And most of them are boys with their toys
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Tag Archives: Anthropology
Miss A and Miss W, Sexual Jealousy, and Julian Assange
Almost Diamonds has two interesting posts on the Julian Assange sexual assault/rape accusation/charges. I want to make a comment on part of the second post, but this may not make a lot of sense to you until you read both of them. They are concise and compelling so you will not regret the time you spend on them:
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Alan Dershowitz to Mike Huckabee: Enjoy your new orifice!
First, the video. Then, if you’re good, I’ll tell you an Alan Dershowitz story. It involves Stephen Jay Gould.
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Fast, Cheap and Ooops. NASA’s NanoSail may be dead, but it was not that big of a deal.
Fast, Cheap and Out of Control
A cold stare with underlying anger for wasting their precious time.
Continue reading Fast, Cheap and Ooops. NASA’s NanoSail may be dead, but it was not that big of a deal.
Elephant Tracks and Child Safety Devices
It is probably true that every culture has child safety devices. It is also probably true that all of these devices are very limited in their effectiveness.
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The Fetish in relation to Skepticism
I was just glancing through the blog of Katheryn Schulz, author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
This has to do with the idea of a fetish. It is likely that I’m using the word “fetish” in a different way than it is usually used in modern English parlance, so some definition is appropriate. Here’s some material from various dictionary sources:
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The Feast
The enemy has arrived, in force, outside your village. The men are armed and wearing the symbols of war, which is appropriate because your group and the group milling about outside your walled settlement are at war. One of the men, wearing war garb but adorned also with white flagging to indicate a peaceful intent attempts to enter your village but is stopped by guards. They converse briefly and the guards allow the man to crawl into your village through the only opening in the surrounding wall left following preparations for possible attack. The man walks into the center of the plaza and kneels, and is handed a large container of beer which may or may not be poisoned. He drinks the entire amount without stopping, so that if it is poisoned, he will surely die, and if it is not, he will surely cop a buzz.
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Introduction 2 Archaeology
Video 1: Dan meets Alice, Alice pwns Dan.
Video 2: Dan meets Alice, gets her name wrong. Dan pwned again.
Ellen Lutz
Ellen Lutz, former Executive Director for the Center for Human Rights and Conflict Resolution and for the last six years or so Executive Director of Cultural Survival, has died. I received this rom Cultural Survival:
Why do women shop and men hunt?
Or, when the hunting season is closed, watch teh game (the guys), or when there are no sales, admire each other’s shoes (the gals)?
This is, of course, a parody of the sociobiological, or in modern parlance, the “evolutionary psychology” argument linking behaviors that evolved in our species during the long slog known as The Pleistocene with today’s behavior in the modern predator-free food-rich world. And, it is a very sound argument. If, by “sound” you mean “sounds good unless you listen really hard.”
I list this argument among the falsehoods, but really, this is a category of argument with numerous little sub-arguments, and one about which I could write as many blog posts as I have fingers and toes, which means, at least twenty. (Apparently there was some pentaldactylsim in my ancestry, and I must admit that I’ll never really know what they cut off when I was born, if anything.)
Before going into this discussion I think it is wise, if against my nature, to tell you what the outcome will be: There is not a good argument to be found in the realm of behavioral biology for why American Women shop while their husbands sit on the bench in the mall outside the women’s fashion store fantasizing about a larger TV on which to watch the game. At the same time, there is a good argument to be made that men and women should have different hard wired behavioral proclivities, if there are any hard wired behavioral proclivities in our species. And, I’m afraid, the validity from an individual’s perspective of the various arguments that men and women are genetically programmed to be different (in ways that make biological sense) is normally determined by the background and politics of the observer and not the science. I am trained in behavioral biology, I was taught by the leading sociobiologists, I’ve carried out research in this area, and I was even present, somewhat admiringly, at the very birth of Evolutionary Psychology, in Room 14A in the Peabody Museum at Harvard, in the 1980s. So, if anyone is going to be a supporter of evolutionary psychology, it’s me.
But I’m not. Let me ‘splain….
Continue reading Why do women shop and men hunt?
A study in dialects
… of English:
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Shamans, Surgery, and the Driveway of Doom
In which I explore the interface between the Jungian Subconscious and my own primordial anguish.
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Those were the days … when a physicist could murder a counterfeiter in the name of the King
William Chaloner reminds me of a handful of people I’ve known. He possessed a sense of entitlement balanced by a remarkable capacity for greed and tempered with an acute sociopathy. He clearly had a keen intellect and extraordinary manual skill. When Isaac Newton murdered Chaloner (to put it the way Chaloner would put it) he did the world a favor. I’m not saying that certain people I’ve known should be hanged, gutted, and sliced like a chicken into five or six parts, but one can see why the idea would have been attractive back in the late 17th century when that was the usual practice for dealing with treasonous individuals in London.
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Sex at Dawn
From Skeptically Speaking:
We talk to author Christopher Ryan about his new book Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality
. We’ll discuss the most recent science and theories, and how social norms compare to our biological impulses.
This Friday. Details here. I may have to read this book.
Why did the Tasmanians Stop Eating Fish?
Georges Bank is a very large shallow area in the North Atlantic, roughly the size of a New England state, that serves as a fishing ground and whaling area (these days for watching the whales, not harpooning them) for ports in New England, New York and Eastern Canada. Eighteen thousand years ago, sea levels were globally at a very low point (with vast quantities of the Earth’s water busy being ice), and at that time George’s Bank would have been a highland region on the very edge of the North American continent, extending via a lower ridge to eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and separated by a low plain (covered in part by glaciers) to the rest of New England.1
As sea levels began rising around twelve thousand years ago, George’s bank became a narrower peninsula and eventually an island visible from the mainland. We know that people lived on this island because artifacts of early Native American groups have been dredged up here, along with the teeth of Pleistocene elephants and other items.
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