Socio(Onto)Geny Book Club Update: The Horse, the Wheel, and Language

I don’t believe I mentioned it here, but I have been running a book club on a private Discord server for the last several months with a bunch of interesting people. Over the past three months we’ve read EO Wilson’s Sociobiology, Robert Triver’s Natural Selection and Social Theory, and most recently Peter Turchin’s Ages of Discord.

This month we’re moving into different territory with David Anthony’s The Horse, the Wheel, and Language. As an in-depth account of Proto-Indo-European origins, this book has been suggested by Spencer Wells as one of the best texts out there on Bronze Age Europe. If you enjoyed my post on David Reich and V. Gordon Childe, you will enjoy this book. Anyone who would like to join should feel free to reach out to me on Twitter or on my contact page here.

Comments on the Bonobo

Over the weekend, a number of biological anthropologists took a critical lens to some of my articles and blogposts. One of them found a pretty important mistake, but I figure this might be a good time to talk about some thoughts I’ve had regarding bonobos and human evolution.

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.