Xref: utzoo sci.skeptic:4036 sci.physics:13412 sci.bio:3196
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!sdd.hp.com!ucsd!ucbvax!agate!shelby!portia.stanford.edu!dhinds
From: dhinds@portia.Stanford.EDU (David Hinds)
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic,sci.physics,sci.bio
Subject: Re: Question about Rupert Sheldrake
Message-ID: <1990Jul1.220250.24364@portia.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 1 Jul 90 22:02:50 GMT
References: <18024@ttidca.TTI.COM> <truesdel.645955159@sun418> <18066@ttidca.TTI.COM>
Organization: AIR, Stanford Universit
Lines: 36

In article <18066@ttidca.TTI.COM> jackson@ttidca.TTI.COM (Dick Jackson) writes:
>
>As I implied, I am not an expert, but an objective scale for visual
>appearance differentiation could be constructed using the follwing types
>of parameters:
>
>	Hair color
>	Nose shape
>	Nose size
>	Eye color
>	Ratio of eye separation to head size
>	and on, and on.
>
>You would have a large number of these items. You could measure the
>variability of each one for each species and come up with a grand score.
>As I said, I believe that something like this has been done.
>
>The fact that man is a social animal and "altruistic" in the ethological
>sense is one reason adduced for human variability. I won't spell it out.
>Dogs are social animals too, but as someone said, they have been hopeless
>mucked up by ours truly. Consider wolves however, although I have not done
>the proposed objective study, it seems clear to me that within a wolf type
>individuals are very much alike (same hair color, eye color, etc).
>
    It seems that the only truly fair measure of individual differences
would have to be the MOST subjective: ask whether creatures of the species
being considered have more/less trouble telling EACHOTHER apart, rather
than whether WE can tell them apart.  It seems to me that in lots of these
species in which individuals are "very much alike", individuals have no
difficulty distinguishing mates/siblings/offspring from others.
    One might use genetic diversity as an objective measure, but I fear
that humans would lose on that count as well.  Does anyone have any data
on this?

 -David Hinds
  dhinds@popserver.stanford.edu