Sunday, May 15, 2022

Correction

REREADING THE POST on E. O. Wilson's book as reviewed by H. Allen Orr, I made a statement that I confess I really don't believe at all:

I will say that E. O. Wilson was a pretty good scientist when he was talking within his narrow area of expertise which was describing ant behavior.

What I may have thought as I typed that was that his lore regarding ant behavior was fairly modestly expressed as compared to others in the pseudo-scientific business of peddling animal lore, of more or less careful observation and more or less modesty in claims about it.  

But I totally reject that alleged science surrounding human behavior can really meet the basic rules of what science is supposed to be - there is absolutely no way to verify the reported subjective experience of any person, not another person, not even ones self.  There is no way to verify that anyone's description of their experience is honest or accurate in the way that what the physical sciences study can do.  

And if that's true for members of the same species as an E. O. Wilson, it's infinitely more true when the only source of information on the experience of experience and internal thought is another species which cannot make even a very likely inaccurate report of what that internal experience is.  And he did it among so many different species, coming to entirely absurd and unevidenced claims of the same thing being present in wildly different orders of animals and, even worse,  than that, classes and phyla.  

I pointed out a number of times the ridiculous credulity of college-credentialed idiots such as the University of Toronto "Emeritus"  and, God help Canada, clinical psychologist, Professor Jordan Peterson making claims about the natural sex roles of human beings based on the alleged behaviors of lobsters, favoring, of course, male supremacy of the old patriarchal kind.  I pointed out that the exact same ancestor that links our species to lobsters also links us to preying mantis in which, at times, females will pull the heads off of males who want to mate with them, the decapitated bodies copulating with the females as she calmly eats the head she just pulled off.   Jordan Peterson is, lest anyone forget, in the same general racket that Wilson was in, the pseudo-science of behavior, and he was in what has the potential of being less dishonest about it than the alleged animal behavior science that he garbled and muddled to come out in exactly the same place he wanted to come out when he started his . . . um. . . thinking about things.  Something that Orr implied Wilson did.

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