Darwin exhibit website
The American Museum of Natural History has set up a Darwin website to accompany their Darwin exhibit. It's pretty good -- not too heavy on detail, and nicely put together. The teaching resources look very useful for K-12 teachers, and there are links to other locations.
So it might be worth checking out.
Definitely one for the top ten
Dienekes came up with his own set of predictions for next year. I have to say I love this one:
At least one paper from the Genographic project in a venue other than National Geographic about some obscure people that no one has heard about but everyone will talk about for days. The paper will have a feel-good message about the unity of mankind.
I wish I had thought of it!
A little touch of Etler
I found out from a reader this morning that Dennis Etler has a blog called "Sinanthropus" -- and it's excellent! If you haven't seen his long-standing website, "The Fossil Evidence for Human Evolution in China", you should check that out too. Both are full of insights!
Oh, and the number of hominid-inspired blog names is quickly decreasing, so start now if you want one. I happen to think that "Cyphanthropus" would be a cool blog name. For someone a little bit self-absorbed, there's always "Primigenius"...
Acne and anthropology
The Freakonomics guys have a blog, and this week they are having guest posts from Seth Roberts, who has developed a new diet through self-experimentation. Usually I don't go for that kind of thing (and I don't endorse any diet), but he has an interesting anecdote today about science, acne, and experiment.
I point to it because it refers to biological anthropologists as the kind of scientists who are more "with it" than medical researchers:
A few months ago I saw a dermatologist about a different problem. I couldn't resist: What causes acne? I asked. Well, not diet, he said. I knew this was false. And, really, how could you say such a thing without testing hundreds of different diets -- at least? Which no one had. Several years ago I asked my friend Katharine Milton, a Berkeley anthropologist, whether the indigenous people she studies have acne. No, she said, unless they eat foreign food. The anthropologist was right, the doctor was wrong. The situation reminded me of something in an NIH-sponsored online medical encyclopedia: dental malocculsion, it said, "is most often hereditary." Whereas the work of Robert Corruccini, a professor of anthropology at Southern Illinois University, such as this, had convinced me that dental malocculsion is due to soft food.
I like to point out when we shine.
Pinker interview on Gene Expression
Another in the series of "10 questions" interviews, this one with Steven Pinker. It touches on the politics of gender at Harvard, his upcoming book, and includes this quote-of-the-day candidate:
It's tremendously gratifying when a seemingly ugly pattern of data suddenly reveals itself as the predicted outcome of an elegant underlying process.
Gombe chimpanzee blog
The Jane Goodall Institute has a blog, which has been updated daily for some time. According to the description:
Gombe scientists tell us about their work, daily chimp dramas, the beauty of the landscape and the struggles they experience and observe. Jane drops in now and then, too.
There is a lot of content in the daily entries, really like a diary version of field notes. I'm pasting a sample, which gives the flavor of just how interesting it is, especially if you have seen documentary footage of these chimpanzees:
Sandi is swelling again, which means she has attracted quite a following. Every male (Kris, Freud, Tubi, Frodo, Wilkie, Gimble, Apollo, Sheldon, Kris, Faustino, and Pax) is closely following her every move. Even the adolescents Ferdinand, Titan and Zeus are waiting in the wings for their chance to sneak a copulation with her at the risk of aggression from the adults. The day was filled with mating, and of course the alpha male, Kris, was most active. When the males were not trying to copulate with Sandi, they were busy fighting each other, trying to keep each other away from Sandi. These fights were impressive, with males chasing each other out of trees, many of them crashing down into the bushes below in their hurry to escape the aggression of another. It certainly is an interesting show, although all the chaos can make it difficult to observe who is actually doing what.
I really recommend it; it's like a chimpanzee soap opera. The only downside is that the entries require Google Earth to read them. This allows the cool map integration that Google Earth does so well, but it seems superfluous here, since the entries don't depend crucially on their locations within the reserve.
I assume that Google must have contributed some money for this, so I wish them well, but it does make it harder to read.
The great Guns, Germs and Steel debates
I posted on the three-part PBS special "Guns, Germs and Steel," but I didn't watch it myself. I tried for a few minutes, but it didn't grab me. Maybe I'll catch a rerun.
In the meantime, a fairly intense set of online discussions have grown up around GGS. It seems to have begun with this post at Savage Minds. It has a great beginning:
Has this ever happened to you? You are at a party, or perhaps a family gathering, or maybe even just standing in line at the DMV when the person next to you strikes up a conversation. If they don't start talking to you about Indiana Jones at the mention of anthropology, there is a fair chance they'll bring up GG&S - expecting that you just love the book. Now you're in a pickle. Diamond showily positions GG&S as the definitive anti-racist take on human history. If you say you don't really care for it, your interlocutor is likely to get a slightly baffled look on her face. What could you possibly mean, you don't like Diamond's noble tome? Are you... a racist? To explain why you don't like the book would take more time than most people making friendly small talk want to spend, and - worse yet - your explanation will necessarily impugn the motives of people who do like it, a group that you now know includes the person with whom you are speaking. My own usual reaction in such encounters is to say that unfortunately I have not read the book but that boy, it sure does sound interesting.
It even quotes me, the part of my post that connects Diamond's ideas to early 20th century anthropology. The point of citing me is to skewer the connection, but I don't buy it. Diamond borrows very freely from pre-postmodernist cultural anthropology; most of what he writes in GGS is no news to anyone who has had a first course in theory. Sure, Boas emphasized cultural differences (as opposed to ecological or environmental differences) to explain differences in cultural products like folk art. But what is there to explain cultural differences themselves? Let's ask Boas himself:
Ethnological phenomena are the result of the physical and psychical character of men, and of its development under the influence of the surroundings...'Surroundings' are the physical conditions of the country, and the sociological phenomena, i.e., the relation of man to man. Furthermore, the study of the present surroundings is insufficient: the history of the people, the influence of the regions through which it has passed on its migrations, and the people with whom it came into contact, must be considered (Quoted by Answers.com from "The Principles of Ethnological Classification").
Boas certainly emphasized culture as an explanation rather than geographic determinism. And historical connections among cultures provided a reason to reject law-like evolutionary progressions of societies. But his rejection of racism did not depend on the primacy of culture: it depended upon the availability of alternative causes for racial differences. One of those was the suggestion that racial features were influenced directly by the environment; a finding that emerged from his study of immigrants. Another is history itself: by applying historicism directly to cultures that lacked a written history, he enabled the examination of the reasons for present material differences between groups.
Here I am reminded of Kroeber's -- Boas' student -- curious fascination with the fire drill and the number of times it was independently invented versus diffused to different societies. This mode of explanation is clearly very similar to that applied by Diamond. Diamond is not an ethnographer, and doesn't care about particular cultures or events, except as examples to bolster his broad trends. But Boasian anthropology was not entirely about ethnographic description or cultural particularism; these particulars were meant to be employed in pursuit of broader goals. Not the broad goal of explanation of history, but the broad goal of debunking racist theories. Of course, Diamond attempts both.
There is a key difference between Boas' and Diamond's theories: a difference in the questions they consider to be important. Boas was concerned with explaining present disparities among human groups; for this, he viewed the history of colonialism to be more than sufficient. Diamond is concerned with explaining why some groups became the colonizers, and for this, he must turn to more distant historical explanations. Again, I think Diamond's work has weaknesses within this historical framework, but I also think it is a lot closer to traditional anthropology than some find comfortable.
On the other hand, I accept the critique of my use of "a strongly Marxist element" to describe his hypothesis. Outside of Marxist anthropology, few take note of the difference between strict and vulgar materialist approaches, and this one is definitely in the vulgar materialist school. A caution to me about the problems of overspecialization.
But I'm not much of a target; my post briefly explained my problems with the book's premise. For the most part, that qualifies me as a "friendly", I guess.
Other blogs have taken each other on more directly. Brad DeLong posted a critique of the critics, which cuts pretty deep. Crooked Timber has a side discussion of the critics and their critics. Nomadic Thoughts has a brief review of the whole thing, with references to his own reviews of the TV miniseries, if you are interested in the series itself. And Savage Minds weighed in with a second post focusing on the problems of ignoring within-society variation in material wealth.
What I like about the back-and-forth is that many of the posts and commenters actually provide references. (What I don't like is how few of them seem to have read these references.) These posts aren't expert opinions; mine isn't either. But they give an impression of the reaction of anthropologists to GGS, and they give an avenue toward finding real expert critiques of Diamond's theory. And it's all free, so I'm happy to point it out to anyone who's interested.
"Just Science"
For the next week, the Just Science aggregator (feed) will be picking up posts from a few dozen science blogs, who have committed to a post a day of just science content. I'll be participating, and while daily science content is nothing unusual here, it may be a great opportunity to find other interesting blogs that you haven't noticed before. Lots of interesting writing about science, all collected in one place -- sounds like a winner!
P. Z. Myers on the Niobrara formation
A very interesting post by Pharyngula scribe P. Z. Myers that helps to put the geologic legacy of western Kansas into perspective. This is the part of the state I am from, and I have a painting of a Niobrara chalk outcrop on my living room wall. But there is nothing like considering the history of the area, with short mentions of the role of the Sternbergs in discovering it, to put the landscape into a deeper perspective. This post goes from a microscopic view of the chalk to the paleontology of ancient reptiles in the formation.
You can find out more about them at the Sternberg Museum in Hays, which preserves many of the original fossils prepared by George Sternberg. The web site could be better, but the museum is a real treat; it rivals some of the best university paleontology exhibit museums I have seen.
You can still find sharks' teeth on the chalk road past my grandparents' farm. They've been waiting 80 million years to be found.
The drive behind science-blogging
August seems to be a month of self-reflection. Maybe it's that everyone is on vacation. There certainly hasn't been much anthropology news, although work here continues.
There has been a recent string of posts elsewhere on the motivations behind blogging in science, and it's worth reading some of them. They come after this recent article in The Scientist (registration required), which focused on blogger Derek Lowe, a pharmaceutical researcher. Lowe now has his own followup, with links to other opinions. Here's a sample:
Chad Orzel goes on to note that large numbers of people see science as something that's difficult, boring, and beyond them, so they just tune out. I'm afraid he's right. But I used to explain my experiments to the janitorial staff when I worked late at my first job, which showed me that this didn't have to be the situation. To be sure, none of my explanations started off with the phrase "Consider the Hamiltonian. . .", but none of my conversations with my colleagues start that way, either, not if I can help it.
...
So when I found out about blogging, I didn't hesitate very long before jumping in. Here was a chance to do just the kind of thing I did when talking to people one-on-one, but for as many visitors as cared to stop by.
I try to describe some difficult stuff here. If I were getting paid for it, I'm sure I could make it more understandable; but as it is, I certainly try.
The post includes this great comment, that sums up some of the most important effects of scientists themselves communicating what they do.
I can't think of a worse way to make science more attractive than by a stepped-up attack on God, ghosts and the Loch Ness monster. People perceive (correctly) that "skeptic" types (a group which, in my experience, has minimal overlap with real scientists) use science as a club to attack the sensibilities of others and aggrandize themselves. I want people to think of science as something that makes the world richer and fuller, not thinner and bleaker.
Cheers to that.
The Tangled Bank
A blog carnival is a selection of self-submitted articles following a theme of topics. A good one in the area of science and medicine is The Tangled Bank.
The current edition includes this great post with an unforgettable title: "How Evolutionary Psychology Can Make You Look Like an Ass." The article is an illustration of uninformed use of EP concepts, and a complaint about how common they are. It's short, and worth thinking about.
John Hawks Department of Anthropology
University of Wisconsin—Madison
Copyright © 2007 John Hawks