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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!duke!mcnc!tim@unc.UUCP (Tim Maroney)
From: tim@unc.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.religion,net.flame
Subject: Re: Making the connection
Message-ID: <6471@unc.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 28-Dec-83 14:20:10 EST
Article-I.D.: unc.6471
Posted: Wed Dec 28 14:20:10 1983
Date-Received: Thu, 29-Dec-83 01:21:52 EST
References: <473@eosp1.UUCP>
Organization: CS Dept., U. of N. Carolina at Chapel Hill
Lines: 31

Here is part of an article from Tobias Robinson:

	Attention span has nothing to do with making a connection
	between Sexual Intercourse and pregnancy.  What matters is
	pattern matching, which happens to be one of the most
	extraordinary activities noticeble in higher, and some lower
	life forms.  Ever try to figure out how much pattern matching
	your pets can do?

Your second sentence is quite remarkable.  Do you plan on trying to support
it, or even to explain it?  It is meaningless and unsupported as is.
However, giving you the benefit of the doubt for now, if it is a pattern
matching activity, then it is a matter of reconciling data with a given set
of patterns.  The data in this case are the sexual activity and the
pregnancy.  Unless the data are in memory at the same time, the pattern
matching cannot take place, and the attention span of animals makes this
coincidence of data impossible.

	The reports of human tribes unable to make the connection keep
	getting repudiated by researchers with better field
	techniques.  I don't believe there are any such tribes.  Old
	anthropological reports are clearly short on studies of how the
	researcher was being fooled.

That would be a lot more convincing with some citations of studies.  I will
try to get Pam to supply her data on tribes which do not know of the
sex-pregnancy link; in the meantime, please supply some evidence for your
assertion, since you seem to be on top of things.
--
Tim Maroney, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
duke!unc!tim (USENET), tim.unc@csnet-relay (ARPA)