Newsweek : French intellectual Claude Lévi-Strauss died at the age of 100 last month, before he could comment on the latest single from Lady Gaga. If you think this an absurd notion, note that Lévi-Strauss’s major project—discovering the common aspects of myths from different eras and continents—has influenced many pop scholars, including Greil Marcus. In our American...
A new paper by Martin A.J. Williams et al, on the Mount Toba eruption 73,000 years ago, proposes that the destructive aftermath of the event caused widespread de-forestation in India, some 3,000 miles distant from Sumatra, the island on which the volcano was located. Here’s the abstract of that paper which is behind a paywall, [...]
The National Science Foundation has announced the opening ot their Evolution of Evolution site. According to the press release, Going wide and deep, Evolution of Evolution: 150 Years of Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” provides a uniquely sweeping, at-a-glance explanation of how “Origin” cut an intellectual swath through anthropology, biology, the geosciences, polar...
The latest generation of religion scholars has studied Lévi-Strauss only to distance itself from his theories, and to challenge the myth of structuralism. Perhaps in doing so we have created a fable of our own.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, visionary anthropologist, once said: "The world began without man and will end without him."Was he post-humanist? Post-monotheist? Such binaries can't capture a thinker of his subtlety.
Researchers from Stony Brook University Medical Center in New York confirmed that the Hobbits, or Homo floresiensis, are indeed a separate “human” species instead of a population of diseases Homo sapiens. The 7th Human Evolution Symposium, Hobbits in the Haystack: Homo floresiensis and Human Evolution was held this year at Stony Brook. A recent full-body [...]
Honoring 150 years of "On the Origin of Species;" Noor is recipient of Darwin-Wallace MedalPlease join the National Science Foundation (NSF) on Monday, Nov. 23, at 10 a.m. ET for a live webcast featuring Darwin-Wallace Medal recipient Mohamed Noor of Duke University, who will answer media questions about current evidence for evolution and modern evolution theory. Among the topics:* Does modern...
Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news: Neuroanthropology has an excellent piece on the late Lévi-Strauss and the development of the scientific study of cultural cognition and anthropology. The Book of the Week in the Times Higher Education Supplement is 'What Intelligence Tests Miss'. Wired UK has a short but sensible piece on 'how to tell if somebody is lying '. In a nutshell,...
Two-dimensional carbon layers, so-called graphenes, are regarded as a possible substitute for silicon in the semiconductor industry. The electronic properties of these layers can be varied by “building in” specific arrays of holes in their structure. Physicists and chemists have, for the first time, succeeded in synthesizing a graphene-like porous polymer with atomic accuracy.
Although I somehow completely missed this latest Four Stone Hearth in that I didn’t even remember it was happening this week, the 80th edition is nevertheless now online at Middle Savagery, so be sure to check it out. The first few entries look at tool use, Ardipithecus ramidus and of course, Neanderthals, without whom no occasion [...]
This via Mind Hacks – Seed Magazine have published a piece by Joe Kloc, in which he looks at the relationship between humans and life-like robots, with regard to the so-called ‘uncanny valley’ effect, described here at Wikipedia: (Masahiro) Mori’s hypothesis states that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the [...]
Alun Salt will doubtless be known to many readers here, not least for his interest in archaeo-astronomy, research which looks into the ways in which ancient peoples regarded the sky from the perspective of its solar, lunar and planetary components. I just got word that he has published the linked paper, for which this is [...]
Show 477 Dennis Prager talks to Dinesh D'Souza, best-selling author and founder of the Y God Institute. His new book is Life after Death: The Evidence. Synopsis of book- Is death the end? Or, as bestselling author Dinesh D'Souza argues, do the latest discoveries in physics and neuroscience, the most convincing philosophical deductions, and the most likely conclusions from anthropology and biology...
We haven't noted the passing of Claude Lévi Strauss here yet (nor that of Dell Hymes). For a piece that talks about Lévi Strauss in connection to linguistics, check out this obituary, including these quotes: he came into contact with structural linguistics, a behaviouristic amalgam of European and American theories, and particularly the more imaginative work of Roman Jacobson, the Russian...
Here’s a link to a brief article by Edmund Blair Bolles regarding the current research into FOXP2, from which this is the introduction: A letter to the current issue of Nature has caused a stir among those interested in the evolution of language. It looks at the FOXP2 gene in more detail than any paper has [...]
Born in 1945, Helen Fisher teaches at Rutgers, in the department of Anthropology. She is a specialist in romantic relationships and the reasons people are attracted to one another. Before assuming her position at Rutgers, she worked in New York as a researcher for the American Museum of Natural History. She was at the museum from 1984 to 1994. Dr. Fisher received her Ph.D. from the University of Colorado
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