Author: gregdowney

Trained as a cultural anthropologist at the University of Chicago, I have gone on to do fieldwork in Brazil and the United States. I have written one book, Learning Capoeira: Lessons in Cunning from an Afro-Brazilian Art (Oxford, 2005). I have also co-authored and co-edited several, including, with Dr. Daniel Lende, The Encultured Brain: An Introduction to Neuroanthropology (MIT, 2012), and with Dr. Melissa Fisher, Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy (Duke, 2006). My research interests include neuroanthropology, psychological anthropology, sport, dance, human rights, neuroscience, phenomenology, economic anthropology, and just about anything else that catches my attention.

Second annual Neuroscience Boot Camp wants you!

recruits
Not your grandad's boot camp!

Applications are now being accepted for the 2010 Neuroscience Boot Camp at the University of Pennsylvania. For more information, head on over to the Boot Camp website.

Kezia Kamentz dropped me an email and shared that last year’s Boot Camp went really well: “great teachers, a small but very diverse group of students, and a varied set of teaching methods.” Kezia said that they would love to have some anthropologists on board, and I know that there’s a few of you out there. Kezia writes:

Through a combination of lectures, break-out groups, panel discussions and laboratory visits, Boot Camp participants will gain an understanding of the methods of neuroscience and key findings on the cognitive and social-emotional functions of the brain, lifespan development and disorders of brain function. Like last year’s faculty, the 2010 Boot Camp faculty consists of leaders in the fields of cognitive and affective neuroscience who are committed to the goal of educating non-neuroscientists.

For more information.

Charlie Rose is on the brain

Charlie Rose 12- part Brain Series started off last night apparently (I’m in Australia, as most of you know — I miss a few things). Heidi Tan dropped us a line to let us know it was happening. The series is also supported by the Simons Foundation.

Last night’s introductory topic was ‘The Great Mysteries of the Human Brain’: consciousness, free will, perception, cognition, emotion and memory with a roundtable of brain researchers.

Charlie’s co-host and guests included Eric Kandel from Columbia University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Cornelia Bargmann from Rockefeller University, Tony Movshon from New York University, John Searle from University of California Berkeley and Gerald Fischbach of the Simons Foundation.

If you missed last night’s episode, according to Heidi, you can catch it again tonight on Bloomberg Television at 8PM and 10PM ET, or listen to the interview simulcast on Bloomberg Radio. Bloomberg Radio is broadcast on 11:30AM in the New York Metropolitan area and is available on XM and Sirius.

For information about the series, you can visit: http://www.charlierose.com/. When I did, it automatically loaded the first episode of the series.

Update: I just posted a piece on the fourth episode in the series that also has links to the ‘collection’ of all the episodes and a schedule of upcoming segments. Please check out, Charlie Rose is back on the brain, for more information and discussion.

New Four Stone Hearth at Paddy K (Swedish stylee)

Yum, anthropology!
Yum, anthropology!
The latest Four Stone Hearth (Number 78) is up at Paddy K (‘the Swedish Experience’ sounds to me like a euphemism for an obscure sexual act stemming from a fascination with high-tax-paying northern Europeans). For those of you unfamiliar with the experience, Four Stone Hearth is the itinerant web carnival of blogging about anthropology, named for the four subfields of our mother discipline (archaeo-, cultural/social, linguistic, and bio-/physical).

There’s lots of anthropology goodness including a personal favourite link to a news story on the ‘unsuitable materials’ rooms at the British Museum (‘racy and disturbing pictures, regarded as unfit for public attention’ including erotic playing cards from the jazz age, a pile of penis drawings, an 11,000-year-old statue of a couple in flagrante, and symbols of ‘the early worship of mankind’ — yup, more penises). Hot Cup of Joe discusses Creationists’ response to the release of papers on Ardipthecus remains (that is, more behavioural data on Agnopithicus creationus, as Joe puts it).

According to Paddy K, Martin Rundqvist is still looking for a host of the Four Stone blog carnival for 7 November, so if you’re into it, consider hosting it at your site. Contact Martin!

Image from Aardvarchaeology.

Sympathy for Creationists

Jesus! vs Darwin!
Jesus! vs Darwin!
Creationists suffer the kind of derision from the scientific community usually reserved for flat earth proponents, faith healers and those who do not appreciate Star Trek. Well, that’s not entirely true; detractors of Star Trek are probably more deeply reviled.

In the spirit of stirring the pot though, I recently gave a presentation ‘Sympathy for Creationists, and Other Thoughts from a Sceptical Anthropologist,’ and thought that I might do an online version. I want to suggest that many ‘believers’ in evolutionary theory share some of the intellectual errors evidenced by Creationists. You know the general principle: try to irritate everyone in your audience so that you at least know they have a pulse.

Many thanks to the Macquarie University Sceptics’ Society for their kind invitation. The Sceptics were a great audience, and I only regret that there was no way to audiotape the lecture — well, actually, I’m probably not half as funny as I like to remember myself being, so maybe it’s a good thing. In addition, I can’t post all the slides because they are, as usual in my lectures, filled with the flotsam and jetsam of the Interwebs, including unlicensed cartoons, pilfered photographs, swiped graphics and other materials. Although it’s one thing to use these sorts of images in a non-commercial presentation, I don’t feel comfortable pinning them up on Neuroanthropology.net.

So although this post will not follow my lecture point-for-point, nor will it have the excellent questions that the audience presented (which my failing memory is already turning into my ‘own’ thoughts in an act of cerebral self-aggrandizement), this should be fun, and it will allow me to link to evolution-related stuff all over the place.

Continue reading “Sympathy for Creationists”

Natureculture conference (May 2010)

The Society for Cultural Anthropology recently circulated an announcement of their biannual meeting, 7 and 8 May, 2010, at the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Prof. Donna Haraway, Professor and Chair of the History of Consciousness Program of the University of California Santa Cruz, will be the keynote speaker and the theme will be ‘Natureculture: Entangled Relations of Multiplicity.’ As Brad Weiss recently wrote:

In recognition of the renewed and growing drive to interrogate the longstanding ontological divide between Nature and Culture, we invite discussions that explore ways of reconfiguring this complex relationship.

Haraway is probably best known in anthropology for her discussions of human-machine hybridization — the ‘cyborg’ — and their implications for feminist theories which tended to rely upon naturalizations of women’s sex and gender, but she has also been crucial for the critical reconsideration of primate studies. Haraway’s landmark essay, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, originally published in Socialist Review, is available online here.

More information is available at the conference website here. There’s no explicit mention of anything brain-related, but the conference announcement is a bit of a ‘what’s hot’ list in cultural anthropology. Check it out if you’re in to these sorts of things…

Sex on the brain & neuroanthropology on sex

brainonsexI promised my Human Evolution students that I would compile a sort of ‘collected works’ posting on our discussions of sex and evolution here at Neuroanthropology.net. I’m a bit frightened to see just how much we talk about it, but here goes anyway…

Over our time at Neuroanthropology.net, there have been a few of posts on abuses of ‘evolutionary psychology’ in its popular incarnations. I suspect that these would be among the most relevant for my students in ‘Human evolution and diversity’: Chicks dig jerks?: Evolutionary psych on sex #1, Girls gone guilty: Evolutionary psych on sex #2, along with Bad brain science: Boobs caused subprime crisis.

Lecture yesterday and tutorial today covered quite a bit about sexual dimorphism and, at the same time, the homologies between men and women. For one take on this, and on how culture can affect the physiological development of gender traits, check our Throwing like a girl(’s brain).

A while ago, probably under the influence of last year’s lecture, I also posted a sprawling piece Neurosexism, size dimorphism and not-so-’hard-wiring’.

If you still haven’t had enough about sex, check out Daniel’s compilation of all sorts of links: The Sex Round Up.

Paul Mason provides a discussion of the Sex and Gender distinction along with a whole series of relevant online resources.

And our most recent discussion of a most egregious attempt to do research on slash fan fiction, alleging that these works exposed the ‘evolutionary roots’ of sexuality. The series has run onto three posts so far: Sex, Lies and IRB Tape: Netporn to SurveyFail, SurveyFail redax: Downey adds to Lende, and Nature/Nurture: Slash To The Rescue.