Word: primally
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This was supposed to be a column about my first experience with streaking last week, sprinting stark naked at midnight through the Yard while ululating at screaming onlookers. From that experience, and from running in Primal Scream the very next night, I had drawn a number of profound lessons about pride and identity at Harvard. But those turned out to be a load of response-paper crap, so I threw most of it out. Here's the short version...
While the Banzers may think of the work Matthew's grandmother and great-aunts do as mere baby-sitting, anthropologists know it is part of a far more primal practice called alloparenting. In all manner of animals, including bees, elephants, lions, lemurs, bats and birds, creatures with no parental investment in offspring routinely expend enormous amounts of energy caring for their relatives' young. Alloparents are not unconditional caretakers; they won't devote scarce resources to other offspring at the expense of their own. But when conditions allow an alloparenting deal to be made, it's a good bargain all around...
...impulse to commit infanticide is indeed part of our genetic legacy, can it be forgiven? Or does such a crime remain a crime no matter how strong the primal drives behind it? Anthropologists take the long view--at least when the crime is abandonment and not murder. "I think we have to re-examine the harsh penalties we place on young, uneducated women who abandon infants," says anthropologist Helen Fisher of Rutgers University. "They were dancing to primitive, natural rhythms, and they got out of synch...
Even the debauchery is ambitious--during Primal Scream, the night before final exams, hordes of undergraduate streakers run naked around the Yard, often in sub-zero weather. No joke...
...Primal Scream. Run again in the spring...