Notice Board

The Department of Philosophy Colloquium Series presents What Kind of Epistemology for Paleoanthropology? by Prof. Richard Delisle. 

Everyone is welcome.

Paleoanthropology's methods since its inception in the 19th century were loose, undisciplined, and chaotic. This is illustrated by (1) the debatable habit of so many fossil discoverers of claiming they have found a "missing link" directly leading to living humans; (2) the unconstrained behavior of too many scholars in expounding a bewildering disparity of views, reasonable and unreasonable. At one time or another, nearly every imaginable viewpoint about human evolution has been proposed. Nevertheless, this "anything goes" approach to human evolution has permitted progress in the field, especially up to the 1970s.  The disparate viewpoints were reduced to a "near consensus" that humans descended from a post-mid-Miocene ape living in the tropics of the Old World. Any viewpoint that went beyond these constraints was deemed unscientific. While this near-consensus allows disagreement, there has been real progress. However, progress has been impeded since the 1980s. In the past, it was easy to select one's favorite among divergent viewpoints—and thus reject many of them—but in the last few decades it has been more difficult to choose between similar evolutionary hypotheses. It is time to move away from the undisciplined past, by instituting “rules of engagements” agreed upon by the scientific community. While such rules remain to be established, future progress in paleoanthropology may depend upon them.