With the exception of a few big controversies, such as Margaret Mead or Jared Diamond (who isn’t actually an anthropologist), it is very rare for anyone to go and talk to an informant and ask them if they really said the words attributed to them by the anthropologist. For this reason the American Ethnologist’s recent announcement that they will fact check all articles is truly groundbreaking.

And it raises a number of questions: how will they pay for it? Fact checking anthropology articles is a lot more difficult that fact checking your ordinary piece of journalism. Especially for fieldwork conducted in some of the more remote corners of the earth. Of course, more and more people have internet access these days, and English skills are more widespread so maybe it won’t be as difficult as all that.

Even then, there is still the question of what constitutes a factual claim in anthropology. Will they just be confirming the most obvious statements of fact, or will they ask informants about the interpretation of their words in the text?

And what about privacy? While I trust American Ethnologist not to divulge names, there are serious risks related to divulging name and contact information to anyone, especially those living in countries that might monitor phone calls or email.

Still, I have seen enough questionable research in print that I applaud AE’s efforts to raise the bar beyond mere peer-review. But the details matter and I worry about how the AE fact-checkers will interpret their mandate. It will be interesting to hear reports from the first round of scholars who submit articles under the new regime. If you are one of them, please let us know and we will be happy to publish your account here.

UPDATE: Please note the date of this post.

I have a weak sense of the details, but I do know that accusations of fraud, regardless of whether fraud was committed, tend to have a range of effects on people involved, especially the administration of a university, the graduate students in a lab, and the fellow researchers in an accused’s field. One might think of this as Hauser’s trolley problem, a tool he’s fond of using himself in order to supposedly get at the basic biological modules or organs of morality. In this case, the person on the track, about to be flattened by a runaway trolley, is Hauser himself. One can imagine a number of scenarios: should one pull a lever to save Hauser? Should one push an unnamed (fat) graduate student or post-doc onto the track to save Hauser? Should one divert the trolley onto a track containing five other researchers who work on moral cognition, or leave it on the track towards Hauser to save those five? Should one derail the trolley and risk destroying a building (cognitive science at Harvard) that might contain sleeping researchers, etc. etc. etc.

As many journalists have noted, there is irony in the fact that Hauser’s forthcoming book is called Evilicious: Why We Evolved a Taste for Being Bad. But it’s more than irony, it’s a question of scale and temporality. Whatever evil is at stake here, it might have both a distant cause (evolution) and a proximate one (the institutional pressure to publish and the problem of being a star scientist), and neither Hauser nor anyone else seems able to mount a theory that would accommodate both. If there is a problem with Hauser’s style of research, it’s probably not that it is fraudulent. More likely, the problem is that his theories cannot explain the possibility of fraud arising as a result of the intense desire to prove that fraud has an evolutionary origin.

…”It might be worth taking a look”:http://lolinator.com/lol/savageminds.org

“Evolutionary Psychology Bingo”:http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d98/sabotabby/evopsychbingo.jpg

Original post “here”:http://punkassblog.com/2007/10/25/evolutionary-psychology-bingo/

But best of all: the entire book available open access so you can “read it in its entirely online”:http://epress.anu.edu.au/customary_citation.html in either “PDF”:http://epress.anu.edu.au/apem/customary/pdf_instructions.html or “HTML”:http://epress.anu.edu.au/apem/customary/html/frames.php. For instance, you can “get my article here”:http://epress.anu.edu.au/apem/customary/pdf/ch05.pdf.

Working with Jimmy and Katie has been a good experience — this volume has gone through peer review from outside readers, is professionally copy-edited, and has high production values. It is available print-on-demand. The ANU press is, to a certain extent, neither fish not fowl as a press, and as such it demonstrates how open access is not an either-or proposition but enables a variety of different — and very flexible — publishing models.

Although scientists have long speculated that the reality gene existed and would work much as Talagi’s team has described, what was unexpected is the existence of a variant gene, which Talagi has named “RG-2” that inverts the relationship between man and his environment. “Instead of rewarding an accurate perception of the world,” says NBRC Associate Researcher Sharon Andeman, “RG-2 makes us feel good when our perceptions do not match the world we live in.” According to Andeman, the carrier of RG-2 is prone to question the reality of the world and to respond instead to abstract ideas about the world. What’s more, as the gap between their abstraction and the real world grows, RG-2 produces more neurotransmitters and creates a greater feeling of well-being, thus encouraging ever-greater levels of abstraction.

While RG-2 would have been maladaptive for our cave-dwelling ancestors, in today’s technologically advanced urban environment RG-2 has been allowed to spread throughout the population at an alarming rate, leading the researchers to speculate about RG-2’s role in the ever-increasing complexity of modern philosophical thought. Ndrupu Umbrere, a neurobiologist at NBRC, has traced the spread of RG-2 back to the ancient Greeks. “Prior to the rise of Greek civilization, people with RG-2 were quickly weeded from the gene pool. However, among Greek elites like Plato and Socrates, survival needs were provided for by others, allowing the possessors of RG-2 to survive and even thrive.” As greater numbers of people were freed from direct engagement with the environment around them, RG-2 was less and less a liability, reaching its peak in the late 20th century when RG-2 had almost completely replaced its healthy natural counterpart. Sometimes referred to as “the postmodern age”, the last several decades of the 20th century were characterized by a virtually wholesale disconnect from the real world, leaving only a tiny minority of men still carrying the reality gene.

Talagi refuses to speculate about the future, but notes that it is rare for a gene to be entirely replaced by a variant. “The same pressures that led to the rise of the gene in the first place generally work to create a state of equilibrium, a balance between the variants.” In the mean time, Talagi and his team are simply happy to have unraveled this mystery of human thought. “Of course we’re pleased”, he says. “How often do you get to discover the true nature of human thought?”

Yesterday, the South Korean research firm Klonaid announced that, in the process of looking for a way to bypass the human body’s natural resistance to cloned embryos, they discovered a way to effectively turn off the set of genetic switches which determine who we are. In other words, using genetic science it is possible to wipe the slate clean, creating babies free of any genetic predispositions.

While real-world implementations remain far off, the possibilities of such tabula rasa babies (TRBs) is already beguiling researchers. Yale scientist Stanley Milgram was quoted as saying:

Freed of their natural wiring, TRBs would allow us to truly observe the effects of socialization for the first time. Whereas before such effects were filtered through each subject’s biological filter, such baggage would be absent in TRBs.

Experimental psychologists are particularly excited about the possibility of observing language acquisition by TRBs. Traditionally, children have imposed phonological and grammatical structure on linguistic input, even when it is not already there. Without such constraints, TRBs exposed to a full range of linguistic stimuli might be able to produce a universal language, unconstrained by the limits of any single syntactic structure.

Evolutionary Anthropologists associated with the Dharma Initiative are excited about the possibility of watching culture emerge for the first time. While there is some concern that TRBs might be unable to survive without some basic behavioral instincts already in place, it is hoped that TRBs will be able to quickly overcome such obstacles, allowing scientists to finally settle the question as to whether human beings in a state of nature will truly descend into a Hobbesian “war of all against all,” or whether they will build a Rousseauian civil society, free of social hierarchies.

(Note: While there might have been reason to doubt South Korean genetics research in the past, recent events have imposed strict standards of proof, including validation by an independent team of international reviewers appointed by the Raelian society.)

But even in a strictly monogamous society, the considerations of the previous paragraph still retain their validity. This deep polyandrous tendency, which exists among all women, always makes the number of available men seem insufficient. Let us add that, even if there were as many men as women, these men would not all be equally desirable – and that, by definition, the most desirable men must always form a minority. Hence, the demand for men is in actual fact, or to all intents and purposes, always in a state of disequilibrium and tension. In such circumstances, is it possible to speak of men as a scarce commodity requiring collective intervention for its distribution? Not only possible but – given the ethnographic evidence – inevitable. Consider that in traditional societies, the group controls the distribution not only of men but of a whole collection of valuables. Food, the most easily observed of these, is more than just the most vital commodity it really is, for between it and men there is a whole system of real and symbolic relationships, whose true nature is only gradually emerging, but which, when even superficially understood, are enough to establish this connection. The ethnographic literature is replete with examples demonstrating that the methods for distributing meat in primitive societies are no less ingenious than those for the distribution of men. In the great majority of human societies, the two problems are set on the same plane. These exchanges form the web of social life; and men are valuables _par excellence_ from the both the biological and social points of view, without which life is impossible, or, at best, is reduced to the worst forms of abjection (only imagine the arid despondency of life bereft of air guitar).

In the course of human evolution, the emergence of symbolic thought must have required that men, like words, should be things that were exchanged. This was the only means of overcoming the contradiction by which the same man was seen under two incompatible aspects: on the one hand, as the object of personal desire, thus exciting sexual and proprietorial instincts; and on the other, as the subject of the desire of others, and seen as such; i.e., as the means of binding others through alliance with them. But man could never become just a sign and nothing more, since he is still a person. In contrast to words, which have wholly become signs, man has remained at once a sign and a value. This explains why the relations between the sexes have preserved that affective richness, ardour, and mystery which doubtless originally permeated the entire universe of human communications. Only a radical bonobologist could fail to concede the point.