original/ima...
DOI - https://doi.org/10.1080/03115518.2022.2132288
Not withstanding that your commentary has nothing to do with the article, as an Australian I am going to request some more information on this.
Australia is by no means a perfect country, but your phrasing suggests that First Nations people are currently sterilised or used for experiments. That may have been the case, but hasn't been for many decades.
Additionally, First Nations people have access to substantial government programs, including free higher education, welfare and housing programs, and specialised medical support. So please, with less inflamatory rhetoric and more fact, how can you possibly compare Australia with District9 (which was itself more accurately a reflection of apartheid South Africa, not Australia)?
Guess not a topic for HN.
You probably mean a tiny grain of salt. As in: "There is very little meat here, so I'll only need [to take it with] a tiny bit (a pinch) of salt."
Based on the supposed origin of the idiom, I think salt and skepticism being proportional is a bit closer to the original meaning, than them being inversely proportional, though neither is especially close. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grain_of_salt
* This is a joke; I know how it works.
I hate to get all ad hominem here, but the fact that it comes from an Australian journal is just a tad bit self-interested. It reminds me of the Chinese scientists who keep insisting that humans evolved in China, not Africa:
https://www.news.com.au/technology/science/evolution/chinese...
> Together this weighty band of experts has just published a paper in the scientific literature that’s likely to be seen as landmark in our understanding of life on Earth.
The far better argument IMO would be "it's a lot easier for new discoveries to be made by and reported in the the country they occur in so it isn't necessarily surprising the initial challenge would come from and be reported in that country". The China human origin one had more problems than just initial suspicion but this one will probably sort itself out into overall consensus in time and I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up being true. However it's probably still getting more self-attention than it would if the discovery were somewhere else in the southern hemisphere than Australia and there is nothing wrong with keeping that in mind regardless where you are or what you currently think.
The assessing motivations game has no role to play here, and no destination for that matter. You could spend the next millennium trying to determine whether this particular piece of research was published in an Australian journal for nationalistic reasons (and whose reasons?) vs whether it just so happened that a piece of Australian research got published in Australian journals (gosh!) vs whether the putative 'research must be reviewed by peers from outside the region' rule (created in an HN thread) was equally applied to default US and EU based researchers. None of it would illuminate the truth or otherwise of the proposed idea.
I noticed over time that my visual system would get into this weird state where it was like I wasn't actively focusing on anything, but I could pick up any tiny motion or snake-like shape anywhere in my visual field. It's a really strange but gratifying feeling.
Its always made me wonder how members of indigenous tribes, that hunt and gather, perceive the world.
Same! It's always weird when I know there's a snake there even before I have consciously recognized that I've seen it.
http://penguinology.blogspot.com/2011/01/fossil-hunt-in-anta...
Why is it a matter of regional pride whether mammals (or humans) originated in your region?
Usually there was no nation or culture there at the time, and in this case, not even any humans.
People are always looking for a reason to be special, they'll take whatever they can get.
not quite. In the former, there were homo sapiens while in the latter, not.
Because dinosaurs are cool.
Animal Planet, I bet.
I'll show myself out now.
Marsupial Saber Tooth Tigers.