tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-60848584875130245222024-03-18T00:14:28.452-07:00AnthropomicsA blog about evolution, anthropology, and science, inspired by the three Georges: Gaylord Simpson, Carlin, and S. Kaufman.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12576920986455084855noreply@blogger.comBlogger21125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6084858487513024522.post-31140106166905731512013-03-09T14:32:00.000-08:002013-03-09T16:57:29.127-08:00Genetics as political ideology<br />
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I just finished writing a brief essay for the journal <i>Sociology</i>, for a retrospective on an important book, Dot Nelkin and
Susan Lindee’s (1995) <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-DNA-Mystique-Cultural-Conversations/dp/0472030043" target="_blank">The DNA Mystique: The Gene as Cultural Icon.</a> It
actually had a major intellectual impact on me, when I reviewed it for the <i>American Journal of Physical Anthropology</i>
in 1995.</div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgskoyOTE9gb_d1xhmqJ-paZdC4RfMp9jB0_Boc3HEPCaJ8rm4bSs31aInY5qFn_XgdhA0biHw5hC-rVtosCyfPQ_RyiQ5rzjgIF0XkiQAfl5m8lYudVhCA9eH4TG-CCAZCV-agTg8HxbVx/s1600/Clip_18.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgskoyOTE9gb_d1xhmqJ-paZdC4RfMp9jB0_Boc3HEPCaJ8rm4bSs31aInY5qFn_XgdhA0biHw5hC-rVtosCyfPQ_RyiQ5rzjgIF0XkiQAfl5m8lYudVhCA9eH4TG-CCAZCV-agTg8HxbVx/s200/Clip_18.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Susan Lindee in 1999 with me and my Caipirinha </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Nelkin
and Lindee’s book was a wonderful cultural analysis that showed how embedded
scientific discourses about heredity are in cultural or folk discourses about
heredity. And those cultural discourses
are invariably political. After all,
ancestry only came to be important in the first place because of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-History-Heredity-Staffan-Muller-Wille/dp/0226545709" target="_blank">the need to divide great-grandpa’s stuff among his heirs.</a>
They show that these are political discourses about hierarchy, worth,
and inequality, and scientific claims are easily framed to be hung in the
gallery of pseudo-scientific justifications for hereditary aristocracies.</div>
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By
implication, then, the only way to understand claims about human genetics is to
understand that they are never value-neutral, and are invariably politically
valent. This means that scientists ought
to be just as accountable to justify the deducible political implications of
their work as they are to justify the data collection and statistics. Nelkin and Lindee stop short of saying this,
but I think it as the only way to make sense of the situation. </div>
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It has
seemed to me for a longtime that the most horrible question that geneticists
can ask themselves is not ”Did I do the right statistical test?” but a far darker
question, the question that goes “Gee, what is it about me that the Nazis like
so much?”</div>
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In other
words, at some point, since this science is so politicized, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Backdoor-Eugenics-Troy-Duster/dp/0415946743" target="_blank">the scientist can’t afford to be naive about its bio-political nature</a>. You see science, and especially human
biology, is particularly suitable to be used by people with, for the sake of
argument, evil intentions – by which I mean increasing the amount of misery in
the world, reinforcing social, political, and economic inequalities, causing harm without benefit. That science should not be done. It violates the basic charter that we, the
civilized people of the world, made with Francis Bacon in the earth 17<sup>th</sup>
century. “Your project sounds good, for
it promises to improve our lives.” But
science that makes people’s lives worse? "Let’s pass on that."</div>
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For all
intents and purposes, that charter was reinforced with the development of
bioethics in the late 20<sup>th</sup> century.
That is to say, we are all for the progress of science, but when science
butts up against human rights, human rights wins, hands down. We needed to codify that point, because for most of
the 20<sup>th</sup> century, the scientific question of “What can I do?” was
often difficult to differentiate from the moral and practical question “What
can I get away with?”</div>
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I think
what often gets lost, and perhaps even deliberately obscured, is the political
stakes involved in naturalizing human cultural history. People have been asking about the sources of large
scale social inequality for around 10,000 years; that is to say, since the
beginning of large-scale social inequality.
The Bible isn’t very helpful here.
Is says God favors some kings, and curses other kings, but doesn’t
actually say why there are kings at all.
Most of the time, it just takes kings for granted, except for one passage
in First Samuel, Chapter 8, in which the
Tribe asks the judge for a king, and the judge tries to talk them out of it, by
explaining why kings suck. But
otherwise, hereditary monarchies are taken to be part of the natural way of
things.</div>
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By the
19<sup>th</sup> century, as the long-standing hereditary aristocracies were
being threatened by democracy and new wealth, there were two opposing
theories for the origin of those hereditary
aristocracies. Why aren’t you king? Well, accident of birth; you’d be a good
king, <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=s2iEeCJAlusC" target="_blank">you just unluckily came from ancestors who had been historically victims of economic and political injustices</a>. Here
you explain the observation of social inequality by the inference of historical
injustice. The solution is to work for
social justice. Science has no
role; we haven’t even mentioned science.</div>
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Second
theory: <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=JeM_1BCeffAC" target="_blank">Civilization depends on the aristocratic classes.</a> They have founded every civilization everywhere,
which eventually collapsed when their blood was diluted. They are thus constitutionally better than
the lower and upwardly-mobile classes, and to get rid of them would foretell the
doom of civilization. Here the same
observation (social inequality) is not caused by injustice, but by the facts of
natural difference. All we need to do is
to identify the nature of those gifts.
Here social justice is not desirable, for the very need for it is denied;
and science may have a role, in convincing us that the secret to aristocratic
success is in the shape of their head, or the number of answers they can get
right on a standardized test, or their DNA sequence.</div>
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That’s the
back story. That’s why Nelkin and Lindee
saw the gene as a bio-political element, a “cultural icon” back in 1995. The point is that we now know about “genetic
essentialism” – also Nelkin and Lindee’s phrase – as an outmoded ideology, and
with a history of bad political baggage, to boot. Can we not reject it on that basis, as one
rejects creationism in science?</div>
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I think
scientists ought to be expected to articulate and explain the politics in their
research, and not be permitted to pretend that their work is value neutral, and that
ethics, morals, values, and politics is somebody else’s problem.</div>
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Here are my guidelines for reviewers of papers in human
behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology:</div>
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<b>Does the paper adequately assess its possible political implications?<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>What stand does the paper take on those political implications?<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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After all, in any inter-disciplinary research, you can't pay attention to only one of the relevant intellectual domains. All you’d have to do is broaden the “Conflicts of Interest”
statement to include political conflicts of interests, which, if you’re submitting
a paper that has political implications, might be a reasonable expectation. I can imagine that had they answered the
questions, there would be far less uncritical derivative citations of Derek
Freeman’s <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/669033" target="_blank">attack on Margaret Mead</a>, <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/99/23/14636.long" target="_blank">Richard Jantz’s</a> <a href="http://nersp.osg.ufl.edu/~ufruss/documents/boas.paperII.pdf" target="_blank">attack on Franz Boas</a>, and <a href="http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001071" target="_blank">Ralph Holloway</a>’s scurrilous <a href="http://anthropomics.blogspot.com/2011/06/plotz-biology.html" target="_blank">attack on Stephen Jay Gould</a>. Sure, the lunatics would still cite them, but
they’d be self-identified, and uncredible in the community of scholars.</div>
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This is
political and has always been. The
people who are the most political tend to be the ones claiming self-consciously
to be the most scientific, and tend to be the ones whose science stands up the worst.
That's another reason to study history. It’s time to stop allowing people to
pretend that this science isn’t political, and claiming the higher scientific ground
for their thinly cloaked politicized science; they are entitled only to the lower scholarly ground and the lower
moral ground. That’s is not where
science belongs.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12576920986455084855noreply@blogger.com45tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6084858487513024522.post-76000634167239348092013-02-19T12:55:00.000-08:002013-02-19T14:41:45.930-08:00Meet Joe Science<br />
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The flap in the last couple of weeks over Jared Diamond’s
publicity for his book, <i>The World Until
Yesterday</i>, and Napoleon Chagnon’s publicity for his book, <i>Noble Savages</i> needs a little context,
which happens to be a specialty of anthropology.</div>
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Anthropology is coming off of a year that was <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/338/6114/1520" target="_blank">described in the leading science journal</a> in these here United States as an <i>annus horribilis</i>. And
you know damn well, that when Americans resort to Latin to describe something,
it’s got to be pretty bad. Of course in
the background we have the perpetual war against the creationists and the
racists, both of whom see anthropology as their enemy. </div>
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So we elect a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Singular-Woman-Untold-Barack-Obamas/dp/1594485593" target="_blank">President whose mother was an anthropologist</a>,
and you think that might bode well for the public appreciation of our
field. But we get <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/gov-rick-scott-daughter-anthropology-major-150042994.html" target="_blank">Florida governor Rick Scott</a>, upset by his daughter’s choice of a major, declaring it to be not the
kind of major we want in Florida. And
shortly thereafter, the big business publications – Kiplinger and Forbes –
publicly branded it as the worst major.
It seems almost as if the Republicans had declared war on anthropology,
along with the creationists and the racists.</div>
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Then we have the one-two punch from the guys claiming to be
Joe Science. Jared Diamond pretends to
be an anthropologist, but does things that no competent anthropologist would
do, and interprets other peoples as no competent anthropologist does. That is to say, he soft-pedals the historical context of
other cultures, and imagines them to be stand-ins for his own ancestors. He tells Stephen Colbert that we don’t call
New Guineans “primitive” because it’s politically incorrect, apparently unaware
that we don’t call them “primitive” because the term connotes a false,
ancestral relationship between “them” and “us”.</div>
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Napoleon Chagnon is a sadder story, because he is not a
pseudo-anthropologist, but an incompetent anthropologist. Let me be clear about my use of the word
“incompetent”. His methods for
collecting, analyzing and interpreting his data are outside the range of acceptable
anthropological practices. Yes, he saw
the Yanomamo doing nasty things. But
when he concluded from his observations that the Yanomamo are <i>innately</i> and <i>primordially</i> “fierce” he lost
his anthropological credibility, because he had not demonstrated any such thing. He has a right to his views, as creationists
and racists have a right to theirs, but the evidence does not support the
conclusion, which makes it scientifically incompetent.</div>
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And so, after the New York Times runs a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/magazine/napoleon-chagnon-americas-most-controversial-anthropologist.html" target="_blank">puff piece on Chagnon in the Magazine</a>, and a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/books/review/noble-savages-by-napoleon-a-chagnon.html" target="_blank">critical review of his book simultaneously in the Book Review section</a>, it seems as though the best we can hope for is a
draw. But wait! Into the fray comes their distinguished
science reporter Nicholas Wade, with a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/science/napoleon-chagnons-war-stories-in-the-amazon-and-at-home.html" target="_blank">second puff piece on Chagnon</a>.</div>
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WTF? His work isn’t
that important to anthropology, except as a methodological counter-example. Why is
it so important to the Times?</div>
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Again, some context,
Nicholas Wade once co-wrote<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Betrayers-Truth-Oxford-Paperback-Reference/dp/0192818899" target="_blank"> a good book on scientific fraud</a>. Judging from his work since then, I am
inclined to attribute its meritorious aspects to his co-author. More recently, Wade has been pushing genetic
determinism as hard as he can from his pulpit at the Times. And you know who his antagonists are going to
be. </div>
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Wade’s 2007 book, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Before-Dawn-Recovering-History-Ancestors/dp/014303832X" target="_blank">Before the Dawn</a></i>, was marketed as a celebration of anthropological genetics. Except that anthropological genetics means something
different to anthropological geneticists than it does to Wade. To anthropological geneticists, it means the
mutual illumination of genetics and anthropology, often using the technology of
the former to study questions framed by the latter. To Nicholas Wade, however, it means that the
Chinese excel at ping-pong because of their genes for it (p. 197). </div>
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<br /></div>
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The book was reviewed in
the leading science journals by leading anthropological geneticists. <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7095/full/441813a.html" target="_blank">The reviewers in <i>Nature </i>found it to be a work of social darwinism</a> (that phrase is not bandied about as a compliment these
days). Rebecca Cann in <i>Science </i><a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/313/5784/174.1.full?" target="_blank">had this to say</a>:</div>
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<span style="font-family: "TimesNewRomanPS","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: TimesNewRomanPS;">As a graduate student … I often wished
that there were science writers energized to follow the new insights from
geneticists as closely and rapidly as others reported interpretations of
fragmentary fossils. Well, be careful what you wish for.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">And
she continued, </span><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPS, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "TimesNewRomanPS","sans-serif"; font-size: 9.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: TimesNewRomanPS;">The book also reveals some unpleasant
truths about science writing that currently passes for objective and informed.
Only smugness that one’s sources must be correct because they represent a
scientific elite group having new and exclusive truths about human evolution
makes it possible to write, in 2006, sentences such as “The Australian and New
Guinean branch [of our phylogenetic tree] soon settled into a time warp of
perpetual stagnation."</span><span style="font-family: "TimesNewRomanPS","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: TimesNewRomanPS;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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In other words, the 19<sup>th</sup>
century idea that in looking at other people we are seeing our ancestors,
against the modern anthropological view that we are seeing people with other histories, is what unites Chagnon’s, Diamond’s, and Wade’s books. It is a false and
outmoded ideology, one that knowledgeable scholars – or, for the sake of
argument, “scientists” - have rejected.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Nicholas Wade,
however, is undeterred. In an <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/an.2007.48.6.35.2/pdf" target="_blank">interview with the <i>Anthropology News</i> in 2007</a>, he told them , "Anyone who’s
interested in cultural anthropology should escape as quickly as they can from
their cultural anthropology department and go and learn some genetics, which
will be the foundation of cultural anthropology in the future." In other words, he wants to return to the pre-modern era of
anthropology, before E. B. Tylor separated “culture” from “race” or “nature” –
because what we think is cultural is really better studied by geneticists. That was actually a “pro-science” stance a
century ago, but it is by no stretch of the imagination “pro-science”
today. It is decidedly anti-science. It fact it sounds almost as if he is beginning
to believe his own bullshit.</div>
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<br /></div>
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So, let’s see what he
has to say about Napoleon Chagnon this week, throwing the weight of his
reputation in the New York Times around, to balance their recent Chagnon pieces
as 2-1 against anthropology. </div>
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He starts off, “What
were our early ancestors really like…?” – a good question, but one to which Napoleon
Chagnon’s work is irrelevant. Bad
start, though, because it means that even now, neither Chagnon nor Wade apparently
understands what the Yanomamo actually tell us about anything.</div>
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“One of Dr. Chagnon’s discoveries was that
warriors who had killed a man in battle sired three times more children than
men who had not killed.” Not exactly a
discovery, though; more of an assertion, which was <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/239/4843/985.full.pdf?sid=69c5a2e2-bda6-4f9f-bb2e-a36cfb1e0592" target="_blank">published in Science</a>, and
shown convincingly to be based on a misinterpretation of the data. Chagnon’s
interpretation is that his data have no historical context, and are simply the
Yanomamo doing what is natural – not only for them, but for us as well. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Yanomami-Warfare-Political-History-Resident/dp/0933452411" target="_blank">Brian Ferguson’s interpretation</a> is universally
taken to be more insightful then Chagnon’s, because it incorporates politics and history.
But neither of the pieces puffing up Chagnon, and publicizing his hatred
of his colleagues, even acknowledges the existence of alternative
interpretations of Chagnon’s work. The problem, simply put, is that Chagnon's statistics were rubbish, because he neglected to include the children of killers who had themselves been killed.</div>
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<o:p><a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/291/5503/416.full" target="_blank">As Science reported it over a decade ago</a>,</o:p></div>
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<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Chagnon's figures on reproductive success did not include dead <em>unokai.</em> The obvious question, in <span class="search-term-highlight">Ferguson</span>'s view, was whether the greater reproductive success of <em>unokai</em> was offset by higher mortality. Responding in <em>American Ethnologist</em>, Chagnon calculated the same figures without the headmen and came up with a correlation similar to, although smaller than, his previous figure. But, Chagnon told <em>Science</em>, he “didn't record at the time the status of <em>unokai</em> men who were killed,” which is necessary to respond to <span class="search-term-highlight">Ferguson</span>'s second objection. “But from what I know,” he says, “it looks as though [<span class="search-term-highlight">Ferguson</span>'s] hypothesis doesn't hold up.”</span></div>
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<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
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<o:p>Here is a translation into scientific terms. Chagnon's apparent statistical conclusion linking killers and babies is bogus because of a flaw in the data, which means that it is invalid to derive the conclusion that Chagnon derived. The best he can do is claim impressionistically that he hopes Ferguson is wrong. </o:p>But that defeats the purpose of pretending to be a scientist and doing statistics in the first place.</div>
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<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
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So now, the best Wade can come
up with is to repeat Chagnon’s claim that he represents science against “the
ideology of his fellow anthropologists.
The general bias in anthropological theory draws heavily from Marxism,
Dr. Chagnon writes.” Kind of makes it
sound as if he’s got a list of names that he wants to give to Senator
McCarthy. Damn commies. (See my <a href="http://anthropomics.blogspot.com/2013/02/been-building-up-havent-they-theres.html" target="_blank">previous post for the commies</a>.) The point is that if the ostensible statistical relationships are mirages, then the only people they are going to be able to convince are other cult members. But science is supposed to be able to convince skeptics, not other cult members.</div>
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And finally, explains
Wade, the entire field of anthropology is like, totally anti-science, even the
American Anthropological Association. “In
2010 the A.A.A. voted to strip the word 'science' from its long-range mission
plan and focus instead on ‘public understanding.’ Its distaste for science and
its attack on Dr. Chagnon are now an indelible part of its record.”</div>
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Sure sounds like the
American Anthropological Association is indelibly anti-science. Actually, though, that "distaste for science" is very delible. How delible is it? Well actually,
that change (to remove the word “science” as a way to emphasize that anthropology
incorporates both scientific and humanistic study, and thus is not limited by
the scope of science) was suggested by a committee, and was <u>rejected</u> by the
membership of the AAA. Wade is wrong,
wrong, wrong. Instrumentally, perniciously, and anti-intellectually.</div>
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<br /></div>
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So on one side you’ve
got the creationists, racists, genetic determinists, the Republican governor of
Florida, Jared Diamond, and Napoleon Chagnon – and on the other side, you’ve
got normative anthropology, and the mother of the President. Which side are you on?<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6084858487513024522" name="_GoBack"></a></div>
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****</div>
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<a href="http://blog.aaanet.org/2013/02/17/science-advocacy-and-anthropology/" target="_blank">AAA response to The New York Times Magazine story.</a></div>
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<a href="http://blog.aaanet.org/2013/02/19/indiana-jones-is-to-anthropology-as-fred-flintstone-is-to-neolithic-life/" target="_blank">AAA President Leith Mullings response.</a></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12576920986455084855noreply@blogger.com315tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6084858487513024522.post-78436956036215163452013-02-13T13:00:00.000-08:002013-02-14T13:33:16.442-08:00Diamonds and clubs<br />
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Things have been building up, haven’t they? </div>
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There’s Jared Diamond, <a href="http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/422894/january-15-2013/jared-diamond" target="_blank">dressed like Santa Claus</a>, pushing his new book, telling Stephen Colbert that the people in Papua New Guinea wouldn’t know what to do with an electric can opener, because they don’t have cans. What a card. Never mind that <a href="http://www.imediaethics.org/News/3689/Jared_diamond_misleads_uk_observer_editor__libel_lawsuit_not_dismissed__voluntarily_withdrawn_without_prejudice_.php" target="_blank">he’s being sued by a guy from there</a> who made the mistake of once speaking to him, so that Diamond could casually accuse him of murder <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/04/21/080421fa_fact_diamond" target="_blank">in the pages of <i>The New Yorker</i></a>. Or that his last book, <i>Collapse</i>, was critically examined by archaeologists who actually work on the collapse of civilization, and found that his grand scheme for understanding it was useless, and had a conference and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Questioning-Collapse-Resilience-Ecological-Vulnerability/dp/0521733669" target="_blank">published a book about it</a>. (Diamond responded by shitting on their book in the pages of <i>Nature</i>, and <a href="http://www.imediaethics.org/News/775/Cambridge_u_press_backs_authors_against_jared_diamonds_nature_review.php" target="_blank">neglecting to acknowledge the conflict of interests</a>.) </div>
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Diamond’s problem is not that he is a dummy, which he manifestly is not. It’s that he has realized that the things he is an expert in are boring, and so he writes about interesting things that he is not an expert in. That can sometimes work. It certainly has worked for his bank account. But he can’t figure out why he hasn’t been acclaimed King of Anthropology by the people doing the work that interests him, and everybody else in the field of anthropology.</div>
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The reason is a simple one. With depth of knowledge comes the ability to read critically. My first run-in with him was about 20 years ago, when he was hawking some research that I happened to know far too much about, in particular that it wasn’t so much wrong as <a href="http://personal.uncc.edu/jmarks/dnahyb/Sibley%20revisited.pdf" target="_blank">fraudulent</a>. We exchanged letters in <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v334/n6184/pdf/334656b0.pdf" target="_blank"><i>Nature </i></a>as the data falsification came to be exposed, but he nevertheless made the fraudulent work the centerpiece of his science bestseller, <i>The Third Chimpanzee</i>.</div>
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That convinced me that Diamond is an anti-intellectual, that he thinks he knows more than the experts. Where have we heard that before? Well, from the creationists. From the climate-change deniers. In fact, back in the early 1960s, segregationists were saying in the pages of <i>Science </i>that blacks had not produced any good culture or civilization, in spite of what cultural anthropologists were saying, and various psychologists and biologists added their sober opinions on both sides of the issue. It took the New School anthropologist <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/135/3507/961.2.full.pdf" target="_blank">Stanley Diamond</a> (presumably no relation) to make what should have been an obvious point. Why should anybody give a shit what psychologists or geneticists think about culture or civilization? They are dilettantes in that area.</div>
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The expert most qualified to speak in this matter is the competent cultural anthropologist, precisely because [they deal] with the origin and growth of cultural behavior and with the cultural interaction of human groups. Once this plain fact is accepted in the scientific community at large – and it is high time that it was – geneticists and other biological specialists will no longer have to waste their time on this unrewarding problem ...</div>
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But anthropology holds a special place among anti-intellectuals, because it has been from its very inception, “a reformer’s science”. That is the concluding thought of effectively the first book on the subject, E. B. Tylor’s <i>Primitive Culture</i>. Nevertheless, a century or so later, the segregationists had developed a unique anti-intellectual slander against anthropology, which they inherited in some measure from the eugenicists decades earlier. </div>
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I suspect the eugenicists picked it up from an ever earlier source, the neuroanatomist Grafton Elliot Smith, whose politics weren’t all that bad, but who had an axe to grind against cultural anthropology. You see, Smith believed that “civilization” began in one place, Egypt, and was borrowed or stolen or otherwise adopted elsewhere by imitators and derivatives. Because he was a respected biologist, his ideas got aired, and because they were false and stupid, they were rejected. That didn’t stop him, though, because he knew that, as a real scientist, he was smarter than the so-called experts, who had a different view, <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=uVpBAAAAIAAJ&pg=PP1&dq=grafton+elliot+smith&hl=en&sa=X&ei=l_kbUbHFJZS70AGqvoBg&ved=0CFEQ6AEwBQ" target="_blank">“put forth ex cathedra by the majority of modern anthropologists”</a>.</div>
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Somehow, there is just something wrong with them dang anthropology perfessers. </div>
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The eugenicists picked up this thread, and wove it into the beginnings of a conspiracy theory – Franz Boas had come out against their applied genetics program, and it must have been because of his closed-mindedness, those Hebrews being a stiff-necked race, by their own admission.</div>
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But it was the segregationists who took that thread and spun it into a suit – a white one, with a matching hood. The psychologist Henry Garrett, geneticist Ruggles Gates, and their mouthpiece, writer/businessman Carleton Putnam revealed that <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Science-Segregation-against-Education-Critical/dp/0814742718" target="_blank">anthropology had come under the influence of a cabal of Jews and communists</a>, all dovetailing in the person of Franz Boas. It was the commie-Jew-anthropologists who had made the discourse of human diversity political, when it should be dispassionate and apolitical. The scientific segregationists were well financed, from the same funding source as Arthur Jensen, Philippe Rushton, and Thomas Bouchard – <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Funding-Scientific-Racism-Wickliffe/dp/0252074637" target="_blank">the Pioneer Fund</a>. And if you could be objective and scientific about human diversity, you would see the world as they do, ... and reject the civil rights movement.</div>
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The idea that anthropology is hidebound in a leftist anti-science conspiracy resurfaced in 2000 in a book called “Taboo” by a writer named Jon Entine. I crossed swords with him after he asked for my comments on his book manuscript and didn’t like the comments I gave him.</div>
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And that brings us to this Sunday’s New York Times. </div>
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A journalist named Emily Eakin writes a puff piece on <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/magazine/napoleon-chagnon-americas-most-controversial-anthropologist.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">Napoleon Chagnon</a>, whose memoir is being published soon. Chagnon is renowned in anthropology as the counter-example of good fieldwork. This is the anthropologist who worked with the Yanomamo, got them angry at one another (by broadly violating their taboos about names of dead relatives in order to collect his genealogical information), armed them (with machetes), and then reified the ensuing violence in his monograph “The Fierce People” – removing history, politics, and his own field methods from his analysis of their violence. It was a great undergraduate read, but it isn’t taken very seriously as scholarship. Why? <i>Because he removed history, politics, and his own field methods from his analysis of their violence</i>. </div>
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Like some other fuzzy thinkers in the late 1970s, Chagnon believed the voice of Darwin had spoken to him, and adopted the tenet that only by studying ants could we become better ant-hropologists , and followed E. O. Wilson in trying to reinvent anthropology based on the idea that to do human science properly, you must begin by pretending we aren’t human.</div>
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Well, that was a long time ago, and since then, the worst elements of sociobiology have metastasized into evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology is a brilliant coinage, because you don’t need to know much about either psychology or evolution to practice it, which makes evolutionary psychology particularly attractive to morons. But in order to do evolutionary psychology, which has no discernible scholarly standards, you have to begin first by dismissing the field that studies the actual evolution and diversity of humans and their lifeways, namely anthropology. And you do that by the exceedingly judicious citation of things that you agree with, and consequently wish were true. </div>
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First, Napoleon Chagnon showed that the Yanomamo are inherently violent, and they stand as synecdoche for all human societies, especially ancient ones. <a href="http://www.livinganthropologically.com/2013/02/06/yanomami-science-violence-empirical-data-facts/" target="_blank"> But what about the scholarly literature that showed how terribly flawed Chagnon’s analysis was?</a> Ignore it, or blame it on the commies and Jews who control anthropology. </div>
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Second, Margaret Mead was bamboozled, and everything she ever said and did is wrong, as that fine objective scholar Derek Freeman showed. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Trashing-Margaret-Mead-Anthropological-Controversy/dp/0299234541" target="_blank">Not true either.</a> The remaining tatters of that argument are disproved by Paul Shankman in the latest issue of <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/669033" target="_blank">Current Anthropology</a>.</div>
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And third, anthropologists think there are no human races, because they are fluffy liberals, led by the geneticist Richard Lewontin (and don’t ask about his politics or ancestry)! Actually, Lewontin’s famous 1972 paper on “the apportionment of human diversity” came after well over two decades of biological anthropologists (i.e., from the sciencey end of anthropology) coming to empirically reject the idea that race is a basic biological structure of the human species, while nevertheless studying the actual patterns of human biological diversity. As far as I can tell, the idea that anthropologists believe everyone is the same goes back to a throwaway line in Kurt Vonnegut’s classic 1969 novel “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Slaughterhouse-Five-Novel-Kurt-Vonnegut/dp/0385333846" target="_blank">Slaughterhouse-Five</a>”: </div>
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I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.<br />
Another thing they taught was that nobody was ridiculous or bad or disgusting.</div>
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Probably not a good idea to take that passage at face value. Vonnegut did do graduate work at the University of Chicago in anthropology, but most of the book takes place on the planet Tralfamadore. It’s not really an autobiography.</div>
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And as you can tell if you’ve read this far, anthropologists do think some people are ridiculous, bad and disgusting. Top of the list: people who degrade science by using it rhetorically to naturalize social inequality. </div>
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Some respectable scholars, like<a href="http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001109" target="_blank"> Johan Bolhuis</a> and <a href="http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/context-and-variation/2013/02/11/5-ways-to-make-progress-in-evolutionary-psychology-smash-not-match-stereotypes/" target="_blank">Kate Clancy</a>, have recently tried to talk some sense into evolutionary psychologists, by suggesting ways to make the field more rigorous. <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/pop-psych/201302/is-it-only-good-science-when-it-confirms-your-world-view" target="_blank"> But I don’t think the evolutionary psychologists are listening.</a> The New York Times sought a soundbite from that great anthropologist Steven Pinker, who obliged: “Pinker said that he was troubled by the notion that social scientists should suppress unflattering information about their subjects because it could be exploited by others.”</div>
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So here is my point to the evolutionary psychologists and race reifiers. This is bio-politics. What is “sociobiology” for ants is “sociopoliticobiology” for people. And you had better smarten up, because if you are repeating anthropological arguments made first by Nazis and segregationists, then you are indeed political, and you are politically bad - in addition to being anti-science.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12576920986455084855noreply@blogger.com45tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6084858487513024522.post-78828917056525852912012-11-20T10:20:00.001-08:002012-11-20T13:14:33.328-08:00A Rootin', Tootin' Blog Post<br />
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The newest issue of the <i>Yearbook
of Physical Anthropology</i> contains some provocative material (including my
own article, “Why Be Against Darwin? Creationism, Racism and the Roots of
Anthropology”), but one other article in particular is provoking this rant –
“Two Faces of Earnest A. Hooton” by Eugene Giles.<span style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">1</span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRPqiJhBWgChLI85nOdgktirdRUm1H0ZP3Th3nwSehIC-BG3qa7JzY6GG3Vp11JKDofSTn329LB7gChjbjmnHL0vseffZEWKghxEbvjDuMc3W9A4L9q631vgOv8CHajXCHWiKlDkmmt_mY/s1600/Hooton+Life+7+Aug+39+p60.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="173" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRPqiJhBWgChLI85nOdgktirdRUm1H0ZP3Th3nwSehIC-BG3qa7JzY6GG3Vp11JKDofSTn329LB7gChjbjmnHL0vseffZEWKghxEbvjDuMc3W9A4L9q631vgOv8CHajXCHWiKlDkmmt_mY/s200/Hooton+Life+7+Aug+39+p60.jpg" width="200" /></a>Giles’s ambition here is to clear the air about Hooton, who
was a leading public intellectual at Harvard during his term there (1913-1954),
and trained the first generation of “modern” (i.e., post-WWII) biological
anthropologists. Hooton was also the
leading scientific authority on race in the US, and a long-term advocate of the
science of eugenics (along with nearly all the other natural scientists in the
US), and Giles sets himself the task of defending Hooton from the charges of
being a racist and a eugenicist.</div>
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Was Hooton a racist?
Well, obviously that’s a term that doesn’t translate well across the
generations. Giles correctly notes that
Hooton was the mentor of an African American M.A. student, Caroline Bond Day,
and had a good relationship with both Howard University and the NAACP. But first things first. Who says Hooton was a racist (whatever that
term might mean, applied retrospectively to someone who indeed worked with Franz
Boas against Nazi anthropology)? Giles
blames the American Anthropological Association’s “Race: Are We So Different?” website.</div>
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<a href="http://www.understandingrace.org/home.html" target="_blank">http://www.understandingrace.org/home.html</a></div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgK7L33jP2mOP6N_7v_LIFLxbX510tRloUeQz7Sr0HnC85Ujv2qUtb1plnUms1FB1wdEbFxgHR6ol8s9KOrnf5NHpwVZW4IF9sFzK8o1XNYGvs49LLp5jgABRp4wYceEtQj_pyn23jq30Ac/s1600/Jon+at+Discovery+Place2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgK7L33jP2mOP6N_7v_LIFLxbX510tRloUeQz7Sr0HnC85Ujv2qUtb1plnUms1FB1wdEbFxgHR6ol8s9KOrnf5NHpwVZW4IF9sFzK8o1XNYGvs49LLp5jgABRp4wYceEtQj_pyn23jq30Ac/s200/Jon+at+Discovery+Place2.jpg" width="185" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Opening of "Race: Are We So Different?"<br />
at the Discovery Place in Charlotte, last year. </td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Disclaimer: I had nothing whatsoever to do with that website, or the traveling museum exhibit (although I have no idea why Peggy Overbey didn’t invite me into it). I do like it, though. I was quoted in it, and attended its opening in Charlotte, and did a public radio show to promote it.</b></span><br />
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Giles does catch some inaccuracies, to be sure, but they are
fleas on a big dog. In the first place,
there is no definitive work on Hooton, and those of us with historical
interests have been waiting for many years for Giles himself to provide
it. Perhaps if he had done so, the AAA
exhibit would have been able to get their facts straighter.</div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTbKOtdEYdCnDv3YVxXajG2_GsAl57fpHQQM_kG3Qxkmkiy1iIMLIFJWGDxZqwkkFhaHEILiukkywrotPLwVh8SfW26vRWkhmD3GbSmn11yMLrPHhFUFWy29bwypY-PVtXa7wWwt22nLYw/s1600/Washburn+cake+3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTbKOtdEYdCnDv3YVxXajG2_GsAl57fpHQQM_kG3Qxkmkiy1iIMLIFJWGDxZqwkkFhaHEILiukkywrotPLwVh8SfW26vRWkhmD3GbSmn11yMLrPHhFUFWy29bwypY-PVtXa7wWwt22nLYw/s200/Washburn+cake+3.jpg" width="156" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Washburn blowing out the candles <br />
on his birthday cake for the last time.</td></tr>
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But more significantly, the AAA Race website certainly was
not the ultimate source of the accusation that Hooton was a racist. His former student (and AAA President in
1962-3), Sherwood Washburn, had been saying that for half a century. By the time I met Washburn, just a few years
before his death, if I mentioned Hooton, Sherry would say, “He was a racist,
you know”. </div>
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There are two things that come through clearly about Hooton. First, he did not take himself all that
seriously. And second, his views
evolved. Consequently, although it may
be tempting to try and find a “real” Hooton behind all the verbiage and
sometimes the outward silliness, that is probably an essentialist fallacy.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6084858487513024522" name="_GoBack"></a> My reading of his
work is that although his ideas about the meaning of race evolved – I allow
students to compare his 1926 and 1936 papers on race in <i>Science, </i>in the latter of which he is desperately trying to
differentiate his good American racial anthropology from bad German racial
anthropology<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">2,3</span></span> – he consistently maintained an anachronistic view that there was
a direct and deterministic relationship between how you looked and how you
thought. This is what united Hooton’s
interests in race, criminal anthropology, eugenics, and constitutional
anthropology; and what his later students rejected after World War II.</div>
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I think that, like a lot of Americans, Hooton took a swing
to the right after World War II. In the
case of the “constitutional anthropology” of William H. Sheldon, which asserted
a direct connection between body build and personality, Hooton should have been
smart enough to see through it, like his later students, but couldn’t; and he
was actually hurt when it got back to him that he was being called a
fascist. Washburn, with whom he was
still on good terms, wrote him quite
poignantly, “To
put the matter bluntly, none of your pupils think that you are at all a
fascist. But, anyone reading Sheldon’s
last book, taking the last 100 pages for what they say, and then hearing that
you believe in Sheldon’s system, might call you a fascist with some
justification. What we need is the
separation of the sane study of body-build from Sheldon’s
system.”<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">4</span></span></div>
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But Hooton was also genteel and non-confrontational,
preferring to criticize someone behind their back rather than to their face. Madison Grant’s 1916 <i>The</i> <i>Passing of the Great Race</i>
was a bestselling classic of scientific racism, called “my bible” by Hitler,
and invoked at the Nuremberg Trials as evidence that the Germans accused of war
crimes had been inspired by American ideas; but Hooton, like many scientists,
served under Grant in the American Eugenics Society. In 1918, Hooton writes a little throwaway
line in the context of a review of a different book in the <i>American Journal of Physical Anthropology</i>, “Only the Prussians and
Madison Grant now believe that the Nordics are a race of supermen and
archangels.”<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">5</span></span> Cute, huh? But he never uses his stature
as a Harvard expert on race to challenge Madison Grant. And when Grant sends him a copy of his 1933
book, <i>The Conquest of A Continent</i> (i.e.,
more of same), Hooton writes him back politely after reading only the first
chapter, “I
don’t expect that I shall agree with you at every point, but you are probably
aware that I have a basic sympathy for you in your opposition to the flooding
of this country with alien scum.”<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">6</span></span></div>
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Of course, he is referring to my grandparents there. So fuck him.</div>
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After Grant’s death, Hooton had some race-nerd fun at his
expense:</div>
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Madison
Grant had a vivid personality and a long head, but, as I remember him, rather a
swarthy complexion. I was curious about
his conception of Nordicism; so I tackled him on the subject of my own racial
type. I said, “Mr. Grant, I have a round
head with a cephalic index of 85, brown hair, mixed eyes, a moon face and a
blobby nose – all these attractive features going with a muddy complexion. How would you classify me as to race? I should call myself a mixed Alpine.” He asked, “Are you not of purely British
ancestry?” I replied, “Yes, my father is
an Englishman and my mother is a Scotch Canadian.” He said, “Then, damn it, you’re a
Nordic.” That is the only occasion when
I have been so classified.<span style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">7</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">(I
published that last bit in my <i>Current
Anthropology</i> paper earlier this year.)</span></span><span style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">8</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<sup><o:p></o:p></sup></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Anyway, when it came to eugenics, Hooton’s views were not very
nuanced, but he believed that all races had comparable proportions of the
unfit, and they should all be extirpated.
It took him till 1936 to resign from the Advisory Board of the American
Eugenics Society, and even then, he kept up his membership. The American Eugenics Society lost most of
its members by 1933, with the Great Depression and the accession of the Nazis. Even its Secretary-Treasurer, Leon Whitney,
had to quit in 1932 because they couldn’t afford to pay him (Whitney went on to become
an authority on animal breeding) – but it limped along, with stalwarts like
Hooton. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXo5o2a8h1k1QVMq06QyI88TliBdlmVGxTVeT0pYP8zCR9W3FIykfC2dNIQzav4y10yDQCsoiYDXfhQF_WJhJ6tMmp7PupTl2mMLMtyvjrwl3T4gn3GSMv0tDdswWd4oYUfaqZe3Hd87N9/s1600/Hooton+Boas+1937a+21Feb.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXo5o2a8h1k1QVMq06QyI88TliBdlmVGxTVeT0pYP8zCR9W3FIykfC2dNIQzav4y10yDQCsoiYDXfhQF_WJhJ6tMmp7PupTl2mMLMtyvjrwl3T4gn3GSMv0tDdswWd4oYUfaqZe3Hd87N9/s400/Hooton+Boas+1937a+21Feb.jpg" width="163" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">21 Feb 1937</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiageoikNL3fgO7UhW8TsPvu12JTnge0DlUqYyb7eH3aQlelcq8r3nN8f_C75tntcQHiFcnaKAB18a7vzEHIowaipwh2DU1whcrOIVPo3IWBlbIpRsdi1secniy2Y8ALmeCsV9iyhY6EvnR/s1600/Hooton+Boas+1937b+21Mar.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiageoikNL3fgO7UhW8TsPvu12JTnge0DlUqYyb7eH3aQlelcq8r3nN8f_C75tntcQHiFcnaKAB18a7vzEHIowaipwh2DU1whcrOIVPo3IWBlbIpRsdi1secniy2Y8ALmeCsV9iyhY6EvnR/s320/Hooton+Boas+1937b+21Mar.jpg" width="169" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">21 March 1937</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So, yes, Hooton was a eugenicist, and to his discredit, he
continued to be one long after it fell out of fashion in the scientific
community. In 1937, Hooton gave a talk
at the Harvard Club in Kansas City, which made the front page of <i>The New York Times</i>. He called for a biological purge upon the
unfit. Oh, sure, he was just being a wry wag, wishing he were James Thurber, but
this was 1937 already, and the Nuremberg Laws were already on the books. You think Hooton read the newspapers? A month later, the <i>Times</i> got a hold of that elderly cultural anthropologist from
Columbia, Franz Boas – with whom Hooton had a respectful relationship – to slap
him down.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
(And yet, the Times also covered Hooton’s 1944 NAACP
address, with the headline, “Dr. Hooton Assails Racial Prejudice.” As I say, he was complicated.)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgYXwyIVrsncIjjU5PMjiztSgLNTJazShNVypnqNOJ4hFm-JoP8zznPKqoi1r5DhE1q27vHqRZcsguLqMxA5ERdtMgYRBksn9srm2C0DSPGY7VKDPH1lrllJshyphenhyphen0oWyi_QUVeBe0YEdoDo/s1600/hooton+jewish+nose.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="512" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgYXwyIVrsncIjjU5PMjiztSgLNTJazShNVypnqNOJ4hFm-JoP8zznPKqoi1r5DhE1q27vHqRZcsguLqMxA5ERdtMgYRBksn9srm2C0DSPGY7VKDPH1lrllJshyphenhyphen0oWyi_QUVeBe0YEdoDo/s640/hooton+jewish+nose.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I think it was my old professor, Hermann Bleibtreu, who
first showed me Hooton’s illustration of the Jewish
face.<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">9</span></span> No, that definitely hasn’t aged
well. In fact it is so bizarre that it's hard to believe he intended for it to be taken completely seriously. As Hooton wrote a few pages later, "Without going into excessive detail, these are then my impressions of the cause of the physical distinctiveness of many Jewish individuals. I may be wrong. This subject has not been completely or scientifically explored, and I am recording impressions rather than the results of detailed surveys." (Washburn was also quick to
identify Hooton as an anti-Semite, but Hooton’s first student was Harry
Shapiro, later a long-time curator at the AMNH.
I once heard a story that Hooton brought Shapiro to the notoriously
anti-Semitic Galton Society in New York, to educate them as to what a “good Jew” was.)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Hooton’s doggerel in “Subverse”
is far more horridly sexist than racist.
But he clearly aspired to be the Dorothy Parker of old-school physical
anthropology:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 11pt; margin: 0.7pt 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 9.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
Bushman’s stature is not great,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 11pt; margin: 0.7pt 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 9.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">His
jaw is quite prognathous;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 11pt; margin: 0.7pt 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 9.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Within
his yellow, wool-starred pate<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 11pt; margin: 0.7pt 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 9.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">His
skull is not capacious.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 11pt; margin: 0.7pt 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 9.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">His
seamed membranous lips are thick;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 11pt; margin: 0.7pt 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 9.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">His
molars are protrusive;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 11pt; margin: 0.7pt 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 9.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">He
sprays his words with dental click,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 11pt; margin: 0.7pt 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 9.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">His
speech is most effusive.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 9.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">He
squints with epicanthous eye<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 11pt; margin: 0.7pt 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 9.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Across
a nose prodigious;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 9.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">He
likes his ostrich-eggs quite high,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 11pt; margin: 0.7pt 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 9.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">His
women steatopygeous.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That’s better than I could do, and it’s a guilty pleasure of
mine, even if there are some errors of physical anthropology in there. But as long as we’re on the subject, Hooton
was definitely not in Ogden Nash’s league – here is Ogden Nash on anthropology:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 11.0pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .7pt; mso-line-height-rule: exactly;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 11pt; margin: 0.7pt 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Why
does the Pygmy <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 11pt; margin: 0.7pt 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Indulge
in polygmy? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 11pt; margin: 0.7pt 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">His
tribal dogma <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 11pt; margin: 0.7pt 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Frowns
on monogma. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 11pt; margin: 0.7pt 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Monogma's
a stigma <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 11pt; margin: 0.7pt 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">For
any Pygma. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 11pt; margin: 1.2pt 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">If
he sticks to monogmy <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 11pt; margin: 1.2pt 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 9.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">A
Pygmy's a hogmy. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Anyway, back to Hooton.
His ideas about race, and about human biology generally, certainly weren’t
the worst ones around at the time, but that’s faint praise. I think my biggest problem with Hooton, since
it’s hard to know exactly what he did believe at any point in time, is that he did not use his
position as an authority to confront and repudiate the worst elements of racial
science in America. He went after the Germans, which was safe, and although he
tried to differentiate his racial science from theirs, he ultimately was not
very successful, because his physical anthropology was in fact only subtly
different from theirs. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Sherry Washburn once told me a story about the time he first
met Theodosius Dobzhansky, both of whom were on the faculty at Columbia. Washburn visited Doby, who eyed him warily, and asked, “So you
were a student of Hooton’s? So what
exactly does he mean by “racial type”? I
just don’t understand it .” And Sherry replied,
“I have no idea, and I think neither does he.”
At which point Doby shook his hand, and they became fast friends.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
(Probably bullshit, of course, but Sherry did tell it to me.)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I think Giles’s main mistake was in trying to defend Hooton
rather than trying to complexify him.
And there is a certain irony in Giles going after the AAA’s race
website, rather than real source of the harsh judgment of Hooton, which was
from Sherry Washburn. Washburn got on quite
badly with Hooton’s first two students, Harry Shapiro and Carleton Coon, both
of whom were fiercely loyal to Hooton.
Shapiro was cold to Washburn when he taught at Columbia Medical School,
and was studying the growth of rat skulls.
Coon was giving clandestine assistance to the segregationists, and was a
target of Washburn’s 1962 AAA Presidential address,<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">10</span></span> which consigned racial
anthropology to the dustbin of history, as Washburn had been arguing for a
decade. (In fact, Washburn also recalled Dobzhansky, at the time a member of the American Anthropological Association, rushing up to be the first to shake his hand after the address.)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<sup><o:p></o:p></sup></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That was the point of Washburn’s famous, paradigmatic paper
on “The New Physical Anthropology” (1951).<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; line-height: 115%; vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">11</span></span>
I’m sure you can guess who embodied the old.</div>
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<br /></div>
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References</div>
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</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<ol>
<li>Giles, E. (2012) Two faces of Earnest A. Hooton. <i>Yearbook of Physical Anthropology (Supplement of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology)</i>, 149, Supplement 55:105-113.</li>
<li>Hooton, E. A. (1926) Methods of racial analysis. <i>Science</i>, 63:75-81.</li>
<li>Hooton, E. A. (1936) Plain statements about race. <i>Science</i>, 83:511-513.</li>
<li>Washburn to Hooton, 20 August 1951, Earnest A. Hooton papers, Harvard University.</li>
<li>Hooton, E. A. (1918) <i>American Journal of Physical Anthropology</i>, 1: 365.</li>
<li>Hooton to Madison Grant, 3 November 1933, Earnest A. Hooton Papers, Harvard University.</li>
<li>Hooton, E. A. (1940) <i>Why Men Behave like Apes and Vice Versa</i>. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.</li>
<li>Marks, J. (2012) The origins of anthropological genetics. <i>Current Anthropology</i>, 53:S161-S172.</li>
<li>Hooton, E. A. (1939) Twilight of Man. New York: Putnam. (plate opposite p. 236).</li>
<li>Washburn, S. L. (1963) The study of race. American Anthropologist, 65:521-531.</li>
<li>Washburn, S. L. (1951) The new physical anthropology. Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, Series II, 13:298-304.</li>
</ol>
<br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12576920986455084855noreply@blogger.com39tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6084858487513024522.post-28192113478706499752012-05-14T15:38:00.000-07:002012-05-14T15:39:33.120-07:00Bad Anthro Theatre<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
I haven’t really reviewed a movie since my days in graduate
school at the Arizona Daily Wildcat, but I watched a really bizarre and horrid
one the other night that kind of begs to be belittled.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s
called “<a href="http://www.allegedthemovie.com/index.html" target="_blank">Alleged</a>” – and it’s unclear just what the title actually refers to,
because it’s about <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVD4TjxnJ0M" target="_blank">the famous “Monkey Trial” in which John T. Scopes was charged with, and convicted of, the crime of teaching evolution in Dayton,Tennessee in 1925</a>. Nobody ever said he
was innocent during the trial; his defense was basically about the badness of the law.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This
weird movie purports to be the “real” story of the Scopes Trial, unlike the
classic play and movie “Inherit the Wind,” which contains numerous errors. Well let’s start right there. “Inherit the Wind” contains no errors at all,
because it is a work of fiction, a “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_a_clef" target="_blank">roman-a-clef</a>”. There is no John Scopes, there is Bertram
Cates; there is no Clarence Darrow, only Henry Drummond, no William Jennings
Brian, only Matthew Harrison Brady; and no H. L. Mencken, only E. K.
Hornbeck. Further, it is about the
McCarthy era, not the Roaring Twenties.
Sure it takes place in the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM_Xsmk6NIE" target="_blank">Roaring Twenties</a>, but the play was about <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqQD4dzVkwk" target="_blank">the political suppression of ideas, which was the issue in the 1950s</a>, when it
opened.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Alleged,”
however, self-consciously asserts its verisimilitude, even going so far as to
use the real names of the famous principals, as it butchers the very reality it
claims to imitate. The movie takes place
in a preternaturally clean rural Southern town, free of class prejudice and the
Ku Klux Klan, much less the fire-and-brimstone caterwauling of the age.
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The
movie then integrates a eugenics sub-plot to tie evolution to eugenics. Now this is something I am a bit sympathetic
to, since I’ve written about it over the last few years. There’s only two problems with this plot
contrivance. First, eugenics didn’t
actually come up at the trial. And
second, the people the movie demonizes – Darrow and Mencken – are the ones who
actually wrote eloquently against eugenics (shortly after the trial
ended). In Mencken’s literary magazine, <i>The American Mercury</i>, <a href="http://dododreams.blogspot.com/2011/09/reprint.html" target="_blank">Darrow called the eugenicists “irresponsible fanatics”</a>. In
the <i>Baltimore Sun</i>, Mencken called
eugenics “mainly blather”. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
William
Jennings Bryan was very much the pacifist and isolationist, and was ahead of
his day in his views on equality and his views again social Darwinism. But he didn’t write specifically against
eugenics. Darrow and Mencken did. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZL1fTHIDX0OUg2Sm8cjUaXaLqx16RqGothv93ZcD-h1gi8m7e-N9H9d2sybDtD8V95GZvAvb6Snsw51sP2iO8Dr0E6WZA8DKD2CapQbvi87_H7r3bRFO85LBWfEmWFLCeutbt7QjYqq-J/s1600/rp1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZL1fTHIDX0OUg2Sm8cjUaXaLqx16RqGothv93ZcD-h1gi8m7e-N9H9d2sybDtD8V95GZvAvb6Snsw51sP2iO8Dr0E6WZA8DKD2CapQbvi87_H7r3bRFO85LBWfEmWFLCeutbt7QjYqq-J/s200/rp1.jpg" width="200" /></a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOssMhYmEip9BYaF_2W9mwpkGhVsNCBf_pLsJkSCLO2e3_DWohLb_MIbi5OzvQ7OysEOgQMZs1igIURznan8ii8Qao8pXW3Z_V0rJ5IqpRbyN0q2WvOdYliivgKc99NF3XYCUUS0UrGOnr/s1600/rp2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOssMhYmEip9BYaF_2W9mwpkGhVsNCBf_pLsJkSCLO2e3_DWohLb_MIbi5OzvQ7OysEOgQMZs1igIURznan8ii8Qao8pXW3Z_V0rJ5IqpRbyN0q2WvOdYliivgKc99NF3XYCUUS0UrGOnr/s200/rp2.jpg" width="190" /></a> In fact,
Darrow published his critique of eugenics in H. L. Mencken’s literary magazine,
<i>The American Mercury</i>. When the very first biologist to make a
public critique of eugenics comes forward, it is H. L. Mencken’s friend, the
Johns Hopkins geneticist Raymond Pearl.
And he publishes as well in <i>The
American Mercury</i>, and it is so newsworthy that it gets picked up by the
wire services and makes headlines all across America. Story goes that it even cost Pearl an offer
of a professorship at Harvard. The
point is that, far from being the eugenicist that the film depicts, it is hard
not to see Mencken’s hand all over the mobilization of American opinion <u>against</u>
eugenics.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What
little there is of the famous cross-examination of Bryan by Darrow – <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdHbgFnJ06Q" target="_blank">the climax of “Inherit the Wind”</a> – is actually condensed into a single minute of this
ridiculous movie. This Bryan (played by
former Senator Fred Thompson) is serene, thoughtful, and implacable for his
minute of cross-examination. The event
actually took place on July 20, 1925, on a Monday after most of the journalists
(including Mencken) had left town. Serene,
thoughtful, implacable. This movie’s
cross-examination gives us no glimpse of whatever inspired <i>The New York Times</i> to include in their next day’s Page One
headline, “Angered, He Shouts That He Is Fighting for God against America’s
Greatest Atheist”.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimXcxmj_C0ADnB5__T7Q_yf1PWTjvVHnL0Xf2gWGCgFo-4fpGQQc-xecHq7ophSLm_o1usCW1XQU9cGIwQhZAuo-ZcrJ1zJI1nHtfcPTolD1KP9lCgJM36cn8K1gnMhyphenhyphenMR2PqB4RItQyD4/s1600/Clip_3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimXcxmj_C0ADnB5__T7Q_yf1PWTjvVHnL0Xf2gWGCgFo-4fpGQQc-xecHq7ophSLm_o1usCW1XQU9cGIwQhZAuo-ZcrJ1zJI1nHtfcPTolD1KP9lCgJM36cn8K1gnMhyphenhyphenMR2PqB4RItQyD4/s320/Clip_3.jpg" width="156" /></a></div>
What’s
even weirder is that this film plays around with the actual court testimony
just as egregiously as “Inherit the Wind” did, except that his film claims <u>not</u>
to be doing so, which means that it is more of a lie than “Inherit the Wind”
could possibly be. For example, when William Jennings Bryan volunteers that he believes that the “days” of
creation may have been indefinitely long periods of time (he wasn’t tricked
into it, as “Inherit the Wind” implies), this movie has Darrow respond “You do
not!”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The
truth is much more interesting. Darrow
was surprised to learn that Bryan accepted the age of the earth, but would
certainly not accuse Bryan of perjuring himself by lying about his beliefs
under oath. But District Attorney Tom
Stewart immediately realized Bryan’s answer was a big problem, and interrupted.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">STEWART: I want to interpose another objection. What is the
purpose of this examination?</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But he
was too late. Bryan was already orating.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: #cce1cc; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; margin-bottom: 14pt;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">BRYAN: The purpose is to cast ridicule on everybody who believes
in the Bible, and I am perfectly willing that the world shall know that these
gentlemen have no other purpose than ridiculing every Christian who believes in
the Bible.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But Darrow
hardly ever let an adversary have the last word.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: #cce1cc; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; margin-bottom: 14pt;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">DARROW: We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses
from controlling the education of the United States, and you know it, and that
is all.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So Bryan
continued speechifying.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">BRYAN: I am simply trying to protect the Word of God against the
greatest atheist or agnostic in the United States. I want the papers to know I
am not afraid to get on the stand in front of him and let him do his worst. I
want the world to know that agnosticism is trying to force agnosticism on our
colleges and on our schools, and the people of Tennessee will not permit that
to be done. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Cue the
applause. The day ended about a
half-hour-later, and not at all serenely, as this movie suggests. In fact, “Inherit the Wind” captures the
chaos a lot better. Here is how the day
ended, not at all suggested in Senator Fred Thompson’s portrayal.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: #CCE1CC; margin-bottom: 14.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">BRYAN: Your Honor, I think I can shorten this testimony. The only
purpose Mr. Darrow has is to slur at the Bible, but I will answer his
questions. I will answer it all at once, and I have no objection in the world.
I want the world to know that this man, who does not believe in a God, is
trying to use a court in Tennessee to slur at it, and, while it require time, I
am willing to take it.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: #cce1cc; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; margin-bottom: 14pt;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">DARROW: I object to your statement. I am examining you on your
fool ideas that no intelligent Christian on earth believes!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: #cce1cc; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; margin-bottom: 14pt;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">JUDGE RAULSTON: Court is adjourned until nine o'clock tomorrow
morning.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I
thought it was pretty weird also when Darrow reviews human evolution privately
with his scientists and reduces the fossil evidence to Java Man, Nebraska Man,
and “Boxhole Man”. I think the
screenwriters probably meant “Boxgrove”.
You’d think the scientists would have been even passingly familiar with
“Neanderthal Man” and “Piltdown Man” (both of which were indeed known at the
time, although the latter turned out to be unreal, like the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paluxy_River" target="_blank">Paluxy River footprints that prove humans lived with dinosaurs</a>). </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Nebraska
Man is interesting, because it does represent an egregious example of
scientific overreach. By 1927 it was
understood to be a peccary. Isolated,
worn teeth are sometimes not as clearly diagnostic as we might like, but it
certainly wasn’t something solid enough to bludgeon the creationists with, and
often quite snarkily. Historian
Constance Areson Clark discusses this in her very interesting recent book, “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/God-Evolution-Medicine-Religion-Historical/dp/0801888255" target="_blank">God or Gorilla</a>”.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
The plot
of “Alleged” is actually a clumsy, vapid romance between a budding newsman and
his budding girlfriend, set against the backdrop of the trial. The newsman has no family except a dead
father, and the girlfriend has a black half-sister, which isn’t at all
scandalous in clean, rural 1925 Tennessee.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The real
problem is the idea that a counter-lie must be put out there to offset a prior
lie, in this case, the filmmakers’
perception of “Inherit the Wind”. This
is, I think, related to the stupid creationist idea that there are exactly two
sides to any story: the scientific and the Biblical. And since it is a zero-sum game, anything bad
for science must <i>ipso facto</i> be good
for the Bible. So making Mencken look
bad must make Jesus look good. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The
biggest lie of all, however, is actually in the credits. After placing the story in the backdrop of “actual”
events and “real” personages, in order to claim a degree of verisimilitude that
they don’t actually deserve, the producers actually show the standard
disclaimer.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2JvCGGTVc4hW_HAJiRkq6MGlxTXU3XzL7H-1YI_ZOMappMk5eTUekYgRFAZhk_u86p-0KBeEUHClsgM-2QQESO_hdDnYFAHDAZdF9wBFTMX0mTv-c8IS9lOq7D3Uw7UqO8MrHbjG6Zo1J/s1600/blog1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="147" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2JvCGGTVc4hW_HAJiRkq6MGlxTXU3XzL7H-1YI_ZOMappMk5eTUekYgRFAZhk_u86p-0KBeEUHClsgM-2QQESO_hdDnYFAHDAZdF9wBFTMX0mTv-c8IS9lOq7D3Uw7UqO8MrHbjG6Zo1J/s640/blog1.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Paradoxically, that is probably the truest thing about the movie.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12576920986455084855noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6084858487513024522.post-15409138118334743532012-03-17T06:44:00.003-07:002012-03-17T09:29:29.383-07:00Gorilla my dreams, I adore you<div class="MsoNormal">What to do about geneticists? On one hand, they are so smart that we should accept whatever they say, no matter how absurd, inaccurate, or even racist it may be. (See Nicholas Wade’s <i>Before the Dawn</i>).<a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Gorilla%20my%20dreams.docx#_edn1" name="_ednref1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">[1]</span></span></span></a> On the other hand, they’re ignorant and arrogant assholes and they should be thrown in jail (See Trofim Lysenko).<a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Gorilla%20my%20dreams.docx#_edn2" name="_ednref2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">[2]</span></span></span></a> There has got to be a middle ground.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The gorilla genome is now out, and when combined with human, chimpanzee, and orangutan, it allows us to do a phylogenetic comparison.<a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Gorilla%20my%20dreams.docx#_edn3" name="_ednref3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">[3]</span></span></span></a> We have known since the 1980s that human-chimp-gorilla genetically is a very close call, with DNA tending to place humans and chimps a little closer, but only with a lot of discordance or statistical noise. (That is in fact exactly what the ill-fated DNA hybridization showed, although it was infamously misrepresented.) When the mtDNA data first came out <a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Gorilla%20my%20dreams.docx#_edn4" name="_ednref4" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">[4]</span></span></span></a> they linked human to chimp pairwise, but only if you ignored the fact that over half of the phylogenetically informative DNA sites did not in fact show it to be human-chimp. Those data showed it to be chimp-gorilla and human-gorilla. The only way to extract human-chimp from those data was to treat the question like a Republican primary, where whoever gets the plurality of the votes wins the state. So human-chimp was Mitt Romney, winning the nomination, but with barely 45% of the phylogenetically informative sites.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It then becomes a trivial task to explain away the discordant data, that is to say, the 55% of your data that you have decided is giving you the “wrong” answers. You say it is “incomplete lineage sorting” or the result of ancestral polymorphisms, which have segregated into descendant taxa in a pattern different from the sequence of speciation. Geneticists illustrate this with images that always seem to remind me of maps of the London Underground, with chimpanzees being Bakerloo and humans Victoria Station.</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFwJIykbbMGLGAGFZBJGUKm_ueoUcNGrQ9l-OWxg31bXSWkbFQjNKQgYXBwPzx57cFvb9CwfO7We_L_4FMY2WsCKUg3SdfJ0vWVpJHoH81W81PA1R2Qo2A9oLjAT7eMx_2rT4uoA0IIPu0/s1600/bakerloo+hcg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="177" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFwJIykbbMGLGAGFZBJGUKm_ueoUcNGrQ9l-OWxg31bXSWkbFQjNKQgYXBwPzx57cFvb9CwfO7We_L_4FMY2WsCKUg3SdfJ0vWVpJHoH81W81PA1R2Qo2A9oLjAT7eMx_2rT4uoA0IIPu0/s320/bakerloo+hcg.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But I digress. It might also be parallel mutation or even backcrossing. The problem, though, is that you have a lot of homoplasy, and one of the assumptions of cladistic/phylogenetic analysis is that homoplasy (i.e., observed as discordance) is very, very low compared to synapomorphy (i.e., the shared derived characters that you think are tracking the actual branching history of the species). </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">This is the equivalent of simply choosing the most parsimonious solution to the phylogenetic problem. Most of the data that give a pairwise resolution give <u>this</u> pairwise resolution, therefore it must be the right one. But there is an inherent contradiction in this logic. You are choosing the most parsimonious solution in a system that is not obviously very parsimonious. In other words, if you are willing to accept the possibility that 55% of your phylogenetically informative sites are homoplasies (that is to say, are giving you the “wrong” answer), then how can you reject the idea that 70% of your sites might be giving you the “wrong” answer? I talked about this many years ago in the <i>American Journal of Physical Anthropology</i>.<a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Gorilla%20my%20dreams.docx#_edn5" name="_ednref5" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">[5]</span></span></span></a> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The model that fits the data best is <u>not</u> a model of two successive bifurcations, but what we called at the time a “trichotomy” and now would call “reticulate” or even “rhizotic” evolution.<a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Gorilla%20my%20dreams.docx#_edn6" name="_ednref6" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">[6]</span></span></span></a> <span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"><a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Gorilla%20my%20dreams.docx#_edn7" name="_ednref7" title="">[7]</a></span></span><a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Gorilla%20my%20dreams.docx#_edn7" name="_ednref7" title=""></a></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><br />
</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal">The geneticists working on this problem have been hampered by the cladistic necessity of regarding speciation as events, rather than as processes – when their ape data are showing speciation as processes, not as events. The new paper on the gorilla genome says that 30% of their phylogenetically informative sites are discordant. This is how the new paper imagines the genomic relationships of humans, chimps, and gorillas – as indicating two temporally isolated speciation “events” and whatever the hell is going on in the middle there.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqo4jylE_fk1YrYTb95GXQvyZEua6cCUA1lL2c0zesoWEn82ZIdK0sjiUoFwPWUMcyzGMrW37jzCbWeGmvniYKbuknvVuMG1hA_1Ak5jyRljTgHlowbelkguWTFi-Ej6YeDpuHRVo_I_eU/s1600/Clip_3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqo4jylE_fk1YrYTb95GXQvyZEua6cCUA1lL2c0zesoWEn82ZIdK0sjiUoFwPWUMcyzGMrW37jzCbWeGmvniYKbuknvVuMG1hA_1Ak5jyRljTgHlowbelkguWTFi-Ej6YeDpuHRVo_I_eU/s1600/Clip_3.jpg" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The creationists jumped all over this inconsistency, and it really is just the result of sloppy thinking by the scientists.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.opposingviews.com/i/religion/30-gorilla-genome-contradicts-supposed-evolutionary-phylogeny-humans-and-apes">http://www.opposingviews.com/i/religion/30-gorilla-genome-contradicts-supposed-evolutionary-phylogeny-humans-and-apes</a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">In trying to plug the genomic data into sequential speciation events, we are committing the square-peg-round-hole fallacy. There are historical and ideological reasons for depicting it as two successive, temporally distinct “events,” but that certainly misrepresents the evidence, and most likely misrepresents the biological history. One of the most bizarre illustrations was in a recent introductory textbook, which showed this to students:</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLFKDAhy1YzlFTwqhVo0NwN5mgsMfpfEdI9onjMhlbdMZGvfXjEpken8sK2vmpwbzIDkwQNHrpUyqJDXj6F2IVq2RBwAsDnc-HCP3AUIalyQR25JRns45CCWm09bZogYQjyf0cYLj46wYS/s1600/larsen+phylogeny2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLFKDAhy1YzlFTwqhVo0NwN5mgsMfpfEdI9onjMhlbdMZGvfXjEpken8sK2vmpwbzIDkwQNHrpUyqJDXj6F2IVq2RBwAsDnc-HCP3AUIalyQR25JRns45CCWm09bZogYQjyf0cYLj46wYS/s400/larsen+phylogeny2.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It’s trying to say that there were two speciation events, 7 mya and 6 mya, but has located the 7 mya event incorrectly. If you look at the scale, you’ll see that it’s actually drawn at 8 million, to put a separation between them that shouldn’t be there. The same text draws it this way a bit later. with very little (vertical) time separating the two “events” at 7-8 mya and 5-7 mya, but a lot of (horizontal) space. That ought to learn ‘em!</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZ15vmnWIr8d9vuZilNtGAv_FgSMRxQgl6xNpdy8QuhOCmu5pUBXHd749om7zrZDPIMEBzUzsPYUSpHLecbgqt7SpFV1a9Wq3Mc2QF-Q0PP_se4bEzzpd7FwDnD__hZxfZhyphenhyphenC02FOObbjK/s1600/larsen2a.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="290" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZ15vmnWIr8d9vuZilNtGAv_FgSMRxQgl6xNpdy8QuhOCmu5pUBXHd749om7zrZDPIMEBzUzsPYUSpHLecbgqt7SpFV1a9Wq3Mc2QF-Q0PP_se4bEzzpd7FwDnD__hZxfZhyphenhyphenC02FOObbjK/s400/larsen2a.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Obviously, that’s not the text I use. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The new paper on the gorilla genome, I might add, sets the “speciation events” at 6.0 and 3.7 mya. The 3.7 mya date for the divergence of human and chimpanzee is simply, to the extent that anything can be falsified in the fossil record, <i>false</i> - although it is oddly congruent with some of Vince Sarich and Allan Wilson’s early writings on the subject in the 1960s.<a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Gorilla%20my%20dreams.docx#_edn8" name="_ednref8" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">[8]</span></span></span></a> The (myriad) authors of the new paper go on to argue that they can juggle some of the parameters in their computer program to make the dates come out to about 6 and 10 million years ago – <i>as if that is supposed to give us confidence</i>!</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">For the Alternative Introduction, I drew this figure to illustrate the problem.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2aDctrVMT9VRWW9YDyoCJCsZicd8og_0-yuuHcRODuPTfy09VFoRe1ZgrxoFpMy25jUBSuayEWKRaRVHUkdBi8sFCFUjivlZZLTXdV5HAWBLjquSpFGg2SuqOCXJGUKYOSsCeudKJBWvK/s1600/not+the.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="196" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2aDctrVMT9VRWW9YDyoCJCsZicd8og_0-yuuHcRODuPTfy09VFoRe1ZgrxoFpMy25jUBSuayEWKRaRVHUkdBi8sFCFUjivlZZLTXdV5HAWBLjquSpFGg2SuqOCXJGUKYOSsCeudKJBWvK/s400/not+the.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Rather than prurient talk about cross-species buggery on the part of early hominids, how about speciation here as a temporal process, and populations through time as anastemosing capillary systems (Earnest Hooton’s metaphor, expressing the same point as rhizomatic and reticulate evolution). It is also noteworthy that we tend to model and depict the gene pools of all three species as equivalent, when we’ve known for years that chimps and gorillas, even as relict populations, have gene pools that are considerably more extensive than that of our own species. That is to say, <i>Homo sapiens</i> is relatively depauperate in genetic diversity. The only study to try and incorporate that information into a phylogenetic analysis, many years ago, found that it completely obscured the phylogenetic “signal” and that it was therefore a fool’s errand to try and extract two successive bifurcations from a genomic analysis of human, chimpanzee, and gorilla.<a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Gorilla%20my%20dreams.docx#_edn9" name="_ednref9" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">[9]</span></span></span></a> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Interestingly, the new paper actually did look at diversity in gorilla genomes, but didn’t incorporate that into their phylogenetic analysis. Bottom line: Human evolution is probably more interesting than the geneticists realize.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div><br />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><div id="edn1"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -0.5in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Gorilla%20my%20dreams.docx#_ednref1" name="_edn1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;">[1]</span></span></span></a> Wade N. 2006. Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors. New York: Penguin.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><br />
</div></div><div id="edn2"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -0.5in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Gorilla%20my%20dreams.docx#_ednref2" name="_edn2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;">[2]</span></span></span></a> Medvedev Z, and Lerner I. 1969. The Rise and Fall of TD Lysenko. New York: Columbia University Press.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><br />
</div></div><div id="edn3"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -0.5in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Gorilla%20my%20dreams.docx#_ednref3" name="_edn3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;">[3]</span></span></span></a> Scally A, Dutheil JY, Hillier LW, Jordan GE, Goodhead I, Herrero J, Hobolth A, Lappalainen T, Mailund T, Marques-Bonet T et al. . 2012. Insights into hominid evolution from the gorilla genome sequence. Nature 483(7388):169-175.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><br />
</div></div><div id="edn4"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -0.5in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Gorilla%20my%20dreams.docx#_ednref4" name="_edn4" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;">[4]</span></span></span></a> Horai S, Satta Y, Hayasaka K, Kondo R, Inoue T, Ishida T, Hayashi S, and Takahata N. 1992. Man's place in hominoidea revealed by mitochondrial DNA genealogy. Journal of Molecular Evolution 35(1):32-43.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><br />
</div></div><div id="edn5"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -0.5in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Gorilla%20my%20dreams.docx#_ednref5" name="_edn5" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;">[5]</span></span></span></a> Marks J. 1994. Blood will tell (won't it?)? A century of molecular discourse in anthropological systematics. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 94:59-79.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><br />
</div></div><div id="edn6"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -0.5in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Gorilla%20my%20dreams.docx#_ednref6" name="_edn6" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;">[6]</span></span></span></a> Marks J. 1995. Learning to live with a trichotomy. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 98:211-213.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><br />
</div></div><div id="edn7"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -0.5in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Gorilla%20my%20dreams.docx#_ednref7" name="_edn7" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;">[7]</span></span></span></a> Arnold M. 2009. Reticulate Evolution and Humans: Origins and Ecology. New York: Oxford University Press.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><br />
</div></div><div id="edn8"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -0.5in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Gorilla%20my%20dreams.docx#_ednref8" name="_edn8" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;">[8]</span></span></span></a> Sarich VM. 1968. The origin of the hominids: An immunological approach. In: Washburn SL, and Jay PC, editors. Perspectives on Human Evolution I. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. p 94-121.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><br />
</div></div><div id="edn9"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -0.5in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Gorilla%20my%20dreams.docx#_ednref9" name="_edn9" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 115%;">[9]</span></span></span></a> </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Ruano G, Rogers, Jeffrey A., Ferguson-Smith, Anne C., Kidd, Kenneth K. 1992. DNA sequence polymorphism within hominoid species exceeds the number of phylogenetically informative characters for a HOX2 locus Molecular Biology and Evolution 9(4):575-586.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><br />
</div></div></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12576920986455084855noreply@blogger.com31tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6084858487513024522.post-34743986573783446812012-02-02T08:15:00.000-08:002012-02-02T09:50:03.984-08:00Ten points for evolutionary psychology (but not a touchdown and a field goal)<div class="MsoNormal">1. There is no Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness. “Pleistocene Africa” covers a lot of time and turf.<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"><a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Anthropomics.docx#_edn1" name="_ednref1" title="">[i]</a></span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><br />
</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Anthropomics.docx#_edn1" name="_ednref1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"></span></a></div><div class="MsoNormal">2. <i>The Descent of Man</i> is Darwin’s worst book, full of sexist Victorian claptrap. Even William Jennings Bryan knew that.<a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Anthropomics.docx#_edn2" name="_ednref2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">[ii]</span></span></span></a> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">3. What 1000 male college students in Texas think about women cannot be extrapolated to the minds of the entire human species. Nor can they be extrapolated to the minds of australopithecines, in spite of the obvious joke.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">4. Homology is a Darwinian relationship, the result of common descent; analogy is a literary device, the application of metaphor. Humans have slavery; ants have “slavery”. Humans rape; ducks "rape”. Humans wage war; chimpanzees “wage war”.<a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Anthropomics.docx#_edn3" name="_ednref3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">[iii]</span></span></span></a> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">5. Life evolves; culture “evolves”.<a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Anthropomics.docx#_edn4" name="_ednref4" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">[iv]</span></span></span></a> Even Herbert Spencer knew that.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">6. Homologous does not mean “the same as”. A sparrow’s wing is homologous to your arm, but it can flap it and fly away and you can’t. A chimp’s foot is adapted for grasping; a human’s foot is adapted for weight-bearing. Their brains are adapted to different functions as well.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">7. Whether or not chimpanzees are cultural, they are doing things quite differently than humans are, so you still have to come up with a different descriptor for human behavior: like “euculture” or “accumulated culture”.<a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Anthropomics.docx#_edn5" name="_ednref5" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">[v]</span></span></span></a> It’s the same distinction, and we’ve already made it. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">8. A non-cultural chimpanzee is a chimpanzee; a non-cultural human is a corpse.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">9. There is no human nature independent of human culture.<span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"><a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Anthropomics.docx#_edn6" name="_ednref6" title="">[vi]</a></span></span><a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Anthropomics.docx#_edn6" name="_ednref6" title=""></a></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><br />
</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal">10. Hunter-gatherers are no more human than the rest of us, your ancestors did not live in the Kalahari desert, and the Yanomamo aren’t hunter-gatherers.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">And one more for good measure: Reading a book by Steven Pinker does not make you an expert on human evolution.</span> </span><br />
<div><br />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><div id="edn1"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Anthropomics.docx#_ednref1" name="_edn1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">[i]</span></span></span></a> <span style="font-size: 12pt;">Irons, W. 1998. "Adaptively Relevant Environments Versus the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness." In <i>Evolutionary Anthropology. </i> 6:194-204.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><br />
</div></div><div id="edn2"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Anthropomics.docx#_ednref2" name="_edn2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">[ii]</span></span></span></a> <span style="font-size: 12pt;">“Darwin explains that man’s mind became superior to woman’s because, among our brute ancestors, the males fought for the females and thus strengthened their minds. If he had lived until now, he would not have felt it necessary to make so ridiculous an explanation, because woman’s mind is not now believed to be inferior to man’s” (Bryan W. J. 1922. God and evolution. <i>The New York Times</i>, 26 February.).<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><br />
</div></div><div id="edn3"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Anthropomics.docx#_ednref3" name="_edn3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">[iii]</span></span></span></a> <span style="font-size: 12pt;">Simon, M. A. 1978. "Sociobiology: the Aesop's fables of science." In <i>The Sciences. </i> 18:18-21.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><br />
</div></div><div id="edn4"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Anthropomics.docx#_ednref4" name="_edn4" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">[iv]</span></span></span></a> <span style="font-size: 12pt;">Fracchia, J. and Lewontin, R. C. 1999. "Does culture evolve?" In <i>History and Theory. </i> 38:52-78.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><br />
</div></div><div id="edn5"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Anthropomics.docx#_ednref5" name="_edn5" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">[v]</span></span></span></a> <span style="font-size: 12pt;">Wilson, E. O. and Lumsden, C. J. 1981. <i>Genes, mind and culture: the coevolutionary process</i>. Harvard University Press. Mesoudi, A. 2011. <i>Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences</i>. University of Chicago Press.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoEndnoteText"><br />
</div></div><div id="edn6"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><a href="file:///C:/Jonfiles/Anthropomics.docx#_ednref6" name="_edn6" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">[vi]</span></span></span></a> <span style="font-size: 12pt;">See Clifford Geertz’s 1966 essay “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465097197/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=livinganthrop-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0465097197" target="_blank"><span style="color: windowtext;">The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man</span></a>” reprinted in <i>The Interpretation of Cultures</i> (1973). More recently, Keller, E. F. 2010. The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture. Duke University Press. And nicely reviewed by Jason Antrosio </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: black;"><a href="http://www.livinganthropologically.com/anthropology/human-nature/">www.livinganthropologically.com/anthropology/human-nature/</a></span></span><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"><br />
</div></div></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12576920986455084855noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6084858487513024522.post-3885090619943559662011-12-31T07:49:00.000-08:002012-01-03T11:47:31.607-08:00Simpson story #3<div class="MsoNormal">One day in 1983, while I was over at the Simpsons’ doing the typing, I mentioned that the local PBS station in Tucson was about to start re-running the Richard Leakey series, “The Making of Mankind”. Anne Roe Simpson thought it would be lovely to watch over lunch, and George agreed, and so we toodled off from the library into the house and turned on the TV.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Anne made George his lunch (two martinis, every day for half a century) and sat down to knit some booties for their new great-grandchild. The show begins; it’s the introduction to the series. Richard Leakey comes on. Anne mentions how they happened to be visiting Rusinga Island when his mother Mary found that <i>Proconsul</i> fossil. Remember, G? (She called him ”G”. Nobody else did.) GGS starts sucking down his lunch and zoning out.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Richard Leakey comes back on, announcing to the audience that there are some wonderful new ideas in evolutionary theory, and we’re going to hear about them from the amazing and wonderful Stephen Jay Gould. Gould comes on and says, “Stasis... blah blah blah ... change ... blah blah blah ... punctuated equilibria”. Simpson, who had only a minute earlier been fading fast, suddenly straightens up, as if detecting the subtle presence of another adult male Hamadryas baboon nearby. From behind the Coke-bottle eyeglasses, his eyelids pop open, like Mister Magoo’s.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“The great man is about to speak,” said the graduate student in my head, “So listen carefully.” Gould’s star had risen to the apex of evolutionary biology – I had been an avid reader of his <i>Natural History</i> columns since starting graduate school in the late 1970s. And now I was going to hear what George Gaylord Simpson had to say about his work.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Simpson leaned forward. The future faux historian in me froze the moment. And Simpson said, “Boo! Boo! Boo!” Even Anne joined in: “Hiss! Boo!”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And that is what I remember, for all time: George Gaylord Simpson booing at Stephen Jay Gould on the fucking television set.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">*********</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"> Simpson felt as though Gould had been making his own reputation in part by putting him down. In particular, he didn’t like Gould’s argument that Simpson “had it” in <i>Tempo and Mode in Evolution</i> (1944) but “lost it” in <i>The Major Features of Evolution</i> (1953). He felt, to some extent rightly, besieged by the punctuated equilibriists, the cladists, and the vicariance biogeographers – all of whom were bouncing their new ideas off of Simpson’s – without being able to see that as a testament to the scope of his impact upon the field. Once I suggested that one could make an analogy to Darwin’s first (1859) and last (1872) editions of <i>The Origin of Species</i>. The first is the one that made a mark on the modern world, the one that caused the sensation by presenting a bold and convincing naturalistic explanation for adaptation and the taxonomic hierarchy, which had previously not had one. The last edition is flabbier, because it incorporates rebuttals and side arguments that don’t really add much, over a century later. So maybe the first one is the more important one to read, all things considered, and maybe the same holds for Gould’s point about the importance of <i>Tempo and Mode in Evolution</i>.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Frankly, I have no idea where I got the balls to say such a thing to Dr. Simpson. I can only guess that it must have been after lunch, so he was a bit mellow. He just growled, “The sixth was the one that Darwin intended for posterity.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Years later, though – Darwin’s own Victorian inbred sexist intentions be damned! - I recommend the first to students. That was the important one. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Gould's essay, though, pissed off Simpson so much that when Gould subsequently published a <i>Natural History</i> piece on how his three idols while growing up were his father, Joe DiMaggio, and George Gaylord Simpson, GGS wrote him a nasty letter that ended something like, “and I don’t want to be your idol any more, either!” True to his word, when PBS did a profile of Gould a few years later, Gould looked straight into the camera and told the audience how his three idols while growing up had been his father, Joe DiMaggio, and ... Charles Darwin. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 1in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -0.5in;"><b><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><br />
</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 1in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -0.5in;"><b><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Gould SJ. 1981. G. G. Simpson, paleontology, and the modern synthesis. In: Mayr E, and Provine, W., editor. The Evolutionary Synthesis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. p 153-172.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">***********<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Here’s something new, a book on applied evolution, based on a wonderful Darwin Bicentennial Symposium in Melbourne, back in ’09 (as Victoria was on fire, I recall). </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521760550/">http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521760550/</a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I’m essay #16, in between Douglas Futuyma and Michael Ruse, here to remind you what a lousy idea it was to try to apply evolution to human society a century ago. Anthropologists are such killjoys, aren’t we? </div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12576920986455084855noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6084858487513024522.post-33576076386074341202011-11-25T09:23:00.000-08:002012-01-04T11:20:24.236-08:00So, est-ce la science?<div class="MsoNormal">The American Anthropological Association’s one hundred and tenth annual meeting, held in Montreal, is over. Over six thousand people registered, more than ever before, but certainly fewer than next year, barring another San Francisco chambermaid strike (which, you may recall, made us international laughingstocks just a few years ago).</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"> Had a pretty good time. Saw a lot of people I like, and didn’t see too many I can’t stand. (Those people tend to avoid the AAA, anyway.) Overall, it was kind of cold, kind of inconvenient, and kind of expensive.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"> So, Is This Shit Science? Actually the session was called, Science in Anthropology: An Open Discussion. (I know, I left out the “merde” in the title of this post, but I don’t know where to put it.) Ad-libbed a line about how Whether or not this is science, I needed a fucking GPS to find this room. Got a titter. I think the only substantive thing I had to say was that there is no anti-science conspiracy in anthropology, and only a paranoiac would keep saying it. Now the paranoiacs are out to get me. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"> Neither the organizer (Peter Peregrine) nor the chair (Virginia Dominguez) really had much to say. I held in reserve the fact that the Association was going to present its “Anthropology in Media” award the following night to someone who runs a pseudo-scientific internet dating site based on an updating of the Hippocratic humors – in which you are governed by testosterone, estrogen, dopamine, or serotonin – as if that is something that brings honor to the practice of anthropology. But it never came up. (The site is called chemistry.com, and is not about to be honored by the American Chemical Society anytime soon. )</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"> Russ Bernard had some interesting demographic facts, but didn’t convince me that the primary issues are demographic. (I’m still mad at having been told back in the 1980s that there were all these anthropologists about to drop dead, and there would be all these jobs available...) From the floor, Karen Strier seemed to agree that the problem was ecological/demographic (people fighting over resources), rather than ontological (the complexity of rigorous thought in a subject that spans biological and symbolic processes). I still like to cite an old paper by Ralph Linton, who observed in 1938 (in one of those great old review articles in <i>Science</i> that you just don’t see any more):</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">This current tendency to bring physical anthropology into closer liaison with a whole series of natural sciences may widen still further the gap between it and cultural anthropology. The connection is already so tenuous that a complete break between the two seems well within the bounds of possibility. The phenomena with which the two disciplines deal are of different orders and the question is whether there is any real link between these orders.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"> I saw eye-to-eye with Dan Segal on most of the issues, except one – the “Evolution is just a theory” warning-sticker-on-the-textbook issue. Dan seemed to say that it’s true, and actually is a teaching moment for the philosophy/anthropology of science. Both clauses are right, but I don’t think you can so easily dismiss the fact that it really is about fundamentalist Christians trying to undermine science education in the United States. I think it would be a great idea for scientists to actually learn something about science before trying to teach about it (rather than how to do science, which they are good at), but allying with the creationists (or even the allowing the perception thereof) is not a winning formula. There’s a too-clever-for-his-own-good sociologist of science named Steve Fuller, and a philosopher named Jerry Fodor, who have gone down that road, to the extent that nobody listens to them, in spite of the fact the they do indeed have something interesting to say. (In fact, a really good historian named David Livingstone recently sent me a manuscript on that very subject.)</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"> On the other hand, the teaching of anthropology is also under unprecedented threat. Not just in Florida, either (where the Republican governor, apparently frustrated by his daughter’s enlightened choice of a major, called anthropology out as singularly undesirable. I can understand why – Edward Tylor had defined it as “a reformer’s science” way back in 1871.) Actually, one of the creepiest bits of information I picked up (at the business meeting) is that there are no longer any departments of anthropology in any of the historically black colleges in the US. Frankly, I haven’t seen the evolutionary biologists flocking to our defense.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"> Maybe something else interesting was said. It made <i>The Chronicle of Higher Education</i>’s blog the next day. Julienne Rutherford keeps threatening to post a video of it. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">---------------------------------------------</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><b><a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Anthropologists-Seek-a-More/129823/">http://chronicle.com/article/Anthropologists-Seek-a-More/129823/</a><o:p></o:p></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><b>Fodor JA, Piattelli-Palmarini M. 2010. <i>What Darwin Got Wrong</i>. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux. <o:p></o:p></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><b>Fuller S. 2008. <i>Dissent Over Descent: Intelligent Design's Challenge to Darwinism</i>. New York: Icon Books. <o:p></o:p></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><b>Linton R. 1938. The present status of anthropology. <i>Science</i> 87: 241-48.<o:p></o:p></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><b>Tylor EB. 1871. <i>Primitive Culture</i>. London: John Murray. <o:p></o:p></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.livinganthropologically.com/2011/11/22/anthropologys-challenge-better-stronger-bigger/">http://www.livinganthropologically.com/2011/11/22/anthropologys-challenge-better-stronger-bigger/</a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://blogs.plos.org/neuroanthropology/2011/11/22/the-montreal-anthropology-meetings-recap-of-aaa-coverage/">http://blogs.plos.org/neuroanthropology/2011/11/22/the-montreal-anthropology-meetings-recap-of-aaa-coverage/</a><br />
<br />
<br />
P.S. - Dan Segal articulates his position on how to engage creationism on his blog, here:<br />
<a href="http://daniel-segal.blogspot.com/2011/08/republican-candidates-attacks-on.html">http://daniel-segal.blogspot.com/2011/08/republican-candidates-attacks-on.html</a><br />
<br />
P.P.S. - Here's the audio:<br />
<a href="http://blog.aaanet.org/2011/11/28/science-in-anthropology-session-at-aaas-annual-meeting/">http://blog.aaanet.org/2011/11/28/science-in-anthropology-session-at-aaas-annual-meeting/</a> </div></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12576920986455084855noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6084858487513024522.post-5513684937313296852011-10-26T16:49:00.000-07:002011-12-31T09:31:17.651-08:00Tell us about Washington, son - Is it run by a bunch of crooks?<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> It’s funny how political humor from 60 years ago could still stand up today. Li’l Abner was a fairly subversive political satire when it started running in the 1930s, the “Doonesbury” of its day. Like Lucy and Desi’s baby a few years later, the marriage of Abner Yokum and Daisy Mae Scragg was a huge media event in 1952. In 1956 it was turned into a Broadway musical, with a fine score by Johnny Mercer and Gene DePaul, and a villainous plutocrat called General Bullmoose (“He makes the rules and he intends to keep it that-a way / What’s good for General Bullmoose is good for the USA”). <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> The most famous song is about Jubilation T. Cornpone (unshaven and shorn-pone!), but the most amazing thing is the Foucaultian eugenics song, sung by the government’s scientists:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Fellow scientists! What delicious conformity! Imagine – all reactions completely, utterly, precisely alike! Think of the unbounded horizons of science! When we can make all mankind look, act, think, feel, hope, desire, dream, buy and sell, inhale and exhale, exactly alike!<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Oh, happy day, when miracles take place<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">And scientists control the human race,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">When we assume authority of human chromosomes,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">And assembly-line women, conveyor-belt men, settle down in push-button homes.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Oh, happy day, when all the cells conform<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">And the exceptional becomes the norm,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">When from a test-tube we produce gargantuas or gnomes,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">And assembly-line babies, conveyor-belt storks, only come to push-button homes.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">So much of this, so much of that for the ears and eyes,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">So much of that, so much of this for the toes and thighs.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Pour in a pot, stir up the lot, that's the basic plan,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">What have we got? I'll tell you what: We've got man-made man!<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Oh, happy day, when we can choose their looks<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">From formulae in scientific books<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">And add their personalities from psychiatric tomes<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">And assembly-line women, conveyor-belt men, settle down in push-button homes.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">But what is inspiring this blog entry is the song describing the government after Li’l Abner visits DC for the first time. Here is a clip from the 1959 film version of the musical, which retained the male Broadway principals, but not the females (Leslie Parrish for Edie Adams as Daisy Mae, and Stella Stevens for Tina Louise as Appassionata von Climax, but notably retaining the immortal Julie Newmar as Stupefyin’ Jones). The indented material was deleted from the movie, but it’s all still amazingly resonant.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/f5cR6JpRCnM?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Them city folks and we’uns<br />
Are purdy much alike<br />
Though they ain't used to living in the sticks.<br />
We don't like stone or ce-ment<br />
But we is in agree-ment<br />
When we gets down to talking politics<br />
<br />
The country's in the very best of hands, the best of hands, the best of hands<br />
<br />
The treasury says the national debt is climbing to the sky,<br />
And government expenditures have never been so high,<br />
It makes a feller get a gleam of pride within his eye <br />
To see how our economy expands.<br />
The country's in the very best of hands<br />
<br />
The country's in the very best of hands, the best of hands, the best of hands.<br />
<br />
<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">[You oughtta hear the senate when they’re drawing up a bill<br />
Whereases and to-wits are crowded in each codicil<br />
Such legal terminology would give your heart a thrill<br />
There's phrases there that no one understands<br />
The country's in the very best of hands<br />
<br />
The building boom, they say, is getting bigger every day<br />
And when I asked a feller “How could everybody pay?”<br />
He come up with an answer that made everything okay:<br />
“Supplies are getting greater than demands.”<br />
The country's in the very best of hands<br />
<br />
Don't you believe them congressmen and senators are dumb<br />
When they run into problems that is tough to overcome<br />
They just declares a thing they calls a “moratorium”: <br />
The upper and the lower house disbands.<br />
The country's in the very best of hands.]<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
The farm bill should be eight-nine percent of parity.<br />
Another fellow recommends It should be ninety-three.<br />
But eighty, ninety-five percent, who cares about degree,<br />
It's parity that no one understands!<br />
The country's in the very best of hands<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Us voters is connected to the nominee,<br />
The nominee's connected to the treasury,<br />
When he ain't connected to the treasury,<br />
He sets around on his thigh bone.<br />
<br />
They sets around in this place they got, <br />
This big congressional parking lot,<br />
Just sets around on their you-know-what,<br />
Up there, they calls it their thigh bone.<br />
<br />
Them bones, them bones gonna rise again<br />
Gonna exercise the franchise again<br />
Gonna tax us up to our eyes again<br />
When they gets ‘em off’n their thigh bone<br />
<br />
The country's in the very best of hands, the best of hands, the best of hands<br />
<br />
Them GOP's and democrats each hates the other one.<br />
They's always criticizing how the country should be run.<br />
But neither tells the public what the other’s gone and done.<br />
As long as no one knows where no one stands,<br />
The country's in the very best of hands<br />
<br />
<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">[They sits around in this place they’re at, <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Where folks in Congress has always sat<br />
Just sits around on their excess fat,<br />
Up there they calls it their thigh bone<br />
<br />
They sits around till they starts to snore <br />
Jumps up and hollers “I has the floor!”<br />
Then sits right down where they sat before.<br />
Up there they calls it their thigh bone.<br />
<br />
Them bones, them bones gonna rise again<br />
So dignified and so wise again<br />
While the budget doubles in size again<br />
When it gets them off of their thigh bone<br />
<br />
The country's in the very best of hands the best of hands, the best of hands]<br />
<br />
<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">The money that they taxes us, that's known as revenues.<br />
They compounds the collaterals, subtracts the residues.<br />
Don't worry about the principal and interest that accrues,<br />
They're shipping all that stuff to foreign lands<br />
The country's in the very best of hands<br />
<br />
<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
<b> So here’s the genetics question: Which of the actors in that clip do I share 12.5% of my DNA with, by descent, including my Y chromosome?</b> I’ll give you a hint, it’s my father’s father’s brother. No, it’s not Peter Palmer (Abner), and it’s not Stubby Kaye (Marryin’ Sam). <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIp7VAklcTWD9sFl5H-luoJhP5J_1t_2E9g7I-xHzN1MCsscaPHuHmDUt9WJgwnffb6K_sOg3lQ2YKjVnzTuYMrmBqW2LoHfvxDHJLPyeJoPjGRMX7cMK5oSUXNtLSPfHQOQmeenzJw83-/s1600/%25283%2529a.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIp7VAklcTWD9sFl5H-luoJhP5J_1t_2E9g7I-xHzN1MCsscaPHuHmDUt9WJgwnffb6K_sOg3lQ2YKjVnzTuYMrmBqW2LoHfvxDHJLPyeJoPjGRMX7cMK5oSUXNtLSPfHQOQmeenzJw83-/s1600/%25283%2529a.jpg" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> Watch carefully when Pappy Yokum says “Tell us about the government, all them crooks!” at 0:59. See the resemblance? <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> All right, this is like Hamlet convincing Polonius to see camels and whales in the clouds. I might as well be related to Julie Newmar. But that’s Joe E. Marks. He was in several things: He played Smee in the Mary Martin – Cyril Ritchard “Peter Pan” and he was the first person on camera in the Lesley Ann Warren - Rodgers & Hammerstein “Cinderella”. You can also hear him here, in the 1965 musical, “Flora, The Red Menace” which was Liza Minnelli’s first Broadway lead:<br />
<br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/SqqlVP437nU?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">And I still have her autograph, from when we went backstage and met her. I think it was just before 3M invented invisible tape.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgX_ewujoxcmeeSjwu0QdLzAbY_VoMRWHs63-7JgbSj3JX9FdhfIuRBS0YyRbeIGsf6ueCkev24_0Mdkiaxjcc0-6s8L5eRhfgLXKuGckh5RKQqBGM3Wk7Rarep564zHtzM_EhntObrTHwM/s1600/auto.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgX_ewujoxcmeeSjwu0QdLzAbY_VoMRWHs63-7JgbSj3JX9FdhfIuRBS0YyRbeIGsf6ueCkev24_0Mdkiaxjcc0-6s8L5eRhfgLXKuGckh5RKQqBGM3Wk7Rarep564zHtzM_EhntObrTHwM/s320/auto.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Al Capp, the cartoonist who drew Li’l Abner, was quite a douchebag in real life, no matter what his politics. Although his politics were progressive in first few decades of Li’l Abner, he swung to the right as the country moved to the left. Here he chats with John and Yoko, and sounds almost like Eric Cartman. At the time, he and John Lennon were about equally famous, and both were more famous than you-know-who. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/7BV3i6ZGECc?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: small;"></span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Oddly, although alkaptonuria was one of the first diseases shown to be inherited genetically, he didn’t have it.</span></span><br />
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</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12576920986455084855noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6084858487513024522.post-59769174166299929612011-09-29T19:13:00.000-07:002011-09-29T19:17:23.707-07:00Everybody’s favorite Nazi vacuum-cleaner mogul<div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Once upon a time there was an incredibly hot Danish model, named Inga Arvad. How hot was she? She was named Miss Denmark, 1928. She parlayed that crown into a movie career, although that career only lasted for two movies: most notably, <i>Flugten fra Millionerne</i>, something like “Fleeing from the Masses”. She marries the director, a charismatic Hungarian doctor/explorer/filmmaker named Pál Fejös, whom we will call Paul Fejos.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Fejos has some wealthy friends, including the founder of Electrolux Vacuum Cleaners, a Swedish industrialist named Axel Wenner-Gren. Axel has branched out from vacuum cleaners to munitions, and some of his biggest clients are the Germans. Inga decides that she’d rather do journalism than acting and modeling, and through Axel, she manages to get the first exclusive interview with Hermann Göring, Hitler’s right-hand man, and with Adolf himself. At the 1936 Olympics (the Jesse Owens games), she sits in Hitler’s box and is introduced by him as the epitome of Nordic beauty.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Inga emigrates to America shortly thereafter, and settles in New York, where she enrolls in the journalism school at Columbia University in 1940. Her classmates, however, quickly tire of hearing her complaints about the Jews, and they put the FBI onto her as a possible Nazi spy. When the G-Men break into her apartment, they discover that she has an autographed picture of Hitler on her mantelpiece, and so they conclude that she is <u>not</u> a Nazi spy – because what kind of a Nazi spy would have an autographed picture of Hitler in their living room? – but they decide to keep her under surveillance as a sympathizer. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> She is still under surveillance, and still married, when she moves to DC to start writing a gossip column for a local paper, The Washington Post-Herald, and starts schtupping the dashing second son of the wealthy former US ambassador to England. The former ambassador is Joseph P. Kennedy. The son is John F.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Suffice it to say, J. Edgar Hoover lived for shit like this. He gets a hold of Papa Joe, and mentions that his son, in the Navy, is frolicking with this Nazi sympathizer. Papa Joe mulls it over, and finds only three things wrong with his son’s amorous activities. One, she’s married. Two, she’s a Nazi. And three, she’s a Protestant. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> So he leaks the relationship to the columnist Walter Winchell, who writes on January 12, 1942: “One of ex-Ambassador’s Kennedy’s eligible sons is the target of a Washington gal columnist’s affections. So much so she has consulted her barrister about divorcing her exploring groom. Pa Kennedy no like.” The tryst is outed, and abruptly terminated, and Kennedy has his son sent first to South Carolina, and thence to the Pacific theater. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Winchell’s column, however, raised an interesting question: Where was her “exploring groom”, and why wasn’t he at home with his smoking hot Nordic beauty queen columnist wife?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Answer: Machu Picchu, of all places, with his old buddy Axel Wenner-Gren. It seems as though Axel Wenner-Gren has some money in US accounts, and the Fed doesn’t like his politics, and are threatening to take it away from him, unless he does something philanthropic with it. So Axel wants to start a fund for his side interest, Nordic studies, and would like Fejos to run it. They compromise that it will be named after Wenner-Gren’s anthropological interest, but will be administered by Fejos according to normative anthropological ideas and interests. And Fejos cables his wife (soon to be ex-wife), “Well, here it is, your first break in the greatest institution of newspaper writing in the U.S. You made Winchell’s column.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Paul Fejos kept the Viking Fund, later the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, resolutely anthropologically mainstream. He consulted with the great ones at Columbia – Ralph Linton, Sherry Washburn – for suggestions about what to fund, and helped subsidize the development of radiocarbon dating, and disseminating Washburn’s new physical anthropology, etc. – to his everlasting credit, and to that of his successors.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Because it could easily have been otherwise. Around the same time, a wealthy textile merchant named Wickliffe Draper was looking to start a philanthropy by which to support like-minded scientists. He called it The Pioneer Fund, and tapped the eugenicist Harry Laughlin to be its first president, in 1937. Laughlin had been awarded an honorary doctorate from Nazi-controlled Heidelberg University the year before, in recognition of his pioneering work in the field of encouraging the modern state to sterilize its citizens involuntarily. The Pioneer Fund, throughout its history, has chosen its beneficiaries quite differently from The Wenner-Gren Foundation. A list of their grantees reads like a Who’s Who of Anachronistic Biological Determinism, resolutely faithful to the principal scientific and political interests of its benefactor, all those years ago. Its current president is the psychologist J. Philippe Rushton.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Lombardo, P. A. (2002) '"The American Breed": Nazi Eugenics and the Origins of the Pioneer Fund', <i>Albany Law Review</i>, 65: 743-830.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Rushton, J. P. (2002) 'The Pioneer Fund and the scientific study of human differences', <i>Albany Law Review</i>, 66: 207-262.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><b><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Tucker, W. H. (2002) <i>The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund</i>, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.</span><o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">************************</div><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">I should add, old Axel Wenner-Gren sure knew how to make a vacuum cleaner. My mother bought an Electrolux in 1950, and it still works.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12576920986455084855noreply@blogger.com217tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6084858487513024522.post-50716358659712301892011-08-01T08:53:00.000-07:002011-08-01T08:53:22.882-07:00Stupid Religions of the World, Volume 2<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The Hebrews finally wrote their legends down around 500 BC, and produced a masterpiece of redaction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It blends Canaanite traditions with Babylonian traditions (from the 6<sup><span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span></sup> century exile, ended by Cyrus the Great), and gives the people a national identity rooted in the oldest civilization they had ever heard of, Egypt.</span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>One of the most remarkable features of the beginning of Genesis is the way in which it relates the same ostensible events in two successive different (even contradictory) voices.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These are actually marked for the reader textually, as the work of a Being referred to as “God” (Elohim) and “Lord God” (YHWH Elohim).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus, in Genesis 1:27, “And God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He them; male and female created He them.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And then slightly later (in Genesis 2:7), “The the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (and Lord God doesn’t get around to making woman until 2:22).</span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And thus are the sacred stories of different groups of peoples officially harmonized.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A millennium or so later, the Christians will do the same sort of thing, albeit a bit more clumsily, with the four gospels.</span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The point is to give the Hebrews (later, Israelites; even later, Jews) a history, an origin, a unity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first Universal Ancestor is Adam; the second is Noah.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first Specific Ancestor – that is to say, the father not of everybody, but just of <u>these</u> people – is Abraham.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Abraham not only roots the Hebrews in the ancient (pre-Egyptian) peoples of the Near East, but his genealogy is a great text in and of itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>If you trace the human race backward, obviously at Adam you run into a dead end.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Abraham is not so much a dead end as a cul-de-sac, with a father (but no named mother), and a marriage to his half-sib, Sarah.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sarah says she is Abraham’s sister, not his wife, twice – and later on, Abraham explains that it isn’t really a lie, for “she is indeed my sister, but the daughter of my father, but not the daughter of my mother” (20:12).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Gods and heroes are not uncommonly the products of incest, for that makes them the end of geneaology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Zeus and Hera are siblings.</span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh13mx4BJyea_m5q2_km7MKNfUPk0ZtKUBRqJVUc_nxW6l23JGlI0-4IPWSwi_rZEuu9RCZxIg556ELSvPiXIamZ_3PQyBWKKoHxc0kOogR5JXvBlTQhG_WHzf3WFuvvpKJ5JXsHkKX-c7C/s1600/Clip.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh13mx4BJyea_m5q2_km7MKNfUPk0ZtKUBRqJVUc_nxW6l23JGlI0-4IPWSwi_rZEuu9RCZxIg556ELSvPiXIamZ_3PQyBWKKoHxc0kOogR5JXvBlTQhG_WHzf3WFuvvpKJ5JXsHkKX-c7C/s320/Clip.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Abraham’s family serves an important political purpose, the claim to the land.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are a lot of peoples there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Who deserves to be there?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Let’s examine the family of patriarch Abraham for the contenders.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>First we have Ishmael, father of many of the local peoples.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is himself the first-born, but illegitimate, son of Abraham, by his Egyptian concubine or handmaiden or slave or something, Hagar.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not only is his mother not from around here, but let’s face it, Ishmael is a bastard.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hardly a noble sort of parentage, entitling his descendants to much in the way of land rights.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Second, we have Moab and Ammon, the sons of Abraham’s nephew Lot, son of his brother Harran.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unfortunately, Moab and Ammon are not really worthy either, as the products of the incestuous union of Lot’s unnamed daughters with their father (Genesis 19).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I mean, your half-sister is one thing, but your daughters?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Enough said. </span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><v:shapetype coordsize="21600,21600" filled="f" id="_x0000_t75" o:preferrelative="t" o:spt="75" path="m@4@5l@4@11@9@11@9@5xe" stroked="f"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <v:stroke joinstyle="miter"> <v:formulas> <v:f eqn="if lineDrawn pixelLineWidth 0"> <v:f eqn="sum @0 1 0"> <v:f eqn="sum 0 0 @1"> <v:f eqn="prod @2 1 2"> <v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelWidth"> <v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelHeight"> <v:f eqn="sum @0 0 1"> <v:f eqn="prod @6 1 2"> <v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelWidth"> <v:f eqn="sum @8 21600 0"> <v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelHeight"> <v:f eqn="sum @10 21600 0"> </v:f></v:f></v:f></v:f></v:f></v:f></v:f></v:f></v:f></v:f></v:f></v:f></v:formulas> <v:path gradientshapeok="t" o:connecttype="rect" o:extrusionok="f"> <o:lock aspectratio="t" v:ext="edit"> </o:lock></v:path></v:stroke></span></v:shapetype><v:shape alt="abraham.gif" id="Picture_x0020_0" o:spid="_x0000_s1026" style="height: 250.6pt; margin-left: 194.45pt; margin-top: 51.6pt; mso-position-horizontal-relative: text; mso-position-horizontal: absolute; mso-position-vertical-relative: text; mso-position-vertical: absolute; mso-wrap-distance-bottom: 0; mso-wrap-distance-left: 9pt; mso-wrap-distance-right: 9pt; mso-wrap-distance-top: 0; mso-wrap-style: square; position: absolute; visibility: visible; width: 334.7pt; z-index: -1;" type="#_x0000_t75" wrapcoords="-97 0 -97 21462 21587 21462 21587 0 -97 0"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> <v:imagedata o:title="abraham" src="file:///C:\Users\Jon\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image001.gif"> <w:wrap type="tight"> </w:wrap></v:imagedata></span></v:shape><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Third, we have Abraham’s younger son, the legitimate one, Isaac.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And just to reinforce the point, Isaac will marry his first-cousin-once-removed (Rebekah) and have twin sons, the younger of whom, like his father, will inherit everything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That son is Jacob, who will change his name to Israel, and whose children – the children of Israel – are the ones presumably reading the book.</span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Like any origin myth, it tells us Who we are, Where we come from, and Why we’re here.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And the answer is, We come from around these here parts, we are descended from the indigenous owners, and we are the legitimate occupants.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s Abraham’s, and his only honorable and legitimate heir was the father of Israel, and we are his children.</span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Except that we also come from Egypt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So we will explain that as well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We start with Izzy’s son Joe (just to make sure that you’re still reading attentively!) and end with Moses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Moses was given God’s law, which includes a special statute, that you should take a day off once in a while, particularly after working six days in a row.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>But there is a theological and political dispute here as well, of course – something involving subaltern monotheists and hegemonic polytheists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His very name, Moses, is weird.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Weird enough, apparently, that the Bible decided that it needs explaining.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus, Exodus 2:10 – Pharaoh’s daughter finds him and decides to call his name Moses, “Because I drew him out of the water,” which is what the Hebrew root (M-Sh-H) would suggest.</span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There are reasons for regarding this as just another load of bulrushes, as Sigmund Freud pointed out in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Moses and Monotheism</i> (1939).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not the least of which is that it presupposes that Pharaoh’s daughter would be a fluent speaker of Hebrew, and would give him a Hebrew name while nevertheless concealing his identity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If we take the position that Pharaoh’s daughter more likely was Egyptian and spoke Egyptian, then we perhaps ought to seek a cognate for the name Mosheh/Moses in Egyptian.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And that is when we discover the fact that there is a cluster of New Kingdom pharaohs who names all contain that lexeme.</span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In the 16<sup><span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span></sup> Dynasty there is a king called Dedu-mose.</span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In the 17<sup><span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span></sup> Dynasty, there are two brothers, and successive kings, Ka-mose and Ah-mose.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And then in the 18<sup><span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span></sup> and 19<sup><span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span></sup> Dynasties, a succession of pharaohs named Thoth-mose (Thutmosis) and Ra-mose (Ramesses), and Amen-mose (Amenmesse).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The root seems to mean “child”, as is “<u>child</u> of Thoth” or “<u>child</u> of Ra” – or even, perhaps, “Hey, look at the <u>child</u> I just pulled out of the river” .<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Somewhere smack in there in there also is the birth of Egyptian monotheism under Akhnaton.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe that’s just a coincidence.</span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The point of all this is that we know a heck of a lot more about Akhnaton than we do about Moses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We don’t know when Moses lived, or even <u>if</u> he lived, but we do know that there exists a nice chunk of bricolage about him for later mythmakers to work with.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And yet, genomic researchers claim to have identified his Y chromosome.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>(Didn’t see that one coming, did you?)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Yes, this comes down to genomics as 21<sup><span style="font-size: x-small;">st</span></sup>-century snake oil.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It will sell bogus tribal affiliations to African Americans, bogus clan affiliations to Europeans, and bogus claims of descent from Moses.</span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>How do you get the Y-chromosome of someone whose ontological status is on a par with that of Achilles and Merlin?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You go after his brother, Aaron the high priest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As the first article on this subject began, in the leading science journal in the world, “According to biblical accounts, the Jewish priesthood was established about 3,300 years ago with the appointment of the first Israelite high priest.”</span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Karl Skorecki, Sara Selig, Shraga Blazer, Robert Bradman, Neil Bradman, P. J. Warburton, Monica Ismajlowicz & Michael F. Hammer (1997) Y chromosomes of Jewish priests.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nature,</i> 385: 32. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">First I have to confess that anyone with the chutzpah to start a paper in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nature</i>, “According to biblical accounts” has got my attention and admiration.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Apparently the rules are that you can adopt the bible as scientifically reliable as long as the book you are referring to is not Genesis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After all,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it isn’t as if Exodus doesn’t contain miracles too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Remember manna from heaven?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCvaEcmW495_FusqWh1FTyjrCnX-SUP1ctbkQfgj9YvsxBdvLEpHaooEv-eivo6FmdLomO5Owhu4bKADxGbN0WLcVy42fCFkiNDvyy5AUBOKGJ3UGohqbE26QFoJcCKx2D3mBqjE_Yg050/s1600/tc92.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="231" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCvaEcmW495_FusqWh1FTyjrCnX-SUP1ctbkQfgj9YvsxBdvLEpHaooEv-eivo6FmdLomO5Owhu4bKADxGbN0WLcVy42fCFkiNDvyy5AUBOKGJ3UGohqbE26QFoJcCKx2D3mBqjE_Yg050/s320/tc92.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Or better yet,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>when the river turned to blood?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I just saw a TV show that explained that it might have been caused by cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those guys must have a different translation, because my bible doesn’t say anything about blue-green algae or cyanobacteria.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It doesn’t say, “And God turned the blue-green algae upon the Nile, and Lo, the Egyptians thought it had turned to blood.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, just where it could have said, And he did smite the Egyptians with cyanobacteria which these hapless morons thought was blood, it says rather “And he lifted up the rod, and smote the waters that were in the river, in the sight of Pharaoh, and in the sight of his servants; and all the waters that were in the river were turned to blood” (Exodus 7:20).</span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It’s a miracle, get it?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not a poorly-remembered history, as primitive 19<sup><span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span></sup> century scholarship often tried to render it. </span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The point is, the geneticists find that Jews who self-identify as priests tend to have more similar Y-chromosome markers than Jews who say they are not priests (or Jews who don’t even know what the fuck you are talking about).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In itself, not very surprising, since Jews who claim to be priests tend to have similar surnames (Cohen, or a cognate – like Katz, a contraction for “true Cohen”).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And of course, people who have similar surnames tend to be more closely related to one another than they are to other people (a condition known as isonymy, with attendant implications for people who have only had surnames for maybe 300 years).</span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And rather than understand the data within the facts of human biology, the authors put it into the context of biblical literalism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And got it published in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nature</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>But most importantly, you can find out if you’ve got The Lawgiver’s Y-chromosome for just $300.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And that’s where we begin to realize what genomics is really all about.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After all, Jesus didn’t know much about genomics (he was haploid to begin with), but he knew that if you have a conflict of interest between truth and profit, the truth will inevitably suffer (Matthew 6:24).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">http://www.cambridgedna.com/genealogy-dna-paternal-ancestry-test-ydna.php<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12576920986455084855noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6084858487513024522.post-16250351256390769032011-06-17T03:36:00.000-07:002011-06-17T11:44:52.847-07:00Plotz biology<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Yet through all this juggling, I detect no sign of fraud or conscious manipulation.</span></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>S. J. Gould, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Mismeasure of Man</i>, 1981: 69.</span></span></div><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">A couple of weeks ago a paper came out in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">PLoS Biology</i> – an online, open access journal – that had some tongues wagging.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Various bloggers blogged about it, some journalists wrote it up – the one about Stephen Jay Gould fudging his data in accusing craniologist Samuel George Morton of fraud 150 years earlier.</span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in;"><a href="http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001071"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.5pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="color: darkgoldenrod; font-family: Calibri;">"The Mismeasure of Science: Stephen Jay Gould versus Samuel George Morton on Skulls and Bias"</span></span></b></a><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span></b></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The problem with the paper is a fundamental one: It purports to be a contribution to the area of “science studies” but is signally poor as such.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It may be a contribution to revisionist positivism studies, but that’s about the most charitable thing I can say about it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even the conclusion is completely ass-backwards, which is something of a giveaway.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The conclusion they come up with, after arguing that Gould fudged, is that there is <u>less</u> fudging in science than is widely thought, rather than more – strange, given that they had presumably just added to the stock of fudge.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There is an informal rule-of-thumb in the anthropology of science, that goes, “When smart people say stupid things, they’re usually doing it for a reason.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Let’s start there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What is this paper even about?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What makes it novel and interesting?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why are they writing it?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Sorry to sound like a science studies fan, but I think that’s what they might ask.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The authors tell us:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Gould’s analysis of Morton is widely read, frequently cited, and still commonly assigned in university courses (refs.).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Morton has become a canonical example of scientific misconduct...</span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Let’s pause right there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Who says it’s an example of misconduct at all, much less a canonical one?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Gould didn’t; Gould argued that Morton fudged unconsciously.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wrote chapters on “Bogus Science” and on<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Scientific Misconduct” in my book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Why I Am Not a Scientist</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(their Ref. 4), and didn’t mention Gould’s<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>treatment of Morton, and I mentioned Morton himself only in passing, as a phrenologist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Perhaps unsurprisingly , that interest of Morton’s – the scientific aspects<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>of head bumps – doesn’t get a mention in the new paper.)</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>So why didn’t I cite it as a canonical example of misconduct?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Two reasons:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>First, Gould himself didn’t think it was; and second, even Gould’s argument for unconscious fudging had been convincingly challenged in a paper published in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Current Anthropology</i> 23 years ago (their ref. 14).</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In fact, not only didn’t I cite Morton as they were bemoaning, but (if their central assertion is true) only one other reference in their list might reasonably be expected to cite Morton, as a work of “science studies” analyzing scientific misconduct – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Great Betrayal</i>, by Horace Freeland Judson (their ref. 16).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><u>And Judson doesn’t mention Morton either.</u></span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.75in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-indent: -0.25in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Michael, J. S. 1988. A new look at Morton's craniological research. <i>Current Anthropology</i> 29:348-354.</span></span></b></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.75in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-indent: -0.25in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Judson, H. F. 2004. <i>The Great Betrayal</i>. Orlando, FL: Harcourt.</span></span></b></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.75in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-indent: -0.25in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Marks, J. 2009. <i>Why I Am Not a Scientist: Anthropology and Modern Knowledge</i>. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.</span></span></b></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>So who do they cite in support of the statement that Morton is a canonical case of misconduct?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Works by three <span style="font-family: inherit;">skeletal</span> biologists: Loring Brace, Della Cook, and Jane Buikstra.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The problem is that the authors of this new paper seem to be criticizing the science studies literature for the perceived failings of skeletal biologists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is unfortunate, but not the problem of people working in science studies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: small;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In fact, if you take the trouble to read Brace's <i>Race is A Four-Letter Word</i> (their ref. 11), you'll be more industrious than the authors of the new article. Why? Because in the context of an extensive and erudite discussion of Morton, Brace goes on to cite Gould's analysis <u>in precisely the opposite way</u> than the new paper claims.</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>As far as science studies goes, then, the paper is erecting and attacking a straw man.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They produce no evidence that people who work in this area regard Gould’s critique of Morton as canonical, important, or valid.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The only two relevant works they cite do not in fact mention it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> One of the three references by skeletal biologists they cite as accepting Gould is actually completely dismissive of Gould (and I don't have access to the papers by Cook and Buikstra). </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The central argument of this paper, then, is to correct the way that some skeletal biologists are mis-citing an obscure historical issue.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>That is not new, interesting, or important.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The bulk of the paper is indeed devoted to establishing a point that has been widely known for over two decades, and is widely accessible<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>because it was published in a major journal:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that Gould did not even reliably establish that Morton had indeed fudged unconsciously.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That paper is their ref. 14.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So their industry brings positive knowledge: Now we know, <u>for absolutely sure</u>, that Gould did not even reliably establish that Morton had indeed fudged unconsciously. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Which brings us to the next question:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What do the authors themselves<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>think is new, interesting, or important about this?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What lessons do they think are to be drawn from their labors, of establishing something that was already known, and is unfortunately occasionally still mis-cited by people in physical anthropology?</span></span></div><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Here are their parting words:</span></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">That Morton’s data are reliable despite his clear bias weakens the argument of Gould and others that biased results are endemic in science. Gould was certainly correct to note that scientists are human beings and, as such, are inevitably biased, a point frequently made in ‘‘science studies.’’ But the power of the scientific approach is that a properly designed and executed methodology can largely shield the outcome from the influence of the investigator’s bias. Science does not rely on investigators being unbiased ‘‘automatons.’’ Instead, it relies on methods that limit the ability of the investigator’s admittedly inevitable biases to skew the results. Morton’s methods were sound, and our analysis shows that they prevented Morton’s biases from significantly impacting his results. The Morton case, rather than illustrating the ubiquity of bias, instead shows the ability of science to escape the bounds and blinders of cultural contexts.</span></span></div><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I must say, I had to read this several times in order to grasp the enormity of their illogic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>First, by vindicating Morton, they believe they have shown that “biased results” are not<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“endemic in science”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Well they certainly <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>still are in physical anthropology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Physical anthropology is just now being discovered by historians of science, but its secrets are fairly well known.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What about Hooton’s criminological work (describing the statistical physical differences between inmates and volunteer firemen in three states)?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The physical difference may well have been real, but his interpretation of it was so crude that Harvard<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>never published the successor volume to Hooton’s 1939 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The American Criminal, Volume I</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What about the nationalistic, racial, and anatomical biases that permitted Piltdown Man to go unchallenged for decades?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What about national traditions between Japanese and American primatologists?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Haven’t you ever noticed how Chris Stringer always seems to find the evidence for Replacement, and Milford Wolpoff always seems to find the evidence for Multiregional Continuity?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Do you think that’s a coincidence? </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It’s biased any number of ways, but it’s still science, and it may or may not be true.</span></span></div><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Let me give a relevant example, because it concerns a literal successor of Morton’s<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>- Carleton Coon of the University of Pennsylvania, sitting President of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in 1962.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Coon published his book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Origin of Races</i>, as a scientific manifesto for the segregationists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How do we know this?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Because we have his mail.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He worked with the segregationists and gave them preprints of his book, which tried to demonstrate that Africans had become <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Homo sapiens</i> 200,000 years after Europeans – and which, he coyly suggested, may explain their backwardness and uncivilizability.</span></span><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.75in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-indent: -0.25in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Coon, C. S. 1962. <i>The Origin of Races</i>. New York: Knopf.</span></span></b></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.75in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-indent: -0.25in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Jackson, J. P., Jr. 2001. "In ways unacademical": The reception of Carleton S. Coon's <i>The Origin of Races</i>. <i>Journal of the History of Biology</i> 34:247-285.</span></span></b></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.75in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-indent: -0.25in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">———. 2005. <i>Science for Segregation</i>. New York: NYU Press.</span></span></b></div><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The author, Professor Coon, wanted his work to be judged independently of the circumstances of its production.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He worked hard to conceal his ties to the segregationists, and wanted people to read it<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>as if it were an objective work of science.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it never was an objective work of science, and to read it today as if it <u>were</u> such a work, is to accept the author’s highly political dissimulation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was a scientific work written for the segregationists, and cannot be read honestly today as anything but that.</span></span></div><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>So whatever Morton may or may not have done, and Gould may or may not have done, it has nothing to do with understanding the role of ideology in co-producing the facts of human science.</span></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Their second conclusion is even less logical:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That although the biases of the investigators are ubiquitous, a scientific fact can transcend them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I suppose so, in theory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But what particular fact are we talking about here, exactly?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a sample of African<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>skulls measured by a creationist phrenologist polygenist may have a smaller average volume than a sample of European skulls? </span></span></div><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Morton, whose work the new paper wants to convince you was shielded from cultural bias, actually was so engrossed in the differences among the sets of skulls <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that he was unable to see them as belonging to a single species, as the products of a single origin</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Does that sound like culturally unbiased scientific work?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Do the authors of the new paper believe that fact shines through the cultural bias as well?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If not, why not?</span></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The ideological bias is so overwhelming, that these authors can’t even see it themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It resides in the question: What do you actually think you are explaining in documenting a difference in cranial volume between two non-representative samples?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Morton really thought that a difference of an average cubic inch in cranial volume explained why black people were enslaved.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Do you?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you don’t, then why do you think this is important?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Morton’s conclusion about the hat size of races is not now, and never was, an important scientific fact.</span></span></div><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Earnest<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hooton really believed that he was explaining criminality by nailing down “the criminal look” of the head.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Carleton Coon really believed he was explaining racial problems in America not as the products of social history and injustice, but of evolutionary <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>biology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the 21<sup>st</sup> century, explaining human social facts by recourse to human biological facts is passé as science.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Go find another reason to measure heads.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>That, to me, was the brilliant lesson of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Mismeasure of Man</i> – it put the craniologists and psychometricians on the defensive, and forced them to justify themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(And they eventually did so a few years later, I suppose, with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Bell Curve</i>.)</span></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 1in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-indent: -0.5in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Herrnstein, R., and C. Murray. 1994. <i>The Bell Curve</i>. New York: Free Press.</span></span></b></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>But this brings me to the dirtiest thing of all about this paper.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Its model isn’t any admirably truth-seeking science; it’s inspired by the venomous nonsense of Derek Freeman.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Freeman was the maniacal Australian anthropologist who attacked Margaret Mead’s 1928 bestseller, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Coming of Age in Samoa</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What was weird wasn’t so much the zeal with which he pursued the half-century old work, but his extraordinary assumption that it was somehow a lynch-pin of modern anthropology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By elevating the significance of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Coming of Age in Samoa</i>, Freeman thereby elevated himself; and moreover, in knocking it down, he would be leading the way to a new and better (sociobiological) anthropology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Freeman permitted other ideologues, like Steven Pinker, to dismiss Margaret Mead, and by extension, normative anthropology, as having been simply discredited.</span></span> </div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.75in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-indent: -0.25in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Mead, M. 1928. <i>Coming of Age in Samoa</i>. New York: Morrow.</span></span></b></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.75in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-indent: -0.25in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Freeman, D. 1983. <i>Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth</i>. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.</span></span></b></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.75in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-indent: -0.25in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Pinker, S. 2002. <i>The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature</i>. New York: Viking Penguin. </span></span></b></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.75in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-indent: -0.25in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Shankman, P. 2009. <i>The Trashing of Margaret Mead: anatomy of an anthropological controversy</i>. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.</span></span></b></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I see a lot of that in here.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I don’t think Gould’s analysis of Morton was any more important to science studies than <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Coming of Age in Samoa</i> was to anthropology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By inflating its significance, the authors of this study themselves become that much more important.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And they see their own exceedingly parochial obsessive work as being somehow paradigmatic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It just isn’t.</span></span> </div><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>So I will take away two lessons from this.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>First, about<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Stephen Jay Gould.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gould, like everybody else in science, tended to see what he was looking for.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s a good science studies lesson.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Second, about this paper.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For the most part, it is paranoid positivist rhetoric mixed with slovenly-argued bombast, and a warmed-over critique of Gould, not a significant new contribution to knowledge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If it were, it might have been publishable in a real journal, like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Current Anthropology</i>.</span></span><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">*******</span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I met Steve Gould once or twice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He autographed my copy of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ontogeny and Phylogeny</i>, “To Jonathan – May the creationists never have a day of peace!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Years later, he did get me hooked me up with the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Annals of Improbable<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Research</i>, which awards the IgNobel prizes annually, and for that I am grateful to him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>G. G. Simpson hated his guts, but that’s a story for another time.</span></span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12576920986455084855noreply@blogger.com29tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6084858487513024522.post-3013164101823895632011-06-09T10:48:00.000-07:002011-06-14T15:11:29.654-07:00Brain fart?E<span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">leven years ago, the psychologist Philippe Rushton sent a lot of social scientists a little booklet, which was an abridgement of his book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Race, Evolution, and Behavior</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rushton’s work is easily appreciated as falling within the generally constituted domain of scientific racism, for example in his belief that the average IQ of native Africans is 70 (or the equivalent of a European with mild Down’s syndrome).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pretty much any knowledgeable scholar can see the primitive racist assumptions guiding the work – the misapplication of evolutionary theory, mistaking the facts of social history for those of biological microevolution, overblown claims about innateness of IQ, and the use of idiotic surrogate variables, like crime rate and degree of civilization, for intelligence – not to mention penis size and libido for reproductive rate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Len Lieberman did a nice critique of Rushton’s nonsense<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a while back.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Joe Graves did such a good job revealing the utter biological incompetence in Rushton’s work that if I remember correctly, Rushton may have actually threatened him with litigation.<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">[Lieberman , L. 2001. How "Caucasoids" Got Such Big Crania and Why They Shrank: From Morton to Rushton. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Current Anthropology</i> 42:69-95.]<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">[Graves, J. 2002. The misuse of life history theory: J. P. Rushton and the pseudoscience of racial hierarchy. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Race and Intelligence: Separating Science from Myth</i>, edited by J. Fish. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 57-94.]<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">When Rushton’s awful book was published, sociobiologist David Barash, fearing that it might give human sociobiology a bad name (as if such a thing were possible), reviewed it in the British journal <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Animal Behaviour</i> in terms that merit quoting in order to properly admire them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“I don’t know which is worse,” wrote Barash, “Rushton’s scientific failings or his blatant racism.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Methodologically, said Barash, Rushton cherry-picks data of very dubious quality to make his pseudo-scientific argument, which amounts to<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">[Barash, D. P. 1995. Book review: Race, Evolution, and Behavior. <i>Animal Behaviour</i> 49:1131-1133.]<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Damn, I wish I had said that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My hat goes off to Barash for saying it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I would argue, further, that racism should be no more tolerable in science than creationism is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(In fact I <u>do</u> argue that, in a forthcoming essay for a volume called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pragmatic Evolution</i>, edited by Aldo Poiani, and being published someday by Cambridge.)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Oddly, though, some otherwise reputable scholars had trouble critically evaluating Rushton’s work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have occasionally referred to these scholars as ”Mr. Eds”,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>being knowledgeable about their narrow area, but so unfathomably ignorant outside that narrow area that they are essentially talking horses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mathematical geneticist Henry Harpending, for one, was so uncritical about Rushton that Rushton excerpted a blurb from Harpending’s review in the aforementioned pamphlet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">"Rushton's Race, Evolution, and Behavior.. .is an attempt to understand [race] differences in terms of life-history evolution.. . . Perhaps here ultimately will be some serious contribution from the traditional smoke-and-mirrors social science treatment of IQ, but for now Rushton's framework is essentially the only game in town."<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">[Harpending, H. 1995. Human biological diversity. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Evolutionary Anthropology</i>, 4 (3):99-103.]<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">He missed what most others found to be retrogressive, incompetent, and galling in the book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the same review Harpending also expressed his admiration for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Bell Curve</i>, which a lot of people had problems with, and which also included a pre-emptive defense of Rushton in an appendix, since it cited about twenty of his papers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Another senior biological anthropologist, Ralph Holloway, also had trouble reading Rushton critically, and defended Rushton’s work to an early internet chat group in 1999: “I know Phil Rushton, and have had the pleasure of his visit to my lab, and</span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 9.5pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">even was able to talk to him at the last AAPA Meetings, and while I disagree with his theories, I have not found him to be a ‘bigot’.” “In short, a ‘racist’ he may be, but I don’t see the ‘bigotry’ myself, despite to what uses his theories might be put.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Whatever.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As if a guy who ass-rapes evolutionary ecological theory in order to show that Africans have an innate intellectual ability equivalent to mentally handicapped Europeans, might merely be a racist but not a bigot – and may not be responsible for how other people will use his objective, scientific work?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">As cranial anatomists go, Holloway is a distinguished one, but if you’re going to talk about race, you have to be able to read the literature critically.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After all, there is supposed to be a distinction between, say, neurobiology and phrenology, which may not be readily apparent to outsiders.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And anyone who can’t read Rushton’s work critically simply isn’t competent to teach anthropology, much less to represent it publicly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wrote a monthly column in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Anthropology News</i> (formerly, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Anthropology Newsletter</i>) for the General Anthropology Division, and when we received Rushton’s Abridgement, I said something about it:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Which reminds me, did you <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">all </span>get your copies of the Special Abridged Edition of J Philippe Rushton’s book, <i><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Race, Evolution </span></i>& <i><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Behavior? </span></i>The mass mailing was bankrolled by the Pioneer Fund, an organization outed in a famous essay in the <i><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">New York Review </span>of <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Books </span></i>on <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Dec </span>1, 1994 <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">by </span>Charles Lane. With friends like Henry Harpending (Utah) and Ralph Holloway (Columbia), Rushton shows how just hard it is to tell bio-anthropological science from racist pseudo-science.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>[Anthropology News, February 2000, p. 60]</span></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The other day my attention was called to Holloway’s recent writing on the subject.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 2008, Holloway published an old fart memoir in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Annual Review of Anthropology</i>, and included the following statement.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Indeed, Jon Marks claimed he “outed” me as a “racist” (Marks 2000; see Holloway 2000 for reply) in his biological section of the <i>American Anthropologist Newsletter </i>because I had the temerity to defend Arthur Jensen against Loring Brace’s assertion that Jensen was a bigot. I had read much of this literature (e.g., Jensen 1998) including Jensen’s infamous 1969 piece in the <i>Harvard Law Review </i>and did not find him a racist.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></o:p></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">[Holloway, Ralph L. 2008. The Human Brain Evolving: A Personal Retrospective.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Annual Review of Anthropology,. 37:1–19]<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br />
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Let’s overlook Holloway’s inability to judge Arthur Jensen’s infamous claim that blacks are innately intellectually inferior to whites as racist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Let’s also overlook that the periodical was called the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Anthropology News</i>, not the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">American Anthropologist Newsletter</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Finally, we'll overlook that it was in the General Anthropology Division column, not the Biological Anthropology Section column (which I had in fact edited a few years earlier). </span>Now let’s start looking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>First, I associated Holloway with Rushton, not with Jensen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rushton and Jensen are indeed associated any number of ways, and they co-wrote a particularly horrid review article in 2005, but Holloway is inventing the Jensen connection, or confusing me with Loring Brace (I’m the one without the ponytail).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Second, since I simply named<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Holloway as a defender of Rushton, the only way that Holloway can say I outed him as a racist is if he equates Rushton’s work with racism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s <u>his</u> inference.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Of course, I’m willing to accept the possibility that the shoe might fit...)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And third, I clearly used the word “outed” in relation to the Pioneer Fund, not to Holloway as a racist.<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">[Rushton, J. P., and A. Jensen. 2005. Thirty years of research on race differences in cognitive ability. <i>Psychology, Public Policy, and Law</i> 11 (2):235-294.]<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">There isn’t even that much there to misquote, but he sure managed to.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unfuckingbelievable, Wilbur.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The really amazing thing is that I wrote that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Anthropology News</i> piece pre-tenure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Looking back, I probably said a lot of things without tenure that a smarter person would have waited until having tenure to say.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">*******</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">[@tristanoman: <span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"> </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">No guns or smoke.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Holloway made six mistakes in his single sentence about me in the Annual Review of Anthropology in 2008.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Measuring brains must be real easy compared to that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s possible that he has rethought Rushton over the last decade or so; I certainly hope so. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Gould-Morton business was mildly interesting when it came out in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Current Anthropology</i> in 1988. ]</div></span><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"></div></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12576920986455084855noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6084858487513024522.post-71260260848425791562011-05-28T08:39:00.000-07:002011-05-28T08:39:35.033-07:00A Carlin story, of sorts<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>George Carlin said 39 years ago – if you can fucking believe that! – that there are seven words you can’t say on television, to wit: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was wrong.</span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>A couple of years ago I was contacted by a British producer who was doing a TV series on race.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of the shows was going to be on “The Human Zoos” and discuss the story of Ota Benga (the central African pygmy who visited New York in 1906, and was kept as a display in the Bronx Zoo for a couple of weeks, essentially as a wildly successful publicity stunt).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were going to contextualize it in terms of the scientific racism of the age, and I had written some stuff about it, and would I care be interviewed?</span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Brownell, S., ed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(2008) <i>The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: Sport, Race, and American Imperialism</i>, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.</span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></o:p></span></b></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Bradford, P. V. and Blume, H. (1993) <i>Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo</i>, New York: Delta.<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Sure, I said, always being up for a free trip to England.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Well, actually I got a free trip to Lynchburg, Virginia, where, it so happens, Ota Benga tragically ended his days.</span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>They found a hot empty warehouse in which to interview me (the significance of which I never fully grasped).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We did it over 2 or 3 hours, with the producer asking me good, leading questions off-camera, and me free-associating answers in full sentences, recapitulating the questions, turning a clever phrase here and there, and trying to give him things he could use.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I read some excerpts from my <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>autographed copy of Madison Grant’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Passing of the Great Race</i> (1916), a horrid classic of American racist thought.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Grant, it turned out, had more-or-less masterminded the stunt.</span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Spiro, J. (2009) Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant, Burlington, VT: University Press of Vermont.<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>As the summer afternoon wound down and we had exhausted everything he wanted to ask and everything I wanted to say, and I was starting to think about getting to the airport for my flight back to Charlotte, he asked me if I had anything to add to what we had already covered.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I looked straight into the camera and smiled and said, “Yeah.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Madison Grant was a real fuck.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Put <u>that</u> on your television show!”</span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And you know what?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They did.</span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The point is, Carlin was wrong.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was working under an ethnocentric assumption.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You can’t say those words on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">American</i> television.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the telly, however, things are a little different.</span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">**************</span></div><span style="font-family: Calibri;">According to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Sunday Times</i>, 1 November 2009:</span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">“He was a real f***, by the way. Put that on your television,” added Professor Jonathan Marks, an angry academic from the University of North Carolina <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">[@Charlotte!]</b>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-human-zoo-sciences-dirty-secret<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12576920986455084855noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6084858487513024522.post-82265002879902473852011-05-11T09:18:00.000-07:002011-05-11T09:18:34.455-07:00Simpson story #2<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Maybe I sensed that I would evolve into a faux historian even back in graduate school.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But when I used to visit Dr. Simpson and do his typing and filing, back in 1983-84, I occasionally would drop names and get his reactions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And they were always candid, especially after the two martinis he had for lunch. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>One day I dropped the name of the old dinosaur paleontologist, Ned Colbert.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">[Edwin H. Colbert, 1905-2001]</b> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I knew that they had overlapped at the American Museum for many years, and that everyone who had ever spoken about him had said he was a really sweet old guy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I figured GGS would have some stock anecdote about a drinking binge together or something.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Instead the ambient temperature in his library dropped about five degrees, and he snarled something at me, which I swear was no more than 5% different from: “That son of a bitch fucked me over back in 1937!” </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Needless to say, even as a smarty-pants graduate student I was momentarily at a loss for words.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I also tended to develop a stutter when talking to him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“But D-d-d-doctor Simpson,” I said, “This is 1983.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That was like almost 50 years ago.”</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>He growled angrily, “That means <u>nothing</u> to a paleontologist,”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> then smiled. </span>I changed the subject.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">************</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Léo Laporte properly set the fight between Colbert and Simpson in 1958, after Simpson had the tree fall on him in the Amazon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Laporte, L. (2000) <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">George Gaylord Simpson: Paleontologist and Evolutionist</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>New York: Columbia University Press.</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 12pt 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">John Ostrom (1928-2005) later told me that he had gone to Columbia to work with Simpson on mammals, but since Simpson was a huge celebrity academic and was never there, he moved over to Colbert instead, to do <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>birds and dinosaurs. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I did learn an important life lesson from that exchange, though.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Grudges are expensive to maintain and generally aren’t worth it.</span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12576920986455084855noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6084858487513024522.post-58239881564935918382011-04-30T13:32:00.000-07:002011-09-29T19:03:39.707-07:00A first lecture on primate taxonomy (with obvious debts to Robert Benchley and Will Cuppy)<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> To begin with, In 1987 there were about 170 species of primates. Today there are over 400. Go Primates! </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> For the sake of argument, let us say that there about 400 species of primates, </span><span style="font-family: Symbol;">±</span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">75%.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> The first kind of primates are called prosimians. Actually, however, they are not really a kind of primate, but two kinds of primate: lemurids of Madagascar, and lorisids of Asia and Africa. To be absolutely fair, however, we have to acknowledge that there are two kinds of lorisids – fast-moving galagos and slow-moving lorises, although at the speed of light they may seem identical – so the first kind of primate is really three kinds of primates.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> But we should also include the fourth kind of primate in this first kind of primate, because the tarsier isn’t quite a monkey, and that’s what prosimians are – “not quite monkeys”. According to cladists, the tarsier should be reclassified with the monkeys because phylogenetically it is almost one of them.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> The first four kinds of one kind of primates share an arbitrary property: namely, that they are still alive, and have not gone extinct. Yet. Consequently we need to expand our first kind of primates to incorporate the adapids and omomyids, two other kinds of the first kind of primates, now extinct. The most interesting feature of the adapids and omomyids is that we don’t know what they evolved from and we don’t know what they evolved into, but we’re pretty sure that they evolved. Don’t tell the creationists. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> And before the adapids and omomyids were the plesiadapids, who only had a few of the primatey features by which we identify primates as primates and not as colugos, or flying lemurs, which are not actually even lemurs, so it’s hardly even worth asking whether they really fly. But they do seem to be transitional forms between other mammals and primates, and you can tell the creationists that for me. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> Fortunately, the diversity of the second group of primates is more precise. The group we contrast with the prosimians is not, as you might think, the antisimians, but rather the simians themselves, although only Europeans really call them that. We officially call them anthropoids, which means “sort of like people” from the Greek, and they should most definitely not be confused with the hominoids, which means “sort of like people” from the Latin, and comprise only a subset of the ones from the Greek.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> There are two kinds of anthropoids, and we distinguish them on the basis of geography and their noses. There are other things we could focus on, like the form of their skull sutures, or the number of premolar teeth they have, but no, we focus on their noses. The kind of monkey found in the Americas is really two or five kinds of monkey. One or more of them is the marmosets, also known as the marmosets and tamarins. Their principal distinction is how small they are. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> How small are they? They are so small that they never grow wisdom teeth. Marmosets are also widely regarded as the stupidest anthropoids. That is probably just a coincidence, however. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> The pygmy marmoset is actually smaller than the dwarf marmoset, but it is the other way around for people.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> The other kind of New World monkey is known as everything else. They include monkeys that hang by their tails, monkeys that hang out at night, monkeys that resemble The Phantom of the Opera, and even monkeys that resemble monks, which sounds more reasonable than it should.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> The other kind of anthropoid is actually two kinds of monkeys and one or several kinds of apes. They all have the same number of teeth as us, or at least they would if we didn’t have our teeth pulled. They are called Catarrhini, on the basis of their noses, from the Greek “flowing downward”. You probably don’t want to know what that’s referring to, but suffice it to say, if you were a New World monkey, you would go through Kleenexes twice as fast.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> The Catarrhini consequently include the vervet monkey, known to biomedical research as The Monkey; and the rhesus macaque, known to neurobehavioral research as The Monkey. Nobody remembers Jimmy Durante anymore, so the future of the proboscis monkey is in doubt. Baboons should never be described as polygamous, since they do not have marriage. They should be called polygynous instead. In addition to the monkeys of the Old World are the Hominoidea or apes. They lack a tail, unlike the Old World Monkeys, which all have a tail, except for some of the macaques. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> The apes are all adapted for hanging from the trees, including humans, who do not hang from trees. Extinct apes were very diverse, but that didn’t help them. Today there are two or more kinds of apes. The lesser apes are gibbons, who are very speciose, but probably not for long. If they were smart enough to know about The Great Ape Project, they would probably get really upset. The gibbons are monogamous, because there is no such word as “monogynous”. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> The hominids come from the Latin for “even more like people”. They may or may not include the great apes. The great apes include the orangutan; the gorilla, known to evolutionary psychology as Koko; and the chimpanzee, known to evolutionary psychology as the human.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> The hominins are the Tribe Hominini. Chimpanzees are the Tribe Panini. When chimps cannibalize the dead infants of their species, they may be confusing them with sandwiches. To cladists, australopithecines never existed. Australopiths existed. But it makes them seem kind of naked without a Latin-sounding suffix.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> Hominin evolution, also known as hominid evolution, includes those hominids, also known as hominoids, who became bipedal, or at least had their canine teeth shrunk. Stone tools, also known as culture, coincide with the origin of the genus <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Homo</i>. Some experts believe that there are 12 species recognizable within the genus <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Homo</i>, of which 11 are now extinct. I guess culture wasn’t such a great adaptation, after all.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">**************</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I know it’s a stretch, but George S. Kaufman and Robert Benchley were both members of the Algonquin Round Table. </span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12576920986455084855noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6084858487513024522.post-75422170621861896932011-04-26T03:00:00.000-07:002011-04-26T03:02:01.763-07:00Clades versus Rhizomes<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Cladistic analysis is certainly a powerful, logically rigorous tool for the determination of relatedness among species.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the simplest case you have three species and want to know which two are most closely related.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You look at features shared by two of the three.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But since evolutionary rates can vary widely in different lineages, two of the three might look similar because the third one changed a lot, not because those two are actually closest relatives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So you look for a subset of shared features, the shared derived features, (or synapomorphies, from the Early Hittite), which you determine by finding a species slightly more distantly related from the three that you are really interested in. Then you tally up the traits shared by two of the three, and <u>not</u> by the outgroup. Those are your synapomorphies and, in principle, they should tell you which two of any three species are closest relatives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It’s quite straightforward, actually.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Trust me.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">[In fact, aside from the Hittite vocabulary, much of the philosophy of phylogenetic reconstruction is articulated in William King Gregory’s 1910 monograph on The Orders of Mammals, which was thrust into my hand back in 1983, when I attempted to raise the subject with Dr. Simpson.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some history-of-science graduate student really ought to “do” Will Gregory, BTW.]</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">But a cladistic analysis contains a number of important assumptions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>First, it presumes that the species only get their features vertically, through a process of what Darwin called “descent with modification”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The goal of the method is to establish relatedness <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">by descent</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If traits are acquired some other way, such as horizontally, by airborne viruses, by Lamarckian inheritance, or by dirty toilet seats, then the system breaks down, for then there is no way to establish synapomorphy, which is what the method is predicated on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shared derived features might be there either by virtue of proximity of descent, or by virtue of infection, or perhaps even by sheer force of will in different animals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Second, it only works on species.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After all, if the taxa in question could receive their similarities via gene flow, the system would likewise break down.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">There are also other constraints.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The outgroup can’t be too distant, and the rate<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>of convergent evolution can’t be very high.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One simply assumes that a single character distributed across three taxa in two states, is the result of a single evolutionary change from one form to another, inherited in the two species that share it, from their common ancestor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not from parallel mutations, or miasmas. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">So I just don’t get how people can build research programs based on the application of cladistics to cultural traits, where the method logically fails.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Worse yet, that’s why paleoanthropological systematics will never get cleared up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To do cladistics, you need species, and the surest way to get species in paleoanthropology is to “split” fossil samples, and pretend that the groups you name correspond to some biological reality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet a cladistic analysis is the most straightforward paper in the field.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One measures a bunch of things and throws the mess into PAUP (for a phylogenetic analysis using parsimony).</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">But suppose the taxa you are making nested phylogenetic clusters out of, aren’t phylogenetically nested in the first place?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Suppose, for example, they were linked bio-historically like a rhizome, or a trellis, or a capillary system (as indeed, generations of physical anthropologists have thought)?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Hooton, E. A. (1946) <i>Up From the Ape, 2d edition</i>, New York: Macmillan.</span></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Holliday, T. (2003) 'Species Concepts, Reticulation, and Human Evolution ', <i>Current Anthropology</i>, 44: 653-673.</span></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Possibly because they were actually members of rather few<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>real biological lineages.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The point is, that if you impose four species on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Homo</i> (as the authors of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Human Lineage</i> seem to, although they do some mighty fancy tap dancing around that issue) or if you impose 12 species on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Homo</i> (as the authors of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Last Human</i> do – ridiculously, but at least clearly), you are not just having a sterile disagreement about a sterile issue of classification.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You are actually disagreeing over what you can fundamentally do methodologically.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Cartmill, M. and Smith, F. H. (2009) <i>The Human Lineage</i>, New York: Wiley-Blackwell </span></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Sawyer, G. and Deak, V. (2007) <i>The Last Human: A Guide to Twenty-Two Species of Extinct Humans</i>, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.</span></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">A cladistic analysis is done on species, not specimens, and is meaningless below the level of the species.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The best you can do is a “numerical taxonomy” analysis – the kind of thing that Chris Stringer was doing back in the 1970s – and that will (if you’re lucky) tell you what is most similar to what else.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it won’t make false assumptions about how they got that similar, which the cladistic analysis probably does.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I confess, I’m an just ol’ country anthropologist, but you know what?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think human evolution is strongly rhizotic, just like the post-modernists might-or-might-not have said.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) <i>A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia</i>, St. Paul, MN: University of Minnesota Press.</span></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">[For the love of God, please don’t give me a quiz on this one, but I know it says something about the rhizome as a powerful metaphor.]</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">But here’s the scary (i.e., challenging) thought:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What if it’s rhizomes all the way down?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Arnold, M. (2009) <i>Reticulate Evolution and Humans: Origins and Ecology</i>, New York: Oxford University Press.</span></span></b></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12576920986455084855noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6084858487513024522.post-12131281930838815182011-04-22T02:29:00.000-07:002011-04-22T03:40:17.031-07:00Simpson story #1<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Back in Tucson in 1983-4, I worked as G. G. Simpson’s secretary, during the last couple of years of his life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I was also inspired by the emerging analytical tools of cladistics, and drew particular intellectual inspiration from Niles Eldredge and Joel Cracraft’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Phylogenetic Patterns and the Evolutionary Process</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So inspired was I, in fact, that I even named my adopted cat Willi, after the godfather of phylogenetic systematics, Willi Hennig.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Unfortunately, I didn’t know much about caring for cats, and I overfed Willi, and he became a fat blob, and one day he just exploded.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Well, he didn’t explode actually, but he died, in my shower stall.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was quite broken up about it.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>So that afternoon I went in to do some typing for Dr. Simpson, and as we sat in his study he could tell I was a little upset, and I told him that my cat had died earlier in the day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Too bad.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What was his name?” asked Dr. Simpson.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I told him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Willi”.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Mm,” said Dr. Simpson, without even looking up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Who’d you name him after?”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Um....<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Holy Shit!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I couldn’t tell Simpson that I had named my cat after Hennig.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That would be like saying I had named my cat after Charles Manson or Josef Stalin, he’d never talk to me again.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Um... Um... <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Um...<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Mays,” I finally said.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Oh,” said<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dr. Simpson.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Good ballplayer.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And he continued his work.</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">**************</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It’s mildly interesting that chimps are born facing in the same direction as humans are (toward the westward sky?) as a recent report has it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=chimps-give-birth-like-humans</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">But whatever merit the observation may have is more than negated by the authors’ articulation of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>its meaning.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Although the study does not tackle that question, it certainly helps to quash the outmoded idea that humans are distinct from the rest of the animal kingdom. "In a broad sense I think humans tend to believe we are unique," says Hirata, "but that belief is not based on facts."</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The fact that a chimp couldn’t possibly articulate that thought as he did, is, ironically, too obvious to be noted by the scientist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>GGS, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Meaning of Evolution</i> (1949) followed Julian Huxley in ridiculing this pseudo-scientific attitude as “nothing-butism”. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">After all, since they understood evolution to refer to the production of difference, the statement that "we are not unique" could reasonably be construed to mean "we have not evolved," could it not?</span></div></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12576920986455084855noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6084858487513024522.post-90702544144639733392011-04-19T10:47:00.000-07:002011-04-19T12:30:52.814-07:00Why Anthropomics?<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Because anthropology isn’t science.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everybody knows that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anthropology wasn’t science at the University of Arizona, when I was a graduate student, nor was it a science at Yale when I taught there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It always amused me that the students couldn’t get science credit for Primate Functional Anatomy – a dissection course! – or Primate Ecology, or Human Paleontology, much less for my own classes, like the only undergraduate course focusing on human genetics offered in Yale College, or even my course like Human Biology and Culture, which (the biology department actually told me) couldn’t possibly be science because it had the word “culture” in it. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Their course in Tissue Culture notwithstanding...</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Anthropology is scholarly, and as such it is bigger than science, but isn't science.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> At any rate, if you can't even convince your dean what it is, don't try and convince me. </span>And between us both, the people who insist the most loudly that anthropology really is a science, tend to do the crappiest fucking science themselves.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Which reminds me that I should probably warn you that my appreciation for, and invocation of, the English language not uncommonly extends beyond the decorous.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was in fact indignantly chastized only last week for using the word “moron” in a podium paper at a scholarly meeting.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">No kidding.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">No names, of course, or name-calling, such as “douchebag retard,” but just an observation that my interlocutor was adopting an age-old sleight of hand to avoid discussing the substantive issues, more about which some other time.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The point is that since anthropology isn’t science, we need a word to signify a sciencey engagement of anthropology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The kind of work that maybe involves expensive machines with flashing multicolored lights, and somber people with greasy hair in white lab coats.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You know, <em>science</em>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Drawing authoritative-sounding conclusions about the state of being human from ridiculously thin bits of data.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">But that’s evolutionary psychology, and we need a word to distinguish ourselves from that, don’t we?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Hence, “anthropomics”. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It jettisons the scholarly implications of “-ology” (from Greek <em>logos</em>, word/knowledge) in favor of the trendily scientistic “-omics” (from an obscure homage to Tom <em>Mix</em>, silent screen cowboy).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Seriously, though, Robert Proctor had a very interesting article on naming processes in science a few years ago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Proctor, R. (2007) “‐Logos,”“‐Ismos,” and “‐Ikos” The Political Iconicity of Denominative Suffixes in Science (or, Phonesthemic Tints and Taints in the Coining of Science Domain Names).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Isis, 98(2): 290-309.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">All right, get back to work.</span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12576920986455084855noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6084858487513024522.post-82367467387242650442011-04-19T09:38:00.000-07:002011-04-19T09:38:56.449-07:00First post<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">“Those who can, do; those who can’t do, teach; those who can’t teach, write nasty book reviews; those who can’t write nasty book reviews, submit indignant letters to the editor; and those who can’t submit indignant letters to the editor, blog.”</span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12576920986455084855noreply@blogger.com3