Day: May 30, 2008

Gotta shuffle before you walk

So, when is it really efficient to get up and move around on two feet? I know that’s what you’re thinking this morning — and your answer is probably, if someone would bring me a cup of coffee in bed, well, that might shift the whole equation. But a recent piece by Sylvester and Kramer asks this question of a model for the shift to bipedal locomotion in primates.

As most folks who do research on or teach about human evolution will tell you, we spend a lot of time and energy thinking about bipedalism. Because it emerges earlier in the fossil record than the really large brains of later hominids, bipedalism seems to be a key adaptation, a kind of evolutionary watershed that opened up environmental niches that weren’t available to other primates.

But it’s really hard to figure out when exactly it started or why; theories about the reasons for bipedalism include a wide range of explanations, from avoiding too much contact with the sun in open savanna to walking on branches while supporting the body overhead on other branches, from predator spotting to low-fruit foraging from the ground. While it’s clear bipedalism has created all sorts of opportunities, it’s not clear which one of them was necessarily the decisive one that sealed the deal and made bipedalism work for ancestors to modern humans.

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The Emerging Moral Psychology

Dan Jones writes on The Emerging Moral Psychology in April’s Prospect Magazine, an article I came across through The Situationist. He could just have easily called it the emerging moral neuroanthropology, for here is his opening, “Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, economists, primatologists and anthropologists, all borrowing liberally from each others’ insights, are putting together a novel picture of morality… The picture emerging shows the moral sense to be the product of biologically evolved and culturally sensitive brain systems that together make up the human ‘moral faculty’.”

Jones takes us through “hot morality,” morality guided by intuitions and emotions and not universal laws, drawing on the work of Jonathan Haidt. Then we get “the tale of two faculties,” highlighting the dual processing view (emotion and cognition) of Joshua Greene. Finally we get “A Moral Grammar” via Marc Hauser. Hauser gives us a moral code based on three principles derived from 5000 people who have taken the Moral Sense Test worldwide via Internet (no snarky comments as Greg might say):

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Maurice Bloch and Everyday, Relevant Anthropology

Maximilian Forte over at Open Anthropology recently covered an interview with Maurice Bloch that appeared in Eurozine. In his summary, Forte highlights certain parts of the interview in a way which struck me as quite relevant to neuroanthropology. Interestingly, Forte had a similarly positive reaction to Bloch’s statements, even though his Open Anthropology project is focused on a different sort of public engagement and synthetic approach than what we do here.

Here’s why, captured in one of the more striking lines from Bloch: “I would consider that all human beings are anthropologists: all are concerned with the general theoretical questions about the nature of human beings, about explanations of diversity and similarity. Of course I’m not worried about the continuation of this form of anthropology.”

What about anthropology in its present, institutional form? There, things are not so clear. Bloch makes this provocative statement, “anthropologists have not been addressing those questions that are burning questions for human beings. Other people have done it and have not made use of what anthropologists have learned… I think we should engage with the general questions that people are ask, rather than spending our time navel gazing.”

On the applied side, particularly with regards to development and anthropology, Bloch tells us that the anthropologists’ “role is one of caution. Because we have learned that easy answers don’t work. So we anthropologists will always have a negative role [in public debates] and I think that’s right.” In contrast, however, the development and conservation experts who come in with big money, big ideologies and big power do not necessarily want to hear the “it’s complicated” anthropology message.

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