just got to this on my day off
He found, intact, an unhatched egg containing an embryo—a fossil of immense research value. The egg and the other remains suggested that dinosaurs and major reptiles were probably not staggering into extinction on that fateful day. In one fell swoop, DePalma may have solved the three-metre problem and filled in the gap in the fossil record.
dude, ho-leeeeee shit.
The real problem, now that the paper is unembargoed, is that none of this is in it. There is one piece of dino bone, the rest is fish.
It’s likely to be a lovely and interesting fossil site. But the author has intentionally conflated data that are in the paper and able to be inspected by experts with data which are not, and unavailable for independent verification.
I’m not saying the guy is a liar or anything. But the coverage of this is incredibly bungled, and that starts with the author himself.
I know that “intelligence quotients” don’t mean anything.
Their theory is that right-wing ideologies attract people with lower mental abilities because they minimize the complexity of the world.
I think this is probably true. Look at the “solutions” right-wingers always give us – soundbites of “school vouchers” and “ban abortion.” And when the left comes up with a solution that actually might work despite complexity, it gets ridiculed by the right; e.g., Bob Dole’s mocking the complex administrative chart of Hilary Clinton’s ~1993 universal health care plan. (I so wanted to transport to the senate floor with a circuit diagram of a TV, and claim “It can’t possibly work!”)
However, just because IQ tests are biased doesn’t mean that there aren’t differences in how people think. Some people seem to be really good at it. Some people don’t. Of course there are many facets to the human mind, in cognition and emotion and so on–and all due to nature and nuture. As @PatRx2 mentioned, low cognition may be an innate inability to solve complex problems, but could be just being uninformed, unimaginative, and/or intellectually lazy. Or a combination of both.
Since it’s so complex, I’m forced to minimize the complexity of the world (as right wingers are prone to do 
), but, as when modeling fluid mechanics, for example, I’m trying not to throw away too much. In this simplified model, a racist attitude is the result of at least three basic things – low cognition (innate or taught or whatever) and/or low compassion (for whatever reason; e.g. abusive childhood) and/or knowledge ingrained as a child. I suggest racists who are really intelligent (whatever that means) are probably low in compassion, for whatever reason, regardless of childhood experience. They want power, and don’t care who they hurt (or, more ridiculously, may think no one will be). For those with low cognition, racists may be compassionate, wonderful people to their friends and family, but still be unable to think through the harm that racism causes. Those who have grown up in a racist environment, and have ingrained racist attitudes, have to unlearn them—but levels of cognition and/or compassion may restrict change in their attitudes.
And of course there are exceptions out the wazoo, and different ways of stating this; but it’s basically just a model of how I think about the problem. YMMV. But I submit the correlation in the paper is probably valid, as an approximation. The paper’s abstract states that not much has been done in this area recently, so maybe more work needs to be done – better data and more realistic models.
Many right wing ideologues are pretty well read. It’s tempting to treat anti-semitism as a “red herring” that fools the credulous, but it’s difficult to claim that Enoch Powell, for instance, was unintelligent.
I think you’re both right. A great many right-wingers rely on the argument “It’s too complex!”
Not because they don’t understand dynamics - a great many do. Because they know the average person, left or right wing, doesn’t understand. There’s raw unintelligence/lack of curiosity/Dunning-Kruger, but there’s also facultative being an airhead. To use @kxkvi’s example … I don’t think Bob Dole didn’t get Hilary Clinton’s plan. He wanted us not to get it.
My comment specifically states that there are really intelligent people out there who are racist.
“Outcrops like [this] are the reasons many of us are drawn to geology,” says David Kring, a geologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, who wasn’t a member of the research team. “Those few meters of rock record the wrath of the Chicxulub impact and the devastation it caused.” But not everyone has fully embraced the find, perhaps in part because it was first announced to the world last week in an article in The New Yorker. The paper, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), does not include all the scientific claims mentioned in The New Yorker story, including that numerous dinosaurs as well as fish were buried at the site.
…
Several more papers on Tanis are now in preparation, Manning says, and he expects they will describe the dinosaur fossils that are mentioned in The New Yorker article. Its author, Douglas Preston, who learned of the find from DePalma in 2013, writes that DePalma’s team found dinosaur bones caught up in the 1.3-meter-thick deposit, some so high in the sequence that DePalma suspects the carcasses were floating in the roiling water. Such a conclusion might provide the best evidence yet that at least some dinosaurs were alive to witness the asteroid impact. But just one dinosaur bone is discussed in the PNAS study—and it is mentioned in a supplement document rather than in the paper itself. That “disconnect” bothers Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh. “I just hope this hasn’t been oversensationalized.”
here’s the pnas article
The brief mention of dinosaur bone is this:
In addition to articulated carcasses from fresh-dead individuals, several examples exist of isolated or small clusters of bones with minimal adhered soft tissue. These specimens were clearly already dead at the time of deposition, yet still shortly enough after death that they retained some traces of intact tissue. One example of this taphonomic mode is a partial ceratopsian ilium with associated impressions of tissue, within Unit 2 of the Event-Deposit (Fig. S29). While slightly higher upslope on the point-bar than the densest carcass assemblage, the specimen occurred within the same stratigraphic horizon of the Event-Deposit (Fig. S29) and was associated with several articulated fish carcasses. skeletonized bones/bone clusters that retain sizable portions of sun-hardened tissue can be readily transported by water flow (Fig. S29). We infer a similar taphonomic history for the ilium at Tanis. The isolated, extensively transported bones, and uncommon isolated bones with associated soft tissue (e.g. ilium) were certainly dead prior to deposition of the Event-Deposit and therefore are not part of the mass death assemblage. The articulated, well-preserved carcasses at Tanis, however, are supported as a single mass-death assemblage by multiple taphonomic factors, described below.
Yep. He’s been working at this site for 6 years, and just publishing a first paper, but making a bunch of claims not in the paper. It’s really hard to get the balance of hype and conservatism right when you talk to the press. He could just be a really freewheeling hype man, and that’s something they’ll run with.
Sure if you entirely ignore all the intellectuals who developed and promoted fascism… the Italian Futurists come to mind. Fascism attracted not too few elite middle class people, in part because it denounced socialism and advocated for the status quo.
That depends on what you mean about thinking, though. All of us are good at different things.
I think that’s assuming that there isn’t an intellectualized based for racism, when there very much is and has been historically. It’s an entire world view that depended upon science for it’s initially validity, and now depends on a cultural argument that is rather well thought out (even if wrong).
Of course. I was talking specifically about whatever it is that prevents someone from being able to connect all the dots between racial attitudes and the real damage it does. (I assumed wrongly that people here would see that.) But my comments are just that, not a thesis, so I am leaving out lots of stuff. Remember, this is just the model I have in my mind that seems to fit. As I learn more (e.g, from your comments) my internal model improves.
I agree, and I have read how the whole concept of race is not only not supported by science, but helped rationalize some pretty nasty attitudes.
I never said intellectuals were not racists. And I’m talking about now, where the final effects of racism (e.g., genocide) are pretty clear. If someone knows this, but is a racist anyway, then I think the table tilts in the favor of low compassion instead of low cognition. The people who developed the concept of racism as a means for may not have foreseen genocide (or cared if they did – the cognition/compassion business).
You know a lot more about this than I do. I look at this from (necessarily) how my brain works, which is that of an engineer, so I tend to use a modeling framework for things like this. Cause --> [Black Box] --> Effect. I’m just trying to understand people and the world. I lack a liberal arts education but I do read and am able to observe. I simplify to understand things. I simplify too much. But it’s all I can do.
Animation and blinking warning. I’m posting this because of the beautiful and hypnotic gif at the top of the page, showing fireflies blinking on and off, in synchronization.
I’m against it. The pleistocene-holocene boundary represents an earlier time in the same mass extinction event. The holocene wouldn’t have a distinct set of life since it’s part of the period of extinction and domestication. If you think 1950 is the best boundary for the extension event, then move the pleistocene-holocene boundary.
hairy eyebrows were crucial to human social development in to complex societies, scientists say.
That may be the weirdest science claim I’ve read today.
Human beings have been living with canines for a long time.
We do similar facial expressions. Who raised the first eyebrow?
