As a non-biologist, I kind-of suspect that article is supposed to be some kind of elaborate joke. It sounds convincing to me, but then again, so did Sokal (1996) to non-physicists; my gut feelings’ prior probability for that claim is tiny (but probably tinier than rationally warranted; possibly, because it kind-of sounds like a parody of ancient astronaut hypotheses); and I can’t find any mention of any mammal inter-order hybrids on Wikipedia.
Sokal’s paper brought up the possibility of a morphogenetic field affecting quantum mechanics, which sounds slightly less rigorous than a Discworld joke—Sir Pratchett can at least get the general aspects of quantum physics correctly. Likewise, Mrs. Jenna Moran’s RPGs have more meaningful statements on set theory than Sokal’s joking conflation of the axiom of equality and feminist/racial equality. I’d expect a lot of non-physicists would consider it unconvincing, especially if you allow them the answer “this paper makes no sense”.
((I’d honestly expect false positives, more than false negatives, when asking average persons to /skeptically/ test papers on quantum mechanics for fraud. Thirty pages of math showing a subatomic particle to be charming has language barrier problems.))
The greater concern here is that the evidence Mr. McCarthy uses to support his assertions is incredibly weak. The vast majority of his list of interspecies hybrids, for example, are either intra-familiae or completely untrustworthy (some are simply appeals to legends or internet hoax, like the cabbit or dog-bear hybrids). The only example of remotely similar variation to a chimpanzee-pig hybrid while being remotely trustworthy is an alleged rabbit-rat cross, but chasing the citation shows that the claimed evidence likely had a different (and at the time of the original experiment, unknown) cause and that the fertilization never occurred. Other cases conflate mating behavior and fertility, by which definition humans should be capable of hybridizing with rubber and glass. The sheer number of untrustworthy citations—and, more importantly, that they’re mixed together with the verifiable and known good ones—is a huge red flag.
The quote’s interesting—and correct! as anyone who’s shown the double-slit experiment can show—but there’s probably better ways to say it and theories to associate it with.
Sokal’s paper brought up the possibility of a morphogenetic field affecting quantum mechanics, which sounds slightly less rigorous than a Discworld joke
There are plenty of New Age people who seriously believe that the world works that way.
Or find it a reasonable / plausible theory…
I’m married to one who evolved into one who reads that pseudo-science, instead of the Stephen Hawking she used to read 20 years ago...
This is a blatant parody. Probability of pig+chimp hybrids involved in human origins are at pascal-low levels.
It sounds convincing to me
This is worthy of notice. It really shouldn’t have been remotely convincing..
Can you identify the factors which caused you to give the statements in this article more credibility than you would have given to any random internet source of an unlikely-sounding claim? Information about what went wrong here might be useful from a rationality-increasing perspective.
Can you identify the factors which caused you to give the statements in this article more credibility than you would have given to any random internet source of an unlikely-sounding claim?
Mostly, the fact that I don’t know shit about biology, and the writer uses full, grammatical sentences, cites a few references, anticipates possible counterarguments and responds to them, and more generally doesn’t show many of the obvious signs of crackpottery.
This is exactly why I (amongst many?) find it so hard to separate the good-stuff from the bad-stuff.
It’s the way the matter is brought to you, not the matter itself. Very thoughtful way of bringing it, as Army1987 says, references, anticipation of counterarguments etc.
I would also very wary of McCarthy arguement. As having studied bioinformatics myself I would say:
Show me the human genes that you think come from pigs. If you name specific genes we can run our algorithms. Don’t talk about stuff like the form vertebra when we have sequenced the genomes.
Yeah, it’s a good quote promoting open-mindedness, but of course that’s because crackpots spend a lot of time trying to hide their theories from any criticism in the name of open-mindedness.
Eugene McCarthy, Human Origins: Are We Hybrids?
As a non-biologist, I kind-of suspect that article is supposed to be some kind of elaborate joke. It sounds convincing to me, but then again, so did Sokal (1996) to non-physicists; my gut feelings’ prior probability for that claim is tiny (but probably tinier than rationally warranted; possibly, because it kind-of sounds like a parody of ancient astronaut hypotheses); and I can’t find any mention of any mammal inter-order hybrids on Wikipedia.
Sokal’s paper brought up the possibility of a morphogenetic field affecting quantum mechanics, which sounds slightly less rigorous than a Discworld joke—Sir Pratchett can at least get the general aspects of quantum physics correctly. Likewise, Mrs. Jenna Moran’s RPGs have more meaningful statements on set theory than Sokal’s joking conflation of the axiom of equality and feminist/racial equality. I’d expect a lot of non-physicists would consider it unconvincing, especially if you allow them the answer “this paper makes no sense”.
((I’d honestly expect false positives, more than false negatives, when asking average persons to /skeptically/ test papers on quantum mechanics for fraud. Thirty pages of math showing a subatomic particle to be charming has language barrier problems.))
The greater concern here is that the evidence Mr. McCarthy uses to support his assertions is incredibly weak. The vast majority of his list of interspecies hybrids, for example, are either intra-familiae or completely untrustworthy (some are simply appeals to legends or internet hoax, like the cabbit or dog-bear hybrids). The only example of remotely similar variation to a chimpanzee-pig hybrid while being remotely trustworthy is an alleged rabbit-rat cross, but chasing the citation shows that the claimed evidence likely had a different (and at the time of the original experiment, unknown) cause and that the fertilization never occurred. Other cases conflate mating behavior and fertility, by which definition humans should be capable of hybridizing with rubber and glass. The sheer number of untrustworthy citations—and, more importantly, that they’re mixed together with the verifiable and known good ones—is a huge red flag.
The quote’s interesting—and correct! as anyone who’s shown the double-slit experiment can show—but there’s probably better ways to say it and theories to associate it with.
The concept doesn’t come from Sokal but from Rupert Sheldrake who used the term in his 1995 book (http://www.co-intelligence.org/P-morphogeneticfields.html).
There are plenty of New Age people who seriously believe that the world works that way.
Or find it a reasonable / plausible theory… I’m married to one who evolved into one who reads that pseudo-science, instead of the Stephen Hawking she used to read 20 years ago...
This is a blatant parody. Probability of pig+chimp hybrids involved in human origins are at pascal-low levels.
This is worthy of notice. It really shouldn’t have been remotely convincing..
Can you identify the factors which caused you to give the statements in this article more credibility than you would have given to any random internet source of an unlikely-sounding claim? Information about what went wrong here might be useful from a rationality-increasing perspective.
Mostly, the fact that I don’t know shit about biology, and the writer uses full, grammatical sentences, cites a few references, anticipates possible counterarguments and responds to them, and more generally doesn’t show many of the obvious signs of crackpottery.
This is exactly why I (amongst many?) find it so hard to separate the good-stuff from the bad-stuff. It’s the way the matter is brought to you, not the matter itself. Very thoughtful way of bringing it, as Army1987 says, references, anticipation of counterarguments etc.
I would also very wary of McCarthy arguement. As having studied bioinformatics myself I would say:
Show me the human genes that you think come from pigs. If you name specific genes we can run our algorithms. Don’t talk about stuff like the form vertebra when we have sequenced the genomes.
Yeah, it’s a good quote promoting open-mindedness, but of course that’s because crackpots spend a lot of time trying to hide their theories from any criticism in the name of open-mindedness.