I've read this exchange with great amusement. I read Bailey's book when it
came out in the 1970's and I was a callow undergraduate at the University
of Cape Town - even at that time, with minimal background in archaeology,
it was apparent that his hypothesis was absurd. What was particularly
alarming however was that Bailey was not just any nut off the street - he
was at that time the editor of the South African Journal of Science! If I
remember rightly, he was a biologist by training.
For some reason scientists, even quite eminent ones, have an unfortunate
tendency to lose their powers of reason when confronted with questions of
race, culture and history. Even Nobel prize winners are not immune - think
of the racist fantasies of Shockley (one of the inventors of the
transistor) and the distinctly odd musings of Murray Gell-Mann ("The Quark
and the Jaguar"). Closer to the subject matter of this list is the truly
bizarre hypothesis of the noted French chemist Joseph Davidovits that the
pyramids at Giza are made of poured blocks of zeolite concrete! (See
Davidovits and Morris, The Pyramids: an Enigma Solved (1988) and the
refutation by Robert Folk and Donald Campbell in Journal of Geological
Education 40:25-34, 1992). There are numerous other examples.
I have often wondered why some scientist's brains turn to mush when human
affairs are involved. Could it just be colossal arrogance - the idea that
the humanities and social sciences are trivial when set aside Large
Questions in the Hard Sciences?
----------------------
David Killick
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology,
University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721-0030.
Phones: office (520)621-8685; laboratory 621-7986; fax 621-2088
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