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Monday, August 18, 2014

Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker 2011.jpg
Pinker in 2011
Born Steven Arthur Pinker
September 18, 1954 (age 59)
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Fields Evolutionary psychology, experimental psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, visual cognition
Alma mater Dawson College,
McGill University,
Harvard University
Thesis The Representation of Three-dimensional Space in Mental Images (1979)
Doctoral advisor Stephen Kosslyn
Known for How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature
Influences Noam Chomsky, Thomas Sowell, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Richard Dawkins, Thomas Schelling[1]
Notable awards Troland Award (1993, National Academy of Sciences),
Henry Dale Prize (2004, Royal Institution),
Walter P. Kistler Book Award (2005),
Humanist of the Year award (2006, issued by the AHA),
George Miller Prize (2010, Cognitive Neuroscience Society), Richard Dawkins Award (2013)
Spouse Nancy Etcoff (1980–1992; divorced)
Ilavenil Subbiah (1995–2006; divorced)
Rebecca Goldstein (2007-present)
Website
www.stevenpinker.com

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0:00
from the BBC programme Desert Island Discs, 30 June 2013[2]
Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-born U.S. experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist, and popular science author. He is a Harvard College Professor and the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University,[3] and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.

Pinker's academic specializations are visual cognition and psycholinguistics. His experimental subjects include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children's language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, and the psychology of innuendo and euphemism. He published two technical books which proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In particular, his work with Alan Prince published in 1989 critiqued the connectionist model of how children acquire the past tense of English verbs, arguing instead that children use default rules such as adding "-ed" to make regular forms, sometimes in error, but are obliged to learn irregular forms one by one.

In his popular books, he has argued that the human faculty for language is an "instinct", an innate behavior shaped by natural selection and adapted to our communication needs. He is the author of six books for a general audience. Five of these, namely The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (2000), The Blank Slate (2002), and The Stuff of Thought (2007) describe aspects of the field of psycholinguistics, and include, among much else, accessible accounts of his own research. The sixth book, The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), makes the case that violence in human societies has in general steadily declined with time, and identifies six major causes of this decline.

Pinker has been named as one of the world's most influential intellectuals by various magazines. He has won awards from the American Psychological Association, the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society and the American Humanist Association. He has served on the editorial boards of a variety of journals, and on the advisory boards of several institutions. He has frequently participated in public debates on science and society.

Biography

Early life, education and career

Pinker was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in 1954, to a middle-class Jewish family. His parents were Roslyn and Harry Pinker.[4] His father, a lawyer, first worked as a manufacturer's representative, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government, while his sister, Susan Pinker, is a psychologist and writer, author of The Sexual Paradox.[5][6] Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced in 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced.[7] His third wife, whom he married in 2007, is the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein.[8] He has two stepdaughters: the novelist Yael Goldstein Love and the poet Danielle Blau.

Pinker graduated from Dawson College in 1971. He received a Bachelor of Arts in psychology from McGill University in 1976, and earned his Doctor of Philosophy in experimental psychology at Harvard University in 1979 under Stephen Kosslyn. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, after which he became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University.

From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, taking a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1995–96. As of 2003, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard; from 2008 to 2013 he also held the title of Harvard College Professor in recognition of his dedication to teaching.[9] In June 2011 it was announced he would give lectures as a visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.[10]

About his Jewish background Pinker has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense ... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew."[11] As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969, when:
As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents' argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 A.M. on October 17, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike... This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters (and offered a foretaste of life as a scientist).[12]
Pinker identifies himself as an equity feminist, which he defines as "a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology".[13] He reported the result of a test of his political orientation that characterized him as "neither leftist nor rightist, more libertarian than authoritarian."[14] He describes himself as having "experienced a primitive tribal stirring" after his genes were shown to trace back to the Middle East.[15]

Research and theory

Pinker in 2005

Pinker's research on visual cognition, begun in collaboration with his thesis adviser, Stephen Kosslyn, showed that mental images represent scenes and objects as they appear from a specific vantage point (rather than capturing their intrinsic three-dimensional structure), and thus correspond to the neuroscientist David Marr's theory of a "two-and-a-half-dimensional sketch."[16] He also showed that this level of representation is used in visual attention, and in object recognition (at least for asymmetrical shapes), contrary to Marr's theory that recognition uses viewpoint-independent representations.

In psycholinguistics, Pinker became known early in his career for promoting computational learning theory as a way to understand language acquisition in children. He wrote a tutorial review of the field followed by two books that advanced his own theory of language acquisition, and a series of experiments on how children acquire the passive, dative, and locative constructions. These books were Language Learnability and Language Development (1984), in Pinker's words "outlin[ing] a theory of how children acquire the words and grammatical structures of their mother tongue",[17] and Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure (1989), in Pinker's words "focus[ing] on one aspect of this process, the ability to use different kinds of verbs in appropriate sentences, such as intransitive verbs, transitive verbs, and verbs taking different combinations of complements and indirect objects".[17] He then focused on verbs of two kinds which illustrate what he considers to be the processes required for human language: retrieving whole words from memory, like the past form of the irregular verb[18] "bring", namely "brought"; and using rules to combine (parts of) words, like the past form of the regular verb "walk", namely "walked".[17]

In 1989 Pinker and Alan Prince published an influential critique of a connectionist model of the acquisition of the past tense (a textbook problem in language acquisition), followed by a series of studies of how people use and acquire the past tense. This included a monograph on children's regularization of irregular forms and his popular 1999 book, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. Pinker argued that language depends on two things, the associative remembering of sounds and their meanings in words, and the use of rules to manipulate symbols for grammar. He presented evidence against connectionism, where a child would have to learn all forms of all words and would simply retrieve each needed form from memory, in favour of the older alternative theory, the use of words and rules combined by generative phonology. He showed that mistakes made by children indicate the use of default rules to add suffixes such as "-ed": for instance 'breaked' and 'comed' for 'broke' and 'came'. He argued that this shows that irregular verb-forms in English have to be learnt and retrieved from memory individually, and that the children making these errors were predicting the regular "-ed" ending in an open-ended way by applying a mental rule. This rule for combining verb stems and the usual suffix can be expressed as[19]
Vpast → Vstem + d
where V is a verb and d is the regular ending. Pinker further argued that since the ten most frequently-occurring English verbs (be, have, do, say, make ...) are all irregular, while 98.2% of the thousand least common verbs are regular, there is a "massive correlation" of frequency and irregularity. He explains this by arguing that every irregular form, such as 'took', 'came' and 'got', has to be committed to memory by the children in each generation, or else lost, and that the common forms are the most easily memorized. Any irregular verb that falls in popularity past a certain point is lost, and all future generations will treat it as a regular verb instead.[19]

In 1990, Pinker, with his MIT graduate student Paul Bloom, published the paper "Natural Language and Natural Selection", arguing that the human language faculty must have evolved through natural selection.[20] The article provided arguments for a continuity based view of language evolution, contrary to then current discontinuity based theories that see language as suddenly appearing with the advent of Homo sapiens as a kind of evolutionary accident. This discontinuity based view was prominently argued by the two of the main authorities, linguist Noam Chomsky and Stephen Jay Gould.[21] The paper became widely cited and created renewed interest in the evolutionary prehistory of language, and has been credited with shifting the central question of the debate from "did language evolve?" to "how did language evolve".[21][22] The article also presaged Pinker's argument in The Language Instinct.

Popularisation of science

The Language Instinct and related books

Noam Chomsky: Pinker's The Language Instinct popularizes Chomsky's theory that language is an innate faculty of mind.

Pinker's 1994 The Language Instinct was the first of several books to combine cognitive science with behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology. It introduces the science of language and popularizes Noam Chomsky's theory that language is an innate faculty of mind, with the controversial twist that the faculty for language evolved by natural selection as an adaptation for communication. Pinker criticizes several widely-held ideas about language – that it needs to be taught, that people's grammar is poor and getting worse with new ways of speaking, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis that language limits the kinds of thoughts a person can have, and that other great apes can learn languages. Pinker sees language as unique to humans, evolved to solve the specific problem of communication among social hunter-gatherers. He argues that it is as much an instinct as specialized adaptative behavior in other species, such as a spider's web-weaving or a beaver's dam-building.
Pinker states in his introduction that his ideas are "deeply influenced"[23] by Chomsky; he also lists scientists whom Chomsky influenced to "open up whole new areas of language study, from child development and speech perception to neurology and genetics"[23] — Eric Lenneberg, George Miller, Roger Brown, Morris Halle and Alvin Liberman.[23] Brown mentored Pinker through his thesis; Pinker stated that Brown's "funny and instructive"[24] book Words and Things (1958) was one of the inspirations for The Language Instinct.[24][25]

The reality of Pinker's proposed language instinct, and the related claim that grammar is innate and genetically based, has been contested by many linguists. One prominent opponent of Pinker's view is Geoffrey Sampson whose 1997 book, Educating Eve: The 'Language Instinct' Debate has been described as the "definitive response" to Pinker's book.[26][27] Sampson argues that while it may seem attractive to argue the nature side of the 'nature versus nurture' debate, the nurture side may better support the creativity and nobility of the human mind. Sampson denies there is a language instinct, and argues that children can learn language because people can learn anything.[27] Others have sought a middle ground between Pinker's nativism and Sampson's culturalism.[28]

The assumptions underlying the nativist view have also been criticised in Jeffrey Elman's Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development, which defends the connectionist approach that Pinker attacked. In his 1996 book Impossible Minds, the machine intelligence researcher Igor Aleksander calls The Language Instinct excellent, and argues that Pinker presents a relatively soft claim for innatism, accompanied by a strong dislike of the 'Standard Social Sciences Model' or SSSM (Pinker's term) which supposes that development is purely dependent on culture. Further, Aleksander writes that while Pinker criticises some attempts to explain language processing with neural nets, Pinker later makes use of a neural net to create past tense verb forms correctly. Aleksander concludes that while he doesn't support the SSSM, "a cultural repository of language just seems the easy trick for an efficient evolutionary system armed with an iconic state machine to play."[29]

Two other books, How the Mind Works (1997) and The Blank Slate (2002), broadly surveyed the mind and defended the idea of a complex human nature with many mental faculties that are adaptive (Pinker is an ally of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins in many disputes surrounding adaptationism). Another major theme in Pinker's theories is that human cognition works, in part, by combinatorial symbol-manipulation, not just associations among sensory features, as in many connectionist models. On the debate around The Blank Slate, Pinker called Thomas Sowell's book A Conflict of Visions "wonderful",[30] and explained that "The Tragic Vision" and the "Utopian Vision" are the views of human nature behind right- and left-wing ideologies.[30]

In Words and Rules: the Ingredients of Language (1999), Pinker argues from his own research that regular and irregular phenomena are products of computation and memory lookup, respectively, and that language can be understood as an interaction between the two.[31] "Words and Rules" is also the title of an essay by Pinker outlining many of the topics discussed in the book.[19] Charles Yang, in the London Review of Books, writes that "this book never runs low on hubris or hyperbole".[32] The book's topic, the English past tense, is in Yang's view unglamorous, and Pinker's attempts at compromise risk being in no man's land between rival theories. Giving the example of German, Yang argues that irregular nouns in that language at least all belong to classes, governed by rules, and that things get even worse in languages that attach prefixes and suffixes to make up long 'words': they can't be learnt individually, as there are untold numbers of combinations. "All Pinker (and the connectionists) are doing is turning over the rocks at the base of the intellectual landslide caused by the Chomskian revolution."[32]

In The Stuff of Thought (2007), Pinker looks at a wide range of issues around the way words related to thoughts on the one hand, and to the world outside ourselves on the other. Given his evolutionary perspective, a central question is how an intelligent mind capable of abstract thought evolved: how a mind adapted to Stone Age life could work in the modern world. Many quirks of language are the result.[33]

Pinker is critical of theories about the evolutionary origins of language which argue that linguistic cognition might have evolved from earlier musical cognition. He sees language as being tied primarily to the capacity for logical reasoning, and speculates that human proclivity for music may be a spandrel — a feature not adaptive in its own right, but which has persisted through other traits which are more broadly practical, and thus selected for. In How the Mind Works, Pinker reiterates Immanuel Kant's view that music is not in itself an important cognitive phenomenon, but that it happens to stimulate important auditory and spatio-motoric cognitive functions. Pinker compares music to "auditory cheesecake", stating that "As far as biological cause and effect is concerned, music is useless". This argument has been rejected by Daniel Levitin and Joseph Carroll, experts in music cognition, who argue that music has had an important role in the evolution of human cognition.[34][35][36][37][38][39] In his book This Is Your Brain On Music, Levitin argues that music could provide adaptive advantage through sexual selection, social bonding, and cognitive development; he questions the assumption that music is the antecedent to language, as opposed to its progenitor, noting that many species display music-like habits that could be seen as precursors to human music.[40]

The Better Angels of Our Nature

Violence in the middle ages: detail from "Mars" in Das Mittelalterliche Hausbuch, c. 1475-1480. The image is used by Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature, with the comment "as the Housebook illustrations suggest, [the knights] did not restrict their killing to other knights".[41]

In The Better Angels of Our Nature, published in 2011, Pinker argues that violence has decreased over multiple scales of time and magnitude, including tribal warfare, homicide, cruel punishments, child abuse, animal cruelty, domestic violence, lynching, pogroms, and international and civil wars. Pinker considers it unlikely that human nature has changed. In his view, it is more likely that human nature comprises inclinations toward violence and those that counteract them, the "better angels of our nature". He outlines six 'major historical declines of violence' which all have their own socio/cultural/economic causes:[42]
  1. "The Pacification Process" - the rise of organized systems of government has a correlative relationship with the decline in violent deaths. As states expand they prevent tribal feuding, reducing losses.
  2. "The Civilising Process" – consolidation of centralized states and kingdoms throughout Europe results in the rise of criminal justice and commercial infrastructure, organizing previously chaotic systems which could lead to raiding and mass violence.
  3. "The Humanitarian Revolution" – The 18th - 20th century abandonment of institutionalized violence by the state (breaking on the wheel, burning at the stake). Suggests this is likely due to the spike in literacy after the invention of the printing press thereby allowing the proletariat to question conventional wisdom.
  4. "The Long Peace" – The powers of 20th Century believed that period of time to be the bloodiest in history. This to a largely peaceful 65 year period post WWI and WW2. Developed countries have stopped warring (against each other and colonially), adopted democracy, and this has led a massive decline (on average) of deaths.
  5. "The New Peace" – the decline in organized conflicts of all kinds since the end of the Cold War.
  6. "The Rights Revolutions" – The reduction of systemic violence at smaller scales against vulnerable populations (racial minorities, women, children, homosexuals, animals).
The book was welcomed by many critics and reviewers, who found its arguments convincing and its synthesis of a large volume of historical evidence compelling.[43][44][45][46][47] It also aroused criticism on a variety of grounds, such as whether deaths per capita was an appropriate metric, Pinker's atheism, lack of moral leadership, excessive focus on Europe (though the book covers other areas), the interpretation of historical data, and its image of indigenous people.[48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58]

Public debate

Pinker is a frequent participant in public debates surrounding the contributions of science to contemporary society. Social commentators such as Ed West, author of The Diversity Illusion, consider Pinker important and daring in his willingness to confront taboos, as in The Blank Slate. This doctrine (the tabula rasa), writes West, remained accepted "as fact, rather than fantasy"[59] a decade after the book's publication. West describes Pinker as "no polemicist, and he leaves readers to draw their own conclusions".[59]

In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about a gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty. Pinker noted that Summers's remarks, properly understood, were hypotheses about overlapping statistical distributions of men's and women's talents and tastes, and that in a university such hypotheses ought to be the subject of empirical testing rather than dogma and outrage.[60] Edge.org ran a debate between Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke on gender and science.[61]

In 2009, Pinker wrote a mixed review of Malcolm Gladwell's essays in The New York Times criticizing his analytical methods.[62] Gladwell replied, disputing Pinker's comments about the importance of IQ on teaching performance and by analogy, the effect, if any, of draft order on quarterback performance in the National Football League.[63] Advanced NFL Stats addressed the issue statistically, siding with Pinker and showing that differences in methodology could explain the two men's differing opinions.[64]

In 2009, David Shenk criticized Pinker for siding with the "nature" argument and for "never once acknowledg[ing] gene-environment interaction or epigenetics" in an article on nature versus nurture in The New York Times.[65] Pinker responded to a question about epigenetics as a possibility for the decline in violence in a lecture for the BBC World Service. Pinker said it was unlikely since the decline in violence happened too rapidly to be explained by genetic changes.[66]

Awards and distinctions

Pinker in Göttingen, 2010

Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential scientists and thinkers in the world in 2004[67] and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in both years the poll was carried out, 2005[68] and 2008;[69] in 2010 and 2011 he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers.[70][71]

His research in cognitive psychology has won the Early Career Award (1984) and Boyd McCandless Award (1986) from the American Psychological Association, the Troland Research Award (1993) from the National Academy of Sciences, the Henry Dale Prize (2004) from the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and the George Miller Prize (2010) from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. On May 13, 2006, he received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.[72]

Pinker has served on the editorial boards of journals such as Cognition, Daedalus, and PLOS One, and on the advisory boards of institutions for scientific research (e.g., the Allen Institute for Brain Science), free speech (e.g., the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), the popularization of science (e.g., the World Science Festival and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry), peace (e.g., the Peace Research Endowment), and secular humanism (e.g., the Freedom from Religion Foundation and the Secular Coalition for America).

Since 2008, he has chaired the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and wrote the essay on usage for the fifth edition of the Dictionary, which was published in 2011.

Bibliography

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Books

Articles and essays

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Margaret Mead

Margaret Mead

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
Margaret Mead
Margaret Mead (1901-1978).jpg
Margaret Mead, 1948
Born December 16, 1901
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US
Died November 15, 1978 (aged 76)
New York City
Education Barnard College (1923)
M.A., Columbia University (1924)
Ph.D., Columbia University (1929)
Occupation Anthropologist
Spouse(s) Luther Cressman (1923–1928)
Reo Fortune (1928–1935)
Gregory Bateson (1936–1950)
Children Mary Catherine Bateson (b. 1939)
Awards Kalinga Prize (1970)

Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 – November 15, 1978) was an American cultural anthropologist, who was frequently a featured author and speaker in the mass media throughout the 1960s and 1970s.[1] She earned her bachelor degree at Barnard College in New York City, and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University.

She was both a popularizer of the insights of anthropology into modern American and Western culture and a respected, often controversial, academic anthropologist.[2] Her reports about the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures shaped the 1960s sexual revolution. Mead was a proponent of broadening sexual mores within a context of traditional western religious life.

An Anglican Christian, she played a considerable part in the drafting of the 1979 American Episcopal Book of Common Prayer.[3]:347–348

Birth, early family life, and education

Mead, the first of five children, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but raised in Doylestown.
Her father, Edward Sherwood Mead, was a professor of finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and her mother, Emily (Fogg) Mead,[4] was a sociologist who studied Italian immigrants.[5] Her sister Katharine (1906–1907) died at the age of nine months. This was a traumatic event for Mead, who had named this baby, and thoughts of her lost sister permeated her daydreams for many years.[3] Her family moved frequently, so her early education alternated between home-schooling and traditional schools.[5] Her family owned the Longland farm from 1912 to 1926.[6] Born into a family of varying religious outlooks, she searched for a form of religion that gave an expression of the faith that she had been formally acquainted with, Christianity.[7] In doing so, she found the rituals of the Episcopal Church to fit the expression of religion she was seeking.[7] Margaret studied one year, 1919, at DePauw University, then transferred to Barnard College where she earned her bachelor's degree in 1923.

She studied with professor Franz Boas and Dr. Ruth Benedict at Columbia University before earning her Master's in 1924.[8] Mead set out in 1925 to do fieldwork in Samoa.[9] In 1926, she joined the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, as assistant curator.[10] She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1929.[11]

Both of Mead's surviving sisters were married to well-known men. Elizabeth Mead (1909–1983), an artist and teacher, married cartoonist William Steig, and Priscilla Mead (1911–1959) married author Leo Rosten. Mead also had a brother, Richard, who became a professor.

Personal life

Before departing for Samoa, Mead had a short affair with the linguist Edward Sapir, a close friend of Ruth Benedict. But Sapir's conservative ideas about marriage and the woman's role were anathema to Mead, and as Mead left to do field work in Samoa the two separated permanently. Mead received news of Sapir's remarriage while still in Samoa, and burned their correspondence there on the beach .[12]

Mead was married three times. Her first husband (1923–1928) was American Luther Cressman, a theology student at the time who eventually became an anthropologist. Mead dismissively characterized their union as "my student marriage" in Blackberry Winter, a sobriquet with which Cressman took vigorous issue. Her second husband was New Zealander Reo Fortune, a Cambridge graduate (1928–1935). As an anthropologist, his Sorcerers of Dobu remains the locus classicus of eastern Papuan anthropology, but he is best known instead for his Fortunate number theory.
Her third and longest-lasting marriage (1936–1950) was to the British Anthropologist Gregory Bateson with whom she had a daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, who would also become an anthropologist. Her pediatrician was Benjamin Spock early in his career.[1] Spock's subsequent writings on child rearing incorporated some of Mead's own practices and beliefs acquired from her ethnological field observations which she shared with him; in particular, breastfeeding on the baby's demand rather than a schedule.[13] She readily acknowledged that Gregory Bateson was the husband she loved the most. She was devastated when he left her, and she remained his loving friend ever after, keeping his photograph by her bedside wherever she traveled, including beside her hospital deathbed.[3]

Mead also had an exceptionally close relationship with Ruth Benedict, one of her instructors. In her memoir about her parents, With a Daughter's Eye, Mary Catherine Bateson implies that the relationship between Benedict and Mead was partly sexual.[14] While Margaret Mead never openly identified herself as lesbian or bisexual, the details of her relationship with Benedict have led others to so identify her. In her writings she proposed that it is to be expected that an individual's sexual orientation may evolve throughout life.[14]

She spent her last years in a close personal and professional collaboration with anthropologist Rhoda Metraux, with whom she lived from 1955 until her death in 1978. Letters between the two published in 2006 with the permission of Mead's daughter[15] clearly express a romantic relationship.[citation needed]

Career and later life

Mead at New York Academy of Sciences, 1968.

During World War II, Mead served as executive secretary of the National Research Council's Committee on Food Habits. She served as curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History from 1946 to 1969. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1948.[16] She taught at The New School and Columbia University, where she was an adjunct professor from 1954 to 1978 and was a professor of anthropology and chair of the Division of Social Sciences at Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus from 1968 to 1970, founding their anthropology department. In 1970, she joined the faculty of the University of Rhode Island as a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Anthropology.[17]

Following Ruth Benedict's example, Mead focused her research on problems of child rearing, personality, and culture.[18] She served as president of the American Anthropological Association in 1960. She held various positions in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, notably president in 1975 and chair of the executive committee of the board of directors in 1976.[19] She was a recognizable figure in academia, usually wearing a distinctive cape and carrying a walking stick.[1]

Mead was featured on two record albums published by Folkways Records. The first, released in 1959, An Interview With Margaret Mead, explored the topics of morals and anthropology. In 1971, she was included in a compilation of talks by prominent women, But the Women Rose, Vol.2: Voices of Women in American History.[20]

She is credited with the pluralization of the term "semiotics." [21]

In later life, Mead was a mentor to many young anthropologists and sociologists, including Jean Houston.[3]

In 1976, Mead was a key participant at UN Habitat I, the first UN forum on human settlements.

Mead died of pancreatic cancer on November 15, 1978.

Work

Coming of Age in Samoa

Samoan girl, c. 1896

In the foreword to Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead's advisor, Franz Boas, wrote of its significance:
Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, very good manners, and definite ethical standards is not universal. It is instructive to know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways.[22]
Mead's findings suggested that the community ignores both boys and girls until they are about 15 or 16. Before then, children have no social standing within the community. Mead also found that marriage is regarded as a social and economic arrangement where wealth, rank, and job skills of the husband and wife are taken into consideration.
Mead, ca. 1930-1950.

In 1983, five years after Mead had died, New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman, published Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, in which he challenged Mead's major findings about sexuality in Samoan society.[23] Freeman's book was controversial in its turn: later in 1983 the American Anthropological Association declared it to be "poorly written, unscientific, irresponsible and misleading."[24]

In 1999 Freeman published another book, The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research, including previously unavailable material. Most anthropologists have since been highly critical of Freeman's arguments. A frequent criticism of Freeman is that he regularly misrepresented Mead's research and views.[25][26] In a 2009 evaluation of the debate, anthropologist Paul Shankman concluded that:
There is now a large body of criticism of Freeman's work from a number of perspectives in which Mead, Samoa, and anthropology appear in a very different light than they do in Freeman's work. Indeed, the immense significance that Freeman gave his critique looks like "much ado about nothing" to many of his critics.[25]
While nurture-oriented anthropologists are more inclined to believe in Mead, there are others who take a nature-oriented approach following Freeman's lead among those are Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, biologist Richard Dawkins, evolutionary psychologist David Buss, science writer Matt Ridley and classicist Mary Lefkowitz.[27] The philosopher Peter Singer has also criticized Mead in his book A Darwinian Left where he states that "Freeman compiles a convincing case that Mead had misunderstood Samoan customs".[28]

In 1996 Martin Orans examined Mead's notes preserved at the Library of Congress, and credits her for leaving all of her recorded data available to the general public. Orans concludes that Freeman's basic criticisms, that Mead was duped by ceremonial virgin Fa'apua'a Fa'amu (who later swore to Freeman that she had played a joke on Mead) were false for several reasons: first, Mead was well aware of the forms and frequency of Samoan joking; second, she provided a careful account of the sexual restrictions on ceremonial virgins that correspond's to Fa'apua'a Fa'auma'a's account to Freeman, and third, that Mead's notes make clear that she had reached her conclusions about Samoan sexuality before meeting Fa'apua'a Fa'amu. He therefore concludes, contrary to Freeman, that Mead was never the victim of a hoax. Orans points out that Mead's data support several different conclusions, and that Mead's conclusions hinge on an interpretive, rather than positivist, approach to culture. Orans claims remains controversial though since there are still many who claims Mead was hoaxed, these include philosopher Peter Singer[28] and zoologist David Attenborough.[29] Evaluating Mead's work in Samoa from a positivist stance, Martin Orans' assessment of the controversy was that Mead did not formulate her research agenda in scientific terms, and that "her work may properly be damned with the harshest scientific criticism of all, that it is 'not even wrong'".[30]

Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935)

Another influential book by Mead was Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies.[31] This became a major cornerstone of the feminist movement, since it claimed that females are dominant in the Tchambuli (now spelled Chambri) Lake region of the Sepik basin of Papua New Guinea (in the western Pacific) without causing any special problems. The lack of male dominance may have been the result of the Australian administration's outlawing of warfare. According to contemporary research, males are dominant throughout Melanesia (although some believe that female witches have special powers). Others have argued that there is still much cultural variation throughout Melanesia, and especially in the large island of New Guinea. Moreover, anthropologists often overlook the significance of networks of political influence among females. The formal male-dominated institutions typical of some areas of high population density were not, for example, present in the same way in Oksapmin, West Sepik Province, a more sparsely populated area. Cultural patterns there were different from, say, Mt. Hagen. They were closer to those described by Mead.

Mead stated that the Arapesh people, also in the Sepik, were pacifists, although she noted that they do on occasion engage in warfare. Her observations about the sharing of garden plots amongst the Arapesh, the egalitarian emphasis in child rearing, and her documentation of predominantly peaceful relations among relatives are very different from the "big man" displays of dominance that were documented in more stratified New Guinea cultures – e.g., by Andrew Strathern. They are a different cultural pattern.

In brief, her comparative study revealed a full range of contrasting gender roles:
  • "Among the Arapesh, both men and women were peaceful in temperament and neither men nor women made war.
  • "Among the Mundugumor, the opposite was true: both men and women were warlike in temperament.
  • "And the Tchambuli were different from both. The men 'primped' and spent their time decorating themselves while the women worked and were the practical ones – the opposite of how it seemed in early 20th century America."[citation needed]
Deborah Gewertz (1981) studied the Chambri (called Tchambuli by Mead) in 1974–1975, and found no evidence of such gender roles. Gewertz states that as far back in history as there is evidence (1850s) Chambri men dominated over the women, controlled their produce and made all important political decisions. In later years there has been a diligent search for societies in which women dominate men, or for signs of such past societies, but none have been found (Bamberger 1974).[citation needed]

Despite its feminist roots, Mead's work on women and men was also criticized by Betty Friedan on the basis that it contributes to infantilizing women.[32]

Other research areas

In 1926, there was much debate about race and intelligence. Margaret Mead felt the methodologies involved in the experimental psychology research supporting arguments of racial superiority in intelligence were substantially flawed. In "The Methodology of Racial Testing: Its Significance for Sociology" Mead proposes that there are three unique problems with testing for racial differences in intelligence. First, there are issues with the ability to validly equate one’s test score with what Mead refers to as racial admixture or how much Negro or Indian blood an individual possesses. She also considers whether or not this information is even relevant to consider when interpreting one’s IQ score. Mead remarks that a genealogical method could be considered valid if it could be “subjected to extensive verification”. In addition, the experiment would need a steady control group to establish racial admixture was actually affecting intelligence scores. Next, Mead argues that it is difficult to measure the effect that social status has on the results of an individual’s intelligence test. By this she meant that one’s environment (i.e., family structure, socioeconomic status, exposure to language) had too much of an impact on an individual to attribute inferior scores to a physical characteristic such as race. Lastly, Mead adds that language barriers create sometimes the biggest problem of all. In similar regards, Stephen J. Gould finds three main problems with intelligence testing, in his book The Mismeasure of Man that relate to Margaret Mead's stance on the problems with trying to determine if there are indeed racial differences in intelligence.[33][34]

In 1929 Mead and Fortune visited Manus, now the northern-most province of Papua New Guinea, reaching there by boat from Rabaul after a stay there which she amply describes in her autobiography and which is mentioned in her 1984 biography by Jane Howard. On Manus she studied the Manus people of the south coast village of Peri. "Over the next five decades Mead would come back oftener to Peri than to any other field site of her career."[35]

Mead has been credited with persuading the American Jewish Committee to sponsor a project to study European Jewish villages, shtetls, in which a team of researchers would conduct mass interviews with Jewish immigrants living in New York City. The resulting book, widely cited for decades, allegedly created the Jewish mother stereotype, a mother intensely loving but controlling to the point of smothering, and engendering guilt in her children through the suffering she professed to undertake for their sakes.[36]

Mead worked for the RAND Corporation, a U.S. Air Force military funded private research organization, from 1948 to 1950 to study Russian culture and attitudes toward authority.[37]

Legacy

On January 19, 1979, President Jimmy Carter announced that he was awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously to Mead. UN Ambassador Andrew Young presented the award to Mead's daughter at a special program honoring Mead's contributions, sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History, where she spent many years of her career. The citation read:[38]
"Margaret Mead was both a student of civilization and an exemplar of it. To a public of millions, she brought the central insight of cultural anthropology: that varying cultural patterns express an underlying human unity. She mastered her discipline, but she also transcended it. Intrepid, independent, plain spoken, fearless, she remains a model for the young and a teacher from whom all may learn."
The 2006 music video for "If Everyone Cared" by Nickelback ends with her quote: "Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." This quote is also in the 15th episode of the 4th season of The West Wing.[citation needed]

The 2014 novel Euphoria by Lily King is a fictionalized account of Mead's relationships with Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson.

In addition, there are several schools named after Margaret Mead in the United States: a junior high school in Elk Grove Village, Illinois,[39] an elementary school in Sammamish, Washington[40] and another in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, New York.[41]

The USPS have issued a stamp of face value 32¢ on 28 May 1998 as part of the Celebrate the Century stamp sheet series.

Publications by Mead

As a sole author
  • Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)[42]
  • Growing Up In New Guinea (1930)[43]
  • The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe (1932)
  • Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935)[31]
  • And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America (1942)
  • Male and Female (1949)[44]
  • New Lives for Old: Cultural Transformation in Manus, 1928–1953 (1956)
  • People and Places (1959; a book for young readers)
  • Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964)
  • Culture and Commitment (1970)
  • The Mountain Arapesh: Stream of events in Alitoa (1971)
  • Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years (1972; autobiography)[45]
As editor or coauthor
  • Cultural Patterns and Technical Change, editor (1953)
  • Primitive Heritage: An Anthropological Anthology, edited with Nicholas Calas (1953)
  • An Anthropologist at Work, editor (1959, reprinted 1966; a volume of Ruth Benedict's writings)
  • The Study of Culture At A Distance, edited with Rhoda Metraux, 1953
  • Themes in French Culture, with Rhoda Metraux, 1954
  • The Wagon and the Star: A Study of American Community Initiative co-authored with Muriel Whitbeck Brown, 1966
  • A Rap on Race, with James Baldwin, 1971
  • A Way of Seeing, with Rhoda Metraux, 1975
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Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jared Diamond
Jared diamond.jpg
Born Jared Mason Diamond
September 10, 1937 (age 76)
Boston, Massachusetts
Residence United States
Citizenship American
Fields Physiology, biophysics, ornithology, environmentalism, history, ecology, geography, evolutionary biology and anthropology
Institutions University of California, Los Angeles
Alma mater
Thesis Concentrating activity of the gall-bladder (1961)
Notable awards
Jared Diamond in London, February 2013
Jared Mason Diamond (born September 10, 1937) is an American scientist and author best known for his popular science books The Third Chimpanzee (1991), Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997, awarded a Pulitzer Prize), Collapse (2005) and The World Until Yesterday (2012). Originally trained in physiology, Diamond's work is known for drawing from a variety of fields, including anthropology, ecology, geography, and evolutionary biology. As of 2013, he is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles.[1][2] He has been described as "America’s best-known geographer".[3]

Early life and education

Diamond was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Both of his parents were from East European Jewish families who had emigrated to the United States.[4] His father, Louis K. Diamond, was a physician, and his mother, Flora Kaplan, a teacher, linguist, and concert pianist. Diamond himself began studying piano at age six; years later he would propose to his wife after playing the Brahms Intermezzo in A minor for her.[5] He attended the Roxbury Latin School and earned a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard College in 1958 and a PhD on the physiology and biophysics of membranes in the gall bladder from Trinity College, University of Cambridge in 1961.[1][6]

Career

After graduating from Cambridge, Diamond returned to Harvard as a Junior Fellow until 1965, and, in 1968, became Professor of Physiology at UCLA Medical School. While in his twenties he developed a second, parallel, career in ornithology and ecology, specialising in New Guinea and nearby islands. Later, in his fifties, Diamond developed a third career in environmental history and became Professor of Geography at UCLA, his current position.[7] He won the National Medal of Science in 1999[8] and Westfield State University granted him an honorary doctorate in 2009.

Diamond originally specialized in salt absorption in the gall bladder.[6][9] He has also published scholarly works in the fields of ecology and ornithology,[10] but is arguably best known for authoring a number of popular-science books combining topics from diverse fields other than those he has formally studied. Because of this diversity Diamond has been described as a polymath.[11][12]

Works

Diamond's first popular book, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (1991), examines human evolution and its relevance to the modern world, incorporating evidence from anthropology, evolutionary biology, genetics, ecology, and linguistics. The book traces how humans evolved to be so different from animals, despite sharing over 98% of our DNA with our closest animal relatives, the chimpanzees. The book also examines the animal origins of language, art, agriculture, smoking and drug use, and other apparently uniquely human attributes. It was well received by critics and won the 1992 Rhône-Poulenc Prize for Science Books[13] and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.[14]

His second and best known popular science book, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, was published in 1997. It asks why Eurasian peoples conquered or displaced Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of vice versa. It argues that this outcome was not due to biological advantages of Eurasian peoples themselves but instead to features of the Eurasian continent, in particular, its high diversity of wild plant and animal species suitable for domestication and its east/west major axis that favored the spread of those domesticates, people, and technologies for long distances with little change in latitude. The first part of the book focuses on reasons why only a few species of wild plants and animals proved suitable for domestication. The second part discusses how local food production based on those domesticates led to the development of dense and stratified human populations, writing, centralized political organization, and epidemic infectious diseases. The third part compares the development of food production and of human societies among different continents and world regions. Guns, Germs, and Steel became an international best-seller, was translated into 33 languages, and received several awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, an Aventis Prize for Science Books[13] and the 1997 Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science.[15] A television documentary series based on the book was produced by the National Geographic Society in 2005.[16][17]

In his third book, Why is Sex Fun?, also published in 1997, Diamond discusses evolutionary factors underlying features of human sexuality that are generally taken for granted but that are highly unusual among our animal relatives. Those features include a long-term pair relationship (marriage), coexistence of economically cooperating pairs within a shared communal territory, provision of parental care by fathers as well as by mothers, having sex in private rather than in public, concealed ovulation, female sexual receptivity encompassing most of the menstrual cycle (including days of infertility), female but not male menopause, and distinctive secondary sexual characteristics.

Diamond's next book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, published in 2005, examines a range of past societies in an attempt to identify why they either collapsed or continued to thrive and considers what contemporary societies can learn from these historical examples. As in Guns, Germs, and Steel, he argues against explanations for the failure of past societies based primarily on cultural factors, instead focusing on ecology. Among the societies mentioned in the book are the Norse and Inuit of Greenland, the Maya, the Anasazi, the indigenous people of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Japan, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and modern Montana. The book concludes by asking why some societies make disastrous decisions, how big businesses affect the environment, what our principal environmental problems are today, and what individuals can do about those problems. Like Guns, Germs, and Steel, Collapse was translated into dozens of languages, became an international best-seller, and was the basis of a television documentary produced by the National Geographic Society.[18][19] It was also nominated for the Royal Society Prize for Science Books.[13]

In 2008, Diamond published an article in The New Yorker entitled Vengeance Is Ours,[20] describing the role of revenge in tribal warfare in Papua New Guinea. A year later two indigenous people mentioned in the article filed a lawsuit against Diamond and The New Yorker claiming the article defamed them.[21][22][23] In 2013, The Observer reported that the lawsuit "was withdrawn by mutual consent after the sudden death of their lawyer."[4]

In 2010, Diamond co-edited (with James Robinson) Natural Experiments of History, a collection of seven case studies illustrating the multidisciplinary and comparative approach to the study of history that he advocates. The book’s title stems from the fact that it is not possible to study history by the preferred methods of the laboratory sciences, i.e., by controlled experiments comparing replicated human societies as if they were test tubes of bacteria. Instead, one must look at natural experiments in which human societies that are similar in many respects have been historically perturbed, either by different starting conditions or by different impacts[clarification needed] . The book’s afterword classifies natural experiments, discusses the practical difficulties of studying them, and offers suggestions how to address those difficulties.[24]

Diamond's most recent book, The World Until Yesterday, published in 2012, asks what the western world can learn from traditional societies. It surveys 39 traditional small-scale societies of farmers and hunter/gatherers with respect to how they deal with universal human problems. The problems discussed include dividing space, resolving disputes, bringing up children, treatment of elders, dealing with dangers, formulating religions, learning multiple languages, and remaining healthy. The book suggests that some practices of traditional societies could be usefully adopted in the modern industrial world today, either by individuals or else by society as a whole.

Personal life

Diamond is married to Marie Cohen, granddaughter of Polish politician Edward Werner. They have twin sons, born in 1987.[25]

Selected bibliography

Boards

Awards and honors

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