Michael Shermer, Founding Publisher of Skeptic Magazine, tweeted Graham Hancock an extraordinary note this week. Shermer announced that based on last week’s blockbuster Abu Hureyra paper he was persuaded to re-think his position on the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis.
What a welcome development in the long effort to win the hearts and minds of persistent critics of global cataclysm at 12.9K.
It reminds the Tusk of the old schoolyard game that went, “Red Rover, Red Rover, Come on over!!” If I were to select someone from long line of opponents to be captured making a run at us, it would have been Shermer. (Since Wally Broecker has already joined our crew). He’s persuasive, amiable, and made the highest profile criticism of the YDIH ever on Joe Rogan.
In light of his pro-science character, we should treat this newly persuaded citizen of science with the respect and admiration he deserves. We should also extend this courteous magnaminty to all future converts, with exception of the Requiem crew and The Bos.
That said, and in case Michael reads this, the YDIH is certainly not Graham Hancock’s “theory,” as he calls it in the tweet. It’s a historically persistent belief that reaches back to Plato and before, which was mostly recently elucidated by the Comet Research Group as a scientific “theory,” and it has no identifiable intellectual parent.
We are all joining the crew and no one invented the game.
As John Maynard Keynes purportedly said (attributed to others as well) when accused of hypocrisy for contradicting an earlier statement: “When the evidence changes I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” https://t.co/sezP9sh3Qk
— Michael Shermer (@michaelshermer) March 12, 2020