ANTHROPOLOGY: FRAUD-PRONE

I spent my entire academic career teaching in university departments that offered anthropology courses so I think I have gained some impression of what it is all about. And the No. 1 impression I gained is that it is intensely ideological -- with many (but by no means all) anthropologists being on the far Left. It is anything but a dispassionate tabulation of kin networks and the like.

And the political nature of anthropology is very clearly shown by the saga of Margaret Mead -- still probably the best-known and most revered anthropologist. The fact that she was a dedicated liar seems to faze almost no-one in anthropology. What she said SHOULD have been right, apparently. Her work is seen as "fake but accurate", to use a recently famous phrase.

Her most famous book was Coming of Age in Samoa, in which she described the Polynesian Samoans as sexually libertine -- which was just about the opposite of the truth. But the book was written at a time when Western sexual morality was still fairly strict and the misrepresentations of the book helped the Left to ridicule that sort of morality. The man who exposed Mead's frauds, Derek Freeman, was not at all thanked for his work -- as he would have been if anthropology had been a true science. He was treated as a pariah, in fact.

And Franz Boas, Margaret Mead's teacher and the man often seen as the "father" of modern anthropology, was a fraud in the Leftist cause too. See here and here and here

So with that background the following recent news item should be no surprise:

"A flamboyant anthropology professor, whose work had been cited as evidence Neanderthal man once lived in Northern Europe, has resigned after a German university panel ruled he fabricated data and plagiarized the works of his colleagues. Reiner Protsch von Zieten, a Frankfurt university panel ruled, lied about the age of human skulls, dating them tens of thousands of years old, even though they were much younger, reports Deutsche Welle. "The commission finds that Prof. Protsch has forged and manipulated scientific facts over the past 30 years," the university said of the widely recognized expert in carbon data in a prepared statement...... The fallout from Protsch's false dating of northern European bone finds is only beginning. Chris Stringer, a Stone Age specialist and head of human origins at London's Natural History Museum, said: "What was considered a major piece of evidence showing that the Neanderthals once lived in northern Europe has fallen by the wayside. We are having to rewrite prehistory." ..... Frankfurt University's president, Rudolf Steinberg, apologized for the university's failure to curb Protsch's misconduct for decades. "A lot of people looked the other way," he said."

I think anthropology is a very important discipline that has much to teach us about the nature of man but, regrettably, you have to beware of anthropologists in studying it. You have to try to get at the facts behind the ideology -- not easy. But occasionally the truth gets out -- as here and here and here

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That "Cowboy capitalism" again: "The economy grew at a solid 3.8 percent annual rate in the final quarter of 2004 - stronger than previously estimated_ an encouraging sign that the business expansion was firmly entrenched at the start of the new year."

Dick McDonald is chortling over the $18 billion loss just posted by Viacom -- parent company of CBS and MTV. I suspect he is not alone.

Buy Hershey today: "This Valentine's Day, Sen. Tom Harkin, Iowa Democrat, encouraged the romantic sweethearts in his party not to buy chocolates from three of the nation's biggest chocolate producers: Hershey, Nestle and Mars. After all, he warned, all three are "red" companies - purportedly supporters of President Bush and his policies".

There is a new Australian site here that looks like it could be interesting to anybody who thinks that genetics has something to do with human behaviour and human differences.

Mark Steyn has a good summary of the playwright Arthur Miller -- showing what a determined Leftist and anti-American propagandist he was. Excerpt: "Miller was the most useful of the useful idiots. It was a marvelous inspiration to recast the communist "hysteria" of the 1950s as the Salem witch trials of the 1690s. Many people have pointed out the obvious flaw with "The Crucible" - that there were no witches, whereas there were certainly communists. For one thing, they were gobbling up a lot of real estate: they seized Poland in 1945, Bulgaria in '46, Hungary and Romania in '47, Czechoslovakia in '48, China in '49... As it is, Miller's play is an early example of the distinguishing characteristic of the modern Western left: its hermetically sealed parochialism. His genius was to give his fellow lefties what's become their most cherished article of faith - that any kind of urgent national defense is, by definition, paranoid and hysterical. It was untrue in the '50s and it's untrue today. "The Crucible" will survive because it's the modular furniture of left-wing agitprop: whatever the cause du jour, you can attach it to and it functions no better or worse than to anything else, mainly because it's perfectly pitched to the narcissism of the left".

EU Jews moving Rightwards: "The Belgian example is extreme, but it represents the sharpest edge of a much broader political shift by European Jews - away from the left, particularly the far left, and toward the center and right, in the face of rising displays of anti-Semitism and the European left's embrace of the Palestinian cause.... Of course, the shift is not monolithic and some of it is also associated with a rise in Jews' social and economic status. In the vast majority of cases it represents a move toward tolerant parties of the center or center-right rather than a leap to the far end of the spectrum - where many xenophobic parties remain unfriendly to Jews as well as to Arabs. So the number of Jews on the far right remains a very slim minority. But the fact that there are any at all is a measure of the degree to which many of Europe's 2.4 million Jews feel abandoned by the left and are still searching for a comfortable place in European politics".

Wicked Thoughts has just put up a post that debunks the "Snopes" fact-checking service.

My latest posting on MarxWords shows that Marx did not understand the economics of his day. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at whether Christ died on a cross or not.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

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