Jonathan Marks
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 3617510 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Jonathan Marks |
| PRENOMES | Jonathan |
| SOBRENOME | Marks |
| ASSINATURA | MARKS J |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Ursinus College |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2594-7191 |
| VERIFICADO | Não |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 134 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 184 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 134 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1982 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Why is anthropology so threatening to reactionaries?
Jonathan Marks reads the committee's report on the humanities as an uncredited rehash of the 1990s science wars, a familiar quarrel with the academic left dressed as a defence of knowledge. Rather than rebut it point by point, he sets out ten propositions about human sameness and difference that anthropology has pressed on the comfortable since the 1870s. Much of what feels natural is a product of history rather than biology. Race marks political…
Complexities of gender and sex
This editorial reflects on the controversy at the American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Anthropology Society's conference, where a session on the fixity of biological sex was cancelled. Retracing developments from Simone de Beauvoir's foundational ideas to the theories of second-wave feminism it emphasizes how the gender concept was posed as a dynamic cultural construct. rather than a fixed biological fate, then shows that biologi…
Marks & Geller Reply
‘‘We’re Going to Tell These People Who They Really Are’’
Are Universities Liberal or Socratic
Genetic testing
In this guest editorial, the author addresses some of the challenges DNA self-analysis poses in anthropology
Human Biodiversity
This isn't rocket science
A Tale of Ex-Apes
Evolution leaves two patterns in nature simultaneously: continuity (i.e., descent) and discontinuity (i.e., modification). In narrating the evolution of our species, we tend to privilege continuity at the expense of discontinuity, for reasons having in part to do with our historical engagement with creationist interlocutors, and to the cultural status ascribed to genetics. In this paper, I will explore the emergence of the imaginary - the univers…
Fixing what ain't broke
With its subtitle ‘Prescriptivism and Language History’, Fixing English encompasses two senses of ‘fixing’: firstly, attempting to freeze the language at a particular historical moment and prevent it from changing further and, secondly, attempting to improve it and repair it of its faults and shortcomings
Solving the riddle of race
Genetics, Race, and the Practice of Science, Part One
Genetics, Race, and the Practice of Science, Part Two
The units of scientific anthropological origin narratives
Biological anthropology often treats its species as if they were natural, zoological units. While biologists sometimes acknowledge the contested aspects of species, I argue that the taxa in our own ancestry are different from those in zoology more generally, by virtue of their roles as characters or elements in our scientific origin myth
Tales of the ex-Apes
Genetics and Paleoanthropology
Genetics and Anthropology
An interdisciplinary endeavour
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
From AAC to Zulu
Affix hopping: a new Olympic discipline or innovative brewing technique? Anglo Frisian brightening: a meteorological phenomenon occurring over the North Sea? Cranberry morph: a result of genetically-modified gardening? Well, no, as it turns out. This Dictionary ‘provides concise and clear definitions of all the terms any undergraduate or graduate student is likely to encounter in the study of linguistics and English language or in other degrees i…
Tales of the Ex-Apes
This book is about the irreducibility of human evolution to purely biological properties and processes, for human evolution has incorporated the emergence of social relations and cultural histories that are unprecedented in the apes. Human evolution over the last few million years has involved the transformation from biological evolution into biocultural evolution. For several million years, human intelligence, dexterity, and technology all coevo…
The new Hippocratics
In this guest editorial the authors look at the association of four blood types with four Hippocratic personality types in Japan and in matching lovers through dating services in the West
Commentary
Keep Rowing
Clines Without Classes
This article examines Shiao, Bode, Beyer, and Selvig's (2012) arguments in their article 'The Genomic Challenge to the Social Construction of Race' and finds that their claims are based on fundamentally flawed interpretations of current genetic research. We discuss current genomic and genetic knowledge about human biological variation to demonstrate why and how Shiao et al.'s recommendations for future sociological studies and social policy, base…
The Nature/Culture of Genetic Facts
This review aims to explore the relationship between anthropology and genetics, an intellectual zone that has been occupied in different ways over the past century. One way to think about it is to contrast a classical “anthropological genetics” ( Roberts 1965 ), that is to say, a genetics that presumably informs anthropological issues or questions, with a “genomic anthropology” ( Pálsson 2008 ), that is to say, an anthropology that complements an…
Toward a new philosophy of biology
Clines Without Classes
This article examines Shiao, Bode, Beyer, and Selvig's (2012) arguments in their article 'The Genomic Challenge to the Social Construction of Race' and finds that their claims are based on fundamentally flawed interpretations of current genetic research. We discuss current genomic and genetic knowledge about human biological variation to demonstrate why and how Shiao et al.'s recommendations for future sociological studies and social policy, base…
The nature and origins of primate species
The living world has genetic discontinuity in it, and morphological discontinuity as well. Patterns of these discontinuities overlap to a large extent. When they do, species discrimination is unambiguous. But directly at the point of cladogenesis, there are parallel sets of processes occurring, which result in patterns that can be difficult to reconcile in a single term such as speciation. Primate “species,” living and extinct, exhibit various de…
The Origins of Anthropological Genetics
Although we often date the conflict of "molecules and morphology" in biological anthropology to the 1962 Wenner-Gren conference "Classification and Human Evolution," the roots of the conflict extend considerably deeper. In the first half of the twentieth century, two established research traditions applied genetic data to problems in physical anthropology: racial serology and systematic serology. These had a tense relationship with the more mains…
Blood will tell (won't it?)
Being derived from the hereditary material, molecular genetic data are often assumed to be a source of sounder inferences about evolution than data from other kinds of investigations. This, however, tends to be taken in the absence of a clear knowledge of the evolutionary processes at work, the technical shortcomings, and the manner of deriving the specific conclusions. The history of biological anthropology shows that, from the beginning of the …
On Nature and the Human
A major contribution of anthropological work has been to challenge a unitary theory of the human. In thisAmerican Anthropologistvital topics forum, a range of prominent anthropologists contribute to this challenge and provide musings on the human. The essays in this forum reflect diversity and unity of anthropological thought on human nature. Some note humans' connection to other primates, and others emphasize our distinction from ancestral patte…
Science and Race
The scientific study of human biological variation has consistently produced knowledge that contradicts widespread popular, or folk, wisdom. Although people and the populations they belong to certainly differ from one another, they do not appear to do so in such a manner that permits the identification of a small number of human subspecies or races. Classification of people into races involves cultural, not biological, knowledge; and race is inhe…
Rousseau’s Critique of Locke’s Education for Liberty
Locke and Rousseau both address the question of how best to educate children, who love both freedom and power, to be free adults who submit only to reason. Contrary to the common view that Rousseau’s disagreement with Locke stems from Rousseau’s radical understanding of freedom, I argue that the disagreement stems from Rousseau’s view, for which he argues convincingly, that Lockean education cannot secure even Lockean freedom. This reconception o…
Rousseau's Discriminating Defense of Compassion
Political theorists from Martha Nussbaum to Amitai Etzioni appeal to compassion as a basis that liberalism otherwise lacks for refraining from exploiting and even for helping others. However, critics like Clifford Orwin and Richard Boyd have raised this question: is compassion too weak and undiscriminating to rely on in politics? Jean-Jacques Rousseau's account of compassion helps answer it. Rousseau understands compassion as a useful manifestati…
The Great Ape Project and Disability Rights
The Great Ape Project is an international animal rights movement with the goal of extending rights to nonhuman primates. While the authors of this essay are sympathetic with scholars who seek to ensure humane treatment for these species, they are concerned with the growing tendency by those in the project to draw analogies between nonhuman primates and humans with disabilities. It is felt that scholars in the Great Ape Project, ignoring findings …
The Divine Instinct? Rousseau and Conscience
Political theorists have long disagreed about what Rousseau's account of conscience means. While most approaches to that account focus on the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” this essay focuses on another aspect of Emile, the development of conscience in Emile himself. First, I argue that conscience is transformed from problem to solution when self-love is transformed, first into gratitude, then, with the aid of religion, rhetoric, an…
Hominoid heterochromatin
The genetic relations of the apes have been the source of contention throughout the last decade. A potentially useful suite of phylogenetic characters is the distribution of darkly staining material (heterochromatin) in the chromosomes of the apes. While the precise etiology of this character suite remains unclear, it appears to be fairly easily reconciled to hominoid phylogeny in general. The distribution of heterochromatin at the tips of the ch…
Anthropological taxonomy as subject and object
Who Lost Nature? Rousseau and Rousseauism
Some of the most profound political consequences for which Jean-Jacques Rousseau's thought is credited or blamed rest on his justification of nature, or physiodicy. That physiodicy, in turn, rests on a distinction between nature and history, which allows Rousseau to declare nature innocent of both the miseries human beings suffer in society and the difficulties that drive human beings into society in the first place. In this essay, I argue that R…
What's old and new in molecular phylogenetics
While it is fairly easy to devise a phylogenetic tree based on molecular data, it has proven difficult to tell how reliable any such tree is. Thus while the genetic inference that humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas cluster together is widely accepted, the genetic inference that the primary division among Old World human populations is between Asia and EurAfrica is not. A molecular phylogenetic inference linking humans and chimpanzees was proposed …
Science, samples and people (Respond to this article at http
A legal action taken by the Havasupai tribe against Arizona State University, for the improper use of their blood, affords an opportunity to reflect on past and future scientific practice within anthropology
Misreading One's Sources
This article challenges Taylor's defense of community by criticizing his reading of Jean‐Jacques Rousseau. Taylor, who adheres to the old charge that Rousseau is at bottom a totalitarian, neglects several points of resistance to the claims of the community that are present in Rousseau's political thought. Such points of resistance prove, on close examination, to be unavailable to Taylor. Taylor inadvertently offers a theoretical attack on individ…
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Michael Sandel and the Politics of Transparency
This essay aims to refute the influential argument, made famous by Jean Starobinski and recently restated by Michael Sandel, that Rousseau's political thought aims at transparency, in which citizens understand each other immediately, unambiguously and without distortion. Whatever transparency Rousseau fosters in the political sphere may safely be characterized as limited and more boldly as a lie. Rousseau favors the appearance of transparency bec…
The Savage Pattern
Attempts to explain the unity of Rousseau's thought have left intact his claim in Emile that producing men and producing citizens are "necessarily opposed objects." I argue that this claim is merely provisional. After examining two prominent interpretations of the unity of Rousseau's thought, I go on to argue that the savage nation, a state falling between that of asocial natural men and fully socialized citizens, provides a pattern of "independe…
Why be against darwin? Creationism, racism, and the roots of anthropology
In this work, I review recent works in science studies and the history of science of relevance to biological anthropology. I will look at two rhetorical practices in human evolution—overstating our relationship with the apes and privileging ancestry over emergence—and their effects upon how human evolution and human diversity have been understood scientifically. I examine specifically the intellectual conflicts between Rudolf Virchow and Ernst Ha…
Recent Advances in Culturomics
Rousseau's Use of the Jewish Example
Rousseau refers to the Jews in major and minor works, setting them alongside the Greeks and Romans as models for republican politics. Yet Rousseau's use of the Jewish example has been almost entirely neglected. I argue that this example, which for Rousseau stands between paganism and Christianity, plays a unique role in Rousseau's political thought. In particular, Judaism, as Rousseau presents it, surpasses Christianity in its this-worldly emphas…
Replaying the Card
Genetic testing
In this guest editorial, the author addresses some of the challenges DNA self-analysis poses in anthropology
The units of scientific anthropological origin narratives
Biological anthropology often treats its species as if they were natural, zoological units. While biologists sometimes acknowledge the contested aspects of species, I argue that the taxa in our own ancestry are different from those in zoology more generally, by virtue of their roles as characters or elements in our scientific origin myth
Unofficial Broadcasting for Politics, Profit, and Pleasure
Negotiating better superfund settlements
Molecular micro‐ and macroevolution in the primate alpha‐globin gene family
Because hemoglobin is among the most abundant and accessible proteins in the human body, the molecular basis for its production is arguably the best‐known genetic system in any higher organism. The hemoglobin molecule is tetrameric and consists all developmental stage of two copies of each of two components, alpha‐like (141 amino acids) and beta‐like (146 amino acids). The beta‐like globins are located in a tight cluster on chromosome 11 and the …
The man with no endorphins and other reflections on science
Toward a new philosophy of biology
Simple curiosity
What's old and new in molecular phylogenetics
While it is fairly easy to devise a phylogenetic tree based on molecular data, it has proven difficult to tell how reliable any such tree is. Thus while the genetic inference that humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas cluster together is widely accepted, the genetic inference that the primary division among Old World human populations is between Asia and EurAfrica is not. A molecular phylogenetic inference linking humans and chimpanzees was proposed …
The nature and origins of primate species
The living world has genetic discontinuity in it, and morphological discontinuity as well. Patterns of these discontinuities overlap to a large extent. When they do, species discrimination is unambiguous. But directly at the point of cladogenesis, there are parallel sets of processes occurring, which result in patterns that can be difficult to reconcile in a single term such as speciation. Primate “species,” living and extinct, exhibit various de…
Evolution at the molecular level
The mendelian revolution
Hominoid heterochromatin
The genetic relations of the apes have been the source of contention throughout the last decade. A potentially useful suite of phylogenetic characters is the distribution of darkly staining material (heterochromatin) in the chromosomes of the apes. While the precise etiology of this character suite remains unclear, it appears to be fairly easily reconciled to hominoid phylogeny in general. The distribution of heterochromatin at the tips of the ch…
Complex rearrangements in the evolution of hominoid chromosome XVII
Hall of Human Biology and Evolution. Ian Tattersall , curator. J. Willard Whitson , designer
Rethinking genes
The gene is the central construct of twentieth‐century biology and evolution. It is a construct because, like “culture” in anthropology, “gene” is widely used and is central to the discipline's discourse, but eludes rigorous definition. Although the gene is acknowledged as a material entity, its membership criteria are unclear and its boundaries are fuzzy—indeed, more than one can occupy the same space at the same time. The purpose of this essay …
Blood will tell (won't it?)
Being derived from the hereditary material, molecular genetic data are often assumed to be a source of sounder inferences about evolution than data from other kinds of investigations. This, however, tends to be taken in the absence of a clear knowledge of the evolutionary processes at work, the technical shortcomings, and the manner of deriving the specific conclusions. The history of biological anthropology shows that, from the beginning of the …
Biological Anthropology Section
Biological Anthropology Section
Biological Anthropology Section
Biological Anthropology Section
Biological Anthropology Section
Learning to live with a trichotomy
Molecular Genetics Supplies New Links
The anthropology of science part II
A major consequence of seeing science as a cultural activity is the ability to distinguish formally between the normative and expressed behaviors of scientists. Science progresses often in spite of the constraints and conflicting goals imposed on scientists; therefore studying science and studying scientists are not equivalent. Nevertheless, what scientists do is a starting point for understanding how science functions in modern society. The euge…
The anthropology of science part I
While we may be disappointed at the level of science literacy in contemporary society, there has also been a quiet revolution in the humanities with respect to the nature of science itself, situating it within the general sphere of human thought and activity. Much of what is now accepted as commonplace within the humanities concerning science is commonly either unacknowledged or perceived as threatening by scientist. A broader perspective about s…
Biological Anthropology Section
Sociology (89 obras) · Computer Science (68 obras) · Anthropology (65 obras) · Citation (60 obras) · Library science (58 obras) · Philosophy (43 obras) · History (41 obras) · Epistemology (31 obras) · Biology (30 obras) · Race, Genetics, and Society (28 obras)