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Re: Tears
Ralph L Holloway (rlh2@columbia.edu)
Thu, 13 Jul 1995 17:40:24 -0400
On Thu, 13 Jul 1995, Nicholas Rosen wrote:
> But it doesn't necessarily argue against tears having been a salt
> excretion at an earlier stage in hominid evolution, which, if I
> understand her correctly, is the hypothesis that Elaine Morgan advances.
>
This is exactly the sort of argumentation that we don't need.
Nicholls provides clear evidence against a part of the AAT position, and
then along comes something like Rosen's argument (from Morgan?) that
there was a stage during early hominid evolution when tears were evolved
for salt excretion--a proposition utterly impossible of any empirical
test. But this really asks for special pleading in the most strenuous
manner. Are we to suppose that something as potentially important as salt
excretion would undergo these evolutionary flip-flops? First, no tears
for salt excretion, then it reverses during early hominid evolution to
salt excretion by tears, then it flops back again to no salt excretion
through tears based on modern humans. Please, read something like a
recent edition of Douglas J. Futuyama's "Evoltuionary Biology", Sinauer
Associates, because coming up with the most improbable scenarios of
evolutionary reversals , which have no chance of being tested, really
weakens the case for AAT, and its getting weaker all the time.
Ralph Holloway
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