Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Razib Khan knows that there is something wrong with the idea that beauty is "purely subjective." But, entranced by positivism, he can only place this non-subjective aspect in biology and evolution. Although he makes a passing mention of the Greeks, he seems to have given little thought to Plato's conception of beauty. The only small problem with his attempt to rescue some objectivity for beauty along biological lines is that it fails utterly. Biology can indicate to us fitness, but not objective truth. It is easy to come up with scores and scores of cases where believing a falsehood is more adaptive than admitting the truth, or where it is simply not important. A trivial case: Let's imagine that people from all cultures see the soldier on the right  in the linked illusion as tallest. That certainly would not mean that objectively he is the tallest! In fact, Khan's evidence could easily be trumpeted by someone who believes beauty is an illusion! "See,...

Aargh! Blogger on an iPhone wiped on my post! Here goes again: Every culture on earth is 100,000 years old, and East African. The exceptions would be any cultures, should any exist, that have at some point suffered a catastrophic culture wipe-out: losing speech, fire, tools, and so on. An example: It is often said that American culture is "younger" than British culture. But American culture just is the wing of British culture that split of in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America from the rest of British culture. Picking which one is older is like picking the older amoeba after one splits into two.