Word: anthropologist
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...wasn't the kind of anthropologist devoted to field work in far-flung places. "I hate traveling and explorers" is the first line of Tristes Tropiques, his classic 1955 account of his years in Brazil and other locales. Instead, his position as one of the greatest figures in anthropology, and as a giant in postwar intellectual life generally, rests upon his effort to draw from anthropology a larger philosophy of human cultures...
...foreign minister offering up grief-filled tributes to a “visionary” and “humanist.” Here in the U.S., media reactions have been more muted: a faithful reflection of our general domestic indifference toward the intricacies of Gallic theory. (That the anthropologist shares his name with the most American of institutions, a denim manufacturer, lends his fate something of a surreal twist; a Google image search intersperses pictures of primitive art with links to purchase boot-cut flares.) Yet Lévi-Strauss deserves a moment of genuine recognition and remembrance?...
...When you pass along that wealth, you reveal it, and you can't exclude others from using it," says Samuel Bowles, an economist at the Sante Fe Institute, who led the study with anthropologist Monique Borgerhoff Mulder of the University of California, Davis, and economist Tom Hertz of the International University College of Turin and U.S. Department of Agriculture. "An economy based on brains and connections has more opportunities for equality that one based on grain and steel...
Other recent genetic research has backed up that notion. One study, published in PNAS in 2007 and led by John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, found that some 1,800 human gene variations had become widespread in recent generations because of their modern-day evolutionary benefits. Among those genetic changes, discovered by examining more than 3 million DNA variants in 269 individuals: mutations that allow people to digest milk or resist malaria and others that govern brain development. (Watch TIME's video "Darwin and Lincoln: Birthdays and Evolution...
...evolutionary changes make inherent sense. Since the Industrial Revolution, modern humans have grown taller and stronger, so it's easy to assume that evolution is making humans fitter. But according to anthropologist Peter McAllister, author of Manthropology: the Science of Inadequate Modern Man, the contemporary male has evolved, at least physically, into "the sorriest cohort of masculine Homo sapiens to ever walk the planet." Thanks to genetic differences, an average Neanderthal woman, McAllister notes, could have whupped Arnold Schwarzenegger at his muscular peak in an arm-wrestling match. And prehistoric Australian Aborigines, who typically built up great strength in their...