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"One-on-one revenge was common in foraging societies, and kin-against-kin blood feuds were common in tribal societies that had not been pacified by a colonial or national government, particularly if they had an exaggerated culture of manly honor."
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Exlpore more Anthropology quotes
"Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars."
"If origin defines race, then the entire human race is African."
"It's always amusing to look at how something early in the 20th century was written in anthropology and how it's written now. There's been an enormous shift in how it's done, but yet you can't put your finger on someone who actually did it."
"Anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities."
"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."
"It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much viatmin C as the average person today."
"Younger anthropologists have the notion that anthropology is too diverse. The number of things done under the name of anthropology is just infinite; you can do anything and call it anthropology."
"If there's ever a place where you can't argue that you can put the facts over here and the text over there and see if they fit, it is surely in anthropology."
"Man is at the bottom an animal midway a citizen and at the top divine. But the climate of this world is such that few ripen at the top."
"Anthropology never has had a distinct subject matter, and because it doesn't have a real method, there's a great deal of anxiety over what it is."
Explore more quotes by Steven Pinker
"Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate."
"As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones."
"Computation has finally demystified mentalistic terms. Beliefs are inscriptions in memory, desires are goal inscriptions, thinking is computation, perceptions are inscriptions triggered by sensors, trying is executing operations triggered by a goal."
"Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance."
"We will never have a perfect world, but it's not romantic or naA ve to work toward a better one."
"I believe that the rape-is-not-about-sex doctrine will go down in history as an example of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. It is preposterous on the face of it, does not deserve its sanctity, is contradicted by a mass of evidence, and is getting in the way of the only morally relevant goal surrounding rape, the effort to stamp it out."
"The mind is not designed to grasp the laws of probability, even though the laws rule the universe."
"The Rights Revolutions too have given us ideals that educated people today take for granted but that are virtually unprecedented in human history, such as that people of all races and creeds have equal rights, that women should be free from all forms of coercion, that children should never, ever be spanked, that students should be protected from bullying, and that there's nothing wrong with being gay. I don't find it at all implausible that these are gifts, in part, of a refined and widening application of reason."
"Science is thus a paradigm for how we ought to gain knowledge-not the particular methods or institutions of science but its value system, namely to seek to explain the world, to evaluate candidate explanations objectively, and to be cognizant of the tentativeness and uncertainty of our understanding at any time."
"Even evolutionary explanations of the traditional division of labor by sex do not imply that it is unchangeable, "natural in the sense of good, or something that should be forced on individual women or men who don't want it."
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