“public understanding.” ping
Don’t forget the economists...every new development is “unexpected” by their experts according to most news reports.
Science is not a subject; it is a methodology.
Absolutely. Unquestionably the most profound and puissant of all branches of science.
“The decision has reopened a long-simmering tension between researchers in science-based anthropological disciplines — including archaeologists, physical anthropologists and some cultural anthropologists — and members of the profession who study race, ethnicity and gender and see themselves as advocates for native peoples or human rights.”
Neither branch is science-based. If they just stuck to observation they could call it science, but they have all sorts of ideas which can’t be tested, verified, or falsified.
IOW their work is intentionally biased. They're not scientists.
The message I get from this is:
The experts can’t come to a consensus, so there are no real answers yet.
BUT, some of the experts are willing to give their opinion.
It is as much a science as history is.
The Neandertal Enigma"Allan Wilson had always been described to me in superlatives, such as 'one of the real geniuses in science,' or 'the most arrogant guy I know...' [H]e apologized for putting me off so long and bluntly explained that the reason he had done so was that he did not trust me... 'The anthropological perspective on evolution is no longer valid; it has been overthrown. And yet the science writers who insist on talking to me come drenched in an anthropological perspective, and there is really no point in talking to them... It is paralytic. It prevents you from asking certain questions, and it forces you to ask others. The whole discipline invites you not to investigate.'
by James Shreeve
...A few months before my visit, Wilson had announced at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science... that the Neandertals were replaced because they could not speak... suggesting that a particular gene for language might have been carried in the mitochondria themselves. Since invading males would have been more likely to mate with resident females than the other way around, the offspring of sexual contact between the two groups would be 'linguistically deaf-mute,' like their Neandertal mothers. Thus disadvantaged, these 'village idiots' would face the same fate as the mothers: extinction. Only the language-endowed African lineage would continue. The language gene idea, and especially the unfortunate term 'village idiots,' elicited hoots of derision from the anti-Eve camp, and gave no joy to Wilson's colleagues." [pp 119-121]
Still, there remains a demand for a legitimate field of study of cultures, kinship groups, mores and taboos, independent and untainted by PC toxins.
I have a degree in physical anthropology and it was all genetics and anatomy. I was not as interested in archaeology but those exams were also run like med school exams: stations with a minute to identify a piece of broken bone and tell which gender, age, etc.
Bullpoop that it’s not science!!
It was all downhill after screeching, nasty feminists changed the UMass Anthropology Dept. to the UMass Department of Feminist Anthroplogy and ran a pogram against all male professors. Physical anthropology is indeed a hard science. Cultural anthropology has been debased to a voodoo science of far-left witch-doctory.
The same phenomenon has occured in other social sciences such as political science. Those of us who would rather study our subjects in a detached manner using the scientific method in search for impartial truth have been elbowed out by charlatans with a political agenda and end game having nothing to due with the search for objective truth. Anything that promotes political agendas isn’t science. What we have a a diminishing number of social scientists in search of truth and an increasing takeover of ALL sciences by socialists pretending to be scientists trying to impose an agenda. Lysenko is alive and well in academia and Stalin is smiling from hell.