-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: Sociobiology in the Nation Magazine Date: Fri, 08 Nov 2002 12:22:59 -0200 From: Maurice Bazin <mauriceb at FLORIPA.COM.BR> Reply-To: Science for the People Discussion List<SCIENCE-FOR-THE-PEOPLE at LIST.UVM.EDU> To: SCIENCE-FOR-THE-PEOPLE at LIST.UVM.EDU
Dear friends, I shall not be able to follow the exchange of ideas on Evolutionary Psy in the SCIENCE-FOR-THE-PEOPLE at LIST.UVM.EDU because I am taking off for a month to work in the "Upper Rio Negro Indigenous Territory" in the Upper Amazon region with Baniwa indians. I'll be doing some conversing around what I think is intelectually exciting math while they teach me how to do baskets. This is real life for me. By the way, Lula's program for "the indigenous question" is one of total respect and help for their own life-style (that is barring the entrance of mineral persuers and forest cutters of all ilks and transnationalities in the indians' own, still to be better defined and enlarged, "indigenous territories").
The more I read you all and the quotes from the "Human Nature" site, the more I get depressed, because you take seriously many things that are mere shoddy excercising of use of science research funding. I thought that gross measurements of external skull sizes was a mute topic after the 20th century... And now I see the analogous gross measurements (with, of course, a more modern technique being used: not millimeters but contrast in MNR pictures) of sizes of gray and white matter inside the same human heads! It is too much for my simplistic honesty.
Probably the thing for us to "prove" again is that money, fashion, individualistic achievements in visibility" (remember Michael Goldhaber's theory of 15 years ago!), capitalist/imperialist ideology, determine the modes of so-called research activity (so-called means self-called, so labeled by the researchers themselves, the so-called peers!). It is all self-consistent indeed.
Here is what made me say the things you just read:
"When we looked at the top performers for spatial tasks in our study - those performing better than one standard deviation above the average - there were nine men and only one woman," Ruben Gur says. "Of these nine men, seven had greater white-matter volumes than any of the women in the study. This suggests that, in order to be a super performer in that area, one needs more white matter than exists in most female brains." Forty men and forty women, all healthy adults, volunteered to participate in the study. Gray and white matter percentages and overall cranial volumes were assessed using three-dimensional MRI imaging techniques. ..... Funding for the research was provided by the National Institutes of Health. The University of Pennsylvania Medical Center's sponsored research and training ranks second in the United States based on grant support from the National Institutes of Health, the primary funder of biomedical research and training in the nation -- $201 million in federal fiscal year 1998. In addition, the institution continued to maintain the largest absolute growth in funding for research and training among all 125 medical schools in the country since 1991."
God! I wish we would all be able to write the same homage to Gould that Dick Levins and Lewontin did. It does help me when I sit among Baniwa "indigenous teachers". Thanks, and let us keep to a "no-shit" approach while we keep our sense of humor and make each other happier. Maurice
Maurice Bazin Rua Pau de Canela 1101 Campeche/Florianópolis 88063-505 BRASIL Fone: 55 48 237 3140 Fax: 55 48 338 2686 (Talvez você precise avisar. May need oral warning)
e-mail: mauriceb at floripa.com.br