Half orcs are real

[Desdichado]

Workable, sure. But fundamentally ignorant and incapable of informing policy in the modern age. We teach people that things are simple. We do it in a way that reinforces cultural biases.

No; fundamentally correct, albeit simplified and failing to explain the unusual cases.

Whenever the real world gets complicated, people think it's an aberration, because we spent high school and nowadays most of college telling them it was simple. They ignore new evidence because we let them believe that these topics are settled.

We tell them we understand things, because we want to believe we do, and we lie to them to comfort ourselves.

Ax to grind much? Why not assume the parsimonious solution; i.e., there's a lot kids have to learn in high school, so you can't get too much depth behind any subject without sacrificing breadth of subject matter expertise that we've decided a high school kid needs to be familiar with.

No reason to put on the tinfoil hat here.

Some of these people go on to be executives and politicians who have to make decisions about science that can affect the lives of entire countries, if not the world. We don't need to give them all the details, but we do need to make them understand that they don't understand. I'm getting tired of running into closed minds who declare facts "impossible" because they contradict something taught to them in 9th grade.

See what I mean? Pretty irrelevant to the discussion.

As for what species concept "fuzziness" is relevant to the discussion... We can't decide if sapiens and neanderthalis are the same species or not, and we're passing judgment on whether they can successfully mate.

Of course not. Because part of the delineation between species is behavior; i.e., do they mate "in the wild?" Since we can only infer and speculate on that based on fossil remains, it may remain an unanswered and unanswerable question forever.

Talking about fungal gametes doesn't help get us closer to that discussion.

We're living in a fuzzy place. But the reaction of the average person to it isn't to get comfortable with fuzzy. It's to make bold, unsupported, partisan statements. I've been doing it myself for years with my insistence that they did mate, probably pretty often, but at least I'm leaning on a few eons of human behavior to justify it. People on the other side are leaning on.... what? Lack of evidence? That's a pretty thin reed on which to insist on a negative.

Uh... what? The bold, unsupported partisan statement is to say that Neanderthals and AMH's did interbreed based on the pretty thin reed of lack of evidence. To say that they didn't is the cautious, conservative, careful approach. Or are you calling your caricature of human behavior--the, "they'd hump a rock if it was vaguely vajay-jay-shaped" claim, "evidence?"

I think you've grossly mischaracterized the nature of the debate there, for some reason.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

Hobo, you are correct that we are getting way, way off topic with all these other species and such. I was trying to address the "they are different species and therefore cannot mate" angle. That's really a red herring.

I disagree that cultural prejudices informing the way we make decisions about this is off-topic. If we have inherent biases that color how we interpret the data at hand, it gets really hard to make unbiased analysis. The history of science is riddled with this stuff. But any real discussion of that pushes way too close to forum rules, so I'm going to drop it.

The whole, "primates will mate with anything" angle was an attempt to address the whole, "Why would we want to mate with a neanderthal?" thing. If we'll bump uglies with horses, rocks, trains that vibrate the right way, and people who talk in the theater, why the heck wouldn't we do it with a human with a heavy brow ridge? But if people don't see the relevance there, that's cool, too. It's really just window dressing.

Fundamentally, this is just about humans.

Stating that two groups of human beings given contact will fail to mate is not a cautious, conservative, careful approach. It is ignorant of history.

Given the opportunity, we will hit that. It's what we do.

Look at genetic studies of human populations. If two groups ever bumped into each other at all, whether in trade or war, some percentage of them produced offspring together. The human family tree is a very stubby little bush.

That's really all this is.

 

[Desdichado]

Hobo, you are correct that we are getting way, way off topic with all these other species and such. I was trying to address the "they are different species and therefore cannot mate" angle. That's really a red herring.

Well, maybe not quite that bad, but it's turned on its head. Rather, it's not "they couldn't have mated; they're different species," which is proscriptive, relies on negative evidence, and is unproveable, but "if they mated and produced viable offspring with at least some regularity, then they're not separate species" which relies on positive evidence, is descriptive, and is (theoretically, at least) proveable. Whether or not the theoretically proveable ever translates into proveable from a practical standpoint is, of course, debateable.

I disagree that cultural prejudices informing the way we make decisions about this is off-topic. If we have inherent biases that color how we interpret the data at hand, it gets really hard to make unbiased analysis. The history of science is riddled with this stuff. But any real discussion of that pushes way too close to forum rules, so I'm going to drop it.

Well, that could be on topic, but that's not really what you're talking about. You're talking about policy makers and high school kids. What that has to do with Neanderthals is unclear, since to the best of my knowledge, there are no surviving Neanderthals about which to enact policy or interact with.

Stating that two groups of human beings given contact will fail to mate is not a cautious, conservative, careful approach. It is ignorant of history.

Given the opportunity, we will hit that. It's what we do.

I think you're showing your bias by continuing to hold up that absurd caricature as if it should be taken at face value. Fundamentally, that's the question that this whole discussion is attempting to answer, though... did early AMH's recognize Neanderthals as sufficiently human to interact with in a mating type fashion?

Alluding to ... uh... Grandma unfriendly relationships with pets and whatnot doesn't help the discussion, because it's anecdotal, not data, and because it doesn't really prove anything except that there's always some weirdo out there who'll do something atypical. That was never really disputed or under debate, though, so that's also irrelevant, and in fact obfuscatory.

 

[Rykion]

Photographic proof of human/Neanderthal hybridization.

He's a great actor too.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

I think you're showing your bias by continuing to hold up that absurd caricature as if it should be taken at face value. Fundamentally, that's the question that this whole discussion is attempting to answer, though... did early AMH's recognize Neanderthals as sufficiently human to interact with in a mating type fashion?

Frankly, that didn't even occur to me. It seems, frankly, astoundingly obvious.

Alluding to ... uh... Grandma unfriendly relationships with pets and whatnot doesn't help the discussion, because it's anecdotal, not data, and because it doesn't really prove anything except that there's always some weirdo out there who'll do something atypical. That was never really disputed or under debate, though, so that's also irrelevant, and in fact obfuscatory.

Which is why I dropped it and went back to humans interacting with humans, which has been roundly ignored every time I bring it up in favor of going after the low-hanging fruit of less typical human behavior. To respond as you did to what you quoted, you had to ignore both the preceding and the antecedent paragraphs placing it securely in the context of humans interacting with humans.

To be more specific, watch "Faces of America" or dig up some studies on human genetic histories and you will see that people who are very physically different from each other were very happy to mate. Often. This is not a caricature. This is fact. People who reliably regarded each other as subhuman on a cultural level were still quite happy to produce large amounts of children with each other on a personal one. Some of these people were at least as odd-looking to each other as Neanderthals would have been. Heck, you could plunk a neanderthal on the streets of most cosmopolitan cities in the world today and people wouldn't notice him. They really were not that different at all. Or at least, they were no more different than say, a San and a Han Chinese, or a European and a Papuan. We rock some pretty significant physical dimorphism with very few genetic changes, after all.

Claiming that Neanderthals might have been "insufficiently human" is simply absurd on the face of it given the comparative morphology. Perhaps running to an absurd extreme in the opposite direction wasn't wise on my part, but my brain seems to be stuck in a state of rueful amusement about this whole thing that limits my ability to inhibit the impulse.

 

[Desdichado]

Well, there's more than just the question of whether or not an AMH would boink a Neanderthal babe (and I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on how "obvious" it is that that would have happened.) There's also the question of whether or not they could produce fertile, viable offspring or "mules" or not produce any offspring at all, or whatever.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

That's a valid question, but I suspect that if we did the math, we'd find out that there are dogs, cats, and rats in the world separated from each other for many more generations than sapiens and neanderthals who crossbreed just fine.

Now, number of generations isn't necessarily an honest signal of divergence, but it's not bad as a placeholder.

Since our behavioral predilections make it likely there was an attempt at breeding, and the time course is not sufficient to think it was impossible.... whereby do we come by this giant cultural insistence that it was unlikely if not impossible?

I think that's interesting. It probably says something about a person, how strongly they believe one way or the other about this.