Biological Anthropology Quotes

Shamanism resembles an academic discipline (such as anthropology or molecular biology); with its practitioners, fundamental researchers, specialists, and schools of thought it is a way of apprehending the world that evolves constantly. One thing is certain: Both indigenous and mestizo shamans consider people like the Shipibo-Conibo, the Tukano, the Kamsá, and the Huitoto as the equivalents to universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and the Sorbonne; they are the highest reference in matters of knowledge. In this sense, ayahuasca-based shamanism is an essentially indigenous phenomenon. It belongs to the indigenous people of Western Amizonia, who hold the keys to a way of knowing that they have practiced without interruption for at least five thousand years. In comparison, the universities of the Western world are less than nine hundred years old.

The body is given meaning and wholly constituted by discourse. The body vanishes as a biological entity and becomes instead a socially constituted product which is infinitely malleable and highly unstable.

Understanding the physiological and neurological features of spiritual experiences should not be interpreted as an attempt to discredit their reality or explain them away. Rather, it demonstrates their physical existence as a fundamental, shared part of human nature. Spiritual experiences cannot be considered irrational, since we have seen that, given their physiological basis, experiencers' descriptions of them are perfectly rational... All human perceptions of material reality can ultimately be documented as chemical reactions in our neurobiology; all our sensations, thoughts, and memories are ultimately reducible to chemistry, yet we feel no need to deny the existence of the material world; it is not less real because our perceptions of it are biologically based... It is not rational to assume that the spiritual reality of core experiences is any less real than the more scientifically documentable material reality.

Hominids are all the Neanderthals, australopithecines, Homo habili, Homo erecti, etc., the upright-walking apes of which we are the only surviving species.

a worldwide flood destroyed all life on earth about five thousand years ago requires denying an immense amount of generally accepted knowledge—from astronomy, physics, geology, paleontology, anthropology, archaeology, biology, cave paintings, and more.

The story of human evolution is the story of bones.

I simply would not accede to being forced into this, and would frequently be kept out of classes because of irreverent comments and mocking this religious stuff. Frankly, it stayed with me to this day. In fact, don't get me going. I'm almost as bad as Richard Dawkins on this issue.

Joseph Campbell affirmed life as adventure. “To hell with it,” he said, after his university adviser tried to hold him to a narrow academic curriculum. He gave up on the pursuit of a doctorate and went instead into the woods to read. He continued all his life to read books about the world: anthropology, biology, philosophy, art, history, religion. And he continued to remind others that one sure path into the world runs along the printed page.

Does the evolutionary doctrine clash with religious faith? It does not. It is a blunder to mistake the Holy Scriptures for elementary textbooks of astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology. Only if symbols are construed to mean what they are not intended to mean can there arise imaginary, insoluble conflicts. As pointed out above, the blunder leads to blasphemy: the Creator is accused of systematic deceitfulness.

I do not write every day. I write to the questions and issues before me. I write to deadlines. I write out of my passions. And I write to make peace with my own contradictory nature. For me, writing is a spiritual practice. A small bowl of water sits on my desk, a reminder that even if nothing is happening on the page, something is happening in the room--evaporation. And I always light a candle when I begin to write, a reminder that I have now entered another realm, call it the realm of the Spirit. I am mindful that when one writes, one leaves this world and enters another. My books are collages made from journals, research, and personal experience. I love the images rendered in journal entries, the immediacy that is captured on the page, the handwritten notes. I love the depth of ideas and perspective that research brings to a story, be it biological or anthropological studies or the insights brought to the page by the scholarly work of art historians. When I go into a library, I feel like I am a sleuth looking to solve a mystery. I am completely inspired by the pursuit of knowledge through various references. I read newpapers voraciously. I love what newspapers say about contemporary culture. And then you go back to your own perceptions, your own words, and weigh them against all you have brought together. I am interested in the kaleidoscope of ideas, how you bring many strands of thought into a book and weave them together as one piece of coherent fabric, while at the same time trying to create beautiful language in the service of the story. This is the blood work of the writer. Writing is also about a life engaged. And so, for me, community work, working in the schools or with grassroots conservation organizations is another critical component of my life as a writer. I cannot separate the writing life from a spiritual life, from a life as a teacher or activist or my life intertwined with family and the responsibilities we carry within our own homes. Writing is daring to feel what nurtures and breaks our hearts. Bearing witness is its own form of advocacy. It is a dance with pain and beauty.

There is a massive, irreconcilable conflict between science and religion. Religion was humanity's original cosmology, biology and anthropology. It provided explanations for the origin of the world, life and humans. Science now gives us increasingly complete explanations for those big three. We know the origins of the universe, the physics of the big bang and how the basic chemical elements formed in supernovas. We know that life on this planet originated about 4 billion years ago, and we are all descendants of that original replicating molecule. Thanks to Darwin we know that natural selection is the only workable explanation for the design and variety of all life on this planet. Paleoanthropologists and geneticists have reconstructed much of the human tree of life. We are risen apes, not fallen angels. We are the most successful and last surviving African hominid. Every single person on this Earth, all 7 billion of us, arose 50,000 years ago from small bands of African hunter-gatherers, a total population of somewhere between 600 and 2,000 individuals.

I personally cannot discern a shred of evidence for ‘[intelligent] design.’ If 97% of all creatures have gone extinct, some plan isn't working very well!

The only value comes if you have something positive to do, and it’s important to match both your own interests and abilities to what you decide to work on. I

The pie-cook and the pie-consumer are both lucky if the smell of the pie 'sells' not only its desirability as biological fuel but also remembrance of pies past.

A foodie is somebody who thinks about food not just as biological sustenance, but also a key part of their identity, and a kind of lifestyle.

neither we nor our planet enjoys a privileged position in Nature. This insight has since been applied upward to the stars, and sideways to many subsets of the human family, with great success and invariable opposition. It has been responsible for major advances in astronomy, physics, biology, anthropology, economics and politics. I wonder if its social extrapolation is a major reason for attempts at its suppression.

Thus physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, sociology, history, the arts all interpenetrate each other and cohere if considered as a single convergent study. The physical studies scaffold our understanding of the life sciences, which scaffold our understanding of the human sciences, which scaffold the humanities, which scaffold the arts: and here we stand. What then is the totality? What do we call it? Can there be a study of the totality? Do history, philosophy, cosmology, science, and literature each claim to constitute the totality, an unexpandable horizon beyond which we cannot think? Could a strong discipline be defined as one that has a vision of totality and claims to encompass all the rest? And are they all wrong to do so?

In the United States both scholars and the general public have been conditioned to viewing human races as natural and separate divisions within the human species based on visible physical differences. With the vast expansion of scientific knowledge in this century, however, it has become clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups. Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g. DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic "racial" groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. This means that there is greater variation within "racial" groups than between them. In neighboring populations there is much overlapping of genes and their phenotypic (physical) expressions. Throughout history whenever different groups have come into contact, they have interbred. The continued sharing of genetic materials has maintained all of humankind as a single species.

It is often thought that the life of the hunter-gatherer was one of feast and famine. But most available data suggest that they were surprisingly healthy and had a fairly stable diet and lifestyle. Not so the primitive farmers. In years when the crops failed, in settlements where the population density was high and where disease weakened the ability to cope even further, life would have been very hard indeed. The settled population could not migrate to follow the food supply as could hunter-gatherers. They were trapped.

The hero of the following account, Homo immunologicus, who must give his life, with all its dangers and surfeits, a symbolic framework, is the human being that struggles with itself in concern for its form. We will characterize it more closely as the ethical human being, or rather Homo repetitious, Homo artista, the human in training. None of the circulating theories of behaviour or action is capable of grasping the practising human - on the contrary: we will understand why previous theories had to make it vanish systematically, regardless of whether they divided the field of observation into work and interaction, processes and communications, or active and contemplative life. With a concept of practice based on a broad anthropological foundation, we finally have the right instrument to overcome the gap, supposedly unbridgeable by methodological means, between biological and cultural phenomena of immunity - that is, between natural processes on the one hand and actions on the other.

Americans tend to shake their heads in astonishment at the Soviet experience. The idea that some state-endorsed ideology or popular prejudice would hog-tie scientific progress seems unthinkable. For 200 years Americans have prided themselves on being a practical, pragmatic, nonideological people. And yet anthropological and psychological pseudoscience has flourished in the United States—on race, for example. Under the guise of “creationism,” a serious effort continues to be made to prevent evolutionary theory—the most powerful integrating idea in all of biology, and essential for other sciences ranging from astronomy to anthropology—from being taught in the schools.

The specious idea that gender differences are due entirely to culture, and have nothing to do with biological or archetypal predispositions, still enjoys wide currency in our society, yet it rests on the discredited tabula rasa theory of human development and is at variance with the overwhelming mass of anthropological and scientific evidence.

To comprehend the interactions between Homo sapiens and the vast and diverse microbial world, perspectives must be forged that meld such disparate fields as medicine, environmentalism, public health, basic ecology, primate biology, human behavior, economic development, cultural anthropology, human rights law, entomology, parasitology, virology, bacteriology, evolutionary biology, and epidemiology.

It must be said that almost all primitive people think themselves divinely wrought, singled out and special. Often their names translate simply as "the people" or, like the San bushmen of the Kalahari, the first people. But this is a symptom of primitiveness; attempting to prove divine biology in the nineteenth century is the anthropological equivalent of a society regressing to sleeping with the lights on.

On the other hand, the conditions of human existence—life itself, natality and mortality, worldliness, plurality, and the earth—can never “explain” what we are or answer the question of who we are for the simple reason that they never condition us absolutely. This has always been the opinion of philosophy, in distinction from the sciences—anthropology, psychology, biology, etc.—which also concern themselves with man. But today we may almost say that we have demonstrated even scientifically that, though we live now, and probably always will, under the earth’s conditions, we are not mere earth-bound creatures. Modern natural science owes its great triumphs to having looked upon and treated earth-bound nature from a truly universal viewpoint, that is, from an Archimedean standpoint taken, wilfully and explicitly, outside the earth. 2

The problem with racial discrimination, though, is not the inference of a person's race from their genetic characteristics. It is quite the opposite: it is the inference of a person's characteristics from their race. The question is not, can you, given an individual's skin color, hair texture, or language, infer something about their ancestry or origin. That is a question of biological systematics -- of lineage, taxonomy, of racial geography, of biological discrimination. Of course you can -- and genomics as vastly refined that inference. You can scan any individual genome and infer rather deep insights about a person's ancestry, or place of origin. But the vastly more controversial question is the converse: Given a racial identity -- African or Asian, say -- can you infer anything about an individual's characteristics: not just skin or hair color, but more complex features, such as intelligence, habits, personality, and aptitude? /I/ Genes can certainly tell us about race, but can race tell us anything about genes? /i/ To answer this question, we need to measure how genetic variation is distributed across various racial categories. Is there more diversity _within_ races or _between_ races? Does knowing that someone is of African versus European descent, say, allow us to refine our understanding of their genetic traits, or their personal, physical, or intellectual attributes in a meaningful manner? Or is there so much variation within Africans and Europeans that _intraracial_ diversity dominates the comparison, thereby making the category "African" or "European" moot? We now know precise and quantitative answers to these questions. A number of studies have tried to quantify the level of genetic diversity of the human genome. The most recent estimates suggest that the vast proportion of genetic diversity (85 to 90 percent) occurs _within_ so-called races (i.e., within Asians or Africans) and only a minor proportion (7 percent) within racial groups (the geneticist Richard Lewontin had estimated a similar distribution as early as 1972). Some genes certainly vary sharply between racial or ethnic groups -- sickle-cell anemia is an Afro-Caribbean and Indian disease, and Tay-Sachs disease has a much higher frequency in Ashkenazi Jews -- but for the most part, the genetic diversity within any racial group dominates the diversity between racial groups -- not marginally, but by an enormous amount. The degree of interracial variability makes "race" a poor surrogate for nearly any feature: in a genetic sense, an African man from Nigria is so "different" from another man from Namibia that it makes little sense to lump them into the same category.

Food processors, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, and clothes-washing machines have substancially lessened the physical activity required to cook and clean. Air conditioners and central heating have decreased how much energy our bodies spend to maintain a stable body temperature. Countless other devices, such as electric can openers, remote controls, electric razors and suitcases on wheels, have reduced, calorie by calorie, the amount of energy we expend to exist.

Among the most virulent of all such cultural parasite-equivalents is the religion-based denial of organic evolution. About one-half of Americans (46 percent in 2013, up from 44 percent in 1980), most of whom are evangelical Christians, together with a comparable fraction of Muslims worldwide, believe that no such process has ever occurred. As Creationists, they insist that God created humankind and the rest of life in one to several magical mega-strokes. Their minds are closed to the overwhelming mass of factual demonstrations of evolution, which is increasingly interlocked across every level of biological organization from molecules to ecosystem and the geography of biodiversity. They ignore, or more precisely they call it virtue to remain ignorant of, ongoing evolution observed in the field and even traced to the genes involved. Also looked past are new species created in the laboratory. To Creationists, evolution is at best just an unproven theory. To a few, it is an idea invented by Satan and transmitted through Darwin and later scientists in order to mislead humanity. When I was a small boy attending an evangelical church in Florida, I was taught that the secular agents of Satan are extremely bright and determined, but liars all, man and woman, and so no matter what I heard I must stick my fingers in my ears and hold fast to the true faith. We are all free in a democracy to believe whatever we wish, so why call any opinion such as Creationism a virulent cultural parasite-equivalent? Because it represents a triumph of blind religious faith over carefully tested fact. It is not a conception of reality forged by evidence and logical judgment. Instead, it is part of the price of admission to a religious tribe. Faith is the evidence given of a person’s submission to a particular god, and even then not to the deity directly but to other humans who claim to represent the god. The cost to society as a whole of the bowed head has been enormous. Evolution is a fundamental process of the Universe, not just in living organisms but everywhere, at every level. Its analysis is vital to biology, including medicine, microbiology, and agronomy. Furthermore psychology, anthropology, and even the history of religion itself make no sense without evolution as the key component followed through the passage of time. The explicit denial of evolution presented as a part of a “creation science” is an outright falsehood, the adult equivalent of plugging one’s ears, and a deficit to any society that chooses to acquiesce in this manner to a fundamentalist faith.

When the knowledge of biological fact is conjoined with imagination, on the other hand, one gets facts stranger than most fiction. When biology and morphology combine perspective with religion, they become a chimera of facts that can change the world view of spirituality. Cats bring this blending of biology, morphology and imagination to the prospective table of religious discussion especially. This is so because they have differing physiological functionalities that humans do not. These differences may seem trivial to many but one wonders how these variations would work themselves out in a sapient religion or spirituality centred on these quadrupedal predatory and often nocturnal creatures. Imagine not the cat worship that other religions in the past may have done. Instead, imagine what religion would be like if cats experienced it as sapient beings. The religion's context would take place in the physical form of the domestic cat, not the anthropological form. From the perspective of cats, the mirror of divinity reflected back at them would be quite different.

Mind control survivors have identified doctors used by the CIA under Project MKULTRA as having used different aliases. I have personally spoken and corresponded with many of these child Cold War survivors. It seems colors were one of the most commonly used themes. Many survivors have identified Josef Mengele as using the aliases Dr. Green, Dr. Black, Dr. Swartz (black in German), Father Joseph, or Vaterchen (daddy) when he did their programming. The experiments and programming he used on us were of such a heinous nature, that they were not unlike some of those performed at Auschwitz. In 1937, Mengele was appointed research assistant at the Third Reich Institute for Heredity, Biology, and Racial Purity. Mengele provided "experimental materials" to the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology from twins including eyes, blood, and other body parts from Auschwitz. Mengele fled Auschwitz in January 1945 before the Russians liberated the camp. French government documents state that the Americans captured Mengele in 1946. According to the French, Mengele "was released without explanation by the Americans on November 19, 1946." The French claimed that American authorities confirmed the Mengele arrest and release on Feb. 29, 1947. 

The gift of living in our time, however, is that we are more and more discovering that the sciences, particularly physics, astrophysics, anthropology, and biology, are confirming many of the deep intuitions of religion, and at a rather quick pace in recent years.

Racism is an avoidable culture clash masquerading as inescapable biological warfare.

Language is so integral to culture that a linguist can reconstruct a culture from its language just as a biologist can reconstruct an animal from a bone.

The nature and ramifications of gender differences are empirical questions of biology, psychology, anthro­pology, sociology, political science, and history. Their dispassionate study will differ greatly from the drawing of foregone conclusions of the sort expounded in women’s studies courses.

The fact that Homo sapiens exists, despite being a biological impossibility, is a mystery that can only be understood in terms of an anthropology of domestication.

(...), I faced the same opposition everywhere. I would have surrendered in front of an overwhelming army of academic giants, if I had not made an immediate discovery. They were giants each in their special field. But the greater experts they were in their own area the less they knew outside their narrow speciality. I began to feel like a little David confronted by an army of anthropological Goliaths, my slingstones being sweet-potatoes, coconuts and other hard evidence from biological genetics.

As the economic and racial disparities grew and middle-class incomes became more unstable in the late 1970s and early 1980s, old segregationist fields—like evolutionary psychology, preaching genetic intellectual hierarchies, and physical anthropology, preaching biological racial distinctions—and new fields, like sociobiology, all seemed to grow in popularity. After all, new racist ideas were needed to rationalize the newly growing disparities.

Rejection of science and free discussion are, of course, characteristic of all totalitarian movements; thus, nonbiblical astronomy was heretical to the Inquisition, unpalatable anthropology was "Jewish" to the Nazis, unsatisfactory biology was banned as "bourgeois" in Stalin's Russia and irritating ethology is "sexist" (and unpleasant psychology is "chauvinist") to these ladies.

The effect of this statement has to be understood in the context of the times. This was a period when, whatever the misgivings about Nazism as a political project, there was widespread popular and academic acceptance of a scientific foundation for the division of humankind into separate races with different, stable, biologically inherited characteristics. While the UNESCO announcement may have come as a bolt from the blue for large numbers of people, the scientific grounding for this challenge had in fact been in preparation for some time before the Holocaust. The interwar period had been characterized by a growing scepticism towards scientific racism. In the USA it came primarily from the newly expanding field of cultural anthropology. In the UK the critique emerged largely from biology and other natural sciences.

Anthropologist Robin Fox, who is now a professor of social theory at Rutgers, in his 1994 book The Challenge of Anthropology shows none of Bouchard’s restraint in responding to the perpetual critical heckling. He dubs the opponents of the biological perspective “leftover, anti-system, left-liberal, chic-radical campus rebels and lumpen Marxists of the 1960s and 1970s … who have lazy minds.” The final zinger refers to Fox’s accusation that the critics have given up on the arduous task of understanding human nature and are content to mouth formulaic opinions instead.

The mantra of this book is that nothing about the biology of exercise makes sense except in the light of evolution, and nothing about exercise as a behavior makes sense except in the light of anthropology.

Although sex is a biological urge, it is rarely experienced in the same way by people everywhere; it is differently practiced and felt depending on the social and cultural settings in which it occurs.

...humans have evolved a desire to consume animal protein, and they are not going to lose that desire. As such, it is wrong-and likely suboptimal to our well-being-to expect us all to become strict vegans. 56 That is simply a fact for which there is anatomical, physiological, morphological (cranial and dental), paleobiological, parasitological, archaeological, cross-cultural, anthropological, nutritional, genomic, genetical, medical, sexual, and psychological data to support my argument.

Certain members of anthropology and biology departments in the 1980s and 1990s wondered, What’s with all those women synchronizing their periods when they live together? That must have an evolutionary advantage, right? One ambitious fellow (published by Yale University Press, no less, in 1991) decided this meant that ancient women somehow evolved to go on collective sex strikes by synchronizing their periods, thereby enabling/encouraging men (less distracted by the pressing desire to screw) to go out and hunt and forage. This, the author theorized, was the root of all human culture. In effect, he argues that humans build cool stuff like the Pyramids and rocket ships because women get periods and therefore don’t have sex for a set number of days per month.

When leaders create a work environment which biologically gets the best out of people, impressive results can be generated. This is not a matter of hiring dream teams or the best talent. It's more a matter of mixing biology and anthropology.

Sexual differentiation begins approximately six weeks after conception, when in male children the gonads are formed and begin to manufacture male hormone, which has a profound effect on the future development of the embryo. In the female, on the other hand, the ovaries are not formed until the sixth month, by which time the greater size, weight, and muscular strength of the male is already established. This is the biological basis of the sexual dimorphism apparent in the great majority of societies known to anthropology, where child-rearing is almost invariably the responsibility of women, and hunting and warfare the responsibility of men. These differences have less to do with cultural `stereotypes' than some fashionable contemporary notions would have us believe. While it is true that at all ages males and females have far more in common than they have differences between them, there can be no doubt that some differences exist which have their roots in the biology of our species. Jung was quite clear about this. Again and again, he refers to the masculine and the feminine as two great archetypal principles, coexisting as equal and complementary parts of a balanced cosmic system, as expressed in the interplay of yin and yang in Taoist philosophy. These archetypal principles provide the foundations on which masculine and feminine stereotypes begin to do their work, providing an awareness of gender. Gender is the psychic recognition and social expression of the sex to which nature has assigned us, and a child's awareness of its gender is established by as early as eighteen months of age.

The acknowledged American leader of the new science of anthropology, Boas was a scrupulous master of detail drawn from his field experience. Boas's The Mind of Primitive Man (1911; revised and enlarged in 1938) demonstrated that "there is no fundamental difference in the ways of thinking of primitive and civilized man." He attacked simplistic racial stereotypes and insisted that "A close connection between race and personality has never been established." His conclusions were firmly based on facts gathered in the field. Boas argued that all surviving societies show equally the capacity to develop culture. They have evolved equally but differently. So he diverted the social scientists' focus from biology (the realism of evolution) to anthropology. And he received the accolade of the German Nazis when they burned his books and rescinded his German Ph.D.

Not to use bacteria as model organisms for more complex animals, but the reverse: to literally make complex animals more like their model organisms, by making living matter conform to the shape, time, and technical forms of simpler experimental models.

Stopping in the 1970s, "Hybridity" as the fifth and final chapter is less of an end point than a certain realization of the artifice, plasticity, and technology that Wells and Loeb envisioned as the future of the human relationship to living matter as well as of the "catastrophic" situation that Georges Canghuilhem (following Kurt Goldstein) saw in life subjected to the milieu of the laboratory.

In the American colonies, the first laborers were European indentured servants. When African laborers were forcibly brought to Virginia beginning in 1619, status was defined by wealth and religion, not by physical characteristics such as skin color. But this would change. Over time, physical difference mattered, and with the development of the transatlantic slave trade, landowners began replacing their temporary European laborers with enslaved Africans who were held in permanent bondage. Soon a new social structure emerged based primarily on skin color, with those of English ancestry at the top and African slaves and American Indians at the bottom. By 1776, when “all men are created equal” was written into the Declaration of Independence by a slaveholder named Thomas Jefferson, a democratic nation was born with a major contradiction about race at its core. As our new nation asserted its independence from European tyranny, blacks and American Indians were viewed as less than human and not deserving of the same liberties as whites. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the notion of race continued to shape life in the United States. The rise of “race science” supported the common belief that people who were not white were biologically inferior. The removal of Native Americans from their lands, legalized segregation, and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II are legacies of where this thinking led. Today, science tells us that all humans share a common ancestry. And while there are differences among us, we’re also very much alike. Changing demographics in the United States and across the globe are resulting in new patterns of marriage, housing, education, employment, and new thinking about race. Despite these advances, the legacy of race continues to affect us in a variety of ways. Deeply held assumptions about race and enduring stereotypes make us think that gaps in wealth, health, housing, education, employment, or physical ability in sports are natural. And we fail to see the privileges that some have been granted and others denied because of skin color. This creation, called race, has fostered inequality and discrimination for centuries. It has influenced how we relate to each other as human beings. The American Anthropological Association has developed this exhibit to share the complicated story of race, to unravel fiction from fact, and to encourage meaningful discussions about race in schools, in the workplace, within families and communities. Consider how your view of a painting can change as you examine it more closely. We invite you to do the same with race. Examine and re-examine your thoughts and beliefs about race. 1

Scientists focused only on the nuclear family miss the central role of alloparenting in our species.* Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, author of Mothers and Others, laments, “Infant-sharing in other primates and in various tribal societies has never been accorded center stage in the anthropological literature. Many people don’t even realize it goes on. Yet…the consequences of cooperative care—in terms of survival and biological fitness of mother and infant—turn out to be all to the good.

When the cross destroys the substance of the sinner, this is not a physical, biological, or psychological destruction, but a soteriological destruction of self-willful efforts to establish one’s own subsistence before God. It is an ontological destruction, in that the cross destroys the ontology of self-justification.

Of course, we could do simulations with random number generators and make statistical predictions about long-term outcomes. But suppose that what looks to us like a random event is really controlled by forces outside our perceptible sphere?

Due to their soft bodies and ephemeral nature, it is unlikely that biological evidence of mushrooms will even be discovered in the archaeological record. This fact poses certain difficulties in determining the antiquity of modern cultural uses of psychoactive mushrooms, like those in Mexico and Siberia, and makes it even more difficult to determine whether psychoactive mushrooms were recognized and used by historical culture groups that are now extinct.

I am perhaps more proud of having helped to redeem the character of the cave-man than of any other single achievement of mine in the field of anthropology.

A true psychology has got to be an evolutionary psychology. Whether

evolutionary psychologists have got it right. We are evolved beings and therefore our psychology will have to be understood in terms of natural selection, among other factors.

In fact, Wilson and King showed that the difference in the average protein-coding gene sequences of chimps and modern humans was about 1 percent. In other words, the proteins that we use in our day-to-day biology are nearly identical to those that chimpanzees and bonobos use.

In response to people who inquire as to why God would create such a world where there is predation, suffering and death, and how that could be called “good,” I would say we have to understand how all the pieces fit together. “Good” pertained to the order that was being formed in the midst of non-order. The non-order, then, was not good, though not evil either, but the plan for continued ordering involved a process by which all non-order would eventually be resolved. We know that because that is the eventual result in new creation (Rev 20). God’s creating involved assigning a place in the ordered world. So, it would not be coherent to speak of God creating (in terms of ordering) a world of non-order. The material world would originally have been not yet ordered (Gen 1:2). Whenever God uses a process (and he often does), his intentions are revealed in the final result and may not be evident in the stages along the way. Those who believe that there was no death or suffering before the fall have associated those consequences with disorder rather than with non-order. It is easy to see how that association might be made, but if the evidence fails to bear it out, we can conclude that association with non-order is defensible from a biblical and theological perspective and enjoys more support from history, biology and anthropology.

even if you count back only four or five generations, you have an enormous number of living biological relatives descended from those ancestors. This is why it’s not very unusual if you are descended from George Washington or another founding father or mother.

A people is what is seen before the eyes or what history reveals; a race is what is looked for and is often assumed.” Here was one of the first explicit intimations that race might be an intellectual rather than a biological construct.

One of the many pernicious aspects of this research was the way it was used to classify human “races.” In biology and anthropology, race has long been abandoned as a meaningful category; indeed, although the term has been in use since the seventeenth century, it has never been precisely defined. There has never been any agreement about the number of human races, or what the definitive characteristics of a race might be: skin color, hair type, head shape, etc. Genetic research in the twentieth century has shown that there are no genes that correspond to racial types and that the range of variation within so-called races is greater than the variation across them. But scientists in the early 1920s were working with an essentialist model of race as something immutable, definitive, and grounded in biological reality.

Evolutionary logic suggests that humans become accustomed to novel, unhealthy behaviors and aspects of our environment when they become quotidian.

Remember that for millions of years natural selection favored women who devoted whatever extra energy they had toward reproduction, partly through the action of reproductive hormones such as estrogen. Natural selection, however, never geared women's bodies for coping with long-term surfeits of energy, estrogen, and other related hormones. As a result, women today are very different and vastly more at risk of developing cancer than mothers from long ago because their bodies are still functioning as they evolved to have as many surviving children as possible.

In short, the invention of agriculture caused the human food supply to increase in quantity and deteriorate in quality, but food industrialization multiplied this effect. Over the las hundred years, people have developed many technologies to produce orders of magnitude more food that is usually nutrient poor but calorie rich. Since the Industrial Revolution began about twelve generations ago, these changes have enabled us to feed more than an order of magnitude more people and to feed them more. Although approximately 800 million people today still face shortages of food, more than 1.6 billion people are overweight or obese.

Nothing over the last few million years of human history has changed human energetics as much as the low cost of working at a desk using machines run by electric power.

One of the ironies of industrialization is that its spread across the globe has required more people to spend more time sitting.

In short, the Industrial Revolution was actually a combination of technological, economical, scientific and social transformations that rapidly and radically altered the course of history and reconfigured the face of the planet in less than ten generations -a true blink of an eye by the standards of evolutionary time.

The bottom line, is that fat is vital for all species, but specially for humans.

Just as not requiring a child to reason critically will stunt her intellect, not stressing a child's bones, muscles and immune systems will fail to match these organ's capacities to their demands.

I view science as the priceless legacy of humanity's search for understanding of the material world. But in an unequal economic system, science cannot avoid being stained by prevailing prejudices and bigotry - not only social sciences, like anthropology, but the so-called hard sciences like biology.

The “chemical imbalance” theory of depression, for example, also known as the catecholamine, monoamine, or serotonin deficiency hypothesis, was based on the chemical action of the first generation of antidepressants, which were discovered serendipitously and found to act on monoamine pathways to increase monoamine concentrations (López‐Muñoz & Alamo, 2009). We now know that the “chemical imbalance” hypothesis of depression is false. First, the fact that drugs that increase monoamine concentrations also reduce depressive symptoms (O'Donnell, 2011) is not strong evidence that depression is caused by a deficiency of monoamines. Aspirin reduces headache symptoms but headaches are not caused by an aspirin deficiency. Second, antidepressant drugs increase monoamine concentrations almost immediately (within minutes), but their antidepressant effects only appear after a few weeks (Frazer & Benmansour, 2002; Harmer, Goodwin, & Cowen, 2009). Third, other drugs, such as cocaine, increase monoamines (Kalsner & Nickerson, 1969; Kuhar, Ritz, & Boja, 1991) but are not effective antidepressants. Fourth, some antidepressant drugs, such as tianeptine, decrease monoamines (Baune & Renger, 2014; McEwen et al., 2010). Fifth, depletion of monoamines does not induce depression in non‐depressed individuals (Ruhé, Mason, & Schene, 2007). In summary, although monoamines might play some role in depression, there is no evidence that depression is caused by a simple imbalance of serotonin, norepinephrine, or any other neurotransmitter or biochemical (Kendler, 2008; Lacasse & Leo, 2015, and references therein).

In Australia, for example, antidepressant use increased 352% from 1990 to 2002, with a further 95% increase from 2000 to 2011. Similar increases in antidepressant and other treatments occurred in Canada, England, and the United States...Nevertheless, no reduction in the prevalence of mood, anxiety, or substance use disorders was observed in any country... The limited efficacy of commonly prescribed antidepressants has been recognized for at least two decades... A recent exhaustive meta‐analysis of published and unpublished antidepressant trials found an almost identical effect of antidepressants over placebo

We now know that the “chemical imbalance” hypothesis of depression is false... Aspirin reduces headache symptoms but headaches are not caused by an aspirin deficiency... treating symptoms is not necessarily equivalent to correcting a biological dysfunction.

Instead, the true pattern of biphasic sleep—for which there is anthropological, biological, and genetic evidence, and which remains measurable in all human beings to date—is one consisting of a longer bout of continuous sleep at night, followed by a shorter midafternoon nap.

The factors facilitating the global emergence of pathogens shared between humans and animals are of particular importance because the diseases they induce have had major impacts on both human and animal health. This transfer of pathogens has ocurred for thousands, if not millions, of years and continues today.

Our species has co-evolved alongside many others to which we were in contact, especially through scavenging, hunting, and then animal husbandry, all of which would have exposed us to novel pathogens and zoonotic diseases. As a species, we had to adapt to these new pathogens without the benefits of modern medicine. The newly emerging diseases of recent decades, while novel in themselves, are but a repeat of patterns which humans have survived over several millennia.

Today there are almost eight billion people on earth, crowded together and travelling widely -this is 1300 times more than were present when the agricultural revolution began around 10,000 years ago and facilitated the spread of many pathogens.

Humans have always lived surrounded by potential pathogens. Whether they co-exist relatively harmlessly or become a problem, cause acute or chronic disease and spread slowly or in epidemics has been, and still is, influenced by how we have impacted the environments we share with other animals. Pathogens are opportunists within these environments, capable and ready to take advantage of anything that promotes their transmission.

Cell biology is inextricably linked with genetics, pathology, epidemiology, epistemology, taxonomy, and anthropology

Evolutionary psychologist Jeremy Sherman explains that there are two “standard” ways in our culture to connect to the spiritual essence of things. There’s Western religion and there’s the Eastern traditions that we have turned to more recently. But he writes of a “third way” to connect. He calls it soul nerding. Soul nerding is about studying our predicament with considered curiosity by “absorbing evolutionary biology, intellectual history, philosophy, anthropology, and above all, literature.” I’d add poetry and art to this list, as well as music, particularly classical. Voltaire called it “cultivating our garden.” It’s the connection we feel in the stillness and attention required to appreciate a creative expression by a fellow human.

Insecurity is wisdom of the jungle against possible predatory attack.

Closely allied with the contribution of chemists to the alleviation of disease is their involvement at a molecular level. Biology became chemistry half a century ago when the structure of DNA was discovered (in 1953). Molecular biology, which in large measure has sprung from that discovery, is chemistry applied to the functioning of organisms. Chemists, often disguised as molecular biologists, have opened the door to understanding life and its principal characteristic, inheritance, at a most fundamental level, and have thereby opened up great regions of the molecular world to rational investigation. They have also transformed forensic medicine, brought criminals to justice, and transformed anthropology.

Every philosophy of life will have an anthropology—a stance on what a human is. Do we interpret the human being through the grid of economics and class struggle (Marxism), biology and the struggle to survive (naturalistic Darwinism), or suffering produced by attachment to transitory things (Buddhism)? Are we bundles of experiences, streams of consciousness?

Thanks to cultural evolution and technological progress, humans have gained unprecedented power to alter their social and physical environment but, in doing so, have also created enormous opportunity for evolutionary mismatch.

Evolutionary mismatch may occur when an evolved mechanism encounters a novel environmental context that falls outside of the range that was recently encountered over its evolutionary history (the EEA or environment of evolutionary adaptation). In the new context, a functional mechanism can give rise to maladaptive outcomes or even induce dysfunctions in other mechanisms.

In modern societies, for example, the media expose people to a relentless stream of images of unrealistically attractive "competitors" -an artificial, evolutionarily novel kind of social stimulus. It has been hypothesized that such exposure hyperactivates the evolved mechanisms that regulate female competition for attractiveness and status, thus contributing to the rising incidence of eating disorders.

For instance, people who form early representations of the world as dangerous or uncontrollable may become anxious and start avoiding situations that they perceive as threatening. Avoidance is usually an adaptive response to danger; in this case, however, it prevents anxious individuals from learning that the environment is actually safer than they believe, thus locking them in a state of exaggerated anxiety. Even if such catastrophic failures of learning mechanisms are statistically rare, they can be highly maladaptive for the individuals who experience them.

To the extent that psychological mechanisms rely on information acquired through learning, they are vulnerable to maladaptive outcomes owing to the intrinsic limitations of learning processes. Indeed, the massive capacity for individual and social learning required to exploit the cognitive niche may contribute to explain our species' seemingly unique vulnerability to mental disorders.

Defensive mechanisms can make two symmetric kinds of mistakes: they can fail to activate in the presence of a threat (false negatives) or become activated when no threat is present (false positives). Even when defenses are functional and optimally calibrated, errors cannot be completely avoided; given the tradeoffs between the costs of different types of errors, the smoke detector principle suggests that defensive systems should typically evolve to commit more false positives than false negatives.

As a matter of fact, Islam does not negate critical inquiry. Muslim scholars who understand this viewpoint are supportive of stem cell research, genetic engineering and robotics within ethical bounds. Even traditional Muslim scholarship in early-twentieth century was not skeptical of evolution as a scientific explanation, which can be seen in the writings of Syed Qutb and Maulana Syed Abul-Ala Maududi. Several Muslim scientists conduct research in evolutionary biology and also teach it including Mohammed Alassiri of King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Ehab Abouheif, Canada Research Chair at McGill University; Fatimah Jackson, Professor of Biological Anthropology at the University of North Carolina and Rana Dajani, Associate Professor at Hashemite University, Jordan.

[There is a] widespread biophobia built into cultural anthropological theory, which results in deep suspicion and contempt for biological ideas. This peculiar contradiction has been characteristic of anthropology for over a century. For example, many undergraduate textbooks in introductory cultural anthropology go to considerable lengths in their discussions of kinship to emphasize the "nonbiological" dimensions of it

I have the greatest respect for conservation biologists. I care very much about conserving the rain forest and the wildlife in Indonesia, but I also found it disheartening. It often feels like you are fighting a losing battle, especially in areas where people depend so heavily on these natural resources for their own survival. After graduation, I decided to return to the original behavioral questions that motivated me. Although monogamy—both social and genetic—is rare in mammals, social monogamy is the norm in birds. Plus, birds are everywhere. I figured that if I turned my attention to studying our feathered friends, I wouldn’t have to spend months on end trying to secure research permits and travel visas from foreign governments. I wouldn’t even have to risk getting bitten by leeches (a constant problem in the Mentawais*). Birds seemed like the perfect choice for my next act. But I didn’t know anyone who studied birds. My PhD was in an anthropology department, without many links to researchers in biology departments. Serendipitously, while applying for dozens of academic jobs, I stumbled across an advertisement for a position managing Dr. Ellen Ketterson’s laboratory at Indiana University. The ad described Ketterson’s long-term project on dark-eyed juncos. Eureka! Birds! At the time, her lab primarily focused on endocrinology methods like hormone assays (a method to measure how much of a hormone is present in blood or other types of biological samples), because they were interested in how testosterone levels influenced behavior. I had no experience with either birds or hormone assays. But I had spent the last several years developing DNA sequencing and genotyping skills, which the Ketterson lab was just starting to use. I hoped that my expertise with fieldwork and genetic work would be seen as beneficial enough to excuse my lack of experience in ornithology and endocrinology. I submitted my application but heard nothing back. After a while, I did something that was a bit terrifying at the time. Of the dozens of academic positions I had applied to, this felt like the right one, so I tried harder. I wrote to Dr. Ketterson again to clarify why I was so interested in the job and why I would be a good fit, even though on paper I seemed completely wrong for it. I described why I wanted to work with birds instead of primates. I explained that I had years of fieldwork experience in challenging environments and could easily learn ornithological methods. I listed my laboratory expertise and elaborated on how beneficial it could be to her research group, and how easily I could learn to do hormone assays and why they were important for my research too. She wrote me back. I got the job.

…popular and populist writers, journalists, and on-air personalities do not so much engage in meaningful examination of controversial issues as reproduce simplistic and long-cherished notions about social and cultural evolution, biological determinism, the timelessness of traditional society, and the intractable character of ethnic and religious animosities… Seemingly outside this process, well-known pundits and public intellectuals – agents of political, economic, and cultural establishments – are mythmakers who persuade by providing their positions with the veneer of scientism: an elite discourse in which readers are invited to participate and which offers sure cognitive “satisfaction” by virtue of its paint-by-numbers explanations.

Natural law: not recurrent behaviour but codes, behavioural prescriptions and restrictions common to all peoples and part of nature’s (i.e., biological in origin) or God’s (i.e., moral and cultural in origin) plan.

Black Eve, Mother of The Human Race (Sonnet) If anthropology is anything to go by, and if there is a God, then it'd be a black woman, not a white, bearded, patronizing, male git - because the only entity who could be considered the origin of the human race, is a black woman - not Adam, but Eve - a black Eve. But then again, considering all the massacres, genocide, persecution, and downright mindlessness, perhaps God is indeed a white guy, because nobody could've screwed up so neatly except a white colonialist. But sarcasm aside, let's talk some facts of biology - no ethnicity has exclusive predisposition for atrocity, just like no ethnicity has a franchise over greatness - morons come in all shapes, sizes, genders and colors. In nature there is no ethnicity, there is only ecosystem of synergy. Ethnicity is a product of dogma, not a marker of human capacity.

Taking this class is a very significant act, and it’s not just about you. You’re also learning physical anthropology for all those friends, coworkers, family members, children, and partners who don’t have this opportunity. For two reasons, your education here is vitally important for others. First, as part of anthropology, physical anthropology will help you learn more about who you are as a biological being—as an animal, a vertebrate, a mammal, a primate, and as a human being, just for starters. Second, physical anthropology is a science. As citizens of our contemporary world, we are absolutely dependent upon science and technology for our survival, and yet, the rate of scientific literacy is appallingly low. Said another way, many people lack a true understanding of the most basic scientific concepts and methods. Still fewer could talk about evolution, natural selection, and adaptation with any degree of accuracy. Your presence in a physical anthropology class can help change that.

In her fascinating and well-researched book Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent, anthropology professor Meredith Small writes, “When signals are missed, babies stop signaling; they withdraw; they suck their thumbs; they turn away; they try to right the system themselves by not sending out any more signals.” The baby protects herself by shutting down, and “accepts” the situation because she has learned that a response is not forthcoming. We

Harvest" is a deep and meaningful exploration of the complexities regarding the origins of the human race as well as the intentions of an alien species.

At the summit of the intellectual scale, the major intellectual development of the end of the nineteenth century was the discovery of the reality and power of the subconscious in human thought and the irrational in human action. While Bergson and Freud had absolutely nothing to do with fascism, and indeed suffered personally from it, their work helped undermine the liberal conviction that politics means free people choosing the best policies by the simple exercise of their reason. Their findings—particularly Freud’s—were spread and popularized after 1918 by direct wartime experiences such as battlefield emotional trauma, for which the term “shell shock” was invented. At the bottom of the intellectual scale, a host of popular writers reworked an existing repertory of themes—race, nation, will, action— into harder, more aggressive forms as the ubiquitous social Darwinism. Race, hitherto a rather neutral term for any animal or human grouping, was given a more explicitly biological and hereditarian form in the late nineteenth century. Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton suggested in the 1880s that science gave mankind the power to improve the race by urging “the best” to reproduce; he invented the word “eugenics” for this effort. The nation—once, for progressive nationalists like Mazzini, a framework for progress and fraternity among peoples—was made more exclusive and ranked in a hierarchy that gave “master races” (such as the “Aryans,” a figment of nineteenth-century anthropological imagination) the right to dominate “inferior” peoples. Will and action became virtues in themselves, independently of any particular goal, linked to the struggle among the “races” for supremacy.