Part 2.
Critics of Jim Moore’s website routinely refer to his
addictive dependency on the logical fallacy of Ad Hominem. As even a cursory reading of the offending
website shows, the accusation is well justified. To my mind, however, the terms
‘logical fallacy’ and ‘Ad Hominem’ do not adequately describe the nature of Mr.
Moore’s remarks. They suggest that the faults being described are mere
technicalities; no more serious than errors of grammar or syntax. But if we look to plainspoken English to
replace such uncommon terms, those that come to my mind are denigrate and belittle. Consider these extracts from Moore’s review of Morgan’s
last book ‘The Naked Darwinist’:
She immediately goofs – she doesn’t seem to understand –
very confused – science deniers – are a rant – not being entirely accurate – a
sort of unctuous, attempt at flattering and cozying up to people, or a pose as
a somewhat imperious ”voice of
authority” – doesn’t understand it – doesn’t understand or deliberately
confuses – railing against – extended rant – her methods are very similar to
those of fundamentalist creationists – a tactic to mislead the reader – she
simply doesn’t understand it – gloss over the fact – a massive ego – didn’t do
even this tiny bit of research –reality gets thrown overboard – ludicrous to
hold Morgan’s idea – cultlike view of
“Darwinism” – used by a host of creationist sources in exactly the dishonest way Morgan does
- it’s truly disturbing to see Morgan
adopt their tactics so often – rail against it – without (again) seeming to
understand – Morgan here (like a lot of people do) gets confused – her longest
running and most ridiculous errors – she gets kind of mad…….
In what purports to be a scientific review of the Aquatic
Ape Hypothesis, why does Jim Moore feel the need repeatedly to denigrate Elaine
Morgan? If his concern is solely with
the hypothesis, it is pertinent to ask why he is bothering himself to review The Naked Darwinist. As he admits:
So, book read, it
turns out not to have anything new, to be simply a regurgitation of her previous works in shortened form, with
even less substance and more whining (whinging for you Brits)….
So if, book read, it contains nothing new, what is there to
review? Why trouble to regurgitate
arguments already to be found elsewhere in his website? Not only does he
prepare this seemingly redundant critique but extends it to great lengths.
Moore admits:
You can see it [Morgan’s
many errors and misunderstandings of theory] reflected in the length of this critique, which is somewhat over half
the length of Morgan’s book. I know I
can be longwinded ……
The purpose of this longwinded review is, I contend, simply
and solely to enable Jim Moore to continue his denigration of Elaine Morgan.
The fact that he bothers to review her last book at longwinded length is, I
suggest, not simply evidence but proof positive that his target is not the AAT;
his real target is Morgan.
A few extracts from the newsgroup ‘sci.anthropology.paleo’
will establish the tone of the relationship between Moore and Morgan. Let a
third party, Bryce Harrington by name, act as prologue in this complaint he
addressed to Jim Moore:
With the vicious
personal attacks you’ve made on Elaine lately, I am not surprised she’s
thinking of ignoring you. She’s shown an
amazing amount of patience and resilience and has rarely descended to your
level of flames and ad hominem attacks
The exchange Mr. Harrington referred to begins with Elaine
Morgan’s request to Jim Moore :This makes
it very tempting to let everything with your name on top of it go unread as
hate mail. That would be a pity, because on this occasion you were right, the
case does need amending, and if I had not read your contribution I would not
have realised it. But I do wish you would sound a bit less like the Witchfinder
General.
Jim Moore replies: Whether
you “let everything with (my) name on top of it go unread” is not a concern of
mine. If you wish to consider anything
that isn’t fawningly uncritical adoration as being “hate mail”, you are
certainly free to do so.
This exchange is further proof, if further proof were
needed, of Moore’s real motive. Rather than continue to discuss ‘the case that does need amending’, that
is to say to continue discussing the AAT, Moore chooses instead to continue his
‘vicious personal attacks’. It surely cannot be disputed here, that to Jim
Moore, the insults are far more important than the hypothesis.
Jim Moore does not even attempt to criticise the Aquatic
hypothesis. Nowhere in his long
‘scientific’ critique does he show, or even try to show, that the evolutionary
history of humankind could not possibly include a semi-aquatic episode. No
matter how many false facts he claims to find in the arguments of Morgan, the
hypothesis itself contains no false facts because the hypothesis contains no
facts whatsoever. It maintains simply
that many characteristics unique to humankind as a terrestrial mammal can (
‘can’ not ‘must’) be explained by positing a semi-aquatic episode in its
pre-human (hominin) past.
As long as an hypothesis
does not offend any established scientific fact, it can claim some validity -
whether or no the scientific establishment gives it recognition. Like all other
current attempts to chart the evolution of our species, the Aquatic Ape
Hypothesis is a speculation; a scenario; a just-so-story. So even if Moore’s
readers can stretch their credibility to somewhere beyond the limits of the
known universe and so able to accept all of his criticisms; to be convinced
that Morgan’s army of argumentative men are made of straw; that each and every
one of her facts are proven false; that she is totally ignorant of evolutionary
theory, the her every quotation is a misquotation, even then Moore has
established no more than Morgan’s inadequacies as a proponent of the AAT. The hypothesis itself remains unscathed.
The individual proponents
of an hypothesis each put forward their particular arguments; but in order to
counter the hypothesis, its opponents must do more than merely criticise these
arguments. The opponent must attempt to bring
forward proof that the hypothesis ‘must’, not ‘might’, be wrong. It is generally believed impossible to prove
a negative; which means that it is not possible to prove that something did not
happen. So it is impossible for Jim Moore to establish that our hominin
forebears were never semi-aquatic. From the start he is backing a loser. In
order to demonstrate his contention that no such aquatic creature has ever
existed, he should produce, if not proof positive, at least a preponderance of
evidence of an alternative and superior explanation. Elaine Morgan once advised Jim Moore to invest
his talents into devising an hypothesis that would ‘knock Alistair Hardy’s into
a cocked hat’. It was sound advice. If this is beyond his capability, he could
instead make a detailed comparison between Nancy Tanner’s more fact-oriented hypothesis and what he considers to be Elaine
Morgan’s poorly researched compendium of ridiculous ideas.
On page 20 of ‘The Naked Darwinist’ Morgan writes:
I expected some
scholarly figure to be invited into a studio where he would say “The points the
author fails to take into consideration are (a) and (b) and (c). These facts alone render her idea
unacceptable.”
Because, at least in his own estimation, Jim Moore is conversant
with every facet of evolutionary theory and from his vast knowledge is able to
correct all Elaine Morgan’s “false” facts, he should easily be able to provide
facts (a) and (b) and (c) and so put paid ,once and for all, to the pesky
hypothesis. He does not even attempt this simple, parsimonious method of
refutation. He does not try to assemble the few facts necessary to prove the
hypothesis untenable. Instead, Jim Moore goes through Elaine Morgan’s books
with the finest of fine tooth combs searching for any and every statement that
he can criticise, then taking the opportunity of levelling a broadside or two
of derogatory remarks at the author. But why? For what purpose? To what end?
Jim Moore seems to believe that in criticising the works of
Mrs. Morgan he is protecting the scientific community from contamination by a
theory full of false facts. He invokes a quotation from Darwin to his aide: “False facts are highly injurious to the
progress of science, for they often endure long…”
Darwin’s remark makes sense only if the false facts are
accepted as true by science; only then can they be injurious to its progress.
There is an infinity of false facts; two plus two equals five, or six, or seven
and so on to infinity; potatoes grow on banana trees; a tripod has four legs;
false facts would fill the Library of Babel twice over. But none of these are injurious to the
progress of science because science does not accept any of them. Nor, as Moore is ever ready to remind his
readers, does it accept the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis. Since none of its facts,
false or otherwise, are of the slightest interest to science, none can cause
the slightest injury to its progress.
So, if Moore is not able to prove the impossibility of an
aquatic ape; if he is not valiantly defending the integrity of science against the
strawmen hordes of Morgan’s 'false' facts; then what is he up to? What he is up to, I suggest, is the defamation
of Elaine Morgan. Although his website takes the form of a critique of the AAT,
its primary purpose, I believe, is to provide a convenient platform from which
to lob incessant insults at Elaine Morgan - with an occasional sideswipe at
anyone who has the temerity to give an approving nod towards the AAT. Moore’s
website ‘Aquatic Ape – Sink or Swim’ would be more accurately entitled ‘Elaine
Morgan – Dishonest or Deluded’.
In her final book ‘The Naked Darwinist’, Elaine Morgan has
written:-
“That book, The
Descent of Woman, became a best seller,
and in the United States it was a Book of the Month selection. I became a minor celebrity, ferried around
America coast-to-coast for a couple of weeks, appearing on the top chat shows.”
Moore’s method in reviewing the writings of Morgan is to
scrutinise them painstakingly, word by word, criticising wherever he can. It is
notable that his reading of the passage above recording Mrs. Morgan’s ‘minor
celebrity’ in America does not raise his hackles; his critical comb picks up
nothing worthy of disparaging comment. Surprisingly, he does not jump at the
opportunity of pointing disdainfully at Morgan’s conceit in thinking the whole
of the USA was rushing from the local bookstore clutching its treasured copy of
her ‘Book of the Month’ so as to be home in time to see her next riveting
interview on TV. Perhaps the book's popularity and its author’s celebrity remain
a sore point to Jim.
Because of the publicity, it is presumed that ‘The Descent
of Woman’ came to the notice of Professor Nancy Makepeace Tanner and her helpmeet,
Jim Moore. Were they impressed by its feminist agenda or were they irritated by
the remarkable success of a book dealing with the very matter - the role of the
female in human evolution - which was to
be the subject of Nancy Tanner’s intended scientific research?
Jim Moore does not give the book ‘The Descent of Woman’ his usual microscopic inspection. His comment is limited to a few
uncharacteristically short-winded words:
Elaine Morgan, at the time an Oxford grad in English and a TV scriptwriter,
entered the scene in 1972 with the book ‘Descent
of Women’ (sic), the idea for
which she got from Desmond Morris’s book.
This was a pop book, with a pretty chatty style which seems dated now
but was popular then, and it sold quite well. Looking back at it, I wouldn’t
call it particularly female-oriented (compare Morgan’s notion of early female
hominid behaviour being the result of continual rape to more fact-oriented
ideas like Tanner and Zihlman’s idea of the selective power of sexual choice by
females in hominid evolution), but Morgan presented it as “the” alternative to
what she then called “The Mighty Hunter” theory.
Perhaps Moore tip-toes warily around the book because to give
it his usual detailed review might expose the origin and nature of his
animosity towards Morgan.
The professor’s book ‘On
Becoming Human’, published some nine years after ‘The Descent of Woman’, has much in common with Morgan’s book. On page
three of the book, Tanner writes:
“The English language
in which man can refer to humans in general as well as be used in its more restricted
sense to refer to the male gender per se, reflects and reinforces the Western
cultural tendency to focus on males”.
This observation is paralleled on page nine of Morgan’s
book:
- the fact that ‘man’ is an ambiguous
term. It means the species; it also
means the male of the species. …..I believe the deeply rooted semantic
confusion between ‘man’ as a male and ‘man’ as a species has been fed back into
and vitiated a great deal of the speculation that goes on about the origins,
development, and nature of the human race.
Both stress the primacy of woman the gatherer over man the
hunter as the developer of tool use:
Morgan (page. 27):
One idle afternoon after a good deal of trial and error she picked up a
pebble – this required no luck at all because the beach was covered with
thousands of pebbles – and hit one of the shells with it, and the shell cracked.
Tanner (page 268): By
gathering with tools, early mothers could obtain enough food for themselves
and to share with their young, even on the savanna. It is therefore, highly probable that it was
women with offspring who developed the new gathering technology and that this
was the innovation critical to the ape-human divergence.
Tanner (page 259): It would be those mothers who invented
and used stone tools as dental substitutes.
Amongst other similarities is that both dismiss the baboon
as a suitable model for early hominin society and both were written for the
same general readership. Although the
author of ‘On Becoming Human’ is a
professional anthropologist and the book full of the references and
acknowledgements required of a scientific work, it is also replete with a variety of line drawings including
Victorian ladies, Thai dancers, chimpanzees aplenty and even a member of the
rock group ‘Kiss’. On page 11, the
professor writes:
“This chapter is,
necessarily, rather technical, and some readers may prefer to skim or skip
parts of it on their first time through the book.”
The ‘some readers’ referred to are, presumably, those
without a scientific background and so, like ‘The Descent of Woman’, the
book is intended to popularise the view
that women and, particularly, mothers,
played a critical role in the evolution of humankind. It is the dissimilarities,
however, that are the more significant.
It is to be expected that, because Elaine Morgan was a professional
writer, her book is written in a more attractive and engaging manner – or as
Moore describes it a ‘pop book, with a
pretty chatty style’ – so much so that after forty years and many reprints
, it is still readily available. More importantly, whereas Nancy Tanner sets
her hypothesis in the scientifically respectable ‘mosaic’ – which as a
non-scientist I take to mean any part of the African continent excepting the
densely forested areas - the radical Elaine
Morgan dunks her hypothetical hominins first in then out of the water.
My speculation is that Nancy Tanner returned home from her
years spent studying a gatherer- hunter tribe in Sumatra, her feminist mind
musing on the male dominion over current evolutionary theory and, in her own
words “seeking to correct what has been
both a ludicrous and a tragic omission in evolutionary reconstructions” only
to find that another feminist had already made a well received attempt at the
correction, An obscure foreign TV
playwright, Elaine Morgan (Elaine who?) had, literally, flown in out of the
blue, trespassed on the intellectual preserve of anthropology and become a
minor celebrity on the basis of her ‘Book of the Month’. It was as though someone
had crossed the finishing line before Nancy had even chosen her running shoes.
The title Morgan had chosen for her book - ‘The Descent of Woman’ - might also
have been somewhat galling. On page 167 of her book, Tanner comments:
He [Darwin] was prevented from harvesting all the
fruits of his fertile imagination because he did not follow through with the
logic of his own argument – to discover how female choice influenced the origin
of the hominids; that is, to show how sexual selection was important at the
very onset of human evolution. Because
of an unfortunate blind spot engendered by his own cultural background, Darwin
was unable to explicate the necessary interrelationship and carry his work to
its more logical conclusion.
It is clearly evident that Professor Tanner considered her
book to be developing Darwin’s work along the logical path that, had his
imagination not been fettered by the constraints of Victorian England, he
himself would have explored. So what
better title for such a work than the feminisation of Darwin’s ‘The Descent of Man’? Unfortunately, due to the unexpected,
unwelcome and untrained amateur contender, E. Morgan, that prize title, ‘The Descent of Woman’ had been won for
the Principality of Wales.
I am supposing then that Jim Moore was irritated by Morgan’s
successful ‘pop’ book; and that the
cause of his negative response was not the Aquatic Ape hypothesis. It was the feminism that caused the suggested
resentment felt by Jim and that this resentment motivates his ‘Aquatic Ape-
sink or swim’ website. Although the website takes the form of a critique of the
AAT, its primary purpose is to provide a convenient means of expressing his
animus towards Elaine Morgan.
Before examining Moore’s critical techniques it will be
helpful to consider his general intellectual stance. In this review, in all his reviews of
Morgan’s books, in his contributions to the newsgroup ‘sci.anthropology.paleo’ Moore
assumes the role of omniscient polymath. Whatever the subject, Moore is an
authority able to instruct others of a lesser intellectual breed. Consider the following illuminating exchange:
Brian Doyle asks: “If
a species forces another species into extinction, i.e. Humans hunting animals,
either by pollution or other conventional means, into extinction, is this
considered Natural Selection?
Greggory Senechal replies: “I’m going to go out on a limb and say no. I look at Natural Selection
in a more positive light.
Characteristics are selected in, not selected out. If some animals tunnel underground,
protecting themselves from human hunters, the “tunnelers” might be selected
in. Does that make sense?
Whereupon our Jim, bristling with absolute certainty, storms
into the fray:” No” he thunders. “It’s “Natural Selection” all right, no
matter how “unnatural” we might think of it.
It’s no different really than, say, a hurricane or two wiping out a
small, nearly extinct population. And I
would also think of natural selection with different words than you use (the
“in” or “out”, or ”selection for” [a similar phrasing]. Natural selection works
only by basically wiping out organisms; it “selects” by not “allowing”
effective raising of young (at any stage of that process) (and my quote marks
are proliferating because of the inherent problems and baggage associated with
words like *allow” and “select”). In
that sense, natural selection only selects “against”, never “for”. It only happens when something “doesn’t”
work, and the fact that things that ‘do’ work are left (and sometimes get”
better”) is an artefact. Sexual
selection, OTOH , is an active selection “for” traits.
In this enlightening exchange, the tentatively questioning
Greggory, doggedly hanging on to his limb, reveals his true understanding of
natural selection – his tunnelers would of a certainty be more likely to
survive the hunt and so able, by procreation, to pass on their tunnelling
characteristics to the next generation; whereas the all-knowing Jim shows that
when it comes to natural selection he is completely out of his depth; drowning
in a high tide of quotation marks. Natural
selection is nothing like a hurricane that wipes out a small population; nor even
like the meteorite that supposedly put paid to the whole caboodle of dinosaurs.
Such catastrophes are evolutionary tragedies; histories of genocide written in
the rocks by old father deep-time; but nothing whatsoever to do with natural
selection - except to provide opportunities for it to exploit. The baggage of
which Moore complains is not attached to the offending words but cluttering his
confused misunderstanding like abandoned luggage. He needs to enclose so many
words within quotation marks because he understands none of them in a Darwinian
context. And as for ‘artefact’ - things that ‘do’ work are left (and
sometimes get” better”) is an artefact. Artefact? Being no scholar I assumed my understanding of
the word might be in error so I sought reassurance in Chambers Twentieth
Century Dictionary:
Artefact, artifact, n. a thing
made by human workmanship.
So here we have it; according to Moore,( a sort of Pope Jim
the Infallible handing down his papal bulls), after natural selection has wiped
out the organisms that didn’t appeal to its taste, everything thereafter that
works can, according to Jim, be made by any smart gal with a half decent workshop. I really think it’s time to move quickly on
before Jim manages to struggle free of those two large, kindly gentlemen in
white coats trying to coax him back into his straitjacket.
Jim Moore’s belief that natural selection is a negative
process, that it always selects ‘against’,
never ‘for’, must have occasioned
certain tensions when he was assisting Professor Tanner with her book ‘On Becoming Human’. Their harmony must
have hit repeated discords when she wrote:
….(page 271) selection for decreasing sexual dimorphism also continued during early human
evolution ….. (page 222 ) Selection
was for increasingly efficient, time-saving, energy-saving ways of getting
food ….. (page 209) Selection for early intelligence is one basis for
expanding brain size and more sophisticated mental capacities. (page 161) For gathering females, natural selection
for bipedalism and tool use in the food quest was intense. (162)…. must
have been strongly selected for….
(My underlining)
And how can ‘wiping out’ be the defining characteristic of
natural selection when all organisms, without exception, are wiped out? Darwinism is concerned not with the wiping
out but with the happenings before the wiping out occurs. Then out of the confusion, as welcome as it
is unexpected, emerges a glimmering of truth. Jim turns momentarily away from his
doom mongering and announces: it
“selects” by not “allowing” effective raising of young. Had our sunny Jim defined natural selection
simply as a concern for the effective raising of the young, the Darwinian ranks
of Tuscany could have scarce forborne cheering themselves silly. Pity ‘tis that
this little ray of light should be obscured, scarcely discernible behind her thick
veil, as she follows the mourners at the mass funerals of those wiped out by
the serial murderer ‘Natural Selection’.
In his eagerness to contradict Morgan’s every statement
Moore often succeeds only in contradicting himself. In his website Jim Moore
makes many references to Morgan’s strawman version of the savannah:
….a favourite
technique of hers, constructing a savannah strawman….Morgan constructs her
strawman….she gets out her strawman kit again……
Moore claims that for the last hundred years the savannah
has been defined as a type of woodland
characterized by a very open spacing between its trees and by intervening areas
of grassland.
In ‘On Becoming Human’
Nancy Tanner gives a more comprehensive description:
About half the surface
of Africa is covered by dry savanna and grass steppe or by open woodland and
mixed savanna. These areas are a mosaic
landscape that includes open grasslands, scattered tree clumps, riverine
forests, gallery forests and marshy areas.
Whatever the savanna is, it most certainly is not, according
to Moore, hot and dry. Such a
description is Morgan’s strawman version.
Then in his review of ‘The Naked
Darwinist’ the unwary Jim, not looking where he is putting his feet, turns
his attention to Professor Peter Wheeler of the Faculty of Science at Liverpool
John Moores University.
Peter Wheeler's
"radiator hypothesis" -- briefly, very briefly, Wheeler has done a
series of papers describing his studies of how shorter body hair arranged as
human body hair is arranged, along with human style sweating, is an immense aid
in cooling in a hot, dry, relatively open area, allowing the use of
that environment at times when other animals find it difficult, or even
effectively impossible, to utilize it. So Wheeler, using accurate descriptions
of our body hair and sweating abilities, was able to show how our hair and
sweat characteristics would be an advantage in dry
hot areas, and observations from cultural anthropologists show how
this was indeed effective, for instance in persistence hunting -- also very
briefly, "chasing antelope or other game in the
midday heat, often for hours,
(My emphases.)
By acknowledging that, regardless of current understanding,
science once accepted that the habitat in which Homo sapiens evolved was hot
and dry, Jim Moore here admits that Elaine Morgan was correct in her claim and
that his silly strawman jibe needs, belatedly, to be thrown out of the window. But
having put one foot in it, our Jim insists on putting in the other. This hypothesis, with the mighty hunter
chasing after antelopes, often for hours in the midday heat, is surely an
exemplar of those ‘reconstructions’
which incurred Nancy Tanner’s disapproval. It is typical of the exclusively
male accounts of human evolution which Tanner describes as ludicrous and which, by failing to give attention to the
evolutionary role of the female as mother, she regards as a tragic omission in evolutionary reconstructions. So it seems that
his own argument having required him to heave his ‘strawman’ absurdity out of
the window, it now requires Jim to defenestrate Nancy Makepeace Tanner together
with her misguided matrilineal hypothesis.
Jim has left the window wide open and had his phylogeny
equipped him as a triped, is now preparing to put his third foot in it. Having confidently commended Peter Wheelers
account of hair loss and sweating prowess, he announces with his usual
unchallengeable authority:
She’s (Morgan’s) long been solidly against even any
invocation of sexual selection, probably because many of the features she seeks
to explain via natural selection – hair, sweat, fat – are classic cases of
sexual selection.
So much for Peter
Wheeler’s explanation of hair loss by natural selection. The Liverpool Professor
would have better spent his time in the Cavern listening to the Beatles instead
of sweating it out in the heat of Africa concocting daft hypotheses. So out of
the window goes Peter’s sweaty hunter landing atop Morgan’s strawmen and
Tanner’s female gatherers.
It is conceivable that Jim Moore could gather together these
apparent contradictions and construct from them a cohesive scenario. But he has
no such a positive ambition. His sole
aim is to belittle Elaine Morgan. So
when she proposes that our reduced
hairiness is due to a watery environment, he wheels out Wheeler to
contradict her. And when she seemingly
ignores sexual selection, Moore dumps the now useless Wheeler and his strawman
savanna so that he can continue his contradictions.
To me the great conundrum is why such eminent intellects as
P. Z. Myers; John Hawks and Greg Laden should find Moore’s website so
compelling. According to P. Z. Myers it
is ‘definitive’; that is to say it is the final word. Thanks to Jim Moore, P.Z.
tells his readers, the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis has been destroyed beyond
reconstruction. Jim Moore has given it
the last rites.
To me this trinity of eminent academics add justification to
the remark of the philosopher Daniel Dennet:
During the last few
years, when I have found myself in the company of distinguished biologists,
evolutionary theorists, paleoanthropologists and other experts, I have often
asked them just to tell me, please, exactly why Elaine Morgan must be wrong
about the aquatic theory. I haven’t yet
had a reply worth mentioning, aside from those who admit, with a twinkle in
their eyes, that they have also wondered the same thing.
The three scientists, seemingly unable between them to
provide any convincing scientific rebuttal of the aquatic theory, would better remain
of the twinkle-eyed persuasion rather than put their reputations at risk by an
alliance with Mister Jim Moore.
