I guess the folks at Ubisoft didn’t get the memo that only dudes hunted mammoths.
(Maybe because it’s not true. It may be that no one did. But a video game about people looting already dead mammoths probably wouldn’t sell many copies.)
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I found that I drifted away from Zero Punctuation a few months ago, though I had somehow missed the GG and transphobic foofaraw. For me, the problem was that Yahtzee had gotten a long string of relentlessly mediocre games that weren’t really good joke fodder, so he ends up going through the motions. He needs another “Clive Barker’s ‘Clive Barker’s
Jericho’ by Clive Barker” or equivalent to really sink his teeth into.
I think the purpose of the “evolution is only a theory” talking point is so creationist graduate students can pretend to themselves that evolution is true hypothetically for research purposes. That lets someone write an acceptable dissertation and graduate with a PhD. But things would get a lot more interesting if that person then got a tenure track position.
Most people who go into science academia decide that evolution is compatible with their personal beliefs unless they’re under immense pressure from family.
On the topic of mammoth extinction, let’s not forget that some populations of wooly mammoths survived in isolated islands and didn’t fully become extinct until only ~4000 years ago (the pyramids were being built at the time!). And they disappeared when…? Quoth Wikipedia:
The Wrangel Island mammoths were isolated for 5000 years, and due to the small population present when the island was isolated by rising post-ice-age sea level, about 300 to 1000 individuals, experienced a 20% to 30% loss of heterozygosity, and a 65% loss in mitochondrial DNA diversity. However, the population seems to have subsequently been stable, without suffering further significant loss of genetic diversity. Genetic evidence thus implies the extinction of this final population was sudden, rather than the culmination of a gradual decline; the disappearance coincides roughly in time with the first evidence for humans on the island
Granted, there’s no actual evidence that they were hunted, but still there’s quite a strong correlation here.
@W
Sounds like my high school chemistry teacher. Dude was a hardcore creationist. The two “High points” of suffering through his failure were getting a week of detention for correcting his spelling (he always spelled “Metal” as “Mettel”) and our 12th grade exam, which turned out to be a multiple choice thing where every question was “What causes [random chemical reaction]? 1. God. 2. Jesus. 3. Satan.”
I’m not kidding.
Bonus: After I graduated, he left teaching for med school. He’s a doctor now.
The use of the word “Theory” in science is frequently confusing for lay people. But I’m shaking my head at the Ph.D candidate in Biology. She should know that Theory with a capital T means the evidence backing up that idea is solid and verifiable, and objectively true. After all, Gravity is also a Theory.
(I forgot to add, I absolutely adore Beyond Good and Evil, one of my favorite games on the PS2.)
well, I’d argue with you on the point of ‘objectively true’ from a philosophical perspective. After all, the strength of science lies in the admission of human fallibility, as opposed to dogmatic thinking which is where most people who deny evolutionary theory are coming from
you know, this little discussion did get me thinking: is there any work out there by neurologists/psychologists/etc investigating possible links between people who espouse the ideologies of MRAs and, uh, ‘impaired cognition’? There would be very real issues regarding statistical sampling and participant biases that would need to be fully considered but if not, it might be interesting work for anyone so inclined.
Argenti, we don’t have any perfect evidence to say they absolutely can’t have babies until the older sib is done weaning, but we think they’re elephant-like in that regard.
And, yeah, only being able to have 1 baby every 5-6 years makes it really hard for a population to recover from the loss of juveniles.
🙁
It’s hard to say for sure on behavioral things for extinct animals, though, so they could have differed! Maybe…
I’m betting they didn’t.
I go in stages with Yahtzee. I would get in the mood for some quick fire rants and would watch a bunch of his stuff until I got offended. Then I would not watch him again until I got that urge again. It is like my horrible urge to read Youtube comments. I know it is terrible but I keep doing it.
Damn you all, now I’m hungry. And I’ve got no mammoth steaks in the house either! I should have stocked up when they were on sale at Costco, while I was there picking up the “Enough toilet paper to last through one of those Biblical floods a-la-Noah”-sized packages and the 50 gallon drum of Windex. I have a lot of windows. 😉
It’s not like all the North American megafauna are gone. There’s moose and bears, still, although not the largest bears (and a Kodiak is quite large enough, thank you!).
Just most of them.
I don’t have the game, but it looks like you can hunt mammoths (while riding tamed dinosaurs) with modern weapons in ARK: Survival Evolved.
msexceptiontotherule – Does that make you the archetypical person living in a glass house, then?
Re evolution and megafauna: this reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend a couple of weeks ago.
I was telling him about my bizarre childhood education, specifically how in sixth grade I’d gone to a small Christian school that used the “School of Tomorrow” curriculum (just imagine an avant-garde learn-at-your-own pace teaching system coupled with old-school Americana and evangelical creationism. And the King James Bible. A lot of King James Bible. Not even the NIV or something.)
Anyway, I told him that the whole “Earth being 6,000 years old” thing was strange to me “because I’d grown up with dinosaurs.”
Yup, I said it like that! We both had a laugh at the image.
Off topic but I need to vent about this: I’m watching the daily show, and I need to ask How can Ben Carson be a brain surgeon and be so goddamn stupid? “Why didn’t the victims of the shooting rush the gunman?” Please tell me this sinks his presidential campaign.
contrapangloss — yeah I pretty much think of them as hairy elephants with bigger tusks, which is probably not quite fair to either species, but I do better with analogies. In less depressing things, the Pittsburgh zoo had/has a walk through “oliphant” exhibit, it’s about elephants but come on, we all get the joke. Granted, the walk through deer, this one with animals not just history facts, will always be my favorite after they decided my brother was a really delicious salt lick!
Another AAA sandbox/open-world title. Thank the heavens for Kickstarter.
If you mean mentally ill or mentally disabled – hell no. They’re just a bunch of angry, hateful, willfully ignorant mega-assholes.
I am not surprised that Ubisoft are showing women hunting mammoths, because they’ve spent the better part of two years being slammed for sidelining women in favour of more ‘marketable’ stubbled white dudes. The Far Cry team definitely got a serve of it; presumably they thought that a character based on Anita Sarkeesian meant that they had done enough.
What’s funny is that game journalists have been complaining about this for years, but it’s only very recently that the market’s been worried enough to listen. It’s deeply ironic that Gamergate blames ‘SJWs’ for changes that the almighty dollar’s forcing on the industry.
you know, this little discussion did get me thinking: is there any work out there by neurologists/psychologists/etc investigating possible links between people who espouse the ideologies of MRAs and, uh, ‘impaired cognition’?
It’s unlikely, mostly because I think the sociologists have a much more convincing explanation. A subculture that’s established with a clear in-group and out-group, with its own ideologies, can be remarkably resistant to persuasion.
If you like watching Let’s Play’s with no racism/misogyny/GGer crap, Many A True Nerd is my FAVE. His Fallout runs are what he’s most known for, but he plays lots of indie games and old stuff as well, and his commentary is hilarious. He’s got a great LP of Deadly Premonition (a so bad it’s good game based a lot on Twin Peaks)
@megpie71
No, just a house with lots of windows and a few mirrors. It’s far too much exposure to live in the proverbial ‘glass house’ interpreted literally, and if proverbially it’s a sort of behavior I try to avoid with varying success. 😉
“Impaired cognition”? I’m unsure how that is defined, but if it includes the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Also, the “just a theory” canard derives from the habit of taking dictionary definitions as definitive and prescriptive, quite common among cranks. I think Numbers, “The Creationists” describes such an episode.
That should have been: “… if it includes the Dunning-Kruger effect, MRAs are a textbook example.”
yeah, y’all are right I’m sure. I guess it is a little easier to believe that there might really be something wrong (like, physiologically wrong) with such people rather than just being angry, manipulative, hate-fueled dipshits with an internet connection. That kind of thing is what is slowly eroding my hope for the human species