[MD] A Place for the Principled Person

[Heather Perella]

Hello Ian,

     Ian said:  "As I may have mentioned I'm just
> reading E O
> Wilson's Consilience at the moment, and his big
> criticisms of the
> social sciences (lack of consilience) is that they
> ignore their
> bilogical underpinnings, a kind of political
> correctness (Victorian
> prejudice), and therefore float free and arbitrary.
> Pirsig got this
> evolutionary hierarchy right."

     I don't know if EO Wilson mentions anthropology
or not.  In anthropology the meeting of social and
biological is a readily studied phenomona.  The
argument does get testy at times, for it must be
correct, and correctness in scientific fields can be a
battle that wages for centuries.  
     This battle circles around language (linguistic
anthropology), material items (paleoanthropology and
archaeology), fossil remains (where's the hyoid bone -
where vocal muscles attach), bipedalism (so far in the
country of Kenya the species Orrorin tugenensis
provides the oldest evidence, though not yet
definitely concluded, for bipedalism) which frees the
hands, leading to more artistic endeavours of both
practical (making of a hammer stone [Homo habilis] and
esthetic or non-practical in the strictest sense of
the word, reasons [Homo neanderthalensis (where
burials with material items such as flowers, auroch
bones, etc... were placed in the grave as well)].
     The study in these circles tries to fits pieces
together that track down the emergence of more and
more social functions from the more prehistorical
biological ways of living.  Anthropology itself is set
up with Anthropology being the the general field of
study defined as the study of humankind any time, any
place.  Then the first two splits of Anthropology are
Physical Anthropology and Cultural Anthropology. 
These two general fields of Anthropology are known to
converge and the convergence becomes interesting
studies.  What are the changes in biology that allow
for the emergence of cultural traits evidenced by
skeletal structure, the appearance of tools made by
hominoids, etc...?

     There is the what we can find by evidence,
looking in the dirt aspect of myself, and then the
'what is this self?' aspect of me that can't be found
only in the dirt questioning that has gone on for
thousands of years orally and scripturally passed down
over the generations.


Thanks,
SA  
     

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