The title of this post comes from a 1930 article in Man which discusses the superiority of such tops over various other ways to measure skin color, such as Broca’s skin color charts. While I knew anthropologists had used Broca’s charts, I don’t recall reading about the use of color tops, which was apparently quite common. The tops used were actually by Milton Bradley, but as best I can tell they were quite similar to the Bauhaus design pictured above. [Can anyone find a picture of the actual Milton Bradely tops?]

The colour top is a device made by the Milton Bradley Company, of Spring- field, Mass., U.S.A., a firm which manufactures kindergarten supplies. It is, primarily intended for teaching children the principles of colour blending. The first investigator to use it for recording skin-colour was Davenport, who employed it in his study of the heredity of skin-colour in Negro-White crosses in Jamaica (1913). The principle is one with which we were all familiar in our childhood. The apparatus consists of a small top, of the disc variety, spun by means of a wooden spindle kept in place by a nut. On this basal disc, which is of cardboard, are placed paper discs of various colours. When the top is spun the colours blend… The proportion of each colour which goes to the make-up of this composite surface can be varied at will, by merely moving the discs round upon the spindle… By suitable adjustment of these four discs, the spinning surface can be made to reproduce,with a considerable degree of exactitude, the colour of human skin of all shades and gradations that may be met with.

Be warned, however,

The judgment must always be made while the top is rotating at full speed. Even slight slackening of speed renders matching difficult and the records unreliable.

I learned of the use of these tops from an interview with Michael Keevak, author of Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking. It sounds like another interesting book from the man who wrote The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar’s Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax, which I blogged about back in 2006.

The article disappeared pretty quick (the link above is to the Google cache), so either someone at the magazine had a lucid moment or they don’t know how to work their Internet thingies, but either way, it’s out there and it bears the imprimateur of a pretty mainstream magazine.

Here’s the gist: During interviews for a longitudinal study of American adolescent health called Add Health, researchers assign a score for how attractive their subjects are, using a scale of 1-5. Kanazawa takes those objective-because-it’s-a-number-yo! figures and averages them by race, does a little factor analysis, and concludes that black women are objectively less attractive than all other women.  And after discarding a few factors like the “fact” that black women are fat and stupid (which, he points out, doesn’t seem to hurt black men much, who are seen as the most attractive of men), Kanazawa concludes it must be because black women are so testosteroney.

We will NOT be seeing Mr. Kanazawa on Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader? 

Missing in Kanazawa’s analysis is any consideration of cultural conditioning both his researchers and his subjects have received in a society where for four centuries black women have been consistently branded as chattel and animals and where the peril of sexual relations with them has been a constant drumbeat. For 200 of those years, the offspring of black women were legally slaves. Black men have also been denigrated, of course, but in a society that highlights power, strength, and the capacity for violence as key elements of masculinity, the same racist tendencies that reduce black men to their physical presence works in their favor where raw attractiveness is concerned.

This is easy stuff. Even if there is a biological component, you can’t derive it from Kanazawa’s write-up because he hasn’t done the science – he has selected a hypothesis that fits what he wants to say and put it forth as fact. In the absence of the consideration of alternative hypotheses, there’s no there there.

But you don’t expect to see science from someone who claims to be an evolutionary psychologist and unwittingly undermines a central premise of his own discipline! Oh, right – he accidentally throws a key theory, that the absence of genetic mutations is a factor in attractiveness, under the bus in his rush to be all racist and stuff.

…Africans have more mutations in their genomes than other races.  And the mutation loads significantly decrease physical attractiveness (because physical attractiveness is a measure of genetic and developmental health).  But since both black women and black men have higher mutation loads, it cannot explain why only black women are less physically attractive, while black men are, if anything, more attractive.

This is a big deal in evolutionary psychology, that genetic health = attractiveness. Never mind that nearly everyone procreates except the most egregious outliers, which kind of undermines the selective pressure that attractiveness is supposed to provide (if ugly people procreate, then their ostensibly unhealthy genes stay in the gene pool). But even leaving that aside, there’s the problem of, if high levels of genetic mutations are so unattractive, why are black men rates so attractive?

I’ve already given one explanation: on a purely physical basis, the raw sexuality we’ve saddled cultural understandings of black maleness with is fairly compelling. But in the absence of a cultural explanation – which is to say, in Kanazawa’s worldview – the only explanation must be that the accumulation of mutations has nothing to do with attractiveness, and that therefore genetic health has nothing to do with attractiveness, and that therefore the factors that influence mate choice are not related to genetic health, and that therefore they must be non-biological factors – which is to say, cultural standards! (Man, Kanazawa, you got yourself coming and going with this one!)

PZ Meyers has more on this piece at Pharyngula, digging further into the basic problems inherent in research based on researchers ogling teenagers and assigning them attractiveness scores, but Meyers sticks largely to the biology. Kanazawa’s problem isn’t (just) that he’s a poor biologist, but that he’s a racist who has applied his meager intellect uncritically to a pile of suspect data in order to support his own prejudices. I’ve yet to come across an evolutionary psychological explanation that doesn’t have a corresponding – and often more plausible – cultural explanation; while the cultural explanation might not ultimately be right, if you’re going to build a science on the primacy of the biological over the cultural, you’re going to have to at least consider the cultural as an alternative hypothesis!

Over at BoingBoing Carrie McLaren points us to the Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement. Despite its annoying flash-based interface, the site is a useful resource.

It’s hard to believe eugenics was as popular here as it in fact was without seeing the visual evidence. The images here include Fitter Family contests, where white Americans competed at state fairs–much like cattle–to determine who had the best breeding. (Make sure to check out this traveling exhibit.) Also, lots of documents and flyers linking criminality to immigrants and heredity. (Oh, the irony of using the swastika to indicate the racial inferiority of Germans!) The interface is pretty clunky but it’s worth pecking around.

For background on the early 20th century American eugenics movement, you could do worse than [Carrie's] interview with historian Daniel Kevles.

All of which is to say that inverting the moral valuation of different forms of racial classification is not the same thing as dismantling the system of classification itself.

Steven Pinker’s latest apology for behavioral genetics is in this weekend’s NYT Magazine. There are two things to pay attention to. 1) he’s right about personal genome sequencing: regardless of whether it’s correct, or the results can be properly interpreted for people, people are going to do it, and for all kinds of reasons, good and bad, and this is in itself something that will change behavior–call it proximate causality for individual behaviors. And the comparison with astrology, sorcery and other forms of readouts about your fate should probably be taken more seriously, especially by anthropologists, rather than used as a dismissal of genetic essentialism or determinism. 2) genetics seems to have become so confused with heritability that the claims about “what genes cause” have become incoherent; scales are routinely mixed up, which is what results in the manic fantasizing about why we conserve one gene or another (“gene so-and-so is correlated with baldness, therefore baldness must have conferred an advantage on our distant ancestors by serving as an effective way to deflect light before mirrors were invented” etc). As a result, our ability to argue about the roles that distant causality play versus those that proximate causality play have been compromised. Oh, and one other thing, There is no mention at all of epigenetics… is that deliberate, I wonder, or does it represent troubling ignorance on Pinker’s part?

and btw, I will note that our category for genetics at SM is “Race, genetics” which (and I’m not blaming anyone here) is interesting.

I’m off to make a browser for cynics. or maybe one for black panthers, which strikes me as something we might need more right about now.

So I was happy to see that a publication I had never heard of before— “The Global Spiral: A Publication of the Metanexis Institute”— has published a series of articles by scholars in science studies, philosophy and literature (Andy Pickering, Don Ihde, Katherine Hayles and others) about transhumanism (volume 9, Issue 3). Unfortunately, they are all pretty un-anthropological in their approach, preferring to criticize transhumanism rather than engage it. I know why… extreme versions of transhumanism can be pretty unctuous, raising specters of race-purity, eugenics, bad technological determinism etc. However, I for one am pretty surprised by the continued growth of this “movement” (what makes it a movement?) and lately, I’ve started to think that it might well move into a more mainstream light as there are people like Nick Bostrom (an Oxford Ph.D.) and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies gaining attention and authority… Wait a minute, ethics and emerging technologies? Isn’t that what I study?!? Quick, freeze my head!

In any case, I think this is yet another place where there is the possibility for an interesting dialogue. Most of the critiques of transhumanism center around its more speculative aspects, like the notion of the singularity, the emergence of artificial intelligence etc. But I think there is increasingly an opening here for thinking about what we do and what we do not have control over as humanity evolves. Most transhumanist rhetoric seems to imply that there is no control—it’s just the next stage of evolution—but when push comes to shove, whatever “evolution” means to them, it isn’t simply your basic genetic-species evolution, but involves culture and technology as well. And there are some interesting bridges between transhumanism and anthropology as well. I often wonder what transhumanists would think of Carl Elliot’s Better than Well as a kind of middle ground between transhumanism and Foucault… especially since the motto of the World Transhumanist Organization is… “Better than Well.” More generally, I think the transhumanists could do with some more rigorous historical work on the relative importance of figures like Nietzsche, Julian and Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapeldon or Teilhard de Chardin—to say nothing of outsiders like FM-2030, an Iranian exile who wrote novels and lectured and created the core of the movement in the only obvious place in the world for transhumanism to begin: Los Angeles. Most of what is written so far is just a lining up of “father figures” rather than any careful attempt to think about the differences and their social impact on thought in general… a little careful history goes a long way.

In any case, i think that transhumanists will increasingly come to dominate discussions about the controlability of technology and its effects on people and their potential. But more than that, I think anthropologists are already interested in transhumanism, we just don’t call it that because we’ve given up (or just studiously avoid) trying to define the human. So, I wonder, once more, if our ability to participate in such public discussions will be any better in this case than it is in others

Consider a few examples where the issues of transhumanism might be relevant:

1) corn, high fructose corn syrup and ethanol: Corn is domesticating us as we monoculture it beyond all reasonable limits. It’s changing our bodies, it’s changing our ecosystem, it’s changing our technology, and it itself is becoming unrecognizable (i.e. most of it is no longer edible off the stalk, but has to be processed to be used). This is transhumanism, no?

2) the pharmaceutical industry. It’s all well and good to dream of drugs that modify our bodies and minds at will, but we hardly need speculation… it’s in the water, literally. The explosive growth of the number of different prescribed drugs is a massive collective experiment, whether it’s obese kinds on statins, Viagra in the water supply, an entire population on mind-and-mood-altering drugs… we’ve already gone transhuman in this respect.

3) Exercise fads. Bring out your Marcel Mauss (Techniques of the Body) and talk to me about the cultural variation of bodies today— perhaps it seems too silly, but between yoga and pilates, soloflex machines, extreme sports (to say nothing of professional sports and doping, where this issue came up before), and the various medical interventions one can have after injury (or before, depending on when you get your hips and knees replaced), what more speculation do we need to think that we haven’t already started well down the path of evolution in whatever sense transhumanists think they mean?

I like to think that anthropologists would develop better bio-cultural models and explanations of these kinds of things than the current crop of transhumanists will… but I’m not sure I think that anyone other than anthropologists will listen, and perhaps this is the most important part of why transhumanism is so appealing, and why it is so hard to distinguish it from religion: it makes promises about the future.

In re-reading the following passage I found myself thinking about the whole Reverend Jeremiah Wright kerfuffle.

in spite of many years of empirical study which is established AAVE as a normally functioning spoken human language, its very existence is often doubted and denied by African and European-Americans alike. The real trouble with black English is not the verbal aspect system which distinguishes it from other varieties of US English, or the rhetorical strategies which draw such a vivid contrast, it is simply this: AAVE is tangible and irrefutable evidence that there is a distinct, healthy, functioning African-American culture which is not white and which does not want to be white. This is a state of affairs which is unacceptable to many. James Baldwin who wrote and spoke so eloquently on the issues at the heart of the racial divide in this country, put it quite simply: “the value [of] a black man is proven by one thing only – his devotion to white people”

I was struck by Irwin’s (the Missions for Dummies guy) insight that ‘Latins’ are ‘touchy feely’ since, in much of the United States, this is a stereotype that ‘white ethnics’ (Italian American, Irish American, Jewish, etc.) have of themselves — that they hug, kiss, and touch each other with a frequency and gusto that is a bit unseemly. The other stereotypes that I’ve heard from my friends in these communities is that ‘their people’ are 1) too loud and 2) prone to serve Too Much Food at family functions – or any functions really.

Now, an anthropologist you always want to ferret out the unexamined side of the contrast — the ‘what is taken for granted in my assumptions’ that goes unsaid. In this case I think what these stereotypes point to is not some distinctive way that white ethnics act, but an implicit contrast with the anglo-protestant norm, which appears to be that anglo-protestants prefer to sit together without touching, silent and hungry. Which is, actually, not a bad way of summing up a certain interactional style which I must admit I have witnessed in certain areas of rural Wisconsin and Minnesota during my time with local church parishioners there.

There are other bodies of stereotypes which, when taken together, form a coherent system that perhaps says more about the implicit assumptions it makes rather than the minority group it is describing. Consider, for instance, stereotypes about groups which have never been widely or successfully missionized:

Jews: good with money. Educated. Once small business owners (tinkers, green grocers), now doctors and Lawyers. Secretly already run the world. Extremely hard working.

Chinese: Excellent business men. Taking over the world economy. Extremely hard working. Educated. Once small business owners (restaurants, laundrys) now Math and science experts.

Japanese: Took over the world economy in the 80s. Extremely hard working. Educated. Ingenious engineers. (in California/Hawaii: once plantation workers and gardeners, now doctors, dentists, and optometrists).

South Asians (India/Pakistan/Bangladesh): Incredibly hard working. Once small business owners (convenience stores) but now taking over the worlds of computers science and engineering. Educated.

It is these sort of stereotypes which implicitly inform ill-thought research projects to find the genetic code that makes Jews and Chinese people so smart. But when considered together we can see that they say more about the people making the statements than the people described in them. I would argue that these sort of steretypes express deep-seated themes in anglo-protestant culture currently experiencing a wave of nativism greater than anything we’ve seen in a century and a half: a sense that work is enobling but that prosperty and virtue are antithetical, and a plain-speech tradition which sees erudition and education as corrosive of an authentic and morally valuable simplicity.

This is, of course, an extremely simplified picture of both the streotypes and the ‘other side of the contrast’ — perhaps a bit too “sadness of sweetness” and unnuanced. But… it was what I was thinking of this morning. Happy Monday!

The idea that something can’t exist because there is no convenient evolutionary just-so story for it is absurd. Kristof should read some Stephen Jay Gould:

Gould’s favorite example is the human chin, whose presence is an incidental consequence of the differential growth rate of two bones in the lower jaw. The dentary bone which carries the teeth elongates more slowly than the jawbone itself, so the chin juts out. In our ape-like ancestors the jawbone grows more slowly so no chin develops. Of course one can always try to invent a story about why having a chin confers more reproductive potential, but that is a parlor game, not science.

If humans can have chins, they can also have misogyny. Maybe even misogynists with chins.

I ask because my Ph.D. fieldwork was on gold mining in Papua New Guinea, and in particular about negotiations with Papua New Guinean land owners and Australian mine employees. The mine employees were mostly former colonial officers who have shifted from being ‘liasons’ between Australia’s imperial administration to mouthpieces for global capital. The topic, in other words, was highly ‘raced’ — although what it meant to be ‘white’ and ‘black’ varied depending on when and who you asked, white and black were still/thus the central terms I found in my fieldsite. I continue to use them, unapologetically, in my work even though/because they are part of a global discourse with deep roots in colonialism. (For more on race in PNG I cannot recommend Ira Bashkow’s superb “The Meaning of Whitemen” strongly enough).

I am always a bit suspicious of the new terms since they often refer to more or less the same thing that the old term referred to, but obscure its genealogy. The distinction between The North and The South, for instance, has always driven me nuts because PNG is north of Australia and in OZ/PNG English when expats leave Australia they ‘go south’. So in my field work The South is to the north of The North, which is really a pain.

This leads me to the term ‘Euro-American’ — is this just code for ‘white’? Because if so then it simultaneously denies and reinscribes the racial basis of the distinction it is making. Are white Australians and South Africans ‘Euro-American’? I ask because this term seems to obscure the global nature of white settler colonialism in favor of an emphasis on Europe and the New World. Are African-Americans ‘Euro-Americans’ because they are ‘American’ even if they are not ‘Euro’? How does the term compare with ‘Western’ or ‘WASP’?

Again, I ask because this term is not, as far as I know, one that is very widely used in the PNG/Australia context that I work on.

For the poor, a group that includes a substantial proportion of minorities, heritability of I.Q. is very low …

Even when a trait is highly heritable (think of the height of corn plants), modifiability can also be great (think of the difference growing conditions can make).

… Tested in later childhood, the German children of the white fathers were found to have an average I.Q. of 97, and those of the black fathers had an average of 96.5, a trivial difference.

… when a group of investigators sought out the very brightest black children in the Chicago school system and asked them about the race of their parents and grandparents, these children were found to have no greater degree of European ancestry than blacks in the population at large.

… A superior adoption study — and one not discussed by the hereditarians — was carried out at Arizona State University by the psychologist Elsie Moore, who looked at black and mixed-race children adopted by middle-class families, either black or white, and found no difference in I.Q. between the black and mixed-race children. Most telling is Dr. Moore’s finding that children adopted by white families had I.Q.’s 13 points higher than those of children adopted by black families.

…Within each race, prior knowledge predicted learning and reasoning, but between the races it was prior knowledge only that differed.

… That environment can markedly influence I.Q. is demonstrated by the so-called Flynn Effect. … in the Western world as a whole, I.Q. increased markedly from 1947 to 2002. In the United States alone, it went up by 18 points. Our genes could not have changed enough over such a brief period to account for the shift; it must have been the result of powerful social factors.

… In fact, we know that the I.Q. difference between black and white 12-year-olds has dropped to 9.5 points from 15 points in the last 30 years — a period that was more favorable for blacks in many ways than the preceding era.

… Most important, we know that interventions at every age from infancy to college can reduce racial gaps in both I.Q. and academic achievement, sometimes by substantial amounts in surprisingly little time. This mutability is further evidence that the I.Q. difference has environmental, not genetic, causes. And it should encourage us, as a society, to see that all children receive ample opportunity to develop their minds.

UPDATE: The New Yorker has an article about a new book by James “Flynn Effect” Flynn. (via Amardeep)

This time around its kinship. In the article Pinker claims that “for all its fascination, kinship is a surprisingly neglected topic in the behavioral sciences.” While “many social scientists have gone so far as to claim that kinship is a social construction with no relation to biology” others disagree. “Genetics and evolutionary theory,” Pinker says, “predict that the biology of kinship should have biased our thoughts and emotions about relatives in several ways” — for instance, that we like to share resources with them (this helps perpetuate their genes, including the genes we share with them).

Ancient humans, of course, could not do DNA testing to find people who shared genes with them, so “instead we rely on cues that in the evolutionary past tended to _correlate_ with relatedness” such as living together. And indeed, “recent experiments by Debra Lieberman, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides have shown that two kinds of life experiences are crucial in triggering family feelings towards siblings… one consists of observing the infant being cared for by one’s mother…. the other is having grown up in the same household as the sibling”.

Unfortunately, says Pinker, this previously-adaptive method is now problematic for two reasons. First, an ‘obsession’ with genealogy it is actually a pretty lousy method of reckoning kin in a world where the amount of genetic material you share with collateral relatives plummets exponentially the higher you ascent a family tree to locate a shared ancestor. Second, “successful [nonkin] coalitions often try to co-opt family feelings by tricking the brain into perceiving collateral kin” so that, for instance, the Mafia uses kin-inspired idioms of brotherhood to cement ties between unrelated people. In sum, Pinker writes, “Outside a small family circle, the links of kinship are biologically trifling, vulnerable to manipulation, and inimical to modernity.”

Pinker’s argument sounds plausible at first — especially if you don’t know anything about the centuries-old literature on kinship or lack in-depth knowledge of the cultural complexity of ours species. In Pinker’s case the problem is mostly naivete. “A martian reading a textbook in psychology would get no inkling that human beings treated their relatives differently from strangers,” writes Pinker, as if to demonstrate that this is a sign of how “surprisingly neglected” kinship is as a field. But obviously, the lack of kinship in pyschology textbooks points to a problem with _psychology_ and not to _science_. Pinker’s failure to review the literature on the topic can be blamed on many things, but our failure to write it is not one of them.

Of course this is just a popular article and so Pinker can perhaps be excused from citing “Nonagnates Among The Patrilineal Chimbu.” But simply because your work lacks a scholarly apparatus doesn’t mean that you don’t have to do your homework. And it is clear that Pinker and his colleagues are slowly trying reinvent the wheel, spoke by spoke. I have not read the research by Lieberman et. al. that Pinker cites, but if they are seriously conducting ‘experiments’ to deduce that people raised together feel related, I wouldn’t be surprised if their next ‘experiment’ proves that human beings eat by first chewing and then swallowing. I understand the impulse to make bench science the gold standard of scientific objectivity, but do we really need grant money going to work of this sort?

But let me get to the main point: there are two main problems with Pinker’s argument. First, there is that we have no evidence of what social organization was like deep in our evolutionary past. Of course we can imagine what they might have been like, but speculation is not science — especially for someone sufficiently serious about intellectual rigor that they feel the need to conduct experiments to prove the obvious fact that people who are raised together feel related. So his claim that feelings of kinship were once nontrivially adaptive in the evolutionary past but no longer are is in fact based on speculation. There is nothing wrong with speculation — indeed, it is all we have to go on with in some cases — but this point needs to be flagged.

The second problem is with Pinker’s claim that kinship is currently no longer adaptive. The problem here is that Pinker, as philosophers say, ‘proves too much’. For, as he himself shows and anthropology has already demonstrated, folk theories of relatedness and accurate biogenetic reckoning are so loosely coupled as to be only tenuously connected. In fact they are so tenuously connected that one wonder why he thinks they are or should be connected at all, except for his assumption (based on speculation) that they must have been in the past. Let’s take a closer look.

What exactly is the phenomenon we are examining here? Throughout the article Pinker vacillates between providing an account of the American craze for genealogy using DNA based testing and a more universal “fascination with ancestry [which] has long been part of the human condition”. But which is it? Americans obsession with roots is clearly distinct and different from obsessions with roots in other times and places. What accounts for this local variation? Pinker cannot simultaneously claim American obsession with roots is both culturally distinct and based on species-wide evolved psychologies.

And _is_ an obsession with genealogy a cultural universal? Pinker moves rather to quickly from ‘experiments’ proving the importance of _siblingship_ and shared biogenetic substance to a focus on _lineage_. How, evolutionarily, does this slippage occur? And _does_ it occur? Pinker should provide some evidence of the universality of this train, but in fact the only main ‘non-Western’ sources that he draws on are ‘the Bible,’ a description of cousin marriage in Iraq published in _The American Conservative_, and scenes from _The Godfather_. The best thing that can be said of this ‘evidence’ is that its juxtaposition of Abrahamic genealogy and Muslim marriage helps remind us how ‘Western’ the Islam is — Isaac and Jacob, after all, married their cousins.

But are the begats of the bible a failed attempt at biogenetic reckoning? As Nancy Jay writes in _Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion, and Paternity_, the genealogies in the Hebrew Bible (and the Gospel of Matthew, for that matter) manage to portray men producing male heirs without any female intervention whatsoever — thus Abraham begets Isaac, who begets Jacob who begets Isaac. Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah — who did the physical begetting, let’s not forget — completely disappear. It is for this reason that reform Jews add the matriarch back into their daily prayers. Even if you dislike Jay’s mix of furniture-chewing feminisim and stratospheric social theory (I think it is delightful, personally) the point has been made by researchers ranging from Emrys Peters to Andrew Shryock to J. David Schloen: kinship in this area of the world not only fails to reckon genetics accurately, the whole _point_ of it is to elide how reproduction actually works and emphasize agnatic ties to the exclusion of collateral ones.

For an even clearer example of this fact, consider the material from _Sport of Kings_, Rebecca Cassidy’s delightful ethnography of British thoroughbred breeding. Although ostensibly about improving the performance of their horses, Cassidy demonstrates that breeder’s theories of blood and pedigree have rather more to do with the British class system than optimizing their horse’s time. Here we have a cultural system in which hundreds of years of breeding have failed to produce increased performance in their horses but have done a wonderful job of reproducing the social structures of the world of high-end racing. This is an example of a group _explicitly_ attempting accurate biogenetic reckoning which end up doing something else altogether.

Both of these examples suggest what all anthropologists have long known — that there is a ‘hidden force’ at work in people’s obsession with relatedness. But that force is culture, and distinct and recognizable cultural formations influence thinking about relatedness.

Consider the Simpsons, for instance. In classic ‘eskimo’ style kin reckoning (what Americans use) Bart and Lisa are siblings, and Ling, Selma’s daughter is his cousin (Selma is Marge’s sister, thus making Ling Bart’s mother’s sister’s daughter or, as we say in the business, his MZD). But in a ‘Hawaiian’ style system all members of the generation above you (the ‘ascending generation’) are classified as siblings themselves, so Selma would be Bart’s mother and Ling would be his sister. In an Iriquois-style system Selma would be Bart’s mother and her children would be his siblings but Abbie (Homer’s sister) would be considered his aunt and her children his cousins. Why? Because Iriquois-style kinship practices bifurcate merging, in which same-sex siblings are identified but cross-sex siblings are not. Father and father’s brother are both called ‘father’ and mother and mother’s sister are both called ‘mother’, but mother’s brother is called ‘uncle’ and father’s sister is called ‘aunt’.

And of course people can even have elaborated theories of relatedness that aren’t tied to genetics at all. James Leach has shown that on the north coast of New Guinea imagine people being grown, like plants, out of the territory where they live. For them relatedness is about rootedness in land. The Malay fishermen studied by Janet Carsten explicitly understand themselves to be related by shared nurturance, not biogenetic substance. These sorts of examples could be multiplied.

They say that everything looks like a nail to a guy holding a hammer, and Pinker’s obsession with evolutionary adaptiveness means that refuses to see this bigger picture. He claims that it is a “paradox” that kinship should be so out of step with his hypothesis about biology and kinship. But the big question is not why our systems of relatedness are bad reckoners of biology, but why Pinker thinks that they are or ought to be reckoners of biology at all. Relying on an unproven assumption about our deep past, Pinker imputes a goal to kinship systems which they themselves have never claimed to try to solve. To a scientist — who prefers elegant, parsimonious explanation — it appears not that there is a ‘paradox’ between the data and Pinker’s hypothesis to be explained away, but simply that his hypothesis is incorrect.

In fact, given the data, it makes much more sense to say that culture organizes biology, rather than the other way around. Or, to be more specific, that there is a complex interaction between folk theories of relatedness and genetics. Saying this is not a call for postmodern epistemological nihilism or wooly-headed feel-good relativism, but a demand for serious research. The problem is that we are not likely to get it from Steven Pinker and his colleagues. However titilating Pinker’s brand of pop evolutionary psychology is, it lacks what he prides himself on most — scientific rigor and a reliance on the extant data on human social organization. This work _is_ being done and it _is_ important — however it is being done by anthropologists, biologists, and researchers in a host of other fields. We’ve been doing it for over a century now…. ever since we got the memo.

At its heart, this book answers that question. It explains how and why municipal swimming pools in the northern United States were transformed from austere public baths—where blacks, immigrants, and native-born white laborers swam together, but men and women, rich and poor, and young and old did not—to leisure resorts, where practically everyone in the community except black Americans swam together.

But the story does not end there. A second social transformation occurred at municipal swimming pools after midcentury. Black Americans challenged segregation by repeatedly seeking admission to whites-only pools and by filing lawsuits against their cities. Eventually, these social and legal protests desegregated municipal pools throughout the North, but desegregation rarely led to meaningful interracial swimming. When black Americans gained equal access to municipal pools, white swimmers generally abandoned them for private pools.

Slightly related: even though Taiwan is an island with numerous rivers and streams and even public swimming pools, many people can’t swim. Each year many drown as a result. I know many girls don’t like to swim because they don’t like to spend too much time in the sun, which could “ruin” the pale white complexions they work so hard to maintain, and if the girls aren’t swimming I suppose the boys are much less interested as well… (Many of my female students also equate getting muscles from exercise with getting “fat.”) So I was glad to hear that my university instituted a policy requiring all students to pass a swimming test in order to graduate.