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J Scott Hill

Food For Thought: Meat-Based Diet Made Us Smarter : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...eat-based-diet-made-us-smarter

evolution human thought food diet

shared by J Scott Hill on 29 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Our earliest ancestors ate their food raw — fruit, leaves, maybe some nuts. When they ventured down onto land, they added things like underground tubers, roots and berries.
  • "You can't have a large brain and big guts at the same time," explains Leslie Aiello, an anthropologist and director of the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York City, which funds research on evolution. Digestion, she says, was the energy-hog of our primate ancestor's body. The brain was the poor stepsister who got the leftovers.
  • "What we think is that this dietary change around 2.3 million years ago was one of the major significant factors in the evolution of our own species," Aiello says.
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  • cut marks on animal bones appeared
  • that could have been made only by a sharp tool.
  • But Aiello's favorite clue is somewhat ickier — it's a tapeworm. "The closest relative of human tapeworms are tapeworms that affect African hyenas and wild dogs," she says.
  • Besides better taste, cooked food had other benefits — cooking killed some pathogens on food.
  • It breaks up the long protein chains, and that makes them easier for stomach enzymes to digest. "
  • collagen is very hard to digest. But if you heat it, it turns to jelly."
  • starchy foods like turnips, cooking gelatinizes the tough starch granules and makes them easier to digest too. Even just softening food — which cooking does — makes it more digestible. In the end, you get more energy out of the food.
  • J Scott Hill on 29 Jan 13
     
    Interesting audio piece on cooked food, meat, and the evolution of our big brains.
Stephanie Hegarty

Response to Allegations against James V. Neel in Darkness in El Dorado, by Patrick Tierney - 3 views

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...PMC384880

epidemic darkness allegations

shared by Stephanie Hegarty on 05 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • The most serious charge accuses Neel of deliberately initiating a 1968 measles epidemic among the Yanomami by using a hazardous and contraindicated vaccine to test theories about human evolution, “leadership genes,” and infectious diseases.
  • Various other allegations against Neel in Tierney’s book include the following:1.That he failed to provide medical care to the Yanomami during the measles epidemic.2.That the Yanomami population-genetics studies directed by Neel were performed as controls for comparison with work on mutation detection among the survivors of the atomic bombing in Japan.3.That Neel performed unethical experiments on the Yanomami, involving radioactive iodine injections.4.That he sought to demonstrate the existence of a “leadership gene” among the Yanomami headmen.5.That Neel was somehow involved in administering plutonium injections into patients in the Rochester hospital where he was a medical house officer in the 1940s.6.That he discounted the risks of atomic radiation.7.That Neel denounced modern American society and advocated improving the human race by principles of coercive eugenics.
  • Stephanie Hegarty on 05 Feb 13
     
    "The most serious charge accuses Neel of deliberately initiating a 1968 measles epidemic among the Yanomami by using a hazardous and contraindicated vaccine to test theories about human evolution, "leadership genes," and infectious diseases."
J Scott Hill

A Family Tree in Every Gene - 0 views

raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Leroi

race culture racism genetics adaptation evolution

shared by J Scott Hill on 26 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Who speaks of "racial stocks" anymore? After all, to do so would be to speak of something that many scientists and scholars say does not exist. If modern anthropologists mention the concept of race, it is invariably only to warn against and dismiss it. Likewise many geneticists. "Race is social concept, not a scientific one," according to Dr. Craig Venter—and he should know, since he was first to sequence the human genome.
  • But now, perhaps, that is about to change
  • The dominance of the social construct theory can be traced to a 1972 article by Dr. Richard Lewontin, a Harvard geneticist, who wrote that most human genetic variation can be found within any given "race." If one looked at genes rather than faces, he claimed, the difference between an African and a European would be scarcely greater than the difference between any two Europeans.
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  • Three decades later, it seems that Dr. Lewontin's facts were correct, and have been abundantly confirmed by ever better techniques of detecting genetic variety. His reasoning, however, was wrong. His error was an elementary one, but such was the appeal of his argument that it was only a couple of years ago that a Cambridge University statistician, A. W. F. Edwards, put his finger on it.
  • Genetic variants that aren't written on our faces, but that can be detected only in the genome, show similar correlations. It is these correlations that Dr. Lewontin seems to have ignored. In essence, he looked at one gene at a time and failed to see races. But if many—a few hundred—variable genes are considered simultaneously, then it is very easy to do so. Indeed, a 2002 study by scientists at the University of Southern California and Stanford showed that if a sample of people from around the world are sorted by computer into five groups on the basis of genetic similarity, the groups that emerge are native to Europe, East Asia, Africa, America and Australasia—more or less the major races of traditional anthropology.
  • J Scott Hill on 26 Feb 13
     
    "A Family Tree in Every Gene By Armand Marie Leroi Published on: Jun 07, 2006 Armand Marie Leroi, an evolutionary developmental biologist at Imperial College in London, is the author of Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body." This Article is a fairly sensible, nuanced, defense of the race concept based on recent genetic analyses of hundreds of genetic variables at a time.   
J Scott Hill

RACE - Are We So Different? :: A Project of the American Anthropological Association - 1 views

www.understandingrace.org/home.html

race culture racism history adaptation evolution

shared by J Scott Hill on 26 Feb 13 - Cached
  • J Scott Hill on 26 Feb 13
     
    This cite is mentioned in Kottak's text...it has a lot of good information about Race.
James Granderson

El Dorado Interim Report/Request for Information - 1 views

anthroniche.com/...0459.htm

taskforce neel vaccination darkness allegations radioactive

shared by James Granderson on 06 Feb 13 - No Cached
Erin Brennan liked it
  • El Dorado Task Force
  • activities that may have resulted in personal gain to scientists, anthropologists and journalists while contributing harm to the Yanomami
  • activities by anthropologists, scientists and journalists that may have contributed to malnutrition, disease and disorganization
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  • evolution of various codes of ethics and ethical guidelines existing during the time a particular set of actions occurred
  • That damaging representations of the Yanomami were published and repeated even after such representations were criticized as likely to cause them harm
  • That a program of vaccination of Yanomami undertaken by James Neel in 1968 caused an epidemic of measles
  • That practices of anthropologists in the field were unethical, ignoring legal constraints and ethics codes and tending, either through oversight or purposefully, to exacerbate violence, spread disease, and violate the dignity of individual Yanomami through, for instance, inappropriate sexual relations
  • our response to the allegations will not always be to determine whether they are true or false, since in many cases this is simply undeterminable.
  • That anthropologists, especially Americans, and others generally ignored threats to the Yanomami and gave the highest priority to continuing established programs of research of no immediate benefit to the Yanomami
  • That anthropologists and others working with the Yanomami have not adequately addressed malnutrition, disease, and disorganization among them
  • That experiments involving the injection of radioactive iodine were carried out among the Yanomami without attention to the principles of informed consent then in effect
  • James Granderson on 06 Feb 13
     
    Interim report that details specific allegations made against Neel and anthropologists in "Darkness in El Dorado." 
Mia Gooding

Kenan Malik's review of 'Darkness in El Dorado' by Patrick Tierney - 0 views

www.kenanmalik.com/...tierney_darkness.html

research anthropology paradigm

shared by Mia Gooding on 05 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • In the twentieth century, the consequences of racial science led anthropologists to reject naturalistic explanations and to see human behaviour as dictated largely by culture, not biology
  • all too often anthropologists saw what they wanted to
  • The most prominent of the new generation of sociobiological anthropologists was the American Napoleon Chagnon
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  • Chagnon presented the Yanomamo as a fierce, primitive tribe whose mores opened the window onto our own past ('our contemporary ancestors' as Chagnon has described them).
  • linked Yanomami violence to genetic success
  • Chagnon revealed that men who had killed had more than twice as many wives and three times as many offspring as non-killers. The idea that murderous violence enhanced Yanomami men's reproductive success was manna for sociobiologists.
  • Chagnon's paper is one of the most widely cited scientific studies of all time - and one of the most fiercely criticised.
  • Tierney presents a convincing case that Chagnon has consistently overestimated Yanomami violence, and that he himself was responsible for fomenting much of it
  • Patrick Tierney's Darkness in El Dorado
  • Tierney accuses Chagnon, among other things, of scientific fraud, sexual abuse, political corruption and, most sensationally, genocide
  • Chagnon, and his mentor the geneticist James Neel, may have deliberately infected Yanomami with measles, beginning an epidemic that wiped out hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of people, as part of a grotesque experiment to test the impact of natural selection on primitive groups.
  • Tierney's book, they claim, is 'a case study of the dangers in science of the uncontrolled ego'.
  • humans are an inherently violent and aggressive species. Chagnon himself has said that violence 'may be the principal driving force behind the evolution of culture'
  • Chagnon had changed the political balance between different Yanomami groups by favouring some over others, and by selectively providing steel goods and weapons to certain groups. Chagnon was apparently given to bursting into villages decorated in war paint and brandishing a shotgun. Yanomami men soon realized that their own displays of aggression would be rewarded with machetes and other highly prized tools.
  • Chagnon was an active participant in the wars. Yanomami men were fighting for access not to women but to Chagnon himself.
  • In 1968 a measles epidemic decimated the Yanomami population. At exactly the same time, Chagnon had embarked on an expedition to the Amazon under the leadership of the geneticist James Neel. During that expedition the two men initiated a programme of inoculation against measles to protect the Yanomamo. According to Tierney, however, it was that very programme of inoculation that caused the epidemic in the first place.
  • Tierney quotes several people who hint darkly that an epidemic might have been exactly what Neel wanted. Moreover, once the epidemic was under way, Neel and Chagnon 'refused to provide any medical assistance to the sick and dying Yanomami', insisting that 'they were there only to observe and record the epidemic, and that they must stick strictly to their roles as scientists, not provide medical help.'
  • Neel rejected the medical orthodoxy that the Yanomami were genetically susceptible to measles, believing that the Yanomamis' survival-of-the-fittest lifestyle had given them immune systems more robust than those of us in pampered modern societies have. The epidemic would prove Neel's theories.
  • Tierney produces very little direct evidence to back up his monstrous claims.
  • The consensus is that the measles epidemic began before Chagnon and Neel arrived in Venezuela, and that they initiated their inoculation programme precisely because they were aware of the earlier outbreak
  • used Edmonston B
  • after receiving advice from the Venezuelan government
  • In many ways Darkness in El Dorado raises more questions about Tierney's motives, and those of Chagnon's other critics, than it does about Chagnon's own work.
  • What Tierney is questioning is the very possibility of a scientific anthropology. Anthropologists cannot simply be observers, as traditional scientific objectivity requires, but must actively take sides in any political struggle involving the peoples they are studying. And in such a struggle the norms of scientific objectivity become subordinate to the political aims
  • Mia Gooding on 05 Feb 13
     
    I find this article interesting because it not only describes Tierney's point of view of Chagnon in 'Darkness in El Dorado' but it questions Tierney's own credibility of accusing Chagnon for such outrageous crimes.  It describes his reasoning behind all his claims but also points out the last of factual evidence he presents with them.
markyearick

Perspectives on Tierney's Darkness in El Dorado - 0 views

www.jstor.org/...320007

perspectives darkness anthropology Yanomami

shared by markyearick on 06 Feb 13 - No Cached
J Scott Hill liked it
  • markyearick on 06 Feb 13
     
    "Even before its publication, Darkness in El Dorado became a Janusfaced text that in calling attention to methodological and ethical shortcomings of scientific research in the Amazon also brought attention to faults in its own production." "Tierneys harrowing account forces us to ask how personal and professional ethical questions are defined and connected. His merit is to have brought together a vast amount of information about Western anthropological and medical practices carried out among the Yanomami and to have situated these practices within the network of institutional connections that made them possible and the ideologies of science and history that have rendered them so popular." "While Tierneys focus is on individuals, his book locates them in two relevant contexts: the cold war and the Vietnam War, during which currents of evolutionary genetics, sociobiology, and cultural anthropology claiming that aggression plays a positive role in human evolution found broad support, and the Venezuelan petrostate culture of clientelism, which fostered a network of corrupt politicians and businessmen with interests in the Yanomami and their territory for reasons of profit and power."
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