"Never Elevated Nature or Nurture to the Exclusion of the Other Factor"

"If the phrase 'almost unbelievably malleable' represents human nature as clay, in Mead's later formulation it was more like a bonsai tree, still able to be shaped but not just any which way. Mead knew the pain of having qualities of temperament associated strongly with the opposite sex. But she did not believe that her desire to be a wife and a mother arose only from cultural conditioning, nor did she find it uncongenial to appear or act feminine. That was who she was, how she wanted to present herself. She just wanted to have a vibrant career and room for sexual exploration, too."

Elesha J. Coffman at Aeon discusses Margaret Mead's views on sex and gender.

"The Window Into the Past That These Children Provide Is Priceless"

"By analyzing the older infant's genome, Potter and his colleagues, including José Víctor Moreno Mayar and Lasse Vinner, have shown that she belonged to a previously unknown group of ancient people, who are distinct from all known Native Americans, past and present. The team have dubbed them the Ancient Beringians.
"'We'd always suspected that these early genomes would have important stories to tell us about the past, and they certainly didn't disappoint,' says Jennifer Raff from the University of Kansas, who was not involved in the study.'"

Ed Yong at The Atlantic writes about new "clues about when and how the first peoples came to the Americas."

"Professor of Mambo"

"Thompson wants his students to recognize how aspects of African cultures infuse not only the music, art, and dance of the Americas, but also philosophy, religious practice, textile design, everyday gestures, and even vocabulary as quotidian as Uh-huh (yes) and Unh-unh (no). According to David Doris '02PhD, a professor of African art history at the University of Michigan, 'He coined the term that became prevalent in academia: "Black Atlantic."' Says Thompson, 'We can't know how American we are unless we know how black we are.'"

In a 2010 Yale Alumni Magazine article, Cathy Shufro profiles art historian Robert Farris Thompson.

"When Activists and Scholars Find Themselves in Conflict Over Critical Matters of Human Identity"

"That would be a shame, because in addition to being highly readable, 'Galileo's Middle Finger' has an important and seldom-voiced message. 'Science and social justice require each other to be healthy,' Dreger writes, 'and both are critically important to human freedom.' Yet, too often, from Dreger's perspective, ideological or politically strategic needs take priority over the evidence. People, while trying to do good, find themselves deliberately ignoring or obscuring the truth."


In Salon, Laura Miller reviews Alice Dreger's Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists and the Search for Justice in Science.


Tom Bartlett at The Chronicle of Higher Education talks with Dreger.

Coming of Age in Anthropology

Alice Dreger at The Atlantic and Emily Eakin in The New York Times Magazine discuss the controversial reputations of anthropologists Margaret Mead and Napoleon Chagnon.

Lucy in the Ground with Fossils

"Researchers had previously believed that the first member of the human family tree to walk upright was Homo erectus, which flourished between 1.8 million and 70,000 years ago before giving way to modern humans. But the new discovery indicates that the transition from trees to grasslands actually took place one to 2 million years earlier."

Thomas H. Maugh II in the Los Angeles Times reports on a recent conclusion about a "fossilized foot bone from Ethiopia."

A Paler Shade of White

"The modern concept of a Caucasian race, which students my age were taught in school, came from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach of Göttingen, the most influential of this generation of race scholars. Switching from skulls to skin, he divided humans into five races by color—white, yellow, copper, tawny, and tawny-black to jet-black—but he ascribed these differences to climate. Still convinced that people of the Caucasus were the paragons of beauty, he placed residents of North Africa and India in the Caucasian category, sliding into a linguistic analysis based on the common derivation of Indo-European languages. That category, Painter notes, soon slipped free of any geographic or linguistic moorings and became a quasi-­scientific term for a race known as 'white.'"

Linda Gordon in The New York Times reviews Nell Irvin Painter's The History of White People.

The Raw and the Cooked

"A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was an avatar of 'structuralism,' a school of thought in which universal 'structures' were believed to underlie all human activity, giving shape to seemingly disparate cultures and creations. His work was a profound influence even on his critics, of whom there were many."

Edward Rothstein writes an obituary for Claude Lévi-Strauss in The New York Times.

I Have Reached an Elegant Sufficiency and Anything Additional Would Be Superfluous

"So why is our culture still chasing, consuming, striving ever harder, even though we know in our sophisticated minds that it’s an unrewarding route to eco-geddon? New scientific studies are helping to reveal why. It’s our primitive brains. These marvellous machines got us down from the trees and around the world, through ice ages, famines, plagues and disasters, into our unprecedented era of abundance. But they never had to evolve an instinct that said, 'enough'.
"Instead, our wiring constantly, subliminally urges us: 'Want. More. Now.'"

The Times provides an extract from John Naish's Enough: Breaking Free From the World of More.

A Fall from Grace?

"About 12,000 years ago people embarked on an experiment called agriculture and some say that they, and their planet, have never recovered. Farming brought a population explosion, protein and vitamin deficiency, new diseases and deforestation. Human height actually shrank by nearly six inches after the first adoption of crops in the Near East. So was agriculture 'the worst mistake in the history of the human race', as Jared Diamond, evolutionary biologist and professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, once called it?"

The Economist doubts the idea that the development of agriculture marked a decline for humanity.