Wednesday, October 10, 2018

Scientists and the new habit of conjecture.

More and more I am reading about scientists who make preposterous claims that have no fact in evidence. Most recently is the discovery of a child who had a Denisovan father and a Neanderthal mother. The child's bone was found in a known Denisovan cave. Fine. I can believe that!

What I can't believe is what I'm hearing them say about it. For example Svante Pääbo, the lead author in the study said to Science Daily that, "Neanderthals and Denisovans may not have had many opportunities to meet. But when they did, they must have mated frequently -- much more so than we previously thought." Pääbo goes further when speaking to The Guardian and said, "I’m beginning to think that when these groups met, they were quite happy to mix with each other." Why? Because you found one instance? Even if you found one hundred instances, what makes you think they were happy?

If we're going to make suppositions, then it sounds even more to me like the Neanderthal was taken by force. I mean, this was a Western Neanderthal not found in the region she was from! Who is to say that these were not warring beings and that the Neanderthal wasn't a slave?

The father, though obviously Denisovan, did carry some of his own Neanderthal DNA. That doesn't mean that his ancestor wasn't taken, raped or something else just as violent.

Scientists unfortunately look at the past with rose colored glasses. The past was a brutal hateful place! Murder was acceptable in many instances and the death penalty was very well appreciated. There were no human rights and suffering was rampant.

It's too bad then that we can't seem to get the real truth from scientists, today. I do apologize to Mr. Pääbo for picking on him because it's not just him. I see it all the time now. I would prefer that they stick to the evidence and don't try to coat it with sugar. Let's hear the real science and leave it at that.