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certitude. Particularly distressing was Holloway's reminder to readers
that those whose views he championed had been great scientists (per
the epigraph that opens this chapter), the not too veiled implication of
which was that readers should prefer the opinions emanating from such
great men over the opposing conclusions of Falk-the-phrenologist.
Radinsky, rest his gentle soul, was terribly upset and informed the
powers-that-be at the
American Journal of Physical Anthropolog y
that he
viewed such remarks as paternalistic and unbecoming to the journal.
Perhaps it was because of his intervention that I was allowed to reply in
another article. One of my comments there was, “The fact that Clark,
Dart, and Smith were renowned scientists has nothing to do with where
the lunate sulcus is actually located on the Taung specimen. The line
of reasoning used by Holloway is known to logicians as the
argumentum
technical as we went round and round in print, with Holloway defend-
ing Dart's (and his) interpretation of an evolved posterior part of the
Our debate focused on the lunate sulcus, even though it did not show
up clearly on the Taung endocast or those of the other South African
australopithecines. (This is not surprising, because this particular sul-
cus rarely appears on ape endocasts.) While Holloway acknowledged
that the lambdoid suture was, indeed, visible on Taung's endocast and
that a clear lunate sulcus was not, he nevertheless argued that Taung's
lunate sulcus had probably had a “more human-like placement” in the
of australopithecine brains evolved (became neurologically reorganized)
ahead of brain size and before other regions of the brain became more
gestion that major evolutionary changes evolved at different times in
different parts of the cerebral cortex may be envisioned as a picture
puzzle [or mosaic] of the brain in which certain pieces were filled in
before others.)
12
I, on the other hand, identified a little depression that
