#27 - Global Reference, Must Be True, Purpose

[ashpine17]

I am extremely angry with this question because I just couldn't pick between C and D. I ended up going for C because I thought the author wasn't completely 100% onboard with the whole cooking causes changes in human anatomy hypothesis. DIdn't he say there needed to be more testing? And I thought the passage was organized in a way so that the author was talking about the implications of the hypothesis from the first paragraph in the second and third. Why is this wrong? This is driving me absolutely insane.

[ashpine17]

So I read earlier up the thread and I'm still pretty miffed about this whole situation because a whole point rests upon how you interpret the term elucidate. I also knew that elucidate meant to make more clear and I don't see how exploring implications of a hypothesis isn't the same thing as that.

[ashpine17]

I have an overarching question about this passage: why did the author even bring up the "traditional" viewpoint about eating meat being a possible cause of anatomical changes in humans at the very end of the passage when he spent the first two paragraphs talking mostly about cooking causing these changes?

[Robert Carroll]

ashpine,

I see earlier in the thread that a student said "elucidate the implications of a hypothesis", but that's not what answer choice (C) says at all. We should stick to the test as written. "Meaning" and "implications" aren't synonyms. So arguing about whether the primary purpose is to elucidate the implications of a hypothesis is taking us completely off track. The question should be whether the passage is elucidating the meaning of a hypothesis, and that's pretty clearly not true.

In the last paragraph, the author is bringing up the traditional view in order to challenge it. The author's entire purpose throughout the passage is to adduce evidence that cooking changed human anatomy over evolutionary time. The last paragraph discusses the view that at least the soft parts of the human digestive system might have evolved because of raw meat consumption, not cooking, because that would challenge the author's view about the evolution of soft parts (something the author thinks, as with jaw size etc., is likely due to cooking). The author even says, starting in line 54, that the cooking hypothesis could also explain that. So the author's introducing the idea that the cooking hypothesis may be able to displace the raw meat hypothesis, but that more testing is needed.

Robert Carroll