Two and a half millennia ago, Plato wrote a book we have no reason to assume is not fiction about a conversation he was not present at. In the course of the conversation, one character mentions that his grandfather had been told by his father that his father (so the character's great-great-grandfather) had claimed to have been to Egypt and heard a rumor there about the existence of ancient records that tell about Atlantis. If you read that game of telephone and only heard “according to ancient Egyptian records, Atlantis blah blah,” Species with Amnesia is the book is for you.
Whenever Sepehr blunders into an area I’m not completely ignorant of, he is just clearly wrong. If (as Sepehr affirms) Japanese (p. 85) or Basque (p. 81) speakers could understand the (allegedly related) languages of Central America, this would be an easily verifiable fact that would overthrow not only all knowledge of human migration but also all of the field of historical linguistics—languages do not remain static over so many millennia, especially absent a writing system!
We’re supposed to be impressed by the fact that “many ancient peoples give remarkably similar names to an island or continent formerly situated in the Atlantic Ocean” (p. 61)—but Atlantis is really famous, and how do we know the Basque word “Atlaintika” isn’t just the Basque word for Atlantis. The Basque call Japan “Japonia” (thank you, Google translate)—does that mean the ancient Basque knew of a land on the other side of the globe? For that matter, “Atli” is not a Scandinavian word for an island or continent or a place of any sort—it’s the Norse form of Attila the Hun—and while the Aztec “Aztlan” is a lost place, there’s no indication it’s an island in the Atlantic. It’s just another location with some letters in a convenient order, like SeATTLe.
Here’s Sepehr quoting Mabel Royce (p. 75): “All other earthly primates also have this Rh factor. But this leaves out the people who are Rh negative. If all mankind evolved from the same ancestor their blood would be compatible. Where did the Rh negatives come from? If they are not the descendants of prehistoric man, could they be the descendants of the ancient astronauts?”
Mutation, perhaps? But if we ignore mutation, then Occam’s razor demands ancient astronauts, doesn’t it? By my count, this was the first mention of ancient astronauts in the book, and, man, the text does not build to it; it just springs ancient astronauts upon the reader, because what else could be the source of any change?
In (the quoted source) Blood of the Gods, Royce at least mentions the possibility of mutation before discarding it for no real reason. Sepehr leaves that part out in his quote, so we’re left with a bad summary of a bad source. But they’re all bad sources. I mean, Plato is good by some definitions of the word good, but he’s no better evidence for Atlantis than his Symposium is evidence that humans were once hermaphrodites. Edgar Cayce? “Congressman” Ignatius Donnelly? These are not good places to start. Could it be that all the books I was steeped in in my youth are, in fact, bad influences?
I don’t know anything about haploids, so I’m not in a position to call Sepehr out, but of course his willingness to build a castle on sand is hardly encouraging. I will say that whenever Sepehr talks about haploids he sounds like a guy at a party trying really hard not to sound racist but constantly winking at you regardless.