Re: IS ANTHROPOLOGY A SCIENCE?DETA

Robert Snower (rs219@IDIR.NET)
Fri, 26 Apr 1996 10:33:55 -0500

At 06:50 AM 4/26/96 -0500, you wrote:
>>...in my opinion, of Mark Shapiro's
>>THE SOCIOBIOLOGY OF HOMO SAPIENS. The latter presents a unifying theory
>>which has genuine application to the immense body of utterly diverse and
>>disorganized detail anthropology has provided us. Yet the work has received
>>no attention, to my knowledge. Mo one seems to be aware it exists.
>
>Shapiro's book has been ignored because it is not very good. Truly, it is
>filled with short chaapters that are at best thoughtful, but usually not
>very helpful. OOther books I think have shown much better the systhesis you
>refer to.

>Fred

Thanks for your response. I was very pleased that you take the notion of a
synthesis of physical and cultural anthropology seriously. But you can't
just say Shapiro's book is "not very good" because it offers a very precise,
detailed, specific, radical, theory which has direct application to the data
of anthropology, which other people in sociobiology do not. You have to say
it is dead wrong, and therefore utterly silly and absurd, or maybe it is
right, and therefore very very interesting.

R. Snower rs219@idir.net