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4Principle and Practice in Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning EducationIn Christopher Lynch & Jonathan Marks (eds.), Principle and prudence in Western political thought, State University of New York Press. pp. 133-149. 2016.
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IntroductionIn Christopher Lynch & Jonathan Marks (eds.), Principle and prudence in Western political thought, State University of New York Press. pp. 1-12. 2016.
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12Principle and prudence in Western political thought (edited book)State University of New York Press. 2016.Reflections on principle and prudence in the thoughts and actions of great thinkers and statesmen. Discussions of the place of moral principle in political practice are haunted by the abstract and misleading distinction between realism and its various principled or idealist alternatives. This volume argues that such discussions must be recast in terms of the relationship between principle and prudence: as Nathan Tarcov maintains, that relationship is not dichotomous but complementary. In a s…Read more
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730More than provocative, less than scientific: A commentary on the editorial decision to publish CofnasPhilosophical Psychology 33 (7): 893-898. 2020.This letter addresses the editorial decision to publish the article, “Research on group differences in intelligence: A defense of free inquiry” (Cofnas, 2020). Our letter points out several critical problems with Cofnas's article, which we believe should have either disqualified the manuscript upon submission or been addressed during the review process and resulted in substantial revisions.
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3220We are addressing this letter to the editors of Philosophical Psychology after reading an article they decided to publish in the recent vol. 33, issue 1. The article is by Nathan Cofnas and is entitled “Research on group differences in intelligence: A defense of free inquiry” (2020). The purpose of our letter is not to invite Cofnas’s contribution into a broader dialogue, but to respectfully voice our concerns about the decision to publish the manuscript, which, in our opinion, fails to meet a r…Read more
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25What if the human mind evolved for nonrational thought? An anthropological perspectiveZygon 52 (3): 790-806. 2017.Our knowledge of the evolution of human thought is limited not only by the nature of the evidence, but also by the values we bring to the authoritative scientific study of our ancestors. The tendency to see human thought as linear progress in rational capacities has been popular since the Enlightenment, and in the wake of Darwinism has been extended to other species as well. Human communication can be used to transmit useful information, but is rooted in symbolic processes that are nonrational—t…Read more
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39Your body, my property : The problem of colonial genetics in a postcolonial worldIn Lynn Meskell & Peter Pels (eds.), Embedding Ethics, Berg. pp. 29--45. 2005.
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10The Coevolution of Human Origins, Human Variation, and Their Meaning in the Nineteenth CenturyZygon 54 (1): 246-251. 2019.Ideas about biology, race, and theology were bound up together in nineteenth‐century scholarship, although they are rarely, if ever, considered together today. Nevertheless, the new genealogical way of thinking about the history of life arose alongside a new way of thinking about the Bible, and a new way of thinking about people. They connected with one another in subtle ways, and modern scholarly boundaries do not map well on to nineteenth‐century scholarship.
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15The Legacy of Serological Studies in American Physical AnthropologyHistory and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 18 (3). 1996.Serological data have been used to address anthropological problems since the turn of the century. These were predominantly problems of two kinds in anthropological systematics: the relations of human populations to one another (racial serology), and the relations of primate species to one another (systematic serology). Though they were the locus of considerable debate about the relative merits of 'genetic' versus 'traditional' data, the serological work had little lasting impact in the field. I…Read more
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2What is the Viewpoint of Hemoglobin, and Does It Matter?History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 31 (2). 2009.In this paper I discuss reductive trends in evolutionary anthropology. The first involved the reduction of human ancestry to genetic relationships (in the 1960s) and the second involved a parallel reduction of classification to phylogenetic retrieval (in the 1980s). Neither of these affords greater accuracy than their alternatives; that is to say, their novelty is epistemic, not empirical. As a result, there has been a revolution in classification in evolutionary anthropology, which arguably clo…Read more
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16Solving the riddle of raceStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 59 161-164. 2016.
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34Book Review: Orin Starn,Ishi's Brain: In Search of American's Last “Wild Indian” (review)Journal of the History of Biology 37 (3): 610-611. 2004.
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25Book Review: Orin Starn,Ishi's Brain: In Search of American's Last “Wild Indian” (review)Journal of the History of Biology 37 (3): 610-611. 2004.
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13A Genetic And Cultural Odyssey: The Life And Work Of L. Luca Cavalli‐sforza (review)Isis 97 387-387. 2006.