history

Last week I linked to an article about the dispersal of the potato ("How the Potato Changed the World"). Smithsonian also has an interview with Alfred Crosby, the historian who coined the term, "Columbian Exchange": "

When you wrote The Columbian Exchange, this was a new idea—telling history from an ecological perspective. Why hadn’t this approach been taken before?

Sometimes the more obvious a thing is the more difficult it is to see it. I am 80 years old, and for the first 40 or 50 years of my life, the Columbian Exchange simply didn’t figure into history courses even at the finest universities. We were thinking politically and ideologically, but very rarely were historians thinking ecologically, biologically.

To me, this was the most interesting part:

I had a great deal of trouble getting it published. Now, the ideas are not particularly startling anymore, but they were at the time. Publisher after publisher read it, and it didn’t make a significant impression. Finally, I said, “the hell with this.” I gave it up. And a little publisher in New England wrote me and asked me if I would let them have a try at it, which I did. It came out in 1972, and it has been in print ever since. It has really caused a stir.

To me, Crosby's work marks a trend in which anthropology and archaeology were damaged by changing academic fashion. In Kroeber's time, quantitative study of the material things and their appearance in history was a central part of cultural anthropology and archaeology. Cases like the origin of the fire drill and the spread of the potato were the essential subject matter of a debate between diffusionist and evolutionist theories of culture change. Such cases mattered to anthropologists. By the 1960's, they mattered not so much.

Historical economists and historians took up the subject. Today we are much more likely to see a "history of everyday things" written by a historian, and a popular work of "ecological history" is rather more likely than a popular work in ethnobotany.

The New York Times Magazine tries for a new record in academic killjoy columns: "Wouldn’t It Be Cool if Shakespeare Wasn’t Shakespeare?"

Professors of Shakespeare — and I was one once upon a time — are blissfully unaware of the impending disaster that this film means for their professional lives. Thanks to “Anonymous,” undergraduates will be confidently asserting that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare for the next 10 years at least, and profs will have to waste countless hours explaining the obvious. “Anonymous” subscribes to the Oxfordian theory of authorship, the contention that Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Among Shakespeare scholars, the idea has roughly the same currency as the faked moon landing does among astronauts.

Oh, criminy. Just like undergraduates have been confidently asserting for the last decade that the boy actors in Shakespeare's time were actually women who look a lot like Gwyneth Paltrow and really wanted to get it on with the bard?

Speaking of Jo Marchant, she has a long article in the current Nature about the mummy DNA controversy ("Ancient DNA: Curse of the Pharoah's DNA").

I wrote about the problem earlier this year: "Mummy troubles". My opinion is that this work has been relentlessly hyped and hasn't presented adequate information to assess whether the results are genuine:

Can we accurately type STR alleles from mummies? I wouldn't rule it out given the quantity of tissue available, but there should be many more controls for a high-profile study like this one. The work took place over several years, so it's a bit unrealistic to expect the latest sequencing methods. But JAMA and the Discovery Channel presented the results as important science. They should have ensured that solid answers for the obvious questions were at hand.

Marchant digs up some quotes from the authors:

The researchers deny that the television involvement put them under excessive pressure to produce dramatic results. But working for the cameras did make a challenging project even tougher, says Pusch. "Each time they came in to film, we had to close the lab for a week to clean." Eventually the TV crew was banished and the lab scenes reconstructed.

The article gives an interesting sociology of the competing groups of ancient DNA researchers. I dispute that the field is evenly divided, however. There are a very long list of laboratories doing ancient DNA work according to standardized protocols on skeletal remains from the past several thousand years. Only a few groups claim to be working with nuclear DNA or microbial DNA, the areas of contention in the mummies. Among that small set of labs, most follow similar, conservative techniques.

Then there are the handful that come up with "surprising" results time and again. If the surprising results are accompanied by substantial evidence, I have no problem. But when a paper has no clear explanation why it arrives at results that others think impossible, that raises my skepticism.

The Telegraph has done a puff piece about the Genographic testing of Charles Darwin's great-great-grandson.

Last week I got to attend an incredible panel discussion that focused on the issue of genetic testing and identity. How and why do people connect the results of a genotyping test to their deep conception of themselves?

The Genographic results are only Y chromosome and mtDNA, a tiny fraction of an individual's ancestry. Charles Darwin only accounts for around 6 percent of this descendant's ancestry (possibly a shade more genetically, considering the inbreeding). The Y chromosome is not the seat of the soul. And yet:

Mr Darwin, whose great-grandfather was Darwin's astronomer son George, said the test showed that the desire for knowledge and thirst for discovery was in his genetic makeup.

"I was always a bit concerned that I hadn't inherited Charles Darwin's scientific abilities, but I hoped I had inherited his adventurous abilities, his desire to go over the hill and see what was on the other side," he said.

Interesting how people construct a story about the connection between genes and identity, isn't it?