Scientism and Values.pdf - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Science and the Studies of Man 67
by thinking and communicating and what is the problem, of the
origin of language.
Mr. Coon has many other wonderful stories to tell us. Thus,
he gives us a picture of the social and intellectual life of Upper
Paleolithic men, the Late Ice Age Hunters, although so far as I
have been able to hnd out, these men left us no books, newspapers,
clay tablets, or any records from which such pictures could
have been drawn, nor does Mr. Coon mention any they might
have left. 16 They did leave us their wonderful paintings, and these
give evidence of equality, if not superiority, in skill to the artists
of today. But from them what can we infer? Not much, and that
only in very general terms. Thus, we may assume that animals
endowed with such aesthetic sensibility were fully developed
human beings, and must have had systems of morality and prob...
ably all the other forms of cultural life that we find in men today.
Yet if we believe this, and I do not doubt it, it is because we cannot
imagine that such aesthetic sensibility as the cave painters gave
evidence of could have existed by itself, unaccompanied by the
other kinds of sensibility that accompany it in the case of the
human beings we know and are. But this is all we can infer;
nothing more. Particularly nothing about what manner of animals
were the "ancestors" of the cave painters. We do not know how
Mr. Coon's ape or Hiirzeler's little animal became a human
being-which is to say, a being capable of employing symbols and
developing a culture. That human beings somehow appeared we
know, for here we are and seem to have been here for quite some
time. But Mr. Coon, who seems to believe his own fairy tales,
does not realize that the problem cannot be solved on the evidence
we have. The missing link, of which I used to hear in my childhood,
and which gave so much comfort to believers in special
creation, is, still missing, and while it cannot legitimately give
comfort to fundam,entalists any more than Piltdown man can, it
should disturb the dogmatic slumbers of the evolutionists-and I
take it that it does, at least occasionally, as Hallowell's presidential
address evinces.
The problem, needless to point out, is an extremely complex
one. For it is not only a question of factual evidence, but of basic