ANTH 1000

Introduction to Anthropology

Article – Body Ritual Among the Nacirema

Examples from text:
*Portion of the day is spent in ritual activity
*Most powerful are medicine men, whose assistance must be rewarded with substantial gifts.
*Were it not for the rituals of the mouth, they believe that their teeth would fall out, their gum bleed, their jaws shrink, their friends desert them, and their lovers reject them.
*People seek out a holy-mouth-man once or twice a year.
*Exorcism of the evils of the mouth involves almost unbelievable ritual torture of the client.
*Hold mouth man opens the client’s mouth and using the tolls enlarges any holes which decay may have created in the teeth.
*Daily ceremonies involve discomfort and torture.
*Nacirema believe parents bewitch their own children while teaching them the secret body rituals.
*Intercourse it taboo as a topic and schedules as an act.
*Medicine men have imposing temple, or latipso.
=> Teeth indicate health
=> Note that [Nacirema] is [America] spelled backwards

“Mirror for Humanity”

Chapter 1: What is Anthropology?

*To become a cultural anthropologist, one normally does ethnography (the first-hand, personal study of local settings). Ethnographic fieldwork usually entails spending a year or more in another society, living with the local people and learning about their way of life. No matter how much the ethnographer discovers about the society, he or she remains and alien there.
*Anthropology is the exploration of human diversity in time and space.
-> Studies the whole of the human condition: past, present, and future; biology, society, language, and culture
-> Study of the human species and its immediate ancestors.
*Anthropology is a uniquely comparative and holistic science.
-> Holism refers to the study of the whole of the human condition: past, present, future; biology, society, language, and culture.
*Cultures are traditions and customs, transmitted through learning, that form and guide the beliefs and behavior of the people exposed to them.
-> Children learn such a tradition by growing up in a particular society, through enculturation.
-> Cultural traditions include customs and opinions, developed over the generations, about proper and improper behavior.
*Adaptation refers to the process by which organisms cope with environmental forces and stresses, such as those posed by climate and topography or terrains, also called landforms
*Racial classification (the attempt to assign humans to discrete categories [purportedly] based on common ancestry).
*(A species is a population whose members can interbreed to produce offspring that can live and reproduce.)
*Phenotype refers to an organism’s evident traits, its “manifest biology” – anatomy and physiology. Human display hundreds of evident (detectable) physical traits. Range from skin color, hair form, eye color, and facial features.
*Racial classifications based on phenotype raise the problem of deciding which traits are most important. Should races be defined by height, weight, body shape, facial features, teeth, skull form, or skin color?
*Such racial labels is that they don’t accurately describe skin color.
*In theory, people of the same race share more recent common ancestry with each other than they do with any others.
*Similar problems arise when any single trait is used as a basis for racial classification. An attempt to use facial features, height, weight, or any other pheno-typical trait is fraught with difficulties.
*We know now that changes in average height and weight produced by dietary differences in a few generations are common and have nothing to do with race or genetics.
*Biocultural refers to the inclusion and combination of both biological and cultural perspectives and approaches to comment on or solve a particular issue or problem.
-> Culture is the key environmental force in determining how human bodies grow and develop. Cultural traditions promote certain activities and abilities, discourage others, and set standards of physical well-being and attractiveness.
*Natural Selection is the process by which the forms most fit to survive and reproduce in a given environment – such as the tropics – do so in greater numbers than others in the same population do. Less fit organisms die out and the favored types survive by producing more offspring
*Cultural anthropology is the study of human society and culture, the sub-field that describes, analyzes, interprets, and explains social and cultural similarities and differences.
-> Ethnography provides an account of a particular community, society, or culture. They gather data that he organizes, describes, analyzes, an interprets to build and present that account, which may be in the form of a book, article, or film. They studied local behavior, beliefs, customs, social life, economics activities, politics, an religion.
-> Ethnology examines, interprets, analyzes, and compares the results of ethnography. Uses such data to compare and contrast and to make generalizations about society and culture. Attempt to identify and explain cultural differences and similarities, to test hypotheses.
*Archaeological anthropology reconstructs, describes, and interprets human behavior and cultural patterns through material remains.
*Ecology is the study of interrelations among living things in an environment
*Linguistic anthropology studies language in its social and cultural context, across space and over time.
*Sociolinguistics investigates relationships between social and linguistic variation.

Chapter 2: Culture

*Enculturation is the process by which a child learns his or her culture.
*Cultural learning depends on the uniquely developed human capacity to use symbols, signs that have no necessary or natural connections to the things they stand for or signify.
*Every person beings immediately, through a process of conscious and unconscious learning and interaction with others, to internalize, or incorporate, a cultural tradition through the process of enculturation.
-> Culture is also transmitted through observation.
-> Symbols are often linguistic.
-> Culture is transmitted in society.
*People have to eat, but culture teaches us what, when, and how.
*Cultures are integrated, patterned systems. If one part of the system (the overall economy, for instance) changes, other parts change as well
*Humans have both biological and cultural ways of coping with environmental stresses.
-> Economic growth may benefit some people while it depletes resources needed for society at large or for future generations. Thus, cultural traits, patterns, and inventions can also be maladaptive, threatening the group’s continued existence.
-> “Beneficial” technology often create new problems.
*The term hominins is used for the group that leads to humans but not to chimps and gorillas and encompasses all the human species that ever have existed.
*Cooperation and sharing are much more developed among humans.
*Humans are among the most cooperative of the primates – in the food quest and other social activities.
*Marriage creates another major contrast between humans and nonhuman primates: exogamy and kinship systems.
*When cultural traints are borrowed, they are modified to fit the culture that adopts them. They are reintegrated – patterned anew – to fit their new setting.
*Culture is contested: Different groups in society struggle with one another over whose ideas, values, goals, and beliefs will prevail.
*Ideal Culture consists of what people say they should do and what they say the do.
*Real culture refers to their actual behavior as observed by the anthropologist
*Ethnocentrism is the tendency to view one’s own culture as superior and to apply one’s own cultural values in judging the behavior and beliefs of people raised in other cultures.
*Opposing ethnocentrism is cultural relativism, the viewpoint that behavior in one culture should not be judged by the standards of another culture.
*Diffusion or borrowing of traits between cultures.
*Acculturation, a second mechanism of cultural change, is the exchange of cultural features that results when groups have continuous firsthand contact.
*Independent invention is the process by which humans innovate, creatively finding solutions to problems – is a third mechanism of cultural change.

Chapter 4: Language and Communication (2/6/2011)

*Regional patterns influence the way all Americans speak
*Another TA complimented me, “You luctured to great effuct toay.”
-> Student lamented that she had not done her “bust on the tust”
-> The truth is, regional patterns affect the way we all speak
*Language is transmitted through learning. Language is based on arbitray, learned associations between words and the tings they stand for.
-> Allows us to discuss the past and future, share our experiences with others, and benefit from their experiences.
*Only humans speak
-> The natural communication systems of other primates (monkeys and apes) are call systems.
-> These vocal systems consists of a limited number of sounds – calls – that are produced only when particular environmental stimuli are encountered.
*Communication came to rely almost totally on learning.
*Experiments have shown that apes can learn to use,if not speak, true language.
-> Several apes have learned to converse with people through means other than speech. (Sign Language)
*Cultural transmission of a communication system through learning is a fundamental attribute of language.
*Koko and the chimps also show that apes share still another linguistic ability with humans which is: productivity.
-> Apes also have demonstrated linguistic displacement.
-> Absent in call systems, this is a key ingredient in language. Normally, each call is tied to an environmental stimulus such as food.
*A mutated gene known as FOXP2 helps explain why humans speak and chimps don’t. (Can’t make fine tongue/lip movement)
*Language permits the information stored by a human society to exceed by far that of any non human group.
-> Effective vehicle for learning.
-> Speak things we never experienced,
-> Anticipate responses before we encounter the stimuli.
*We communicate when we transmit information about ourselves to others and receive such information from them.
-> Expressions, stances, gestures…
*American girls and women tend to look directly at each other when they talk.
*Kinesics is the study of communication through body movements, stances…
*Linguists pay attention not only to what is said but to how it is said. (Facial expressions etc…)
*Culture teaches us that certain manners and styles should accompany certain kinds of speech.
*The scientific study of a spoken language (descriptive linguistics) involves several interrelated areas of analysis: phonology, morphology, lexicon, and syntax.
-> Phonology, the study of speech sounds, considers which sounds are present and significant in a given language.
-> Morphology studies the forms in which sounds combine to form mophemes – words and their meaningful parts. (Thus the word cats would be analyzed as containing two morphemes – cat, name of the animal and -s, a morpheme indicates plurality.
-> Lexicon is a dictionary containing all its morphemes and their meanings.
-> Syntax refers to the arrangement and order of words in phrases and sentences. (Do nouns come before or after verbs?…)
*Difference between r and l is phonemic
*Phoneme is a sound contrast that makes a difference, that differentiates meaning.
*Phonetics is the study of speech sounds in general, what people actually say in various languages.
*Phonemics studies only the significant sound contrasts of a given language.
-> Variation is important in the evolution of language. Without shifts in pronunciation, there could be no linguistic change.
*Believe that different languages produce different ways of thinking: Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
-> Argued that the grammatical categories of particular languages lead their speakers to think about things in different ways.
-> English divides time into past, present, and future.
*Lexicon (or vocab) is a language’s dictionary, its set of names for things, events, and ideas.
-> Influences perception.
*Specialized sets of terms and distinctions that are particularly important to certain groups (those with particular foci of experience or activity) are known as focal vocabulary.
*Vocabulary is the area of language that changes most readily.
*Names for items get simpler as they become common and important. Television = TV
*Language, culture, and though are interrelated.
-> Accurate to say that changes in culture produce changes in language and though than to say the reverse
*Cultural contrasts and changes affect lexical distinctions…
*Semantics refers to a language’s meaning system.
*Sociolinguistics investigates relationships between social and linguistic variation.
-> Focus on features that vary systematically with social position and situation. To study variation, sociolinguists must observe, define, and measure variable use of language in real-world situations.
-> When new ways of speaking are associated with social factors, they are imitated, and they spread.
*Engage in style shifts. In certain parts of Europe, people regularly switch dialects.
-> Phenomenon, known as diglossia.
*We use and evaluate speech in the context of extralinguistic forces – social, political, and economic.
*In Labov’s study, r pronunciation was clearly associated with prestige.
*Our speech habits help determine our access to employment and other material resources.
*Black English Vernacular (BEV)
-> Vernacular means ordinary, casual speech.
-> BEV is the “relatively uniform dialect spoken by the majority of black youth in most parts of the US.
-> BEV is a complex linguistic system with its own rules, which linguists have described.
*SE does happen to be the prestige dialect.
*Historical linguistics deals with longer-term change
-> Historical linguists can reconstruct many features of past languages by studying contemporary daugter languages.
-> We call the original language from which they diverge the proto-language.
*Language changes over time. it evolves – varies, spreads, divides into subgroups
-> A close relationship between languages doesn’t necessarily mean that their speakers are closely related biologically or culturally, because people can adopt new languages.
*Cultural similarities and differences often correlate with linguistic ones.
-> Linguistic clues can suggest past contacts between cultures.
* One aspect of linguistic history is language loss. The world’s linguistic diversity has been cut in half in the past 500 years, and half of the remaining 7000 languages are predicted to disappear during this century.

Chapter 9: Religion (2/13/2011)

*Religion as “belief and ritual concerned with supernatural beings, powers, and forces”

-> Focuses on bodies of people who gather together regularly for worship.
-> Stressed religious effervescence, the bubbling up of collect emotional intensity generated by worship.
*Communitas is an intense community spirit.
-> A feeling of great social solidarity, equality, and togetherness.
-> Form an imagined community with people of similar faith throughout the world
* Religion both unites and divides
-> Participation in common rites may affirm, and maintain the social solidarity of a religion’s adherents.
-> However, religious difference also may be associated with bitter enmity.
*Religion exists in all human societies.
-> Cultural Universal.
*Tylor concluded that attempts to explain dreams and trances led early human to believe that two entities inhabit the body, one active during the day and the other – a double or soul – active during sleep and trance states.
*Animism, the earliest form of religion, was a belief in spiritual beings.
-> Religion evolved through states.
-> Polytheism (the belief in multiple gods) and then monotheism (the belief in a single, all – powerful deity)
*Mana is a sacred impersonal force existing in the universe.
-> Can reside in people, animals, plants, and objects
*Taboo (set apart as sacred and off-limits to ordinary people)
*Function of religion is to explain.
-> A belief in souls explains what happens in sleep, trance, and death.
-> Explains differential success that people can’t understand in ordinary, natural terms.
*Magic refers to supernatural techniques in tended to accomplish specific aims.
-> Religion and magic don’t just explain things. They serve emotional needs as well as cognitive.
-> Supernatural beliefs and practices can help reduce anxiety.
-> Religion helps people face death and endure life crises.
-> Magical techniques can dispel doubts that arise when outcomes are beyond human control
-> When people face uncertainty and danger, they turn to magic
-> People can’t control matters such as wind, weather, and the fish supply, they turn to magic.
*Ritual are formal – stylized, repetitive and stereotyped.
-> People perform them in special (sacred) places) and at set times. Rituals include liturgical orders – sequences of words and actions invented prior to the current performance of the ritual in which they occur.
-> Translate enduring messages, values, and sentiments into action.
-> Are social acts.
*Beliefs and rituals also can create anxiety and a sense of insecurity and danger.
-> Anxiety may arise because a rite exists.
*Rites of passage (customs associated with the transition from one place or stage of life to another)
-> Involve changes in social status, such as from boyhood to manhood.
-> 3 phases: Separation, liminality, and incorporation.
-> They exists apart from ordinary distinctions and expectations, living in a time out of time.
-> They are cut off from normal social contacts.
-> Often collective. Men at military boot camps, football players – together as a group
*Social aspect of collective liminality called communitas, an intense community spirit, a feeling of great social solidarity, equality, and togetherness.
-> People experiencing limninality together form a community of equals.
-> Liminal people experience the same treatment and conditions and must act alike.
-> Basic to every passage rite.
-> May be used to set off one (religious) group from another, and from society as a whole.
-> Agree to all rules
-> Identity as a group member is expect to transcend individuality.
*Totems could be animals, plants, or geographical features.
-> Totemism uses nature as a model for society.
-> Continue to mark groups
-> Sacred emblems symbolizing common identity.
*Religion has meaning for people. It helps them cope with adversity and tragedy
-> Offers hope that things will get better. Lives can be transformed through spiritual healing.
-> Sinners can repent and be saved.
*Religion can work by getting inside people and mobilizing their emotions – their joy, their wrath…
-> When religions meet, they can coexist peacefully, or their differences can be a basis for enmity and disharmony.
*Leveling mechanism is a custom or social action that operates to reduce status differences and thus to bring standouts in line with community norms – another form of social control.
*Shamans aren’t full-time religious officials but part-time religious figures who mediate between people and supernatural beings and forces.
-> General term encompassing curers (“witch doctors”), mediums, spiritualists, astrologers, palm readers, and other diviners.
*Communal religions have, in addition to shamans, community rituals such as harvest ceremonies and collective rites of passage.
-> Believe in several deities (polytheism) who control aspects of nature.
*Olympian religions, which arose with state organization and marked social stratification, add full-time religious specialists – professional priesthoods.
*Pantheons trial nation-states, including the Aztecs of Mexico…
*Monotheism priesthoods and notions of divine power. Single eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent supreme being.
*Revitalization movements are social movements that occur in times of change, in which religious leaders emerge and undertake to alter or revitalize a society.
-> Christianity originated as this…
*Cargo cults of Melanesia and Papua New Guinea weave Christian doctrine with aboriginal beliefs. They take their name from their focus on cargo
-> Cargo cults blend aboriginal and Christian beliefs.
*Problems of Religion
-> If we define religion with reference to supernatural beings, powers, and forces, how do we classify ritual-like behaviors that occur in secular contexts…
- Anthro. believed that there are both sacred and secular rituals. Secular include formal, invariant, stereotyped, repetitive behavior and rites of passage that take place in nonreligious settings.
-> If the distinction between the supernatural and the natural is not consistently made in society, how can we tell what is religion and what isn’t?
- Betsileo, view witches and dead ancestors as real people who play roles in ordinary life. However, their occult powers are not empirically demonstrable.
-> The behavior considered appropriate for religion occasions varies tremendously from culture to culture.
- One society may consider drunken frenzy the surest sign of faith, whereas another may inculcate quiet reverence.
*Mr. Desola…he took cultures on their own terms rather than try to relate everything to the West. (Mr. Levi-Strauss)
*Religion establishes and maintains social control through a series of moral and ethical beliefs and real and imagined rewards and punishments.
*Wallance defines four types of religion: shamanic, communal, Olympian, and monotheistic.

“The Agile Gene”

Prologue:

*In truth, the number of human genes changed nothing.
*Venter’s remarks concealed two massive non sequiturs: first, that fewer genes implied more environmental influences; and second, that 30,000 genes were “too few” to explain human nature where 100,000 would have been enough.
*Repetitive argument over environment versus heredity that the publication of the human genome should be broken on the Procrustean bed of nature versus nature.
*Even the human genome, at its birth, was being claimed for nurture versus nature.
*Human behavior has to be explained by both nature and nurture.
*The discovery of how genes actually influence human behavior, and how human behavior influences genes (debate).
*You will have to enter a world where your genes are not puppet masters pulling the strings of your behavior but puppets at the mercy of your behavior.
*Darwin’s idea is to seek the character of man in behavior of the ape and to demonstrate that there are universal features of human behavior
*It is genes that allow the human mind to learn to remember, to imitate, to imprint, to absorb culture, and to express instincts. Genes are not puppet masters or blueprints. Nor are they just the carriers of heredity.
*They are both cause and consequence of our actions.
*Darwin is writing now just about difference (between civilized and savage man) but about similarity – the affinity between such a man and an animal.
* Darwin was applying to animals what he had been taught to apply to geology: the uniformitarian principle that forces shaping the landscape today are the same as those that shaped in the distant past.
*The gap between the “lowest” human and the “highest” ape is enormous.
*Genetically, the differences between a human being and a chimpanzee are at least 10 times as numerous as those between the two most dissimilar human beings.
*We still believed we were the only animal with language. But then we discovered that monkeys have a vocabulary for referring to different predators and birds, whiles apes and parrots are capable of learning quite large lexicons of symbols”
*Where two species show similar behavior, it tells you less about their common ancestor and more about the pressures of the environment that shaped them.
*Infanticide is common among gorillas, as it is among many primates. A bachelor male infiltrates a harem, grabs a baby, and kills it.
- Two Effects on Baby’s Mother (apart from causing her great, though transient, distress):
-> First by halting her lactation it brings her back into estrus
-> Second, it persuades her that she needs a new harem master who is better at protecting her babies
*As predicted by feminist doctrine, male bonobos have reacted to the new female-dominated regime by evolving kinder, gentler natures.
*Female bonobos are even more sexually active than chimps and have sex nearly 10 times.

Chapter 2: A plethora of instincts

*Chomsky argued that it was impossible for a child to learn the rules of language from examples:
-> The child must have innate rules to which the vocabulary of the language was fitted.
*A mouse shares much of its genetic code with a human being. Oxytocin and vasopressin are identical in the two species and are produced in the equivalent parts of the brain.
*Defining “instinct” has baffled so many scientists that some refuse to use the word at all.
-> Useful: It implies that the behavior is at least partially inherited, hardwired, and automatic, given the expected environment.
*Prime candidate is sex and gender difference.
*In nearly all cultures, social status, ambition, and industriousness in a mate mattered more to women than to men. Men by contrast placed more emphasis on youth (in all cultures men wanted younger women) and physical appearance (in all cultures, men wanted beautiful women more than women wanted beautiful men.
*Thanks to “Money versus Diamond,” an extraordinary battle in the nature-nurture war, there is a glimmer of light cast upon this subject.
*Money believes that sex roles are the products of early experience, not instinct.
*At birth, said Money, human beings are psycho-sexually neutral. Only after experience, at about the age of two, do they develop “gender identity”.
!Brenda Riemer, had endured a confused and unhappy childhood, constantly rebelling against girlish things, though he knew nothing ofhaving been born a boy.
-> David Reimer is not alone. Most boys reassigned as girls declare themselves boys at adolescence.
-> Recent studies of people born with ambiguous genitalia found that those who escaped the surgeon’s knife had fewer psychological problems that those who had been operated on in childhood.
*So females’ relative preference for faces, which gradually turns into a preference for social relationships, seems to be there in some form from the start.
*Baby boys slightly preferred to look at the mobile…
*But in the case of the human mind, almost all such instinctive modules are designed to be modified by experience.
*One of the besetting sins evident in the nature-nurture debate has been utopianism.
-> The notion that there is one ideal design for society, which can be derived from a theory of human nature.

Chapter 3: A Convenient Jingle (2/13/2011) -

*Both debates also thrived on ignorance; the more that came to be known, the less argument seemed to matter
*Galton was simply asserting that talent runs in families.
*Galton – twins who appeared identical behaved identically.
*Many aspects of our behavior start within us in some way, that we are not putty in the hands of society or victims of our surroundings.
*Nature prevails over one kind of (shared) nurture when it comes to defining differences in personality, intelligence, and health between people within the same society.
*Moreover, heritability can measure only variation, not absolutes.
*Families do matter for personality; a child desperately needs to be reared in a family in order to develop her personality.
*Ida of the meritocracy, this is an encouraging discovery. It means there is no excuse for discriminating against people from underprivileged backgrounds, or to be wary of ppl brought up in unusual families. A disadvantaged childhood does not condemn a person to a certain personality.
*Genes are the agents of nurture at least as much as they are the agents of nature.
*Heritability is usually highest for those features of human nature caused by many genes rather than by the action of single genes. And the more genes are involved, the more the heritability is actually caused by the side effects of genes rather than direct effect.
*Influence of genes increases the the influence of shared environment gradually disappears with age. The older you grow, the less your family background predicts your IQ and the better your genes predict it.
*By adulthood, intelligence is like personality
*Nature can act only via nurture
*Genetics: It tells you that nature plays a role in determining personality, intelligence, and health – that genes matter. But it does not tell you that this role is at the expense of nurture. If anything, it proves rather dramatically that nurture matters just as much, though it is inevitably less good at discerning how (there is no environmental equivalent to the natural experiment created by identical and fraternal twins).
*

Chapter 9: The Seven Meanings of “gene” (2/6/2011) -

*Correns acidly pointed out that though De Vries’s experiements were his own, his conclusion – particulate inheritance – was borrowed, not just in outline but in detail, from the work of a long-dead Moravian monk named Gregor Mendel
-> Not citing Mendel
-> Fraud
-> No surprise when a scientist buries his ancestors, more or less unconsciously downplaying the insights of his predecessors lest they seem to diminish his own breakthrough.
*20th century geneticists used at least 5 overlapping definitions of the gene. The first was Mendel’s: a gene is a unit of heredity, and archive for the storage of evolutionary information.
-> De Vrie’s interchangeable part…Human being has far more genes in common with the fly and the worm than anybody expected.
-> The genes flies use for learning and memory are also duplicated in people – and also presumably inherited from roundish flatworms.
-> Diseases they cause when broken, the OGOD definition: one gene, one disease. This is misleading in two ways: it fails to mention that one mutated gene can be associated with many diseases, and one disease with many mutated genes; and it implies that the function of the gene is to prevent that disease.
-> 4th – Right from the start, the pinoneers of DNA realized that genes had two jobs: copying themeselves and expressing themselves through the construction of proteins.
-> Garrod suggested that genes made enzymes: chemical catalysts.
-> Watson suggested that DNA make RNA, which makes protein
*Protein does the work, DNA stores the information, and RNA is the link between them, as Watson guessed. So the Watson – Crick gene is a recipe.
-> 5th – Gene as a switch and therefore as a unit of development.
-How bacterium in a solution of lactose suddenly begins to produce the enzyme that enables digestion of lactose, and then stops making it when enough has been produced. The gene is switched off by a repressor protein, and the repressor is disabled by lactose.
*Gene called Sonic Hedgehog – Turns neighboring cells to start growing into limbs – Multiple Jobs
*Different way of viewing genes: as a set of developmental switches.
*Definition of a Gene that is neither a unit of heredity nor a unit of development but a unit of selection.
-> It hardly matters for this purpose what this “gene” is made of
*Kenshin, (Killed or be Killed) – Beings a male is bad for survival and therefore fails the test of natural selection
*Sexual Selection (Darwin’s much neglected theory) which urges not survival of the fittest but reproduction of the fittest.
-> Suggested that the risk-taking of many male animals results from an unconscious ploy by the genes of a female to expose the genes of males to trial by fire so that she can be sure of selecting the best genes for her offspring.
-> By mating with winner, she automatically selects fighting genes for future generations.
-> Sexual selection of this kind can breed and kind of male, (bully, nice, gentle, caregiver…)
*Most ants, as workers, never breed.
-> Represented an exception to the rule that animals strive to reproduce.
*Tooby and Cosmides, argued that the expressed behavior of a human being need not be directly related to genes, but the underlying psychological mechanisms could be.
*(Sarah Hrdy)Juvenile human beings are “designed” by their past to expect to be reared communally rather than in a nuclear family. Impossible to parcel these studies in to “nature” or “nurture.” Are about both.
*Nature cannot be compartmentalized from nurture.
*Genes are very far from being fixed in their actions.
*Pattern of genes being expressed in your brain changes, often in direct or indirect respone to events outside the body.
-> Mechanisms of experience.

Types of Writing Logical Fallacies (2/2/2011) -

Logical Fallacies – Use of faulty logic or reasoning to reach conclusions which discredits arguments and shows lack of support and reasoning.