I wrote this post for the blog I write for a course, Peoples and Cultures of the World, and originally intended it primarily for a student audience. However, I think it fits well here as well.
“Possible,” “Plausible,” “Probable,” and “Proven” are terms used to indicate rough degrees of statistical probability of something happening or some proposition being true. (My use of the “probable” here reflects the vernacular. When we say that something is probably true, we don’t mean that it has just any level of statistical probability, but specifically that it is quite likely to be true.)
The terms do reflect an ascending order of probability (and a nested one – anything that is plausible is also possible; anything proven is also probable, plausible, and possible), though not in a numerically precise way. They represent a sort of qualitative statistics. When we can realistically indicate precise probabilities, that is obviously a useful thing, but even a rough sense of degree of probability is far more useful than no such sense at all.
Errors in thinking arise whenever we jump up this ascending ladder of probability without evidence, or without sufficient evidence (though admittedly, knowing what counts as sufficient evidence is always tricky business). Just because it’s possible that Bigfoot could be running around the Pacific Northwest or elsewhere doesn’t make it plausible, much less probable or proven.
The Possible
Saying that something is possible simply means that it does not violate the basic laws of logic. In the realm of empirical scholarship, one could also add that it does not violate basic physical laws, that something is both logically and physically possible.
The existence of Bigfoot is possible – it violates no logical or physical rules, but given the overwhelming lack of evidence, there’s no reason to regard Bigfoot’s existence as having anything but the lowest degree of probability. The same goes for claims about extraterrestrial influence in building the Egyptian Pyramids or Stonehenge or the Nazca Lines.
The Plausible
To say that something is plausible is to indicate that it has a higher probability than the merely possible - it is believable, it makes sense. But claims that are merely plausible (that is, that are not also probable) lack the evidence to be taken as having a high degree of probability of truth.
Thor Heyerdahl’s famous voyage on his Kon-Tiki raft from South America to Polynesia certainly proved that it was possible for people to have traveled from the one place to the other using fairly simple watercraft. He even made it plausible that Polynesians could have made voyages to South America, but his voyage alone did nothing to make such notions probable, much less proven. (See this news article from this past summer from Live Science on both Heyerdahl and more recent evidence of Polynesian voyaging to South America that I’ll discuss below.)
An article I encountered this morning on Science Daily, “Early Apes Walked Upright 15 Million Years Earlier Than Previously Thought, Evolutionary Biologist Argues,” makes what I’d consider a plausible claim. “An extraordinary advance in human origins research reveals evidence of the emergence of the upright human body plan over 15 million years earlier than most experts have believed. More dramatically, the study confirms preliminary evidence that many early hominoid apes were most likely upright bipedal walkers sharing the basic body form of modern humans.” So long as there’s evidence, it’s plausible that hominoid bipedalism might be much older than previously thought, but this is an extraordinary claim, and as such requires not simply a single study with good evidence, but a body of good evidence in order to be taken as probable, much less proven by many scholars.
The Probable and the Proven
To say that something is probable means that it is very likely to be the case, that it has a high degree of probability. To refer to something as proven implies that a claim is definitely true, though given the ever present possibilities of faulty observation (even systematic faulty observation), partial understanding or misunderstanding of empirical materials, nothing (at least outside the abstract realm of pure logic and mathematics) is ever demonstrated to be completely and irrevocably true. Instead, to say something is proven is really to say that it has such a high degree of probability of truth that we can pragmatically assume it to be true (though ideally keeping an open mind towards potential counter-evidence).
When Pizarro and his Spanish soldiers reached Peru, they encountered chickens (an Old World domesticated bird) already there. There are at least a couple ways the chickens could have arrived in the New World – they could have been brought by the very earliest European voyages to the Caribbean and Central America in the 1490s and 1500s and very rapidly diffused southward; or they could have been brought by Polynesian voyagers to South America (the only problem there being, at least until now, a lack of evidence of such Polynesian voyages having actually occurred).
When Captain Cook and other explorers encountered a variety of Polynesian islands in the late 18th century, they encountered sweet potatoes, among other crops being grown. As I understand it, there’s no definite evidence of how these South American plants reached Polynesia. They could have been brought by the Spanish to the Philippines early in the Colonial period and diffused from there to Indonesia, Melanesia, and ultimately Polynesia, or they could have been brought back from South America by Polynesians themselves.
New evidence released this past summer addresses this situation. Chicken bones were recovered in Peru that, according to carbon dating, predate Spanish voyages to the Americas by about a century. Further, genetic evidence links the chicken bones to Polynesian varieties of chickens. (See the previously cited article from Live Science and also this article from New Scientist.)
If the carbon dating and DNA evidence hold up (always an important consideration with important new claims), this proves that Polynesian chickens reached Peru at least on one occasion. Given the highly implausible nature of chickens making the voyage on their own (though not logically impossible), it makes highly probable if not proving claims that Polynesians came to South America on at least one occasion. It makes highly probable that the chickens seen by Pizarro were of Polynesian stock as well. I’d even go so far as to say that this new evidence makes probable the idea that Polynesians brought sweet potatoes back from South America directly, though the distinction between plausible and probable is a bit more ambiguous in this case.
Showing posts with label Peru. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Peru. Show all posts
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Saturday, July 7, 2007
A Round-Up of Recent News and Blog Posts of Interest
Reforestation
Deforestation has been a major concern around the world in recent decades, related as it is to degradation of species habitat (including the human habitats of many indigenous peoples), desertification in some regions, and global warming.
In at article in the Latin American Post, “Many nations’ forests regrow,” Elisabeth Rosenthal points out that there has recently been significant reforestation in many countries around the world.
This is most clearly the case in the global North, where in some places, such as Eastern North America, this trend has been ongoing for several decades now. As I discussed in “Birds and Human Culture,” changes in agricultural practices over the 20th century led to a decrease in use of land for agriculture in parts of North America (and Europe, too – though I was focusing on North America in the earlier piece), even alongside the intensification of industrial agriculture, a change that has been beneficial to some bird species, such as wild turkeys, even while many bird populations are plummeting.
Reforestation is no panacea for global ecological problems. Still, forests can act as carbon sinks, sucking up some carbon dioxide, and reforestation does help some animal and plant species, even if many don’t thrive in the sorts of small, patchy forests that are typical of this reforesting trend. Overall, this is a positive development, even if not a panacea.
Unfortunately (and a point mentioned but not well developed in the article), this reforestation trend does not include the tropical forests of Brazil and Indonesia, forests that are of particular importance in terms of biodiversity.
Health Insurance and Medical Homes
My first reaction to an article on Science Daily titled, “When Minority Patients Have Insurance And A Medical Home, Their Health Care Improves,” was a sarcastic, “Really? What a Shock!”
On actually reading the article, what became clear, though was the emphasis placed by researchers Anne Beal and others at the Commonwealth Fund on both insurance coverage and the notion of a medical home. There’s currently much debate in the U.S. about the 40+ million medically uninsured individuals. For them, dependable and ready access to quality care depends on access to insurance, but the study reported on in the article makes clear that insurance alone is a necessary, but insufficient condition for quality health care in the U.S.
The following is a quotation from the article:
"Insurance coverage helps people gain access to health care, but the next thing you have to ask is 'access to what?'" says lead co-author Anne Beal, M.D., senior program officer at the Commonwealth Fund. "We found many disparities in care; however, disparities are not immutable. This survey shows if you can provide both insurance and access to a true medical home, racial and ethnic differences in getting needed medical care are often eliminated," she adds.
“According to the report, patients have a medical home when they:
- Have a regular provider or place of care
- Report no difficulty contacting a provider by phone
- Report no difficulty getting advice or medical care when needed on weekends or evenings
- Always or often find office visits well-organized and efficiently run”
I’m one of those Americans fortunate enough to have decent medical insurance through my job, but I’d warrant I’m like a lot of insured Americans, much less uninsured Americans, who can’t honestly claim to have a medical home in the full sense proposed by these researchers.
Terry Eagleton on Bakhtin
Via Arts and Letters Daily, I encountered Terry Eagleton’s essay “I contain multitudes” about Bakhtin in The London Review of Books. I found the following paragraph particularly fascinating:
“Bakhtin’s central concept of dialogism does not mean bending a courteous ear to others, as some of his more liberal commentators seem to imagine. It means that every word or utterance is refracted through a host of other, perhaps antagonistic idioms, through which alone its meaning can be grasped. It thus bears an affinity with the post-structuralist concept of textuality. There can be no unmediated truth. We come to ourselves, as many modern thinkers have claimed, through a medium which is profoundly strange to us. Language for Bakhtin is a cockpit of warring forces, as each utterance finds itself occupied from within by alien significations. Every sign glances sideways at other signs, bears the traces of them within its body, and faces simultaneously towards speaker, object, context and addressee. Like human subjects, words are constituted by their relations to otherness, and language is always porous, hybrid and open-ended. There was never a first word, and there could never be a last one. The inherent unfinishedness and unpredictability of language – the fact that I can never deduce from any two of your words what the third one is going to be – is a token of human freedom, and thus in a broad sense political. Signs are never self-identical, and always mean more than they say (a surplus that includes what they don’t say). The enemy is what Bakhtin dubs ‘monologism’, meaning the kind of meta-language which seeks to subdue this irrepressible heterogeneity. At times in his work, it is a polite word for Stalinism. Language is torn between ‘centrifugal’ and ‘centripetal’ forces – the former decentring, the latter centralising. National languages aspire to be monological but are in fact thoroughly ‘heteroglossic’, spawning a multiplicity of dialects and speech styles.”
Ancient Agriculture in Peru
Most anthropologists and others interested in anthropological news are no doubt aware of the recent findings of squash and other crops from Peru dating back possibly as long ago as 10,000 years. I first read of this finding in this article by Randolph E. Schmid on Yahoo News – Anthropology in the News has a good set of links to others news accounts of the findings.
If these findings hold up, this is significant for pushing back by a few thousand years the earliest known dates for plant cultivation in the Americas.
On reading this account, as well as other recent news stories of early art or trade, I thought of a short, provocative book (sometimes insightful, sometimes irritating), Nomadology: The War Machine by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. At one point, Deleuze and Guattari make what is a ludicrous claim if we are to take it literally, that the state is primeval, having always been a part of human experience. What they meant, or at least what I think they meant (and what might be an interesting point even if it’s not what they meant – it’s one of those books) is that the impulse to order and the contrary impulse to freedom have always been with humans, discussed by Deleuze and Guattari using “the state” and “the nomad” as tropes.
While the state in any literal sense has not been around ever since humans have been, and while I’d be shocked if new evidence was found pushing back the beginnings of the state to 10,000 years ago, it is fascinating to me how many things that it had seemed clear even just a few years ago were relatively recent in human history have now been found by recent archaeological study to be far older than we thought.
Savages
In a recent post, “On Images of Savages, Part 3” at Nicolette Bethel’s Blog, Bethel continues a series of posts on racism, in particular the discourse on “savages” that developed alongside European Enlightenment thought. For the discipline of anthropology, this is a topic close to home, for the discipline grew partly out of this attempt to catalogue the cultural and biological traits of the world’s savages, barbarians, and civilized peoples. Bethel’s latest discussion is insightful in laying out and discussing some of the specific characteristics that have often been linked with “savagery” in whichever particular guise and context it has arisen.
Deforestation has been a major concern around the world in recent decades, related as it is to degradation of species habitat (including the human habitats of many indigenous peoples), desertification in some regions, and global warming.
In at article in the Latin American Post, “Many nations’ forests regrow,” Elisabeth Rosenthal points out that there has recently been significant reforestation in many countries around the world.
This is most clearly the case in the global North, where in some places, such as Eastern North America, this trend has been ongoing for several decades now. As I discussed in “Birds and Human Culture,” changes in agricultural practices over the 20th century led to a decrease in use of land for agriculture in parts of North America (and Europe, too – though I was focusing on North America in the earlier piece), even alongside the intensification of industrial agriculture, a change that has been beneficial to some bird species, such as wild turkeys, even while many bird populations are plummeting.
Reforestation is no panacea for global ecological problems. Still, forests can act as carbon sinks, sucking up some carbon dioxide, and reforestation does help some animal and plant species, even if many don’t thrive in the sorts of small, patchy forests that are typical of this reforesting trend. Overall, this is a positive development, even if not a panacea.
Unfortunately (and a point mentioned but not well developed in the article), this reforestation trend does not include the tropical forests of Brazil and Indonesia, forests that are of particular importance in terms of biodiversity.
Health Insurance and Medical Homes
My first reaction to an article on Science Daily titled, “When Minority Patients Have Insurance And A Medical Home, Their Health Care Improves,” was a sarcastic, “Really? What a Shock!”
On actually reading the article, what became clear, though was the emphasis placed by researchers Anne Beal and others at the Commonwealth Fund on both insurance coverage and the notion of a medical home. There’s currently much debate in the U.S. about the 40+ million medically uninsured individuals. For them, dependable and ready access to quality care depends on access to insurance, but the study reported on in the article makes clear that insurance alone is a necessary, but insufficient condition for quality health care in the U.S.
The following is a quotation from the article:
"Insurance coverage helps people gain access to health care, but the next thing you have to ask is 'access to what?'" says lead co-author Anne Beal, M.D., senior program officer at the Commonwealth Fund. "We found many disparities in care; however, disparities are not immutable. This survey shows if you can provide both insurance and access to a true medical home, racial and ethnic differences in getting needed medical care are often eliminated," she adds.
“According to the report, patients have a medical home when they:
- Have a regular provider or place of care
- Report no difficulty contacting a provider by phone
- Report no difficulty getting advice or medical care when needed on weekends or evenings
- Always or often find office visits well-organized and efficiently run”
I’m one of those Americans fortunate enough to have decent medical insurance through my job, but I’d warrant I’m like a lot of insured Americans, much less uninsured Americans, who can’t honestly claim to have a medical home in the full sense proposed by these researchers.
Terry Eagleton on Bakhtin
Via Arts and Letters Daily, I encountered Terry Eagleton’s essay “I contain multitudes” about Bakhtin in The London Review of Books. I found the following paragraph particularly fascinating:
“Bakhtin’s central concept of dialogism does not mean bending a courteous ear to others, as some of his more liberal commentators seem to imagine. It means that every word or utterance is refracted through a host of other, perhaps antagonistic idioms, through which alone its meaning can be grasped. It thus bears an affinity with the post-structuralist concept of textuality. There can be no unmediated truth. We come to ourselves, as many modern thinkers have claimed, through a medium which is profoundly strange to us. Language for Bakhtin is a cockpit of warring forces, as each utterance finds itself occupied from within by alien significations. Every sign glances sideways at other signs, bears the traces of them within its body, and faces simultaneously towards speaker, object, context and addressee. Like human subjects, words are constituted by their relations to otherness, and language is always porous, hybrid and open-ended. There was never a first word, and there could never be a last one. The inherent unfinishedness and unpredictability of language – the fact that I can never deduce from any two of your words what the third one is going to be – is a token of human freedom, and thus in a broad sense political. Signs are never self-identical, and always mean more than they say (a surplus that includes what they don’t say). The enemy is what Bakhtin dubs ‘monologism’, meaning the kind of meta-language which seeks to subdue this irrepressible heterogeneity. At times in his work, it is a polite word for Stalinism. Language is torn between ‘centrifugal’ and ‘centripetal’ forces – the former decentring, the latter centralising. National languages aspire to be monological but are in fact thoroughly ‘heteroglossic’, spawning a multiplicity of dialects and speech styles.”
Ancient Agriculture in Peru
Most anthropologists and others interested in anthropological news are no doubt aware of the recent findings of squash and other crops from Peru dating back possibly as long ago as 10,000 years. I first read of this finding in this article by Randolph E. Schmid on Yahoo News – Anthropology in the News has a good set of links to others news accounts of the findings.
If these findings hold up, this is significant for pushing back by a few thousand years the earliest known dates for plant cultivation in the Americas.
On reading this account, as well as other recent news stories of early art or trade, I thought of a short, provocative book (sometimes insightful, sometimes irritating), Nomadology: The War Machine by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. At one point, Deleuze and Guattari make what is a ludicrous claim if we are to take it literally, that the state is primeval, having always been a part of human experience. What they meant, or at least what I think they meant (and what might be an interesting point even if it’s not what they meant – it’s one of those books) is that the impulse to order and the contrary impulse to freedom have always been with humans, discussed by Deleuze and Guattari using “the state” and “the nomad” as tropes.
While the state in any literal sense has not been around ever since humans have been, and while I’d be shocked if new evidence was found pushing back the beginnings of the state to 10,000 years ago, it is fascinating to me how many things that it had seemed clear even just a few years ago were relatively recent in human history have now been found by recent archaeological study to be far older than we thought.
Savages
In a recent post, “On Images of Savages, Part 3” at Nicolette Bethel’s Blog, Bethel continues a series of posts on racism, in particular the discourse on “savages” that developed alongside European Enlightenment thought. For the discipline of anthropology, this is a topic close to home, for the discipline grew partly out of this attempt to catalogue the cultural and biological traits of the world’s savages, barbarians, and civilized peoples. Bethel’s latest discussion is insightful in laying out and discussing some of the specific characteristics that have often been linked with “savagery” in whichever particular guise and context it has arisen.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Humans as Predators
Science Daily has posted an interesting article: "The Fisherman is a Predator like any Other."
The article reports on a recent study of commercial fishers off the coast of Peru, specifically studying their movements over the sea in search of their prey (in this case anchovies) over a period of a few years. The researchers compared the search strategies of the human fishers with those of non-human predators searching for prey (the article specifically mentions albatrosses and seals) and found that the search strategies employed by all the predators, humans included, paralleled one another.
The article reports on a recent study of commercial fishers off the coast of Peru, specifically studying their movements over the sea in search of their prey (in this case anchovies) over a period of a few years. The researchers compared the search strategies of the human fishers with those of non-human predators searching for prey (the article specifically mentions albatrosses and seals) and found that the search strategies employed by all the predators, humans included, paralleled one another.
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