Dispersal of individuals from their natal communities at sexual maturity is an important determinant of kin association. In this paper we compare postmarital residence patterns among Pumé foragers of Venezuela to investigate the prevalence of sex-biased vs. bilateral residence. This study complements cross-cultural overviews by examining postmarital kin association in relation to individual, longitudinal data on residence within a forager society. Based on cultural norms, the Pumé have been characterized as matrilocal. Analysis of Pumé marriages over a 25-year period finds (...) a predominant pattern of natalocal residence. We emphasize that natalocality, bilocality, and multilocality accomplish similar ends in maximizing bilateral kin affiliations in contrast to sex-biased residential patterns. Bilateral kin association may be especially important in foraging economies where subsistence activities change throughout the year and large kin networks permit greater potential flexibility in residential mobility. (shrink)

Chagnon narrates the ups and downs of his career, how he managed to document the basic ethnography of the Yanomamö of Amazonia, and the loss of scientific compass in American anthropology that brought a good deal of personal villification and the end of his research. The reviewer endorses the view that organized American anthropology is in an intellectually sorry state but argues that Chagnon’s anthropology of anthropology is lacking.

The common view of science is a misunderstanding of today's science that does not recognize how "modern" science has changed since its inception in the 16th to 17th centuries. Science is generally taken to be objectively reliable because it uses "the scientific method" and because scientists work disinterestedly, publish openly, and keep one another honest through peer review. That common view was not too unrealistic in the early days and the glory days of modern science, but it is quite wrong (...) about contemporary science, which has ceased to be trustworthy because it is subject to commercial and bureaucratic influences that have spawned highly damaging conflicts of interest, institutional as well as personal. The birth of "modern" science is credited uncontroversially to "The" Scientific Revolution of the 17th century, but it has not been widely under-stood that there have been three distinctly different stages of scientific activity since then. In the first stage, amateurs were seeking to satisfy their curiosity about how the world works. There were essentially no controlling interests other than truth-seeking. Missteps taken resulted chiefly from the inherent difficulty of making discoveries and from such inherent human flaws as pride and avarice. The second stage, roughly the 19th century, saw science becoming a career, a plausible way to make a living, not unlike other careers in academe or professions like engineering: respectable and potentially satisfying but not any obvious path to great influence or wealth. Inevitably there were conflicts of interest between furthering a career and following objectively where evidence pointed, but competition and collegiality served well enough to keep the progress of science little affected by that conflicting career interest. The way to get ahead was by doing good science. In the third and present stage, which began at about the middle of the 20th century, science faces a necessary change in ethos as its centuries-long expansion at an exponential rate has changed to a zero-sum, steady-state situation that has fostered intensely cutthroat competition. At the same time, the record of science's remarkable previous successes has led industry and government to co-opt and exploit science and scientists. Those interactions offer the possibility for individuals to gain considerable public influence and wealth. That possibility tempts to corruption. Outright fraud in research has become noticeably more frequent, and public pronouncements about matters of science are made for self-interested bureaucratic and commercial motives. The public cannot now rely safely on the soundness of advice from the scientific community. Keywords: historical changes in science, science become untrustworthy. (shrink)

Progress, wrote George Bernard Shaw, depends on the unreasonable person,1 one who transgresses society’s dogmas and taboos. Alice Dreger is such an unreasonable one, and she has contributed mightily to tangible progress toward treating human beings as individuals, medically and socially; in particular those human beings who do not fall readily, physically or emotionally, into distinct categories of “male” or “female”. This book is Dreger’s personal, passionate, colloquial account of three crusades. Few readers will fail to learn a great deal (...) about the varieties of human sexual identity, and few will fail to be engrossed by these true tales of good deeds and bad deeds, of admirable actors and not-so-admirable ones. Dreger — studying history and philosophy of science and believing herself to be a feminist — wanted a PhD topic relating to issues of gender.2 Mentors suggested hermaphroditism. That led to contact and collaboration with activists in the “intersex” community, individuals born with mixtures of the organs and tissues that physically define “male” and “female”. Standard medical practice — into the late 1990s — was for pediatric surgeons to decide whether a given baby should be male or female and to perform “corrective” surgery as a matter of course, typically without consulting the parents. Dreger and her collaborators achieved a great deal toward changing medical practices so that parents make the early decisions, preferably (p. 49) to do nothing until the affected individuals are of an age to make their own individual decisions. This crusade brought considerable publicity, which led to Dreger’s being urged to look into the vicious attacks that had been made on Michael Bailey, an academic psychologist who expounded the views of Ray Blanchard, that there are two distinct categories of men who seek male-to-female sex change. One group comprises gay men, erotically attracted to men; the other are “autogynephiliac” men who experience erotic attraction to the idea of being female without necessarily being attracted erotically to men. The concept of autogynephilia had offended several trans-women to the degree that they waged a campaign to blacken Bailey’s reputation, using means that included public attacks on his family. The intellectual passion driving Dreger’s work is that justice must be evidence-based: evidence and not ideology must be decisive. Good intentions don’t guarantee good actions or outcomes, while those whose actions are damaging are not necessarily evil people (p. 275). The lessons of history may be clear, but historians are not listened to (p. 276). Dreger’s analysis of what happened to Michael Bailey (Dreger 2008) illustrates the scrupulous seeking and collation of evidence that characterizes first-rate historical work.3 Dreger was shocked to find that the anti-Bailey activists were wrong on salient facts, even as they claimed moral authority based on personal experience and feelings — in other words, they were politically correct. As Galileo’s Middle Finger insists over and again, views of what is ethical and moral must accord with the facts; political correctness, in other words, is simply wrong and often irrational.4 Dreger’s analysis of the willful destruction of Bailey’s academic career on false grounds brought Bailey at least some after-the-fact comfort. It also brought Dreger the invitation to look into a similar scandal. Once more she contributed to a belated recognition that the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon had been vilified and hounded in a campaign of ideologically based and factually false accusations (Dreger 2011). Dreger’s third crusade over human sexual identity concerned the disorder of congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), which involves excessive production of androgens that can lead to ambiguous genitalia and quite serious risks to health in genetic females. CAH is genetically recessive, affecting female babies who inherit the pertinent mutation from both parents: there is 1 chance in 4 that a girl will suffer the disorder if both parents carry this genetic marker. (shrink)