Sherwood L. Washburn Xv Note on Orthography Xix Introduction Richard B

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

Sherwood L. Washburn Xv Note on Orthography Xix Introduction Richard B Contents Foreword Sherwood L. Washburn xv Note on Orthography xix Introduction Richard B. Lee 3 I Ecology and Social Change 1 The Dobe-/Du/da Environment: John E. Yellen and 27 Background to a Hunting and Richard B. Lee Gathering Way of Life 2 Settlement Patterns of the !Kung: John E. Yellen 47 An Archaeological Perspective 3 !Kung Spatial Organization: Richard B. Lee 73 AnEco logical and Historical Perspective 4 Subsistence Ecology of Central Jiro Tanaka 98 Kalahari San 5 From Hunters to Squatters: Mathias G. Guenther 120 Social and Cultural Change among the Farm San of Ghanzi, Botswana Further Studies 134 II Population and Health 6 The Population of the Dobe Area !Kung Nancy Howell 137 7 Regional Variation in ! Kung Henry Harpending 152 Populations 8 Medical Research among the !Kung A. Stewart Truswell and 166 John D. L. Hansen Further Studies 195 III Childhood 9 Social and Economic Constraints on Patricia Draper 199 Child Life among the !Kung 10 Maternal Care, Infant Behavior and Melvin J. Konner 218 Development among the !Kung 11 A !Kung Woman's Memories of Marjorie Shostak 246 Childhood Further Studies 278 CONTENTS IV Behavior and Belief 12 Education for Transcendence: Richard Katz 281 !Kia-Healing with the Kalahari IKung 13 Aspects of !Kung Folklore Megan Biesele 302 14 IKung Knowledge of Animal Behavior Nicholas Blurton Jones 325 (or: The Proper Study of Mankind Is and Melvin J. Konner Animals) 15 Sharing, Talking, and Giving: Lorna Marshall 349 Relief of Social Tensions among the IKung Further Studies 372 Contributors 375 Bibliography 377 Notes 395 Index 403 Maps Location of major San field work sites to 1976 11 1.1. The Dobe-/Du/da Area 29 2.1. Land-use division between Dobe and surrounding groups 55 2.2. Location of camp occupied by Dobe group 58 2.3. Routes of Dobe group during two trips from Dobe 59 3.1. Distribution of water sources in the/Xai/xai-/Gam Area 83 3.2. A reconstruction of the distribution of land-holding groups, 85 1920-1930 3.3. Patterns of convergence of land-holding groups during the dry 87 season and in drought years, 1920-1930 3.4. Current land-use patterns of active land-holding groups, 1963-1969 93 4.1. Sketch map of =£Kade Area 99 7.1. Location of study areas 154 Figures 1.1. Rainfall at Dobe for three years 32 2.1. The 1968 Dobe Camp 63 2.2. The 1969 Dobe Camp 64 2.3. A camp in the T^Tum^toa Grove 68 3.1. Variations in annual rainfall at Maun, Botswana, July 1922 to 80 June 1968 4.1. Seasonal changes in water resources 105 4.2. Seasonal changes in main food resources 108 Contents .7.1. Parental distance distribution 161 7.2. Genetic distance map 163 7.3. Genetic distances predicted from migration 164 8.1. Weights and heights of San boys and girls 176 8.2. Subscapular skinfolds of San boys and girls in October 1967 179 (dry season) and April-May 1968 (wet season) 10.1. Percentage of infants and children nursing at time of contact 223 10.2. Amount of passive physical contact with mother 224 10.3. Amount of passive physical contact with anyone 226 10.4. Mean number of children appearing in 15-minute observations 227 of infants 10.5. Attainment of independent sitting in !Kung infants 229 10.6. Attainment of independent rising from lying to standing in 230 !Kung infants 10.7. Attainment of highest phase of independent walking in IKung 231 infants 10.8. Attainment of walking with hands held in !Kung infants 232 10.9. Attainment of first phase of independent walking in IKung 233 infants 10.10. Prehension scale, Einstein scales of sensorimotor development 235 Tables San language families 8 1.1. Heat and cold stress in the Dobe Area 31 1.2. Composition of some major San wild foods 40 2.1. Campsites occupied by Dobe Camp: January 27, 1968 to 57 July 11, 1968 2.2. Numbers of occupants of Dobe dry-season camps: 1964, 1968, 60 1969 2.3. Participants in trips from Dobe, 1968 62 2.4. Game and major vegetable foods from camps in three areas 66 3.1. Dimensions along which social and spatial boundaries may vary 74 in hunter-gatherer groups 3.2. Patrilineal vs matrilineal inheritance of locality 78 3.3. Drought frequencies and intensities at Maun, Botswana, over a 81 46-year period 3.4. Local variations in rainfall among five localities in the Ghanzi 82 District 3.5. Reconstructed groups of the /Xai/xai and /Gam Areas, circa 88 1920 to 1930 4.1. Available dates of standing water 103 4.2. Nutrient composition of the two Bauhinia beans 110 4.3. Estimated weights of food taken daily by the =£Kade San 111 4.4. Number of game animals caught by the #Kade San from 111 September 1967 to March 1968 CONTENTS 4. A. Various species of plants eaten by the =£Kade San 117 4.B. Various animal species utilized as food by the ^Kade San 119 6.1. Inventory of resident population only, 1963 to 1969 140 6.2. Annual variations in fertility, 1963 to 1968 141 xU 6.3. Annual variations in mortality, 1963 to 1968 142 6.4. Retrospective fertility: number of live births by current age 146 of mother 6.5. Retrospective estimates of mortality: deaths of the children 149 born to interviewed women 6.6. Comparison of percentage of parents surviving to women by age 150 7.1. Reproductive performance of !Kung women 157 7.2. Sibship data 158 8.1. Mean heights in cm (and number of subjects) 172 8.2. Mean weight/height ratios 173 8.3. Skinfold thickness in adults 174 8.4. San women's dressmaker measurements 175 8.5. Children's weights, height, and head circumference 177 8.6. Mean biochemical concentrations in adult sera 180 8.7. 24-hour urines from San adults at Dobe 181 8.8. Mean blood pressure of San in different age groups 182 8.9. Mean percentage of fatty acids in fasting serum triglycerides 185 8.10. Changes in adult San October 1967 to April/May 1%8 189 8.11. Serum-free amino acids (mg per 100 ml) 192 9.1. /Du/da Area: band size, age and sex composition 203 9.2. Average number of minutes per hour in which the subject child 208 was completely unsupervised 9.3. Ages and numbers of hours observed of/Du/da children 208 9.4. Average number of minutes per hour in which children have one 209 or more adults in their immediate presence 9.5. Average number of minutes per hour in which/Du/da children 213 were observed doing a task 9.6. Average number of child-caring acts by a subject child per hour 214 of observation 10.1. Prehension scale items administered 236 Illustrations Hunter testing a hollow tree for water (Richard Lee/Anthro-Photo) 1 R. Lee examining the debris of an old campfire (Irven DeVore/Anthro- 6 Photo) Women with infants digging roots (Marjorie Shostak/Anthro-Photo) 25 The mongongo forests north of Dobe and the border road in 1964 27 (Irven DeVorelAnthro-Photo) San herding Herero donkeys at /Xai/xai (Richard Katz/Anthro-Photo) 35 Plane-table survey of San rainy season camp (Irven DeVorelAnthro-Photo) 47 Contents Two families leaving camp to hunt and gather, the men with springhare 51 poles (Irven DeVore/Anthro-Photo) Winter camp at a permanent waterhole (Melvin Konner/Anthro-Photo) 73 Summer camp near the mongongo forests north of Dobe (Irven DeVore/ 79 Anthro-Photo) xiii /Gwi San in the Central Kalahari eating Bauhinia macrantha beans 98 (Irven DeVore/Anthro-Photo) Cattle post San near the Ghanzi District studying a Land Rover motor 120 (Richard Lee/Anthro-Photo) A vigorous /Xai/xai man of seventy (Irven DeVore/Anthro-Photo) 135 A Dobe woman eight months pregnant with her husband, daughter, and 137 a visiting uncle on left (Irven DeVore/Anthro-Photo) /Du/da people moving south along the fenced border road, 1969 152 (Richard Lee/Anthro-Photo) San mother on the move with her baby and her possessions (Marjorie 166 Shostak/Anthro-Photo) Three generations roasting, cracking, and eating nuts (Richard Lee/ 169 Anthro-Photo) Mother nursing older child (Melvin Konner/Anthro-Photo) 197 Two children sharing water from a hollow tree (Irven DeVore/Anthro- 199 Photo) Mother with her four children cracking nuts (Irven DeVore/Anthro-Photo) 204 A man laughing with an infant (Stan Washburn/Anthro-Photo) 218 Newborn, older sister and mother (Melvin Konner/Anthro-Photo) 221 Girls dancing the springhare dance (Richard Lee/Anthro-Photo) 246 Playing the Antbear game. "It" burrows under the legs (Richard Lee/ 261 Anthro-Photo) Man in trance (Marjorie Shostak/Anthro-Photo) 279 San healer laying hands on a pregnant Herero woman (Richard Katz/ 281 Anthro-Photo) San healing dance at dawn (Richard Katz/Anthro-Photo) 285 Playing the musical bow (Richard Lee/Anthro-Photo) 302 Story-telling at a meat distribution (Richard Lee/Anthro-Photo) 305 Dobe man bringing home a porcupine (Irven DeVore/Anthro-Photo) 325 Telling the hunt (Loma Marshall) 327 People sitting close together (Loma Marshall) 349 .
Recommended publications
  • Iciumv LEADERS in ANIMAL BEHAVIOR the Second Generation
    UO1BJ3U3D iciumv LEADERS IN ANIMAL BEHAVIOR The Second Generation Edited by Lee C. Drickamer Northern Arizona University Donald A. Dewsbury University of Florida CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS 13 Myths, monkeys, and motherhood: a compromising life SARAH BLAFFER HRDY Definition of an Anthropologist: "(Someone) who studies human nature in all its diversity." Carmelo Lison-Tolosana (1966) Maternal effects (1946-64) From a young age, I was interested in why humans do what they do. With little exposure to science, certainly no inkling that there might be people in the world who studied other animals in order to better understand our species, I decided to become a novelist. Born in Leaders in Animal Behavior: The Setond Generation, ed. L. C. Drickamcr & D. A. Dewsbury. Published by Cambridge University Press. CO Cambridge University Press 2010. 344 Sarah Bluffer Hrdy Texas in 1946, right at the start of the postwar baby boom, I was the third of five children - Speedway. Prevailin four daughters and finally the long-awaited son. My father's father, R. L. Blaffer, had come segregation, and pi to Texas from Hamburg via New Orleans in 1901 at the time oil was discovered at interested in the e1 Spindletop. He recognized that fortunes would be made in the oil business. He married inheritance, female Sarah Campbell from Lampasas, whose father was in that business. I was named for her, the women's moven Sarah Campbell Blaffer II. My mother's father's ancestors, the Hardins, French Huguenots Reared by a suo from Tennessee, arrived earlier, in 1825, before Texas was even a state.
    [Show full text]
  • The Theoretical Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology
    3GC01 06/09/2015 12:40:42 Page 3 Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (2015). The theoretical foundations of evolutionary psychology. In Buss, D. M. (Ed.), The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, Second edition. Volume 1: Foundations. (pp. 3-87). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. CHAPTER 1 The Theoretical Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology JOHN TOOBY and LEDA COSMIDES THE EMERGENCE OF EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY: WHAT IS AT STAKE? HE THEORY OF evolution by natural selection has revolutionary implications for understanding the design of the human mind and brain, as Darwin himself was Tthe first to recognize (Darwin, 1859). Indeed, a principled understanding of the network of causation that built the functional architecture of the human species offers the possibility of transforming the study of humanity into a natural science capable of precision and rapid progress. Yet, more than a century and a half after The Origin of Species was published, many of the psychological, social, and behavioral sciences continue to be grounded on assumptions that evolutionarily informed researchers know to be false; the rest have only in the past few decades set to work on the radical reformulations of their disciplines necessary to make them consistent with findings in the evolutionary sciences, information theory, computer science, physics, the neuro- sciences, molecular and cellular biology, genetics, behavioral ecology, hunter-gatherer studies, biological anthropology, primatology, and so on (Pinker, 1997, 2002; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). Evolutionary psychology is the long-forestalled scientific attempt to assemble out of the disjointed, fragmentary, and mutually contradictory human disciplines a single, logically integrated research framework for the psychological, social, and behavioral sciences—a framework that not only incorporates the evolu- tionary sciences and information theory on a full and equal basis, but that systemati- cally works out all the revisions in existing belief and research practice that such a synthesis requires (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992).
    [Show full text]
  • An Interview with Sherwood Washburn
    UC Berkeley Anthropology Faculty Publications Title An Interview with Sherwood Washburn Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1xp1w64r Journal Current Anthropology, 33(4) Authors Washburn, Sherwood L. Devore, Irven Publication Date 1992 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Reports An Interview with much more fun. In retrospect, I think that my family was amazingly generous in what they allowed me to do. Sherwood Washburn' The first skeleton I had anything to do with was a porcupine skeleton which my brother and I found in the Catskill Mountains. It had dried out and become just IRVEN DEVORE bones and a few quills. We gave it to the Harvard Mu­ Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A. t5 II 86 seum of Comparative Zoology. Dr. Henshaw was the director at the time. In retrospect, I believe my father 10: We thought we might start with your precollege must have called him before we arrived, because when years, and I urge you to go back to as early a period as we came in with this absolutely wretched bunch of bro­ you want to. ken porcupine bones, he welcomed us as if we were giv­ ing Harvard a great, valuable specimen. He treated us SW: Of course/ I was always interested in zoology­ like adults even though my brother and I were respec­ mammal skeletOns, birds, and behavior. I kept a great tively about eight and six at the time. This experience horned owl for some years when I was young, as well as of respect from an admired adult was very important crows and hawks.
    [Show full text]
  • Evolutionary Psychology
    SN-05(153-196) 3/4/02 2:12 PM Page 153 CHAPTER 5 Evolutionary psychology esearchers committed to an evolutionary perspective Ron humanity were initially united in the face of wide- spread hostility to human sociobiology. However, in the 1980s, as the number of investigators using evolution to study human behaviour increased, subgroups began to emerge with different opinions on how best to proceed. One such subgroup was dominated by academic psycho- logists searching for the evolved psychological mechanisms that they envisaged underpinned any universal mental and behavioural characteristics of humanity. While the intellec- tual roots of some of these practitioners could be traced to human sociobiology, or to the study of animal behaviour, the majority were fresh recruits who sought to differentiate themselves from human sociobiology, and restyled them- selves as Darwinian or evolutionary psychologists. For Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, two of the pioneers of this new discipline, evolutionary psychology owed little intellectual debt to Edward Wilson but did draw inspiration from the writings of Bill Hamilton, Robert Trivers, and George Williams. Tooby, a Harvard-trained anthropologist who had worked closely with Irven DeVore, and Cosmides, a psychologist also from Harvard, were brought by Donald Symons to Santa Barbara where they founded the first Center for Research in Evolutionary Psychology. SN-05(153-196) 3/4/02 2:12 PM Page 154 154 SENSE AND NONSENSE The ‘Santa Barbara school’1 were concerned that human sociobiologists and behavioural ecologists had neglected psychological adaptations: In the rush to apply evolutionary insights to a science of human behavior, many researchers have made a conceptual ‘wrong turn’, leaving a gap in the evolutionary approach that has limited its effectiveness.
    [Show full text]
  • The Learning Environment for Aggression and Anti-Social Behavior Among the !Kung
    University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Anthropology Faculty Publications Anthropology, Department of May 1978 The Learning Environment for Aggression and Anti-Social Behavior among the !Kung Patricia Draper University of Nebraska, Lincoln, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/anthropologyfacpub Part of the Anthropology Commons Draper, Patricia, "The Learning Environment for Aggression and Anti-Social Behavior among the !Kung" (1978). Anthropology Faculty Publications. 12. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/anthropologyfacpub/12 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Anthropology, Department of at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Anthropology Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. Published in Learning Non-Aggression: The Experience of Non-Literate Societies, Ashley Mon- tagu, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Pp. 31–53. Copyright © 1978 Ashley Montagu. Used by permission. [Chapter 3] The Learning Environment for Aggression and Anti-Social Behavior among the !Kung Patricia Draper The !Kung, a hunter-gatherer people of the Kalahari Desert, are of in- terest to this collection of writings on the teaching of non-aggression for a variety of reasons. They have been described as a “harmless people” by Thomas (1958) in a book-length account of the social life and cultural val- ues of !Kung who lived in South West Africa. An opposite characterization of !Kung emerges from an unpublished study by Richard Lee. This study, based on interviews and examination of genealogical records collected in the field, reports on incidents of homicide among !Kung.
    [Show full text]
  • It Does Take a Village by Melvin Konner | the New York Review Of
    Font Size: A A A It Does Take a Village DECEMBER 8, 2011 Melvin Konner Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press, 422 pp., $29.95; $19.95 (paper) Anthony Bannister/Gallo Images/Corbis A !Kung grandmother and grandchild, Namibia Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is one of the most original and influential minds in evolutionary anthropology. She first became known for her field study of Hanuman langurs, the sacred monkeys that range widely in the Indian peninsula. They are large and sometimes dangerous, and Hrdy was among that second generation of bold primatologists, just behind Jane Goodall and Diane Fossey, who did original work with primates. Hrdy discovered, among other things, that dominant males in a group are challenged from time to time by roving adventurers who can mate only by defeating them. If defeated, the former leaders slink away, often wounded, while their successors attack and kill all infants under six months old. This brings their mothers back into heat, and the slain infants are supplanted by the new males’ offspring. Females resist this bravely, but to little avail. If such behavior had been limited to langurs, it might have been an anomaly. But thanks in no small part to Hrdy’s leadership, it was also documented in chimpanzees, patas monkeys, lions, and many other species. Competitive infanticide was seen as a dark side of Darwinism, and a confirmation that no part of nature is free from the amoral logic of natural selection. Hrdy went on to write a well-received book on the evolution of females, The Woman That Never Evolved.
    [Show full text]
  • ANG 6930 – Hunter-Gatherers (Or, Small-Scale Societies in a Big World, and Microhistories in the Minds of Macro-Thinkers)
    ANG 6930 – Hunter-Gatherers (or, Small-Scale Societies in a Big World, and Microhistories in the Minds of Macro-Thinkers) Spring 2013 Kenneth E. Sassaman Section 13H9 Turlington B372 Monday, Periods 7-9 (1:55-4:55) Office hours: Monday 9:00-11:30, or by appt. Weimer 1092 352-294-7601 (during office hours) 352-392-6772 (my lab Tues.-Fri.) [email protected] Required Texts: Panter-Brick, Robert H. Layton, and Peter Rowley-Conwy (eds.) 2001 Hunter-Gatherers: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Clastres, Pierre 1998 Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians. Zone Books, New York. Additional reading as issued on e-learning site ****************************************************************************** Course Description Hunter-gatherer studies had long been the last vestige of anthropology's quest for natural man (Barnard 2004) Although they are no longer the dominant form of human sociality and adaptation, and exist today in relatively minor numbers, hunter-gatherers continue to be the focal point of fundamental debates in anthropology and related fields of inquiry. From the romanticism of Rousseau and the rhetorical extremism of Hobbes, to the evolutionary ideals of Morgan and the ecological idealism of 1970s ethnographers, perceptions of “hunter-gatherers” have both conformed to and effected changes in anthropological inquiry and western society. Having undergone so many and so frequent conceptual shifts in the past two centuries, “hunter-gatherer” is a construct, some have argued, with no empirical or evolutionary validity. Clearly people have lived off the land without the aid of agriculture or animal husbandry, so at the level of subsistence, “hunter-gatherer” is a meaningful category.
    [Show full text]
  • A Conversation with Irven Devore
    Annual Reviews Conversations Presents A Conversation with Irven DeVore Annual Reviews Conversations. 2012 Abstract First published online on November 14, 2012 The Annual Review of Anthropology presents Dr. Irven DeVore, The DOI of this article is: Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Harvard University, in 10.1146/annurev-conversations-010913-100006 conversation with Dr. Peter Ellison, Co-Editor of the Annual Review of Annual Reviews Audio interviews are online at Anthropology and Professor of Anthropology and Human Evolutionary www.annualreviews.org/page/audio Biology, also at Harvard University. In this interview, Dr. DeVore talks about his life and career, describing how he went from social Copyright © 2012 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved anthropology to studying and filming baboons and other primates in Africa, to observing the Bushmen of the Kalahari and the Pygmies. Dr. DeVore was one of the first to incorporate sociobiological theory into his work, a decision that would prove as fundamental as it was challenging. In his own words, he would have to “turn [his] back on everything [he’d] understood until that point in anthropology.” This interview was conducted on May 22, 2012. View video of interview online. 1 A CONVERSATION WITH IRVEN DEVORE Peter Ellison: I’m Peter Ellison, John Cowles Professor of Anthropology and Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and Co-Editor of the Annual Review of Anthropology. I’m talking today with my long-time mentor and friend, Professor Irven DeVore, the Ruth B. Moore Professor of Anthropology, emeritus, at Harvard University. Professor DeVore and I have known each other for all of my professional career and a good portion of his.
    [Show full text]
  • Environmental Anthropology in the Kalahari: Development, Resettlement, and Ecological Change Among the San of Southern Africa
    vis-à-vis: Explorations in Anthropology, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 170-188. vav.library.utoronto.ca This article © 2009 Robert K. Hitchcock, Megan Biesele, and Wayne Babchuk. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada license. Environmental Anthropology in the Kalahari: Development, Resettlement, and Ecological Change Among the San of Southern Africa ROBERT K. HITCHCOCK, MEGAN BIESELE, AND WAYNE BABCHUK ABSTRACT This paper addresses the ways in which environmental anthropology has affected – and been affected by – the San (Bushmen) of southern Africa, particularly the Ju/’hoansi of northwest- ern Botswana and northeastern Namibia. Anthropological research and development work carried out in the Kalahari Desert over the past 50 years has shed considerable light on issues ranging from the ecology of hunting and gathering to the impacts of sedentism, and from demography of small-scale societies to the effects of globalization and climate change. Eco- logical anthropology and conservation biology have focused a great deal of attention on the Ju/’hoansi and other San, who today are some of the best-known and most intensively stud- ied populations on the planet. A wide range of variation exists among the lifestyles of San peoples, all of whom have undergone substantial socioeconomic changes. Here, particular emphasis is placed on the ways in which development, resettlement, and ecological change have affected the Ju/’hoansi and their neighbors. The lessons learned from these studies have affected both academic writing in ecological anthropology and policies aimed at enhancing the well-being of the San and conserving their environments. nthropologists have worked intensively with the San (Bushmen, Basarwa) for over 50 years, although there had been studies conducted among San peoples since the Aearly to mid-19th century (Schapera 1930; Lee 1976; Barnard 1992, 2007:23-52).
    [Show full text]
  • Evolutionary Psychology: Conceptual Foundations
    1 Evolutionary psychology: Conceptual foundations John Tooby and Leda Cosmides Center for Evolutionary Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology David M. Buss, Editor. Revised Draft: January 16, 2005 Note. We dedicate this chapter to Irven DeVore, Professor Emeritus, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, on the occasion of his 70th birthday. 1 2 Intellectual origins of evolutionary psychology The theory of evolution by natural selection has implications for understanding the design of the human mind, and Darwin himself was the first to see this. During the 20th century, many thinkers tried to work out exactly how Darwin’s fundamental insights could be used as a foundation on which to build a more systematic approach to psychology. This resulted in many valuable approaches: the instinct psychology of William James and William McDougall; human ethology, which applied the framework for studying how animals behave in their natural environment, developed by Karl von Frisch, Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen; Skinnerian psychology, which looked for phylogenetic continuities in the laws of learning that would apply across species; and sociobiology, which tried to understand patterns of social behavior— differences as well as universals—in humans and other primates in light of a set of exciting and rigorous new theories then emerging about how natural selection works. Our own early training included this last approach, which was flourescing in Irven DeVore’s living room where Harvard’s Simian Seminar was held during the 1970s and early 1980s. DeVore was a pioneering thinker, deeply interested in human origins, who instigated and then championed the study of primate social behavior under natural conditions and the study of modern hunter-gatherers.
    [Show full text]
  • Sherwood Washburn
    NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES SHERWOOD LARNED WASHBURN 1911–2000 A Biographical Memoir by F. CLARK HOWELL Any opinions expressed in this memoir are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Academy of Sciences. Biographical Memoirs, VOLUME 84 PUBLISHED 2003 BY THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES PRESS WASHINGTON, D.C. Ricco-Mazzuchi Photography, Berkeley, California SHERWOOD LARNED WASHBURN November 26, 1911–April 16, 2000 BY F. CLARK HOWELL OR CLOSE ON TO FOUR decades Sherwood Washburn sought F to encourage, urge, insist, and cajole practitioners of biological anthropology—particularly the core of human evolutionary studies—to shift away from outdated method- ologies, abandon outmoded or questionable precepts, adopt modern perspectives of an emergent evolutionary biology, and practice analytical, comparative, and experimental meth- ods relevant to elucidation of the nature and roots of the human condition. His epiphany emerged progressively and sweepingly across prevalent biological and social science and wrenched but did not utterly revolutionize scientific praxis in biological anthropology as he sought and overtly intended it should. The expansion and elaboration of a number of attendant natural sciences relevant, indeed criti- cal, to such study did play the requisite roles and thus ex- emplified the transformation essential to paradigm shift. Nonetheless Washburn played a unique and manifestly in- valuable role in the refashioning—even restructuring—of human evolutionary studies as they emerged, diversified, and ultimately flourished in the later twentieth century. Sherwood Larned Washburn (always known as “Sherry”) was born on November 26, 1911, and grew up in Cam- 3 4 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS bridge, Massachusetts. His father, a minister and one-time professor of church history, was dean of the Episcopal Theo- logical School in Cambridge.
    [Show full text]
  • Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology
    buss_c01.qxd 4/26/05 10:14 AM Page 5 CHAPTER 1 Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology JOHN TOOBY and LEDA COSMIDES THE EMERGENCE OF EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY: WHAT IS AT STAKE? HE THEORY OF evolution by natural selection has revolutionary implications for understanding the design of the human mind and brain, as Darwin himself Twas the first to recognize (Darwin, 1859). Indeed, a principled understanding of the network of causation that built the functional architecture of the human species offers the possibility of transforming the study of humanity into a natural science capable of precision and rapid progress. Yet, nearly a century and a half after The Origin of Species was published, the psychological, social, and behavioral sciences remain largely untouched by these implications, and many of these disci- plines continue to be founded on assumptions evolutionarily informed researchers know to be false (Pinker, 2002; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). Evolutionary psychology is the long-forestalled scientific attempt to assemble out of the disjointed, fragmen- tary, and mutually contradictory human disciplines a single, logically integrated research framework for the psychological, social, and behavioral sciences—a frame- work that not only incorporates the evolutionary sciences on a full and equal basis, but that systematically works out all of the revisions in existing belief and research practice that such a synthesis requires (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). The long-term scientific goal toward which evolutionary psychologists are working is the mapping of our universal human nature. By this, we mean the con- struction of a set of empirically validated, high-resolution models of the evolved mechanisms that collectively constitute universal human nature.
    [Show full text]