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REVIEW: THE NEANDER THAL
LEGACY
Stan Gooch
My first reading of Stan Gooch was THE ORIGIN OF PSYCHIC PHENOMENA and I enjoyed that book very much. The style was engaging & the material thought-provoking. His latest book is THE NEANDERTHAL LEGACY and somewhere something went terribly wrong. Here the author's style is strident, argumentative & defensive. He treats his own anthropological speculations (the emphasis is on speculation) as literal & true fact that academics & us poor readers (he insists on calling us "students") are too dense to understand without his constant condescension & repetition.
It's
offensively pedantic.
Not only
this, but he is constantly interjecting his tiny kernels of insight with
EXCLAMATION MARKS!!!!!!!!!!! Everybody knows (well, just about everybody) the
excessive use of !!!!!!!!!is like waving your hands about, shouting LOOK AT ME
LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME!!!!
The core
of his argument is that modern man is the by-product of a genetic mix of
Neanderthal & Cro-Magnon populations. Not only is this idea not original,
it's science (that evil institution so despised by Gooch and other New Agers)
is as false as the idea itself. There was a relatively brief time around 30,000
BCE when the two species may have (uneasily) co-existed during the last Ice
Age. There may or may not have been inter-breeding. Gooch bolsters his argument
by invoking the Old Testament. Certainly Neanderthal women were not the
beautiful "daughters of man" that attracted the Cro-Magnon "sons
of god." What little in-breeding that MAY have happened (the Cro-Magnon
males must have been pretty drunk to find a Neanderthal female hot) would
be--and is--totally negligible in terms of human genetics today, cancelled out
by many tens of thousands of years. Cro-Magnon DNA is similar to ours because
we are directly related to them. There has never been & never will be such
a link to Neanderthal--because they were a different species.
As for
Gooch's claim that Big Foot & other such mythical creatures prove his
hybrid thesis, well...
The
author claims to have discovered the Neanderthal source of the religious
instinct--the menstrual cycle. This is more interesting & would have been
original--had it not been commented upon by prominent occultists in the 19-20th
centuries--not to mention the more esoteric forms of Hinduism.
Stan Gooch arrogantly waves aside all branches of thought that disagree with his own--and you better watch out if you do disagree with him, you'll find yourself on the author's ideological hit list along with "the board of the Royal Free Hospital, the Catholic College of Further Education, the New Scientist, the Spectator...we should get rid of all of them..." Page 69. This sounds like the ravings of a paranoid psychotic.
Despite
his claims to higher consciousness, Gooch apparently finds nothing distasteful
with scientists whose work seems to validate his own pet theories: "...Dr.
Bernard...a psychic healer, Oscar Estebany, produced significantly faster
healing in experimentally wounded mice..." Page 92.
Now
that's real barbarism, "experimentally wounding" as in torturing
animals to prove some crackpot theory. My goodness, me thinks I can hear
knuckles scraping the floor from that lab...
On page
112 Gooch drags out the thoroughly debunked "Spontaneous Human
Combustion" theory and, of course, presents it as an established fact. Why
he felt compelled to wrest that old chestnut from the fire is anyone's guess.
It makes no sense no matter how you look at it.
Politically
Gooch is a frustrated reactionary. He lumps all leftist-progressive types into the
left-handed (i.e. sinister group.) The right wing is symbolized by
right-handedness. Simplistic to the extreme, but again students should just
shut up and uncritically accept the Gospel according to Gooch.
I call
the author reactionary because his core argument implicates the left as
belonging to the Neanderthal (i.e. lesser race) group, and the right wingers to
the more advanced Cro-Magnon.
"Steadily
increasing Neanderthalism--socialism--in Britain has led to...a significant
rise in level of crime, in cheating and double-dealing...one-parent families,
the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and teenage pregnancies, the
dumbing down of education...known and dangerous terrorists...so-called asylum
seekers...are given a lifetime of free housing..." Page 126
So now
we see the author's real agenda--but wait, there's more:
"My
own view, of course, is that if large numbers of pedophiles were examined, they
would show a higher incidence of left-handedness (just as do lesbians and
homosexuals)...a higher incidence of the simian line--and so on for all the
other Neanderthal characteristics we have listed earlier." Page 130
Got the
picture?
This is
nothing more than back room Eugenics dressed up in the grave clothes of ageing
New Ageism, another Crusader Against the Scientific Establishment and The Evil
Red Menace.
"One
of the many outcomes of this situation, as we cannot stress too often, is the
emergence and ever-growing dominance of the left-wing political movement, of
left-wing thinking. Communism and socialism are...the Neanderthals' view of the
universe." Page 135.
The
author sandwiches this ridiculous rant in a chapter claiming that the Great
Sphinx is a Neanderthal image and consequently must be 10’s of thousands of
years old. We won't even bother to go there.
Gooch
concludes his diatribe with Appendix 3, a seven page self-serving,
self-aggrandizing listing of his good reviews.
Obviously
we won't be on the next list.
Review: JEFarrow
Updated 05/08
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