Word: anthropologists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...strongest argument against sociobiology is that it underrates the emergence of the human brain, consciousness and culture. Said Columbia Anthropologist Marvin Harris to an M.I.T. audience last year: "Sociobiologists tend to drastically underestimate the result to which human cultures represent an emergent novelty." His point: even simple organisms show great variation in behavior, but only the genes can pass it on. Among humans, learning can be passed on by culture, thus overwhelming the genetic contribution to behavior...
...most vocal critics have been Marxist and other scholars with political points to make. University of Chicago Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins dismisses sociobiology as "genetic capitalism"?an attempt to defend the current structures of Western society as natural and inevitable. Jerome Schneewind, a philosopher at Manhattan's Hunter College, calls it "mushy metaphor . . . a souped-up version of Hobbes." Harvard Evolutionary Biologist Richard Lewontin is earthier; he thinks sociobiology is "bullshit...
...many, such explanations of noble deeds are cold comfort. But Harvard Anthropologist Melvin J. Konner sees a bright side to reciprocal altruism. Sociobiologists, he says, "have in fact uplifted [human nature] by showing that altruism, long thought to be a thin cultural veneer, belongs instead to the deepest part of our being, produced by countless aeons of consistent evolution...
Died. Loren Corey Eiseley, 69, maverick anthropologist, educator and author (The Immense Journey, Darwin's Century); of cardiac arrest; in Philadelphia. Eiseley taught for 30 years at the University of Pennsylvania, but his poetic writing, which bridged the gap between art and science, won him a wide audience outside the scholarly world. Although reconciled to the fact that "there is but one way into the future: the technological way," Eiseley's lyric musings harkened back to humanity's primal origins and the wisdom in fairy tales. Man's "basic and oldest characteristic," he wrote, is "that...
...believe they did. There was widespread, through not unanimous, support on campus for U.S. military involvement in Korea, even among men who considered themselves liberals and who later opposed the U.S. role in Vietnam. Robert S. Harding '52, now a University of Pennsylvania anthropologist, voted for former president Dwight D. Eisenhower while Freedman was snaking through Cambridge on a sound truck campaigning for former Sen. Adlai Stevenson (D-Ill.). Harding, who says he has subsequently "done a complete turnaround," perceived the mood then as "one of threat from the outside. Czechoslovakia had been overthrown a few years earlier...