The Four-Field Approach: American Anthropologist Wants Science Back

Adam Van Arsdale and Mary Shenk, two very good anthropological scientists, have published a new Comment in American Anthropologist titled, “Biological and Evolutionary Perspectives in American Anthropologist: An Editorial Provocation,” arguing that it’s time for biological and evolutionary anthropology to come back to the journal.¹

I think a lot of people have been reading it and probably have opinions of their own, but I imagine there are some scarred folks looking at it and scoffing. Part of the concerns of Dr. Shenk and Dr. Van Arsdale is that anthropology has ruptured at the seams.

David Reich and The New York Times

“Either how canst thou say to thy brother, Brother, let me pull out the mote that is in thine eye, when thou thyself beholdest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother’s eye.” – Luke 6:42, or Robert Trivers

I have to apologize because my last blogpost was about The New York Times, but they won’t stop publishing stories that need to be attended to. For anyone who is following, on Thursday they published a hit piece on Harvard Med School professor David Reich. At 12,000 words, the piece was somewhat difficult to coherently sift through (they have a tendency to do this lately), but it made a number of accusations against both Reich’s lab and the field of ancient DNA in general ranging from scientific racism to methodological sophistry to the use of scare tactics to harass others out of the field and away from valuable skeletal samples in order to monopolize science.

The New York Times Won’t Stop Profiling Smart People Who Talk About Race

I’ve developed this view of journalists lately as the mouthpieces of the intellectual world. That’s not much of a compliment, and if anything they exist on the bottom rung, where their modal operation is flapping their gums without being forced to put much thought into it. At one point there was an internal hierarchy in journalism with amateurs in local news and blogs being on the bottom and entrenched institutions like the New York Times being on top. But now the New York Times is nearly indistinguishable from BuzzFeed: it’s all click bait, no substance, no thought towards the impact of the drivel they’re putting out, and a complete condescension towards the intellects of its readers.