Math Opinion in the NY Times

A new series in the New York Times takes on Math. This ought to be an interesting looking to the power of abstraction, why math is interesting to so many people, and how it has brought us to where we are today.

Cavemen: Part 2

Here's a follow up to this post concerning the Caveman diet.

Prehistoric life was not short. This is a blessed scientific lie.

We explain this in much more detail in the book, but here's the misunderstanding in a nutshell.

* There was high infant mortality in prehistory. (How this compares to infant mortality in Medeival Europe or modern India and China is an interesting question we look at in the book, but no space for it here.)
* There are technical difficulties in distinguishing age of death beyond the early 30s, when one's last teeth are fully erupted from the jaw bone.
* These two factors combined with sloppy thinking to create the wide-spread "fact" that "if you made it to 30 or so, you had done well."

But it's bullshit! Nobody was considered "old" at 30 in prehistory, just as 30 year-olds aren't considered "old" among modern day hunter-gatherers, or in the Old Testament, where humans were allotted 70 years (three score and ten). People who lived beyond childhood often–even typically–lived into their 60s and 70s in prehistory. The evidence for this is overwhelming, and well known to specialists in anthropology, primatology, and archaeology.

Cavemen

Has anyone else heard of this subculture who try to replicate some aspect of living like a caveman for better health?

It seems highly misguided to me. The idea is that modern man is weak when compared to our primitive ancestors. While that may be true, our ancestors were lucky to live past what we now call middle age. I also find it funny that the practitioners have no problem partaking in modern medicine while thumbing their nose at eating vegetables.

I'd call this a fake, except the world is a strange place and I don't doubt that people would attempt something like this. Still it could be a nice little hoax.

Paleontologists at the creation museum

The University of Cincinnati just hosted the North American Paleontological Convention and many of the scientists took a side trip to the creation museum in Northern Kentucky, itself created by the group Answers In Genesis.

Several of us have gotten the NY Times which had an article about this.

The article reported comments from the scientists such as:

Many of the paleontologists thought the museum misrepresented and ridiculed them and their work and unfairly blamed them for the ills of society.

“I think they should rename the museum — not the Creation Museum, but the Confusion Museum,” said Lisa E. Park, a professor of paleontology at the University of Akron.

However, there was a curious neutrality from the reporter, Kenneth Chang. He expressed the opinions of museum officials and a couple of non-scientist museum attendees as well as the paleontologists. It came across as much more "balanced" than I think the topic deserved.

Perhaps someone in the other camp would think the liberal NY Times has portrayed the creation side unfairly, something like the old Ronald Reagan line: "There you go again."

From my biased point of view, there is no other reasonable position and I would hope reporters would call these things honestly instead of with a false neutrality.

Roy