WHATtalk Dr Algis Kuliukas 11.6.23 Brussels time 3 pm "Bipedalism"
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Dear One and All

Please consider yourself invited to the 20th WHAT Talk meeting which is scheduled for a week tomorrow (Sunday, 11th June) starting at 9 pm West Australian Time. To join the meeting please just click the link at the end of this email 10-15minutes before the start. Feel free to copy this to anyone you think might also be interested in these fascinating ideas.

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This month, Algis Kuliukas will talk about his attempt to apply the hypothetico-deductive (or, more simply, “scientific”) method to the problem of hominid bipedal origins and other waterside hypotheses of human evolution.

Having read all of Elaine Morgan’s books on the so-called “aquatic ape hypothesis” by 1997, he was puzzled by why such simple, plausible and evidence-based ideas were still all but ignored by academia so, encouraged by his wife Lesley, he returned to academia himself to try to find out. 25 years later, he’s learned that there are no good reasons for this, only very bad ones. Perhaps the only excuse worth bothering about, he decided, was the criticism that, technically, Elaine had not applied the scientific method to her work. True, she’d made many observations about the human form and she’d come up with sensible, water-based explanations for all of them. What was lacking, perhaps, was the use of the scientific algorithm – hypothesis testing. This is where you phrase an hypothesis in the form of a series of testable predictions, and then you set out to test them in such a way that they might be falsified. This (Popperian) method was one of the first things Algis learned about when he started his Masters degree at University College London and he decided to base his MSc thesis very strictly on this principle. He was awarded a distinction for it and, encouraged, decided to continue his studies by emigrating “down under” to do a PhD at the University of Western Australia. He applied the same methodology to his PhD thesis too. In this talk, Algis will describe the hypothetico-deductive method and how he applied to the wading hypothesis of hominid bipedal origins. He’ll also suggest how so many other waterside hypotheses of human evolution still await similar testing.

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This will be the 20th talk in the WHAT Talks series.

Below is the full schedule so far. Please get in touch if you can suggest any other guest who you think might be interested in participating.