Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
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I will respond to questions and comments as time permits, but if you want to take issuewith any position expressed here, you first have to answer this question:
What evidence would it take to prove your beliefs wrong?
I simply will not reply to challenges that do not address this question. Refutabilityis one of the classic determinants of whether a theory can be called scientific. Moreover,I have found it to be a great general-purpose cut-through-the-crap question to determinewhether somebody is interested in serious intellectual inquiry or just playing mind games.Note, by the way, that I am assuming the burden of proof here - all youhave to do is commit to a criterion for testing.It's easy to criticize science for being "closed-minded". Are you open-mindedenough to consider whether your ideas might be wrong?
I just ran into an acquaintance, vicariously. I first encountered E. Breck Parkman, archeologist for the California State Park system, back in 2003. I had done a web page on a locality in Wisconsin, Rock Springs, and included a picture of a puzzling, highly polished rock. The prevailing best guess was the polish was due to wind abrasion during the Ice Age, but I tossed in the hoary witticism among Wisconsin geologists that maybe the polish was due to mammoths scratching themselves. To my astonishment, Parkman was investigating polished outcrops in California that he thought were rubbing rocks. That summer I had a chance to visit a couple of his sites. At first I didn't find anything, then I thought like a mammoth (at least, I thought like I think a mammoth might think, I think). If I were itchy, where would I go? Well, there couldn't be any rubble around the base of the rock, and the outcrop would have to have sharp projections. Sure enough, there it was, rounding and polish, twelve feet off the ground. The rock was glaucophane schist, my favoritest rock type in the whole world, but relatively soft and not noted for taking a natural polish. So if you know what can polish relatively soft rock twelve feet off the ground, other than itchy mammoths, we'd both like to know.
Parkman and I corresponded several times by e-mail and once by phone. Anyway, when I saw Parkman's name turn up in an on-line article in the Sacramento Bee, I was delighted. This time, he's investigating Olompali State Park, a park north of San Francisco that included Miwuk Indian sites, the oldest standing building north of San Francisco, and, what made the papers, the remains of a 1960's commune that had hosted the Grateful Dead once.
But the commune also experienced some less happy moments. The commune had been living in a historic 1911 mansion added on to the ancient adobe building, but a fire in 1969 gutted it. What seems to have killed the spirit of the commune was the drowning of two young children in a pool when the assigned guardian failed to keep watch. The commune had originally been limited to carefully selected people, but went downhill when membership was opened with few restrictions. Said a former member who is now helping with the archeology, "There were the freeloaders who came, who sat in the living room playing music and not helping at all."
One of the most apt descriptions of the 1960's was the comment by longshoreman turned philosopher Eric Hoffer: "To some, freedom means the opportunity to do what they want to do; to most it means not to do what they do not want to do." Interestingly enough, Hoffer wrote those words in 1951, well before the chaos of the 1960's. But this comment perfectly describes the collapse of the commune at Olompali, and much of the 1960's in general.
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Created 6 September 2009; Last Update 24 May, 2020
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