Diogenes articles from December 1997

Diogenes archives from December 1997

Biology reinvigorated: life/society, nature/culture, evolution/history.(Genes and Humanity's Past: A Renewed Dialogue)
December 22, 1997... In fact, analogy is a legitimate form of comparison, and comparison is the only practical means we have for the understanding of things. The fault of the biological sociologists was not that they used it but that they used it ...

From genes for intelligence to our understanding of genes.(Genes and Humanity's Past: A Renewed Dialogue)
December 22, 1997... From its very beginnings, this century has been under the sign of genetics. Indeed, it was in 1900 that the laws established by Mendel in the mid-nineteenth century were rediscovered. In that same year, Landsteiner identified the first human...

Adaptation and self-organization in primate societies.(Genes and Humanity's Past: A Renewed Dialogue)
December 22, 1997... The primary method by which science endeavors to order the world is the analytic approach, consistent with Cartesian principles of dividing the problem in as many sections as required for an optimal solution, and progressing from the simplest to...

Hominization and apes: an unnatural kinship.(Genes and Humanity's Past: A Renewed Dialogue)
December 22, 1997... The study of human origins is a kaleidoscopic field, a multitude of objects, reflections, and disciplines a swirl in an ever-changing tumult. The extreme diversity of the elements of information that are indispensable to this field of study...

Structure, signification, and culture: different logics of representation and their archeological implications.(Genes and Humanity's Past: A Renewed Dialogue)
December 22, 1997... In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the field of Paleolithic art was a source of intellectual ferment and innovative interpretation. This was in direct contrast to the first forty years immediately following the recognition of...

Does man have a place in nature?(Genes and Humanity's Past: A Renewed Dialogue)
December 22, 1997... Throughout the twentieth century, social anthropology has given the impression of being a science that is eternally in the throes of birth, all the while wondering whether it has the right to exist. As it has taken root, developed, and...

Culture and memory: reminiscences and symmetries.(Genes and Humanity's Past: A Renewed Dialogue)
December 22, 1997... I shall attempt the analysis of memory... because memory in some form is presupposed in almost all other knowledge." Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind (1921) "Beginning with homo sapiens, the formation of an apparatus...

From epistemology to anthropology and back again: crossed reflections.(Genes and Humanity's Past: A Renewed Dialogue)(Interview)
December 22, 1997... In order to leave our debate open, it is important to end with a potentially crucial encounter between two domains whose representatives have not yet engaged in direct dialogue. Epistemology and anthropology, indeed, have many ideas to exchange...

Universal declaration on the human genome and human rights: the general conference.(Genes and Humanity's Past: A Renewed Dialogue)
December 22, 1997... Recalling that the Preamble of UNESCO's Constitution refers to "the democratic principles of the dignity, equality and mutual respect of men", rejects any "doctrine of the inequality of men and races", stipulates "that the wide diffusion of...