I’m busy this weekend finding out how to customize a CRM app in a cloud-computing environment … but I did stumble on this unrelated gem:

Mithen claims [in The Singing Neanderthals] that although Neanderthals had the kind of vocal tract and respiratory control that could have enabled speech, the neural circuitry for language was not present. In The Prehistory of the Mind (1996) Mithen argued that pre-sapiens hominids like Neanderthals lacked “cognitive fluidity” or metaphorical thought—the ability to hold concurrently in mind information from several different cognitive domains. Additionally, the absence of symbolic artifacts in their dwelling sites implies absence of symbolic thought and hence of symbolic utterance—i.e., spoken language (p. 228).

Making it pretty damned unlikely that they could contribute any genes for advanced cognition to the human species, eh? Neanderthals weren’t smart beings handicapped by a lack of language, they were rather beings who were too dumb to develop language. So if humans and Neanderthals ever interbred and produced fertile offspring, all we could have picked up from them were lowbrow genes for survival in the cold, etc.; if there was any flow of genes for intelligence, it only went one way, i.e., from our species to theirs.

So Cochran and Harpending’s “theory” about human-Neanderthal interbreeding being the source of our cognitive explosion is back to being sheer quackery, bereft of evidence and insight, as I had originally suspected. And it’s going to fucking stay there.

But again, this is how the truly Wilber-esque Steveosphere bullshits you across a wide spectrum of subjects; and if you haven’t researched each subject in greater detail than they have, you won’t know that they’re either ignorantly or deliberately misleading you.

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