[MD] A Place for the Principled Person

[ian glendinning]

SA,

E O Wilson sure does mention anthropology, his main agenda appears to
be the biological / cultural split. He's well known as a
neo-Darwinist, advocating an evolutionary view of both, and
recognising that one is built on the other, and that both are involved
in "co-evolution". (He's a memer, seeing memes as units of cultural
heredity, but one of those that still holds that however far ahead of
genes the memes get, they are still on the genetic "leash".)

BTW the only correctness I was referring to negatively was political
correctness - a priori prejudice. Elsewere correctness = quality, for
me.

Ian

On 7/6/06, Heather Perella <spiritualadirondack at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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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