profiles

Cambridge has produced an article about the accomplishments of archaeologist Dorothy Garrod, the first female professor in the institution: "The groundbreaking female archaeologist".

Fingers drummed, heads scratched, because for all the university’s failings on sexual equality, they were eager to have her.

The solution?

“They turned her into a man,” hoots Dr Pamela Jane Smith, a research fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at Cambridge, a 68-year-old academic whose PhD thesis resurrected Garrod’s accomplishments from the dusty folds of history.

Garrod is remembered in paleoanthropology as the excavator of Skhul and Tabun, along with many other important sites.

John Horgan reminisces about his experience interviewing the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn: "What Thomas Kuhn really thought about 'scientific truth'". He includes a long excerpt from his book, The End of Science, and the post is a useful review. The final paragraph got me thinking:

At the end of Structure, Kuhn briefly raised the question of why some fields of science converge on a paradigm while others, art-like, remain in a state of constant flux. The answer, he implied, was a matter of choice; scientists within certain fields were simply unwilling to commit themselves to a single paradigm. I suspect Kuhn avoided pursuing this issue further because he could not abide the answer. Some fields, such as economics and other social sciences, never adhere to a paradigm because they address questions for which no paradigm will suffice.

As I'm reviewing the history of anthropological theory over the next few weeks, I'll be reflecting on how the mode of interpretation has changed over time. Obviously, biological anthropology follows the methodological trends in biology -- we are in many ways more evolution-oriented than most biologists are, although major innovations like the New Synthesis were only slowly taken up by midcentury biological anthropologists who worked within a typological framework.

Within cultural anthropology and sociology, I also think there have been several fairly well-defined methodological and theoretical paradigms. What seems different is that "revolutionaries" are much more common, and more commonly listened to, in these fields. These fields don't throw out bad ideas, they keep all the bad ideas in a cupboard where they can be pulled out and recombined in the service of theory-building.

Eric Michael Johnson has posted a wonderful and wide-ranging interview with Sarah Blaffer Hrdy: "Raising Darwin’s Consciousness: Sarah Blaffer Hrdy on the Evolutionary Lessons of Motherhood".

The balance of my life did not feel right. Furthermore, the state of my field was such that teaching in an anthropology department was not bringing me a whole lot of satisfaction. It’s so hard to talk about it and tell the truth because there were so many different angles to it. But, basically, I wrote a book proposal, submitted it to publishers, there was an auction, the book was sold, and I immediately resigned from the university. I was offered to take the status of Professor Emerita, which I thought was an attractive offer. It didn’t come with any pension or medical benefits but, because my work had been so controversial, it was a way for me to quit with dignity. So that’s what I did.

Discover magazine has interviewed Smithsonian paleoanthropologist Rick Potts, featured in a special "evolution" issue "How We Won the Hominid Wars, and All the Others Died Out". Potts is well-known for his emphasis on past environments and climate variability in forcing human evolutionary adaptations. The interview goes over these topics and spends some time considering why humans are the "only survivor" of a past diversity of hominin species. A sample:

In one of your essays, you ask the question “Are we it?”—are we the final blossom of the human flower? What is your answer?

Actually, my answer to “Are we it?” is to turn the assumption on its head. Considering that we are the only survivor of a diverse family tree—that is, an evolutionary tree characterized by lots of extinction—the notion that our twig is the final blossom of evolution is incredibly outdated. It’s incorrect no matter how ingrained it is in our thinking. Our amazing adaptability has allowed us to shape the environment to our own needs. This transformation has taken place in a remarkable period of climate stability, over the past 8,000 years or so. One deeply ironic result is that we have now narrowed our own options at a time when climate fluctuation appears to be increasing. Of an estimated 15,000 species of mammals and birds, fewer than 14 account for 90 percent of what we eat. Of more than 10,000 edible plants, three crops—wheat, rice, and corn—provide half the world’s calories. And through greenhouse gases released by burning fossil fuels, we’re pulling on the strings of the earth’s unstable climate.

I had to face that issue of "only survivors" recently in a review. Clearly that means something very different now that we know people have a diversity of ancestors among Neandertals, Denisovans, and other archaic populations in Africa.