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To begin with “progressive Liberals” who push race politics are neither progressive nor liberal. Doling out rights and privilege on the basis of race is Regressive and advocating a racial pecking order be implemented by government and enforces with constitutionally nebulous quasi-judicial tribunals and the Marxist witch hunters they employ, is anything but liberal – it is statist authoritarianism.
This is all you need to know about race baiters – they have an ulterior motive of oppressing the majority ethnic group through a tyranny of the minority – the inverse of free democracy.
There’s a clip you won’t see on the CBC, CTV, Global, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, PBS,……….
Sowell, as almost always seems to be the case, has a unique viewpoint on things. I’ve quite enjoyed his Intellectuals and Society although it’s been put away until the winter along witha few of his other books.
One experiment that immediately suggests itself is to look at IQ test scores of the British underclass that Dalrymple has written about at length. I would suspect that these would show significantly lower IQ’s than average. Sowell’s point appears to be that the majority of the people in the world don’t do much abstract thinking. He obviously does, but the average Obozo voter who thinks all their problems are as a result of “white privilege” and who listens to rap likely has no use for abstract thinking aside from coming up ways to scam the system.
A modern society requires people who can think abstractly and what seems to be happening instead is a dumbing down of society. One question that remains unanswered is whether someone who went through a modern non-education (and has passed in the sense that he’s a moron with high self-esteem) can be taught abstract thinking? I sometime wonder whether the products of the current educational system are even the same species as I am.
Loki
“I sometime wonder whether the products of the current educational system are even the same species as I am.”
no they are not, they are blindered and programmed to stay within the blindered program, abstract/logical thinking would push them out of this state. In todays world of complexity and “free” time, most ppl would that some one else does their “thinking” for them so that they can enjoy their freedom. Unions, gov’t, associations, clubs and religions are some of the entities that are leaned on by non-thinkers.
Loki:
You have brought a lot of unique perspective to SDA for which I am grateful.
It has upped the many discussions you have engaged in to the benifit of many here.
Regarding the problem with the “Masses” dereliction of abstract thinking,,,
It’s simply not rewarded.
Gone are the days of the Apollo 13 mindset that we will make this work even though the powers to be initially dtermined that mission was screwed.
The removal of critical thinking from the early scholastic teachings, as well as a propensity to swallow pablum disseminated from MSM, pop culture, and the alienation of successful mentors (Transpose sage elders) has led to this dumbing down of western society.
North American industry relied upon thinking outside the box. My favorite examples were Kelly Johnson and Lee Iacoca. There are many other inovators that increased the standard of living for most North Americans.
But for all of those, there were also the Saul Alinskys and George Soros’s and Norm Chomskies of North American fame whose abstract thinking proved to be the detriment of those values for which you want to see reward and emulation. Sowell to be given a very high placement as the exception to be emulated.
As Kate has often posted,, University is the opposite of diversity in far too many instances.
Individualism as a construct of abstract thinking (and by extension critical thinking) is not rewarded,,,
It has been punished and methodically destroyed. (exceptions exist but are under siege due to deferring to the insane number of nuisance regulations and PC correctness which is never dissected on a cost rewards analysis.)
People can no longer prioritize between Kardasions and Immigration reform.
Between a bogus Rob Ford fake video and a police state fiasco in High River.
And the kicker,, the number of indigent Canadians I talk to of mature age and relative success by their own standards don’t see the problem, especially when interacting with their offspring.
Out on the Left coast I find myself screaming,, Stop,, I can’t take it anymore!
NME666, when you mention the enjoyment of “freedom” by the non-thinkers, presumably you mean what the statists allow them to do. Of course, I do know people who seem to find that bread and circuses are all they need and the most important thing in existence is what’s happening in the NHL.
There was a time in Europe when the vast majority of the population was capable of high level abstract thought. Anyone who wasn’t was considered retarded. Piaget was a Swiss psychologist who looked at child development and I’ve seen him attacked more and more recently for his “unrealistic” expectations of mental development in children. His “formal operations stage” was usually achieved in Europe pre-WWII at around 15 to 16, now I would guess that a majority of the public school “educated” population isn’t even close. There’s nothing more painful to watch than asking a 16 year old to perform mental arithmetic; hell if they don’t know what 100 – 7 equals, they could always count down from 100 by ones and use their fingers to keep track. Instead they are lost and are very annoyed when I tell them they can’t use a calculator. This isn’t because they haven’t had to memorize addition and multiplication tables; they have no concept of number which would allow them to figure out how to solve the problem. Most of my 80 year old patients can do this flawlessly, even if they’re mildly demented and more than one of these patients has figured out that it’s much easier if they subtract 10 then add 3. Might also explain why the only people seemingly concerned about trillion dollar deficits are products of the previous, functional, educational system – for the younger generation it’s just a number and they haven’t a clue how to convert it into a personally meaningful form – that is until the SHTF and they will wonder WTF happened?
I’ve never understood why someone would want another person to do their thinking for them. But then, I can’t stop thinking and trying to figure things out.
The problem is the Marxists, Liberals , collectivists. All believe words are magic. If you can change words you can effect human nature.
Using Identity politics just increases racism by making arbitrary differences bigger than they are. Making castes of people instead of using a meritocracy. This is why Affirmative action was doomed to fail. People are not equal no matter who they are. I will never be a great athlete or scientist. Most folks have talents, but are not prodigies.
Making skin colour or gender, including where your born. Instead of individual characteristics with talents. Only makes for people Ghettos.
Culture too plays a significant roll. That is overlooked by the collectivists especially. In the end it makes for worse racism.
The western white liberal has always stereotyped the negro and the white race.
At least they’re consistent in hating EVERYONE.
On this topic.. Go to Black and Right, and read the essay by the white school teacher and his views on teaching black children.
A propos of this thread, as opposed to the “tofu” thread, which I read and commented on earlier, you may be interested to know that I just performed (twice) your 100-7 test on my 84-year-old mother, who’s a bit hard of hearing, who lost her husband (my beloved father, a 17-year stroke survivor) just two months ago and who has suffered, herself, a couple of TIAs since (she’s an outpatient in the Huron Perth Health Alliance — Stratford — Stroke Prevention Clinic, and is doing fine, with all the right meds, etc.).
She got the answer right twice, in less than three seconds, each time: I asked her, “How did you get that?” And she said, “I deducted 10 from 100 and added 3.” She, who did a year of, you know, “homemaker training” at Macdonald Institute, University of Guelph, in 1947, and then went on to complete her Honours B.A. in history at Western University, indignantly said: “I had a lot of brains in school, you know, even if I don’t have many left…”
So, there you go…
G, you’re right about the marked reluctance of people to push the envelope now. Part of this is that we’ve become a very risk-averse society. In the past, if one broke the rules but had a good outcome, the rule breaking would be overlooked. Now it seems that procedure, protocol and rules are everything and it’s even starting to affect the rural hospital I’m in. What was refreshing when I came out here 5 years ago was that I had almost unlimited freedom (in comparison to Vancouver) to innovate as long as patients got better and I didn’t kill anyone. Now, it seems that we’re facing a seemingly endless number of policies and limits on what we can and can’t do. At some point I’m going to decide I no longer care and will sit down on the front steps of the hospital with a bottle of tequila and a cigar just to see what happens.
The Apollo era was one where there were no environmental regulations, the benefits of technology were obvious to everyone and getting to the moon was going to be just the first step to the colonization of the solar system. I fully expected to have left this mudball by this point in my life and yet the US now doesn’t even have the capability to launch a man into orbit. One interesting posting I read somewhere in the last few weeks is that among young people the perception that the moon landings were a hoax is held by an increasing number of people One potential reason for this is because the CPU on the lunar lander would now be considered far too underpowered to be the basis of a handheld calculator. It seems preposterous to people, when they look at the state of technology in 1969, that people could have gone to the moon when we have far more advanced technology now and can’t even get into orbit. The other thing this shows is that young people identify primarily electronic technology as being useful and have little knowledge outside of that (assuming they even get into looking at electronics).
WRT people like Chomsky, the one individual on your list who actually did do some significant work in linguistics, all of them are “intellectuals”. Thomas Sowell defines an intellectual as someone who works entirely with abstract concepts with no connection to the real world. So, by this definition, I don’t qualify an intellectual since I’ve always been interested in real world application of science and mathematics (back in the days when I thought I might be a mathematician). By being divorced from the real world consequences of their ideas, “intellectuals” can come up with some of the most irrational of ideas.
When I was first exposed to post-modernism I thought it was someones attempt at humor by spoofing university professors. I was completely appalled when I discovered that these people were totally serious even though, from my objective viewpoint, it was utter BS. “Post-normal” science is another one of the “advances” in which subjective impressions of things trump objectivity as, objectivity is an illusion. It’s one of the reasons I have nothing whatever to do with universities now as even science and engineering faculties are succumbing to this brain rot.
As you noted people seem to have an insatiable appetite for news of “celebrities” who are generally complete morons. The idea that because someone is well known then they must know what they speak of has taken hold to an unhealthy degree. One seems this in extreme form if one looks at the online site of any British paper — the whole right side of the website is a seemingly endless series of primarily female “celebrities” and news of their latest wardrobe malfunction, or who they’re dating. Given the limited information handling capacity of the human brain, there’s obviously no room left for an intelligent discussion on immigration reform.
The solution to this is to simply tune out the MSM. I no longer listen to TV (it’s been some time since I watched it) and obtain my news either directly from people or via directed searches on the internet. It’s still possible to be an individual in todays world, but it’s a lot harder as there are more and more penalties for breaking various idiotic rules.
What I’d love to see if Sowell debating a proponent of “critical race theory”. Sowell may be right in that low black IQ scores may be more as a result of never having had to perform abstract thinking rather than an innate tendency to lower intelligence. However, right now, unless the US educational and cultural environment changes, US blacks will forever be a volatile perpetually dependent underclass.
Excerpt from an article written by Gary Jacobucci:
…the circumstances that led up the ‘Prussian model of education’
The Prussian Army had lost a major battle to Napoleon and the generals were called on the carpet to answer to the Prussian aristocracy.
The Generals blamed their defeat on the soldiers thinking for themselves on the battlefield.
The solution proposed was to have the behavioral scientist and the military scientist get together and revise the education system to create a more obedient soldier.
They came up with the idea that moving the youth between cubicles every hour, separated by bells and the rewarding of students to memorize and regurgitate fragmented, isolated information (testing) would solve the problem.
One author writes
“John Gatto, 1991 New York teacher of the year and voice for educational reform, has done a stellar job of describing how the Prussian model set the standard for educational systems right up to the present;
“The whole system was built on the premise that isolation from first-hand information and fragmentation of the abstract information presented by teachers would result in obedient and subordinate graduates, properly respectful of arbitrary orders” he writes.
He says the American educationists imported three major ideas from Prussia. The first was that the purpose of state schooling was not intellectual training but the conditioning of children “to obedience, subordination, and collective life.” Thus, memorization outranked thinking.
Second, whole ideas were broken into fragmented “subjects” and school days were divided into fixed periods “so that self-motivation to learn would be muted by ceaseless interruptions.”
Third, the state was posited as the true parent of children. All of this was done in the name of a scientific approach to
education.”
Full text here: http://rense.com/general93/chll.htm
NME666 (nice moniker, BTW): “Unions, gov’t, associations, clubs and religions are some of the entities that are leaned on by non-thinkers.”
Put a sock in it:
” … associations …” Which ones?
” … clubs …” Which ones?
” … religions …” Which ones?
Check out St. Augustine, St. Catherine of Siena, John Henry Cardinal Newman, and a few of these guys …:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_thinkers_in_science
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Catholic_philosophers_and_theologians‘
… just to name a few.
(Scratch Matthew Fox who is now an Anglican. I’m not sure what’s happened to his witch Starhawk …)
‘Easy for someone as uninformed as you to cast aspersions on Catholic “non-thinkers.” Pick on some other group.
“…the average Obozo voter who thinks all their problems are as a result of “white privilege” and who listens to rap likely has no use for abstract thinking aside from coming up ways to scam the system”
Brilliantly put. Best comment I’ve read in ages. And thanks.
loki
some excellent posts BTW, and by freedom (poorly use in this case) I meant time not needed to sustain one self materially. As to the fact that todays young ppl don’t do math, I’v experienced that in spades. I often catch young ppl making math errors using electronic helpers, and they are surprised at the speed I do these calculations When I tell them I used to win mental math competions they often stare in disbelief, as they can’t even preform simple calcs. in their head, never mind win competions, and yes, I use the break down method to do this.
G… good post!!
Loki >
“Sowell may be right in that low black IQ scores may be more as a result of never having had to perform abstract thinking rather than an innate tendency to lower intelligence.”
Of all your excellent comments this sentence stands out as something to ponder for some reason for me.
I don’t really have anything to add, but my mind keeps asking how blacks “as a race” survived the savannahs, deserts, and jungles of Africa for 200,000 years without serious “abstract thinking”. The fact is that average black IQ’s don’t change dramatically across the globe, although they are indeed slightly higher on average in the US than Africa.
I suppose that at the end of the day, nothing changes regardless of who, what, why, and where. There will always be cultural and racial animosities when living in close quarters with “others”. The African Black, European black, and North American black will always segregate themselves on average, as will Chinese, Muslim, White, Latino, rich and poor, republican and democrat, etcetera.
The biggest problem we face in the west today is the Liberal left mindset that believes everyone can cohabitate peacefully once forced to do so. In effect they support the devastating multicultural policies of global elitist technocrats that clearly understand the problems created for us, but push their own agenda’s for power and control through this form of biological warfare.
Loki wrote:
“By being divorced from the real world consequences of their ideas, “intellectuals” can come up with some of the most irrational of ideas.”
Hence the mode of operation of the current administration of the US and the EU.
I will be buying Sowell’s book though I doubt it will be one of Heather’s Picks!
Loki, the irony now is progressives can succeed if they teach the voter to think abstractly; actually anti-abstractly. These anti-abstracts include the GOP being responsible for economic decline despite Dems having virtual control of governmental powers, the demolition of a presidential campaign by the anti-abstract false narrative of the president arguing the cause of a Libyan massacre was indeed terrorism (with great assistance from Candy Crowley) when his actions and words clearly showed another interpretation; and finally to the anti-abstraction that we all belong to government which builds society, not self-reliant and hardworking men and women paying taxes to the state.
Obama succeeded thusly in the US election, which must now bear the economic brunt of his anti-abstract thinking. Trudeau and Mulcair will try the same approach in 2015, make no mistake. Successes will be ignored so any “bad” news or “scandal” can be magnified to required levels of hysteria to convince the voter the progressivism is the only way.
The media in both countries will gleefully support the progressive anti-abstract meme. A Candy Crowley lurks and awaits the 2015 federal election; no doubt in my mind.
As always though, the progressives will overplay their hand (after great damage in the US) with neither Mulcair nor Trudeau possessing the cunning or timing of the Obama team, thus writing the script for their defeat as the cost of progressivism begins to realize. I hope so lest the Orwellian consequences Sowell describes be visited on us.
God bless America. God help America.
Sowell’s point on abstract thinking cuts to the heart of so many things, but mainly habits and their impact on reality. Thinking patterns are habits which account for much of what we call culture when taken in long term aggregate. This is what makes the west’s situation increasingly hopeless. What habits of thought are our children developing? How many potential innovators, novelists, scientists are being stifled in childhood?
..AND ANOTHER THING! Stuff gets lost in the noise. In the US today, if some whiz kids in a garage come up with some great revolutionary invention, they’re likely being regulated into submission, bought out and shelved by a competitor, or sued out of existence by a patent-law mill. Those things, context or “environmental factors”, matter more to success or failure than silly IQ tests.
And since we’re talking about blacks, the Haya tribe developed carbon steel about 2000 years ago. Their tech didn’t get exported and the anthropological discovery is fairly recent so it’s not mentioned much. It’s one thing that can be pointed at as a major, independently discovered black technological advancement.
“….the Haya tribe developed carbon steel about 2000 years ago”
Yes, lots of cultures inadvertently “invented” carbon steel, namely iron ore mixed with ash from a camp fire(carbon).
It’s not as miraculous as many might think, but that’s a side issue.
That doesn’t sound very inadvertent to me.
Max >
“The result was a far hotter process than anything known in Europe before modern times.”
You’re absolutely right!
That must be why they rule the earth today.
Lets also not forget that “steel” has been around for at least 4000 years and produced by many cultures and societies.
2000 years ago Africa was crawling with Roman’s, Greeks, Carthaginians what have you. Steel had been long developed and around Africa even then.
“Not that miraculous”.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make, but it seems something like “black people are incapable of producing anything of value”. If so, so be it, but own it as your position. I’m neither a big proponent of mandatory diversity celebrations nor a believer in thought crimes such as “racism”. The point I was trying to make was that the best inventions in the world can be lost or stifled by environmental factors.
And please feel free to cite references to the “many cultures and societies” that had blast furnaces 2000 years ago, or evidence of “Romans, Greeks, Carthiginians” frequenting the southwest shores of Lake Victoria. The Haya find is well documented and is a pretty big deal.
max >
“I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make, but it seems something like………..”
It’s seems something like, not making up things that aren’t entirely true. Just because I’m not being politically correct by agreeing that black people invented the first moon rocket, does not make me the racist your attempting to infer that I am.
As far as ancient to modern steel production including what cultures and societies actually did produce it – get a real education and search the volumes of material easily accessed on the internet or your local library.
I’m still waiting for your sourced refutation to Avery and Schmidt of Brown University. And it’s OK to be “racist”. The term has been perverted to include any deviation from a very narrow line of thinking. I guess your position is simply that you don’t believe the Haya find. Understandable, it is quite incredible. Anyway.. enough said.
David, that’s exactly what I mean by having a concept of number and being able to use it. OTOH, I had an 82 year old patient of mine come in for her drivers medical today and she failed miserably at serial 7’s and even spelling “world” backwards. However, she seems perfectly fine in every other way and so the ability to do mental calculation wasn’t universal 60 years ago. It was your post that triggered my doing the test on the patient today whereas otherwise I would have just sent her on her way unaware of her early dementia.
Max >
“I’m still waiting for your sourced refutation to Avery and Schmidt of Brown University”
It’ll be a long wait.
I don’t recall refuting that there may or may not have been some iron smelting in one small part of Africa 2000 years ago. What I clearly stated was that finding a small steel smelting operation in Africa 2000 years ago isn’t that remarkable considering the vast amounts of steel that had already been in production for over 2000 years prior to that.
As far as the Haya find, that great if it’s true, it would mean that there was something happening in one part of Africa at some point in history beyond the hunter gatherer society’s that the colonists claim to have found.
My overall point was that far too many people give far too much credit where it isn’t warranted for the sake of race. We pay for that political correctness in the form of “Social Justice” and the perversion of history attempting to accommodate a few at the sake of the many.
Whitewashing the truth has been the antagonist of both white and black races.
Knight99, there’s little abstract thinking involved in surviving in the wilds. We’ve got a huge subcortical network of instinctive routines which are sufficient to let people survive in a harsh environment. These are, for the most part, completely instinctive routines that let people know in short order if they should fight or climb the nearest tree as fast as they possibly can. Human brains, even in the case of people we would think of as being intellectual dullards, are far more advanced then those of the chimpanzee — the smartest non-hominid species (ok, I didn’t mention dolphins but that’s a whole separate thread).
Where higher order thinking comes into play is when one has a non-jungle society where people have to do extensive planning on how to spend their time, how to best perform their job, how to raise children, etc. This is primarily a frontal lobe function and, given the huge number of people with psychiatric disorders, the new, more intelligent human, is still a work in progress.
Instinctive behaviors are great as they are associated with survival in the wilderness — that’s why we still have them. We stuff ourselves after making a kill as we don’t know where the next meal is coming from. We see something frightening that’s smaller than us and we kill it – if it’s larger we run away.
The prevailing hypothesis of why Europeans came out on top is because they chose to live in a quite hostile environment — in comparison to Northern Europe in the winter, most of Africa is a tropical paradise. Those individuals who had the ability to override their instincts to eat as much as possible when food was available and who were able to articulate the concept that they needed to store x amount of supplies to sustain them for the winter survived whereas those who operated on primitive subcortical routines died off. The ability to make long term plans is a frontal lobe function as is the ability to inhibit instinctive actions.
A modern society operates because millions of people inhibit their immediate desires and perform some function in the society so that the whole aggregate provides them with a much better living than if they just did what they wanted all of the time. The late 1940’s to 1960’s in the US were the peak years of such a system working well. Many of the people alive at that time had lived through the great depression and were determined to never have to go through that again. The irony is that they succeeded too well in their goal of wealth creation.
In some ways, the biggest problem we have is that the human brain is one kludge piled on top of another and we have the primitive instinctive subcortical routines that are untamed in a lot of people. One of the primary roles of the frontal lobes is the inhibition of behavior; normal male behavior in seeing an attractive woman who isn’t accompanied by a male larger than him is to rape her. Similarly, when a primitive desire for something comes up, then the natural instinct is to just take it. Controlling primitive desires is what parents are supposed to teach their kids and, if simple persuasion doesn’t work, a good beating usually does. OTOH, if the parents are still operating as merely instinctual animals then their illegitimate children by multiple absent fathers are going to assume that a completely impulsive self-centered life is normal.
It seems to be the nature of humans that they figure that they’ve progressed enough that they can discard “ancient” practices and the usual result is a descent into savagery. The disconnect of intellect from consequences in “intellectuals” as Sowell defines them, leads to such absurd notions as the blank slate theory of childhood development or the neo-Rousseau concept of the “noble savage”. This is probably the biggest dividing line between Conservatives (I’ll lump Libertarians in with Conservative for now) and the oxymoronically named modern “Liberals”. Conservatives are only too aware of the potential for violence and mayhem that humans have – we didn’t get to be the dominant species on this planet by being nice. “Liberals” labor under the delusion that people are all born as little angels and that environmental circumstances make them into criminals. They are all for letting people be themselves and free of inhibitions and, when the result doesn’t come close to what they expected, they frantically seek more external factors which are making people behave in such unexpected ways. They would never think that a person needs to voluntarily pull a trigger on a gun to kill someone, it’s the gun itself which is to blame.
The capacity for abstract thought, when properly used, allows an individual to run a simulation of their future actions and consider how it affects their life as well as the effect on the society. Thus, individuals who are able to see large numbers of potential future realities through abstract thoughts will usually come to the conclusion that leaving a good job to take up a career of robbing banks is not likely going to be a very long term career.
One other, equally important, complement to abstract thought is a knowledge of history as well as a detailed knowledge of how the society in which an individual is embedded works.
Sorry for running on but 3 hours of sleep and a long clinic day will do that. Seem to always come down the the primary problem being the conflict between those who are aware of reality and the myriad ways in which a human brain can malfunction and the other camp who believes that we’ve now gotten to the point that we’re all little angels who can spend eternity living in harmony with nature and playing with our friendly unicorns; at least once all of the external factors that oppress people and cause them to act in “unhuman” ways are eliminated.
The current situation of the blacks in the US is a direct result of the delusions of the “noble savage” and blank slate applied to a whole population of “victims”. Black IQ levels are the least of their problems given that the majority of their population has developed almost no frontal lobe inhibitory pathways and the result is just what Conservatives would have predicted.
Excellent post Loki.
The post by Max above states that Haya steel making is well documented. Quite the opposite is true. All of the references to it are from a single source, Dr. Peter Schmidt, currently at the University of Florida. In 1988 Dr. Schmidt, chronicling work he had done a decade earlier while at Brown University, made a documentary called “The Tree of Iron”. This film is genuinely fascinating, but only because it documents intellectual dishonesty and academic fraud on the scale of Piltdown Man.
The total disregard for any scientific method here is laughable. The locals in Tanzania are unable to show Dr. Schmidt the method that he insists their ancestors have used to make high carbon steel for over 2000 years (a technology this generation seems to have forgotten in the few decades prior to his arrival.) So with the help of another Brown professor knowledgeable about metallurgy, he teaches these murderers of their own past exactly how they have been producing high quality steel for those two millennia in just five not so easy lessons.
But the foolishness doesn’t stop there. Apparently, the site is contaminated by an earlier steel mill of colonial European origin. How unfortunate. And what did the villagers do with their superior quality high carbon steel? According to Dr. Schmidt they built a skyscraper of course. But why only one?
Some other obvious questions for the good doctor:
-How often is his work cited by respected anthropologists?
-Do any world class history museums exhibit artifacts from this site?
-What work has been done since at this site by reputable anthropologists, including his own students?
-Would Brown or the University of Florida stand by his work in a highly scrutinized forum of experts?
Scientific forgeries of this magnitude are far from benign and we encourage / accommodate them at our own peril. Dr. Schmidt’s archaeological waste is seeping into the pop-science literature (e.g., Wikipedia) and being treated uncritically as fact simply because it appears to bear the stamp of academia. While this poorly crafted fabrication has been around for over 30 years, keep in mind it took 40 years to expose Piltdown Man.
For the sake of its reputation, the University of Florida should take the lead in setting this dubious record straight by either providing resources to validate the extraordinary findings of one of their own and give his work the credibility and visibility it would then deserve, or by exposing this transparent nonsense and sending its author packing with great fanfare.