{"id":43631,"date":"2011-09-18T16:29:34","date_gmt":"2011-09-19T00:29:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=13910"},"modified":"2011-09-18T16:29:34","modified_gmt":"2011-09-19T00:29:34","slug":"rational-optimist-or-scientific-racist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2011\/09\/18\/rational-optimist-or-scientific-racist\/","title":{"rendered":"Rational optimist or scientific racist?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m quite looking forward to Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined<\/a>. It’s coming out in three weeks, so expect to hear a lot more about it. That violence has declined is known outside of Pinker’s own work, and I try and spread this “good news” as much as I can. But I’ve always found it peculiar that some of the most pessimistic and skeptical individuals in regards to these data aren’t reactionaries pining for the ancient idyll, but self-styled progressives who seem to believe that we are fallen creatures. Many of the latter are clearly modern followers of Rousseau, previously discussed in The Blank Slate<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In any case, Jerry Coyne<\/a> points me to a really strange aside in a review<\/a> of Pinker’s book in The Guardian<\/i>:<\/p>\n

\n

To be tagged as a credulous optimist is one thing, yet Pinker also risks being condemned as a scientific racist. His graphs on the incidence of murder show present-day tribal and hunter-gatherer cultures to be far more homicidal than even the most lethally armed developed nation, a fact that is bound to bring censure from those Pinker derides as the “anthropologists of peace”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If the reviewer is characterizing these “anthropologists of peace” correctly perhaps it’s a commentary on what modern anthropology has become. I’ll leave you with some charts….<\/p>\n

<\/span>
\n