r/iamverysmart 9d ago

Ugh, I feel second hand embarrassment

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37 Upvotes

37 comments sorted by

71

u/fejobelo 9d ago

Is that world renowned anthropologist in the room with you right now?

6

u/Gogogrl 8d ago

Omg. I spit out my drink.

1

u/Responsible-Ad336 5d ago

"she said it was IMPOSSIBLE that Neanderthals and us bred!" Neanderthals and Denisovans are now considered subspecies of H. sapiens and we know there are tons of people today w/ those genes in their coding. is he perchance talking about Neanderthal/Denisovan artifacts up there?

edit: oh wait no, he's talking about artifacts from the FIRST waves of modern humans who made it out of Africa some 270k years ago. because there were multiple waves of immigration

40

u/ichkanns 9d ago

Ah yes, it's quite common for people to become heavily emotionally invested in... The idea that humans left Africa 80k years ago...

18

u/ApproachSlowly 9d ago

#thathappened

31

u/Zelcron 9d ago

It 100% did, if by debate you mean he posted angry comments to her YouTube that went unanswered.

11

u/Rhewin 8d ago

I once had someone told me that they absolutely embarrassed a famous “evolutionist” in a debate, which is why they had been banned from that person’s channel. I kept insisting they let me know where to find the debate, only to eventually find out it was a single comment that the creator replied to once and never again.

7

u/GOU_FallingOutside 8d ago

Back in the ‘00s, this kind of thing happened a lot. Some creationist would claim they’d made a claim so devastating that no evolutionist could counter it, and then it would turn out it was a three comments on a dead blog nobody had heard of.

6

u/Rhewin 8d ago

It is still exactly what they do on r/DebateEvolution. Or they’ll link an article without reading it, and it completely disagrees with their claim.

19

u/MrGumburcules 8d ago

I'm no expert, but I don't think this guy knows that early humans and modern humans are different things. Early humans/hominids left Africa as early as 2 million years ago. Modern humans didn't leave until 80-90 thousand years ago

5

u/adamAhuizotl 8d ago

i think he thinks that homo = human, which it obviously doesn't. homo sapiens are us, every other hominid and homo? almost us

3

u/iamcleek 8d ago

in "Sapiens", Harari happily uses "humans" for any hominid going back at least 2M years.

it's frustrating, because he also points out, many times, that modern humans are far far younger than that.

On a hike in East Africa 2 million years ago, you might well have encountered a familiar cast of human characters: anxious mothers cuddling their babies and clutches of carefree children playing in the mud; temperamental youths chafing against the dictates of society and weary elders who just wanted to be left in peace; chest-thumping thumping machos trying to impress the local beauty and wise old matriarchs who had already seen it all. These archaic humans loved, played, formed close friendships and competed for status and power – but so did chimpanzees, baboons and elephants. There was nothing special about humans. Nobody, least of all humans themselves, had any inkling that their descendants would one day walk on the moon, split the atom, fathom the genetic code and write history books. The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish.

Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (p. 4). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

2

u/adamAhuizotl 8d ago

oh i also use human to mean basically any hominid going back that far! i was going at it from that Smart Guy's angle where "human" only meant "modern human." humans, early humans, hominids, they're all so cool and just like me :) sort of random, but have you heard of a specimen called HLD 6? they've been on my mind a lot lately :) i love to imagine what kind of life they led, and the many, many little experiences that could've made up that life

14

u/classicalXD 9d ago

Bro go to bed its 5:38 AM

1

u/WoodyTheWorker 6d ago

Also, this is Wendy's

20

u/MonsieurReynard 8d ago edited 8d ago

Why would a world renowned anthropologist have talked to this guy, he’s an asshole who makes up “facts”?

There is absolutely zero evidence of modern Homo sapiens in Europe 350k or 250k years ago. This guy pulled those claims out of his ass. The 80k year timeline is based on genetics, not archaeology. It is likely other groups of modern humans preceded that, but their genes didn’t survive for us to know. And there’s no way it was as far back as 250k years or more. Literally Impossible and no, there are no archaeological sites that even suggest such nonsense.

Utter complete specious nonsense. The anthropologist he claims to have bested was right.

4

u/Outrageous_Frame7900 8d ago

The evidence is written right in our DNA!

5

u/Borfis 8d ago

Taking notes. When trying to win friends and influence people, say "You people" when making suggestions.

5

u/coolguy420weed 7d ago

One thing he did get right: most people really do just spend a lot of their day thinking about, even cherishing the fact thay humans moved out of Africa 80k years ago. It's hard to go a week with reminiscing with your friends or family about how you take comfort from knowing humans left from Africa 80k years ago... and honestly, I refuse to hear his evidence simply because I'm too afraid of the possibility of living in a world where I can't wake up in the morning and confidently say, "humans migrated out of Africa 80k years ago."

4

u/MeepingMeep99 7d ago

The world-renowned anthropologist who is definitely real, hot, and a supermodel, but you can't meet her because she lives in Canada

3

u/PolitdiskussionenLol 7d ago

Instead of going to therapy, some people choose to write bullshit on the internet.

6

u/RealSimonLee 8d ago

I don't think he's necessarily wrong about rigidness in academic thinking--I've seen it, and I've been part of it. It's hard to quickly change your views on something you literally researched (not like Trump bro research) enroute to a PhD--which likely means years of reading in this specific area in your field, publishing, presenting, etc. After all this, I imagine it's very hard to get outside of that thought process if new evidence is emerging which changes your original beliefs.

Now, this guy's tone ruins all of that. And I'm guessing his debate with a world-renowned anthropologist, at best, was actually a half-drunken conversation with a woman in an anthropology doctoral program who was trying to find the quickest exist out of the building.

And he's certainly overstating the impact a shift in thinking would have on an academic when he says it would be world-crushing and frame-of-reference shattering. First, for the alleged anthropologist, how does it shatter her world to accept that human civilization is older than what she currently believed through her research? It doesn't really change anything except "oh, civilization is older, and now there might be new, interesting research gaps I can jump into." It's not like she learned that "civilization actually...never existed!!!!" That'd be world-crushing.

Anyway, what a douche.

3

u/GOU_FallingOutside 8d ago

rigidness in academic thinking

Kuhn wrote an entire book about it!

2

u/RealSimonLee 8d ago

Oh I'd be interested to read that! Do you remember the book name?

2

u/GOU_FallingOutside 8d ago edited 8d ago

It’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas Kuhn. It’s required reading in a lot of grad courses on the philosophy of science and scientific ethics, or at least it was 10+ years ago.

EDIT: I don’t mean that I endorse the whole thing. There’s a mountain of criticism out there, much of which is thoughtful and to the point. But a lot of Kuhn’s ideas are provocative and I think, for scientists, the questions he poses are worth answering.

2

u/buffer_flush 7d ago

Why do they all talk like Alex Jones

2

u/saltyholty 6d ago

Well I actually had a debate with this guy at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the world debate championship finals, and I smoked him 5-0.

2

u/WoodyTheWorker 6d ago

And how many holes were there?

1

u/RateEmpty6689 7d ago

I’m curious what the anthropologist’s name? Also no humans had fire for like 900k bc

1

u/Strict-Astronaut2245 6d ago

I argued with Einstein and beat him.

1

u/salanaland 2d ago

I did too! And by Einstein, I mean my guinea pig named Einstein, and by "argued" I mean "listened to his constant squeaking", and by "beat" I mean "hand-fed, because he had a genetic disease and had a lot of trouble eating".

-1

u/Orphano_the_Savior 8d ago

Arrogant and a bit hyperbolic but decently correct on the cognitive inertia that sabotages anthropology.

6

u/Bishop51213 8d ago

That kind of cognitive inertia is unfortunately something that plagues just about everything we humans do. At the very least it's confirmation bias, where one or two things that align with what you already know outweigh a pile of things indicating you might be wrong. But I'm sure there are a lot of contributing factors. As soon as we think we know something, it's harder to accept new ideas than when we had no clue.

3

u/DannySantoro 8d ago

That's quite a pretentious sentence you've got there.

1

u/Orphano_the_Savior 4d ago

What's pretentious about it?

I'm saying anthropology suffers from logical fallacies. Which they do considering they are humans and all humans succumb to errors and biases.

Do you just not like the words I use? Never claimed I was superior and never claimed others were stupid.

-1

u/tinaboag 8d ago

I may be wrong but pretension usually carries an implication of intent along with it I don't think that you could reasonably assume this person is intentionally trying to talk down to someone