The Alternative Introduction to Biological Anthropology

About this book

In The Alternative Introduction to Biological Anthropology, Second Edition, author Jonathan Marks presents an innovative framework for thinking about the major issues in the field with fourteen original essays designed to correlate to the core chapters in standard textbooks. Each chapter draws on and complements – but does not reconstitute (except for the sake of clarity) – the major data and ideas presented in standard texts. Marks explores such topics as how we make sense of data about our origins, where our modern ideas come from, our inability to separate natural facts from cultural facts and values as we try to understand ourselves, and the social and political aspects of science as a culturally situated mental activity.

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1. What Is Anthropology, What Is Biological Anthropology, and Should I Be Getting Science Credit for This? (On the Philosophy of Science)
Chapter 2. Where Did Our Scientific Ideas about Ourselves Come From? (On the History of Science)
Chapter 3. Can You Tell If You Are a Darwinist? (On Theories of Evolution)
Chapter 4. Why Do I Look Like the Cable Guy, Daddy? (On Issues of Human Heredity)
Chapter 5. Are We Here? If So, Why? (On Issues of Microevolution)
Chapter 6. Building Better Monkeys, or at Least Different Ones (On Systematics)
Chapter 7. Is That an Ape in Your Genes, or Are You Just Glad to See Me? (On the Place of Humans in the Natural Order)
Chapter 8. Apes Run Around Naked, Live in Trees, and Fling Their Poo. Do You? (On the Relevance of Apes to Understanding Humans)
Chapter 9. Being and Becoming (On the Relevance of Humans to Understanding Humans)
Chapter 10. If History Is Humanities, and Evolution Is Science, What Is Paleoanthropology? (On the Assumptions of a Diachronic Science)
Chapter 11. The Dental and the Mental (On Making Sense of the Early Diversification of the Human Lineage)
Chapter 12. What to Do When Confronted by a Neandertal (On Continuity and Discontinuity)
Chapter 13. Just How Different Is Different? (On Race)
Chapter 14. Nature/Culture, or How Science Manages to Give Little Answers to Big Questions (On the Non-reductive Core of Anthropology)

Index

Customer Reviews

Biography

Jonathan Marks is Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is the author of several books, including Is Science Racist? (2017) and Why I Am Not a Scientist: Anthropology and Modern Knowledge (2009).