Heated hobbit debate takes new turn.

In October 2005, I commented on a scientific dispute pertaining to the discovery of a 'new species' of Hominids in Indonesia known as the Hobbits for their small size, known also as the Flores people, Homo Floresiensis.

At the time, mainstream publications and mainstream science were refuting a dissident voice from an Indonesian researcher contesting the Characterisation of the Flores people as a new species. There were two arguments that rallied me to the dissident researcher voice.

The first one was epistemological and methodological, the Ockham razor hypothesis: he said that research into the new species should first eliminate any doubt about whether the Flores people had a pathological condition.

The second one was more theoretical. If we look at the evolutionary tree below, we realise that for Homo Floresiensis to become a new species, evolution should have taken a bizarre departure from both Gradualism, and Punctuated Equilibrium which states that species change little over time and that evolution occurs in rare rapid events of branching speciation. The H. Floresiensis species not only appears in one giant leap but reaches the phenotypic status of other species situated far away on the evolutionary tree.

This figure, taken from the Prehistoric Cultures web page of the University of Minnesota Duluth, shows the improbable descent of Homo floresiensis.

And then there was this troubling fact that the number of specimen studied was ridiculously low. Good science cannot be made without numbers...

So it was rather an agreable surprise to read today that a new research from an Australian group shows that the Flores people might not be a new species and that they were probably afflicted by a congenital disorder known as Dwarf Cretinism. Of course this doesn't seem enough to close the debate for now but the irony of the finding is that for the refutation to get the approval of the mainstream press, it had to come from an Australian group. The group who are defending the new species hypothesis is also an Australian group and while the early dissident voice of the veteran Indonesian researcher was dismissed by them as Hubris, they might be forced to listen this time to fellow scientists from their country. From what it appears, this case is paradigmatic about how scientific consensus can be race sensitive.

Although I am glad that I was correct in my appreciation of the debate, I am sad for the new species that probably wasn't.

UPDATE: Small bodied humans from Palau.

Philosopher Ernst Tugendhat on unfounded speculations in brain research

This is part of an interview German philosopher Ernst Tugendhat gave to Die Tageszeitung on July 28, 2007. The present translation was published by signandsight.com on August 20th.

"What function does philosophy have now? Is it becoming superfluous – because of the behavioural sciences, brain research and evolutionary biology?

I am very careful about that. As far as the behavioural sciences are concerned, I think that people are too rash in looking for analogies – for example between human morals and animal altruism. That is what Konrad Lorenz, among others, did. As for brain research, I think it's rather crazy what's going on today.

Why?

They can only find out what types of processes are going on in which parts of the brain. But then those professors of brain physiology appear and present theories about the nonexistence of human freedom. And those theories are only based on the fact that they see themselves as scientists and believe in determinism. They are not even aware of the philosophical literature of the last decades, which tries to not see determinism and free will in opposition. I consider that to be completely untenable speculation.

But brain research is still in its infancy.

Brain research may become interesting for philosophy in a hundred years, but it hasn't been until now. I admittedly am a naturalist; I see human beings as part of a biological development. But what the biological sciences do in relation to human beings hardly makes sense.

If brain research has so little to offer – does sure philosophical knowledge exist?

No. And we don't need it. The desire to be on sure ground is the relict of an authoritarian frame of mind. It's a relict of those times when people believed they would receive all that is essential through revelation from the Gods."