{"id":23607,"date":"2010-08-21T23:04:15","date_gmt":"2010-08-22T07:04:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=5798"},"modified":"2010-08-21T23:04:15","modified_gmt":"2010-08-22T07:04:15","slug":"open-thread-%e2%80%93-august-22-2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2010\/08\/21\/open-thread-%e2%80%93-august-22-2010\/","title":{"rendered":"Open thread \u2013 August 22, 2010"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I found out this week that <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Noble_savage#Erroneous_identification_of_Rousseau_with_the_noble_savage\">the idea of the &#8220;Noble Savage&#8221;<\/a> is erroneously attributed to Jean Jacques Rosseau. I haven&#8217;t read much Rosseau myself, so I&#8217;m familiar with the general shape of his ideas through the filters of later interpreters. But even if I&#8217;d consumed the great man&#8217;s oeuvre in totality I wonder if the urban myth is so powerful that I&#8217;d impute to him the concept anyhow?<\/p>\n<p>Which got me thinking, quite often people in the sciences are unfamiliar with the great works of the past in their primary form. I haven&#8217;t read a word of Isaac Newton, but that&#8217;s not very important to me because I&#8217;ve taken courses which cover mechanics. I only recently read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0451529065\/geneexpressio-20\/\">The Origin of Species<\/a> with any level of understanding, but ultimately much of Charles Darwin&#8217;s thinking has become seamlessly interleaved into the body of modern evolutionary biology. In contrast in the humanities the past seems very fresh, and the &#8220;readings&#8221; of original authors can give one a very distorted impression of the primary source.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I found out this week that the idea of the &#8220;Noble Savage&#8221; is erroneously attributed to Jean Jacques Rosseau. I haven&#8217;t read much Rosseau myself, so I&#8217;m familiar with the general shape of his ideas through the filters of later interpreters. But even if I&#8217;d consumed the great man&#8217;s oeuvre in totality I wonder if [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,189],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-open-thread"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23607"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23607\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23932,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23607\/revisions\/23932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}