Anthropomics

I just finished writing a brief essay  for the journal Sociology, for a retrospective on an important book, Dot Nelkin and Susan Lindee’s (1995) The DNA Mystique: The Gene as Cultural Icon. �...

http://anthropomics.blogspot.com/2013/03/genetics-as-political-ideology.html

The flap in the last couple of weeks over Jared Diamond’s publicity for his book, The World Until Yesterday, and Napoleon Chagnon’s publicity for his book, Noble Savages needs a little conte...

http://anthropomics.blogspot.com/2013/02/meet-joe-science.html

               Things have been building up, haven’t they?                 There’s Jared Diamond, dressed like Santa Claus , pushing his new book, telling Stephen C...

http://anthropomics.blogspot.com/2013/02/been-building-up-havent-they-theres.html

The newest issue of the Yearbook of Physical Anthropology contains some provocative material (including my own article, “Why Be Against Darwin? Creationism, Racism and the Roots of Anthropolog...

http://anthropomics.blogspot.com/2012/11/a-rootin-tootin-blog-post.html

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...

http://anthropomics.blogspot.com/2012/05/bad-anthro-theatre.html

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 Before...

http://anthropomics.blogspot.com/2012/03/gorilla-my-dreams-i-adore-you.html

1.  There is no Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness.  “Pleistocene Africa” covers a lot of time and turf. 2.  The Descent of Man is Darwin’s worst book, full of sexist Victoria...

http://anthropomics.blogspot.com/2012/02/ten-points-for-evolutionary-psychology.html

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 M...

http://anthropomics.blogspot.com/2011/12/simpson-story-3.html

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 tha...

http://anthropomics.blogspot.com/2011/11/so-est-ce-la-science.html

            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...

http://anthropomics.blogspot.com/2011/10/tell-us-about-washington-son-is-it-run.html

               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...

http://anthropomics.blogspot.com/2011/09/everybodys-favorite-nazi-vacuum-cleaner.html

               The Hebrews finally wrote their legends down around 500 BC, and produced a masterpiece of redaction.  It blends Canaanite traditions with Babylonian traditions (from...

http://anthropomics.blogspot.com/2011/08/stupid-religions-of-world-volume-2.html

Yet through all this juggling, I detect no sign of fraud or conscious manipulation.                         S. J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 1981: 69. A couple of week...

http://anthropomics.blogspot.com/2011/06/plotz-biology.html

Eleven years ago, the psychologist Philippe Rushton sent a lot of social scientists a little booklet, which was an abridgement of his book, Race, Evolution, and Behavior.  Rushton’s work is ea...

http://anthropomics.blogspot.com/2011/06/brain-fart.html

               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, coc...

http://anthropomics.blogspot.com/2011/05/carlin-story-of-sorts.html

               Maybe I sensed that I would evolve into a faux historian even back in graduate school.  But when I used to visit Dr. Simpson and do his typing and filing, back in 19...

http://anthropomics.blogspot.com/2011/05/simpson-story-2.html

               To begin with, In 1987 there were about 170 species of primates.  Today there are over 400.  Go Primates!                 For the sake of argument,...

http://anthropomics.blogspot.com/2011/04/first-lecture-on-primate-taxonomy-with.html

Cladistic analysis is certainly a powerful, logically rigorous tool for the determination of relatedness among species.  In the simplest case you have three species and want to know which two ar...

http://anthropomics.blogspot.com/2011/04/clades-versus-rhizomes.html

Back in Tucson in 1983-4, I worked as G. G. Simpson’s secretary, during the last couple of years of his life.  But I was also inspired by the emerging analytical tools of cladistics, and drew ...

http://anthropomics.blogspot.com/2011/04/simpson-story-1.html

Because anthropology isn’t science.  Everybody knows that.  Anthropology wasn’t science at the University of Arizona, when I was a graduate student, nor was it a science at Yale when I taug...

http://anthropomics.blogspot.com/2011/04/why-anthropomics.html

“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...

http://anthropomics.blogspot.com/2011/04/first-post.html