The Anthropologists are Coming!

Four Stone Hearth, the anthropology blog carnival, is up at John Hawks' Weblog.



Some terrific posts this time include:

Pure Pedantry has a thought provoking post entitled Why Pairing Science and Atheism is High-Brow. My own two-cents are that there are plenty of good reasons not to believe in God without invoking science (for example see the following) and in most cases there is no connection between religious belief and scientific research because science is a tool and theism is a philosophy. But when dealing with evolutionary biology (and particularly human evolution) the tools of science fundamentally conflict with the philosophy of theism and unless you ignore the science, ignore the religion or paint yourself into a logical corner there is no way to reconcile the two.

Two of the high profile "New Atheists" are scientists (Dawkins and Harris, who is in a grad program in neuroscience) but the other two are not (Hitchens and Dennett). However, when religious believers continue to invoke their "infallible authority" to prohibit genuine science from appearing in government policy and public classrooms I think it's important to poke holes in their foundation with the tools of science. This is an ongoing debate and has no easy answer. Perhaps multiple strategies, including E.O. Wilson's book The Creation appealing to Christian environmentalists along with Dawkins and PZ Myers (his book is coming out someday I'm sure), is the best approach rather than everyone following a single set of talking points. But enough of that, there were some other fascinating posts.

Laura at Savage Minds has an excellent post on Some General Thoughts About Anthropology, Interrogation, and Torture.

Archaeozoology has a wonderful post on endocannibalism entitled Eating the Dead which is sure to wet your appetite for lunch.

There were many others that are worth your attention, so make sure to check them out (then you can remove the nasal bone and get back to watching Oprah).