Anthropology
edyong | September 29, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. The blog is on holiday until the start of October, when I'll return with fresh material.
For decades, scientists have realised that languages evolve in strikingly similar ways to genes and living things. Their words and grammars change and mutate over time, and new versions slowly rise to dominance while other face extinction.
In this evolutionary analogy, old texts like the Canterbury Tales are the English language's version of the fossil record. They preserve the existence of words that used to…
gregladen | September 23, 2009This is the third of three parts of this particular falsehood. (Here is the previous part)
I previously noted that to survive as a Westerner, you can get away with participating in a culture that asks of you little more than to understand the "one minute" button on the microwave, while to survive in a foraging society you needed much much more. Moreover, I suggested that the level of complexity in an individual's life was greater among HG (Hunter-Gatherer) societies than Western societies.
However, this is not to say, in the end, that one form of economy and society is more complex than…
gregladen | September 21, 2009This is yet another in a series of posts on falsehoods. To refresh your memory, a falsehood is a belief held by a number of people that is in some way incorrect. That incorrectness may be blatant, it may be subtle, it may be conditional, it may be simple, it may be complex. But, the unraveling of the falshoodosity of the belief is a learning experience, if it is accomplished in a thoughtful manner and without too much sophistry. In order for a falsehood to "work" as a learning opportunity it is important to define the statement in terms of the thoughts the falsehood invokes in the target…
ejohnson | September 8, 2009
Labor Day marks the traditional transition into fall. It also boasts some of the busiest days for moviegoers, and ScienceBloggers have early reviews of two of the season's films. The Primate Diaries takes a critical look at Peter Jackson's blockbuster film District 9 through the eyes of an anthropologist, citing its "eerily familiar" messages about race politics and colonialism: "District 9 is an exciting, action-packed thriller but it would be missing the point to simply enjoy the spectacle without looking at what the filmmakers had intended to reveal." And on SciencePunk, Frank Swain…
razib | September 6, 2009At Cognition & Culture, a review of Sarah Blaffer Hrdry's new book, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. I really liked her previous work, Mother Nature, so I'm definitely going to check this out. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy was a prominent source in Ullica Segerstrale's Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate.
edyong | September 6, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Everybody, apparently, needs good neighbours, but in many parts of the world, your neighbours can be your worst enemy. In the past century, more than 100 million people have lost their lives to violent conflicts. Most of these were fought between groups of people living physically side by side, but separated by culture or ethnicity.
Now, May Lim and colleagues from the New England Complex Systems Institute have developed a mathematical model that can predict where such conflicts by looking at how…
edyong | September 4, 2009Domestic dogs are very different from their wolf ancestors in their bodies and their behaviour. They're more docile for a start. But man's best friend has also evolved a curious sensitivity to our communication signals - a mental ability that sets them apart from wolves and that parallels the behaviour of human infants. Dogs and infants are even prone to making the same mistakes of perception.
Like infants less than a year old, dogs fail at a seemingly easy exercise called the "object permanence task". It goes like this: if you hide an object somewhere(say a ball under a cup) and let the…
emjohnson | September 3, 2009
Inexplicably, a UFO appears over one of Earth's remote cities. Hovering a few hundred meters above the terrified citizens, a government mission to board the craft is executed only to find the strange beings living in disease and desperation. A decision is made to save their lives and relocate the aliens to the city's outskirts. In that moment, what seemed to be a compassionate action develops into an outdoor prison reminiscent of the worst crimes of colonialism. Imprisoned, literally in the shanty town that is created for them and figuratively within a society that shuns them, the…
gregladen | September 3, 2009At issue here is the idea that "biology" is slow and ponderous, glacial, even geological, in its rate of change, while culture is quick and snappy and makes rapid adjustment. Connected to this is a subtly different but very important idea: Culture actually makes sensible adjustments to compensate for changes in the biological realm.
Surely, it is true that culture can change more quickly than biology, and surely it is true that culture can make adjustments for biological effects or alterations. Indeed, the very essence of humanity is culture's effects on human capacities. We tropical ex-…
gregladen | September 2, 2009OK, folks, your wisdom is needed.
I got an email from Sheril Kirshenbaum asking me to promote a blog post in which she asks for pictures that might be used to illustrate her upcoming book on kissing. I had planned to help her out, and in fact, here I am doing that right now: Please look at this post and consider sending Sheril some pics. Be nice about it. No porn please.
(cc me anything you are not sure of and I'll tell you if it is porn or not.)
Now, DrugMonkey has chimed in and made an interesting comment that I think should be taken into consideration (by Sheril). He points out, in…
gregladen | August 31, 2009The practice of growing food and keeping livestock was invented numerous times throughout the world. One 'center' of agriculture is said to be the Middle East. Despite the fact that calling the Middle East a "center" in this context is a gross oversimplification, it is true that agriculture was practiced in Anatolia and the Levant for quite some time before it was practiced in Europe, and it seems that the practice more or less spread from the middle east across Europe over a fairly long period of time.
Archaeologists have long asked the question: Was this a spread of agricultural people…
emjohnson | August 21, 2009This will be my first foray into baby blogging (technically it's my second, however the first ended up being somewhat accidental). What I hope to explore through these posts will be child development through the lens of anthropology and primatology as I observe my child going through various stages. I first wanted to explore a new idea (at least new to me) that my partner and I have been working with: early potty training, also known as Natural Infant Hygiene or Elimination Communication (EC).
The concept of EC is a simple one: mammals don't like to sit in their own waste and, if allowed…
emjohnson | August 17, 2009Benjamin Franklin once quipped, "Where there's marriage without love there will be love without marriage." His affairs are well known in American history, however this founding father may have been stating a truth extending to evolutionary history as well.
Christopher Ryan (author of the forthcoming Sex at Dawn) offers some thoughts on the role of novelty in the sex lives of our favorite primate. He suggests that men are drawn to variety in sexual partners while women are drawn to variety in technique:
When researchers decided to look at this issue to develop a Sexual Boredom Scale, they…
laelaps | August 14, 2009A male western gorilla (Gorilla gorilla), photographed at the Bronx Zoo. The origin of human bipedalism has long been a hot topic among paleoanthropologists. At the very least it is seen as something of a marker for the emergence of the first hominin, yet it remains unclear whether the earliest hominins evolved from a terrestrial, knuckle-walking ancestor or a more arboreal ape. A common interpretation is that since our closest living relatives, gorillas and chimpanzees, are both knuckle-walkers then the first hominins, too, evolved from a knuckle-walking ancestor. As Tracy Kivell and Daniel…
gregladen | August 12, 2009Four Stone Hearth is the Anthropology Blog Carnival. The main page for the carnival is here. The previous carnival was held at A Hot Cup of Joe, and the next edition will be at Natures/Cultures blog.
The current edition of the Four Stone Hearth Anthropology Blog Carnival is ..... HERE, below the fold. Please visit all the sites and enjoy. We are heavy on linguistics this edition, by the way...
Neuroanthropology ... Uncyclopedia on Anthropology
For our readers not too familiar with the history or current state of anthropology, you could find much more useful resources, but why bother?…
emjohnson | August 7, 2009
For this week's Friday Follow I wanted to highlight two excellent sources for anthropology news and opinion.
Greg Laden's Blog is my go to for informed commentary and daily entertainment. I'm constantly impressed by his prodigious output as well as his thoughtful and informative content. A must read is his recent post on the natural basis for inequality of the sexes:
What is the premise we choose, as a society, to be the basis of our ethical and moral codes, our laws, etc.? For many people, this premise is mutualism. We agree to equality of all individuals (with special exceptions). This…
edyong | August 5, 2009You wouldn't think it to look at our skyrocketing global population, but many parts of the world are experiencing serious falls in fertility. A country's fertility rate is the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime. In most developed countries, it needs to be 2.1 or higher if the number of newborns is to compensate for citizens who die. In developing countries, where death is a more frequent visitor, this replacement threshold is even higher.
The problem is that declining fertility is intimately linked with a country's economic and social development. As a result, more…
gregladen | August 4, 2009The Aquatic Ape Theory is being discussed over at Pharyngula. As PZ points out, an excellent resource on this idea is Moore's site on the topic. Here, I just want to make a few remarks about it.
The Aquatic Ape Theory (AAT) is a human evolution Theory of Everything (TOE) and thus explains, as it should, everything. That is a dangerous way for a theory to act, because if it tries to explain everything then it is going to be wrong in a number of places, and it is going to seem (or even be) right in a number of places but only by chance. (Unless, of course, the TOE is totally rad and really…
gregladen | July 29, 2009In which I explain how Abrahamic religious tradition, ingrained in Western society since before its very history began, explains some of the special ways in which we can be so dumb.
Leviticus, the ancient Biblical law, does not give us a lot of room for negotiation, and I think this may help explain the illogical way in which most Westerners approach the realities of society and culture. Leviticus asserts that human behavior intersects with the law of god in a black and white fashion. We tend to see our fellow human beings as wonderful or terrible.
A recent news story serves as an…
gregladen | July 27, 2009Is the Natural World a valid source of guidance for our behavior, morals, ethics, and other more mundane areas of thought such as how to build an airplane and what to eat for breakfast?1 When it comes to airplanes, you'd better be a servant to the rules of nature (such as gravity) or the airplane will go splat. When it comes to breakfast, it has been shown that knowing about our evolutionary history can be a more efficacious guide to good nutrition than the research employed by the FDA, but you can live without this approach and following FDA guidelines will not do you in. A naturalistic…