roger, you don’t set the standard for what is and what is not valid scientific evidence and how it is presented. Whether you, personally, are convinced, is not part of the standard. Your presumption that any science is a fraud unless it has snapshots is the kind of thinking we’ve come to expect from anti-evolutionists (paraphrased from Charlie Daniel’s message board: “show me a monkey changing into a man and I’ll believe in evolution”). In other words, it’s not how scientific documentation works.
Have you read Bagemihl’s book? It’s not just a flipbook of dirty drawings. There’s a nearly overwhelming amount of textual documentation (it’s a bit of a slog, truth be told). Illustrations are only offered as supporting illustrations; they don’t make the case on their own. They’re more useful for showing *how *something happens; they’re not used as evidence that something *does *happen.
I’d be interested to hear your contributions after you actually read the book.
So you’ve actually read the book then, and weren’t convinced by the scientific rigour? Oh, I forgot. You’re not even convinced by the fossil record that cavemen didn’t hunt dinosaurs.
I took this to mean that you consider Gervais’ comments in this respect to be in earnest; that he really thinks the drawings fail to support the veracity of the work - if you actually meant something else, perhaps you’d better explain it.
If you did actually mean that, then I can only imagine you simply fail to understand Gervais’ act; he makes a major theme of studied ignorance; he pretends to be an idiot who mistakenly thinks the illustrations are being presented as documentary proof (when of course, they’re not)
In the same way that when he says “Stephen Hawking is pretentious because he comes from Kent but speaks in an American accent”, he’s pretending to be an idiot whose attentiion has somehow been escaped by the fact that Hawking speaks using a machine.
That’s the whole thrust of Gervais’ act; he pretends to have missed the obvious point - he feigns ignorance.
That you have described his comments as a ‘brilliant exposé’ demonstrates, I think, that you yourself have also completely missed the point.
Well, of course they don’t have any need to convince you, as a layman - the people they are trying to convince are other scientists, who are professional skeptics. (And of course this kind of information would not “rock the scientific world” at all; polymorphic sexual behavior is quite well known in dolphins. Blowhole sex, while odd, would not be regarded as anything particularly revolutionary to a dolphin ethologist. And respected scientist would not be particularly interested in “making a few bucks” by selling photographs of dolphin porn to someone like you, either.)
Although I cannot access the journal on-line, as far as I can tell the source of the information on blowhole sex is the following article, which appeared in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Aquatic Mammals, which has been published by the journal of the European Association for Aquatic Mammals since 1972.
Renjun, L., W. Gewalt, B. Neurohr and A. Winkler. 1994. Comparative studies on the behaviour of Inia geoffrensis and Lipotes vexillifer in artificial environments. Aquatic Mammals 20.1: 39-45.
This was a study on the Amazon Pink River Dolphin Inia geoffrensis and the similar Chinese White Flag Dolphin, Lipotes vexillifer, both freshwater species that inhabit large rivers.
From a reference in another scientific article, this summarizes some of Renjun et al’s observations on Inia:
While this information might be mind-blowing, so to speak, to someone like you, it’s not all that surprising to scientists.
Why you think that it would be necessary for 5-10% of invidual dolphins to do this to have some bearing on the matter is beyond me.
Okay, here’s the state of play: Sentie writes that ‘the list [of examples of homosexuality in the animla kingdom] is pretty impressive’. I add that ‘the sketches [Bruce] includes which purport to demonstrate bestial homosexuality’ are pretty impressive too. I caution however against taking them too seriously as said line drawings contrast with ‘the lack of solid, scientific evidence in the form of photographs’ and that this was the subject of a brilliant exposé by Ricky Gervais. To which you responded: ‘declaring a book invalid on the say-so of stand-up comedian Ricky Gervais is without a doubt the lamest item of argument I have ever seen offered in earnest.’
I never declared the book to be invalid at any point. Therefore, I asked you who might be doing this (i.e. declaring the book invalid). You responded with a lecture on Gervais’s stand-up act which is, with all due respect, pretty self-evident as well as being immaterial and irrelevant.
Please, roger spare us the bullshit. You referred to the book quite clearly as “dodgy science.” You also evidently took Gervais comments at face value as a serious critique of the book.
If you can’t make any factual contribution to the thread, you should at least refrain from denying your own comments and positions that are clearly visible only a few posts above.
Read the relevant paragraph again carefully. ‘Genre’ refers both backwards and forwards: backwards to the ‘pencil drawings’, and in particular to the drawing of two male dolphins engaging in blowhole sex, which particular drawing I suggest (not without some hyperbole) will become a ‘classic’. And forwards to the genre of using such free-hand illustrations as attempts ‘to-pull-the-wool-over-people’s-eyes-by-using-dodgy-science’, again somewhat hyperbolically, as would be picked up by the careful reader by my use of the meta-comment ‘I shouldn’t wonder’. I never even came close to describing the book as dodgy science.
But, Colibri, you still haven’t provided a translation of that text I highlighted. I am, I’m afraid, unable to parse it at all. I look forward to your response as your next factual contribution to the thread.
I’m shaking my head with disbelief as I type this; that you would try to backpedal into denial of something that is in black-and-white text in the previous page of this very thread is just… flabberghasting.
How can you describe Gervais’ act as self-evident, when you clearly completely mistook his comments on this book as a ‘brilliant exposé’, or a ‘powerful call to reality’ - he was acting the persona of an ignoramus who misunderstood the nature, content and goals of the book and its contents, and you leapt up to agree with this persona.
This is far from irrelevant; it completely undermines your stance.
What bullshit. Even if this is what you meant in the first place, which I doubt, even your back-pedalling still indicates that you intended to cast aspersions on the validity of the book. In any case, any “careful reader” would be driven to madness attempting to derive a coherent message from your posts in this thread.
As others have indicated, use of line drawings in illustrating scientifc articles is standard practice. They do not indicate that the science is either “dodgy” or invalid. The research involved appeared in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, which indicates the reviewers and the journal editor found the observations, whether illustrated or not, credible and well-supported. I have not found any articles contradicting or disputing the observations. You seem to think that this particular observation is something extraordinary, requiring an exceptional level of documentation. As I said before, this kind of polymorphic sexual behavior is well known among dolphins, and isn’t really that surprising to a scientist. As far as I know, you don’t have any qualifications to evaluate the validity of scientific research; your scepticism is nugatory. Whatever you “wonder” is irrelevant to the subject.
Roger, when you’ve dug yourself a hole, the best strategy is to stop digging. Further attempts to deny your clearly stated earlier position won’t do you any good. Your posts don’t disappear once you have scrolled past them on your screen; the rest of us can still see them.
Off-hand, I’d say it helps to insert a comma between surface and underneath. When it was at the surface, the dolphin was swimming normally, and when it was below the surface it was swimming belly-up. That’s my layman’s interpretation.