Word: anthropologists
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...knuckle-walking ape called Dryopithecus, a creature that lived some 20 million years ago and is generally believed to have given rise to both apes and man. This ape's own ancestors seem likely to have lived in Africa as well. As Exhibit A, Duke University Anthropologist Elwyn Simons offered fossils, found near Cairo, of a tree-dwelling primate 30 million years old; Simons christened the creature Aegyptopithecus. Last week, however, a team of Burmese and American scientists created a stir in anthropological circles when they announced that they had found primate fossils in Burma that...
...leader of the delegation is Huan Xiang, vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a diplomat and journalist who disappeared from public view during the Cultural Revolution. The group includes leading Chinese anthropologist Fei Xiaotong...
Much of this new psychiatry centers on schizophrenia, the most disabling and puzzling of mental illnesses. There are dozens of contending theories to explain it. The leading behavioral one derives from Anthropologist Gregory Bateson's concept of the double bind, which holds that schizophrenia arises from a prolonged dose of conflicting instructions, as, say, when a mother tells a child not to eat sweets, yet is constantly rewarding it with candy. But studies of identical twins and adopted children by Biochemist Seymour Kety strongly suggest a genetic base for schizophrenia. According to Kety, the flaw, contained in the cells...
...reveal "what happiness is, who has it and why." Freedman analyzes the results of both popular surveys and casual interviews and also attempts, he says, "to present what we, as social scientists, know about happiness." Soon to be published is Optimism: The Biology of Hope, by Rutgers University Anthropologist Lionel Tiger; it explores the possible biological origins of the human sanguineness that underlies feelings of wellbeing, whatever they are called. New York Psychoanalyst Willard Gaylin has just weighed in with a study called Feelings: Our Vital Signs, which scrutinizes and tries to delineate all the familiar varieties of human feeling...
Lionel Tiger's forthcoming book offers some slightly more definite advice-or at least postulation. Although he is not studying happiness as such, the anthropologist argues that humankind does not have to go looking far for its basic source of wellbeing: it is built right into the human body. Says he: "Our benign sense of the future could have been bred into us and other complex animals out of the need to survive." Tiger speculates that man pushes ever onward, inextinguishably optimistic in the face of adversity, because of his biochemistry. The key to mankind's optimism...