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A Sample Treasure Hunt Level : Level One (Life Sciences)
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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Paragraph after paragraph denigrates Fomenko for no reason other than his popular success.

I thought Rhetoric had fallen off the formal curriculum some years ago. I also thought an uneventful, conformist school career like mine led seamlessly into academia, but cases like this one (and Bernie's opening gambit and the whole Ma'at forum) suggest that there is actually a moment where academics stop to sign up, take an oath and receive a Handbook of Rhetoric to Trot Out Against the Alternos.
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Rocky



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Take a look at the picture here:

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1952074&rendertype=figure&id=pone-0000829-g002

It's from this article:
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1952074

which is basically about:
The newly resolved phylogenetic structure suggests that ancestors of Native Americans paused when they reached Beringia, during which time New World founder lineages differentiated from their Asian sister-clades. This pause in movement was followed by a swift migration southward that distributed the founder types all the way to South America. The data also suggest more recent bi-directional gene flow between Siberia and the North American Arctic.


I wonder if this Beringian pause was when horses were domesticated. I also wonder if the A2a or C1a back-migrators were proto-Mongolians.
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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Ah...back migration, now there's something to conjure! As many of you know, paradigm theories tend to be wrong but they cannot be radically altered because (by definition) entire academic subjects rest on them. Hence, the invention of the "non-falsifiable feature". This a device (often a circularity) that means a given theory can never be demonstrated to be wrong and hence the theory itself achieves immortality.

In THOBR I point out that the general cladistical organisation of biology known as the Linnaean System can never be overthrown because only the discovery of a new species that cannot be fitted into the System will overthrow it. But the System has a rule that says that any new species that cannot be fitted into the System must have a new box opened specifically for this new species!

Back migration is another real get-out-jail cutie. You will recall that Orthodoxy claims that the aboriginal New World population was derived via the Bering Straits from Old World populations, and it all happened c 12000 BP. Well, with the increasing sophistication of genetic surveys this clearly might be falsifiable. But by introducing "back migration" any genetic make-up on either side of the Straits can now be explained simply by moving genetic groups backwards and forwards to fit the observed present distribution. And it will clearly meet the demands of any (forseeable) development in genetic expertise.

This is much more satisfactory than the former explanations for genetic discordancies eg
1. Ooh, they must have all been wiped out in a plague that only affected such and such a genetic grouping.
2. Ooh, the entire population of the Americas derives from two people who accidently crossed over.
3. Ooh, more research is needed.
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Rocky



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What if the big fat red arrow labelled "1" is gotten rid of?

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1952074&rendertype=figure&id=pone-0000829-g002

Does this improve matters?
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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Good boy! Now do the rest.
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Rocky



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I came across this today. I don't think it's been posted yet:

The fossil record has been used to shed light on the late Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions in North America and elsewhere. It is therefore important to account for variability due to the incompleteness of the fossil record and error in dating fossil remains. Here, a joint confidence region for the extinction times of horses and mammoths in Alaska is constructed. The results suggest that a prior claim that the extinction of horses preceded the arrival of humans cannot be made with confidence.


http://www.pnas.org/content/103/19/7351.full
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Mick Harper
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There is one AE aspect of this study that may not have occurred to you. Scholars are always being urged to clear up anomalies but not to shake the paradigm tree. So The Industry is quite adept at encouraging certain lines-of-enquiries but not others. Alaska is simply not part of North America as far as megafaunal extinctions are concerned because the important boundary was not the Bering Straits but the filthy great ten-thousand-foot-thick area of glaciation (essentially covering Canada) between Alaska and the rest of the Americas.

Hence anything discovered by Alaskan research can be explained away simply by sticking it in with North America or in with Asia (depending what you wish to prove). In this case, the important (nay, vital) fact that horses disappearing and humans appearing were coeval but in Alaska can just be finessed into something or other about ice-age econiches.

If you tried to argue that the whole of North America was an econiche so far as the horse was concerned |(a native of North America of course) even orthodoxy would have a tough job -- though that is the current explanation! [They'd like to finger the humans of course but a lack of Clovis points associated with horse fossils is holding them back. They don't know what we know -- the horse was just domesticated.]
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