From: steinly@topaz.ucsc.edu (Steinn Sigurdsson)
Newsgroups: sci.environment
Subject: Re: The Return of Nasty, Brutish and Sh
Date: 13 Dec 92 18:28:35
Organization: Lick Observatory/UCO
NNTP-Posting-Host: topaz.ucsc.edu
In-reply-to: alanm@igc.apc.org's message of 13 Dec 92 23:31:00 GMT

In article <1466601987@igc.apc.org> alanm@igc.apc.org (Alan McGowen) writes:

   Sigurdsson's logic remains as bizarre as ever. He makes a flat 
   assertion of what he considers to be a self-evident truth. I post 
   statements from a standard recent introductory text on 
   anthropology which contradict him. He declares the statements to 
   be wrong, and demands proof for them. I post further statements 
   from other (including refereed) sources and list some suggested 
   reading to serve as a point of departure for an interested 
   reader's self-education. He looks at one of these and declares 
   the study to be flawed, contaminated in ways which were instantly 
   obvious to him but which the anthropologists in question hadn't 
   the wit to notice. He flips out at the statements I posted from 

Perhaps you should try reading the discussion session in
"Man the Hunter" where Sahlins and Lee advance their "orignal
affluent society" theory. It is very difficult to contradict 
Sahlins' "Zen" redefinition of happyness and well being,
when it simply involves defining whatever state the group
being studied as being that of "happyness". A number of field
researchers at the conference commented that they do not consider the
groups they studied to be "happy-go-lucky".
The life expectancy and leisure questions seems to boil down to
Lee's study for one summer of the !Kung, his data contradicts
that Marshalls and others, I consider his methodology of relative
age comparisons to be suspect to systematic errors, perhaps you'd
care to explain why it is reliable.


   Barkow's _Darwin, Sex, and Status_ and declares them to be 
   obviously unscientific since they clash so severely with his 
   cultural myths.

here's a part of that quote:

"Ethnographers do tend to be frank within the fold of their
fellow field-workers: and it is my own (unscientific) experience
that those who have worked among hunter-gatherers, and, to a
lesser extent, those who have worked among pastoral nomads,
really do mean the things they publicly say. They like the
peoples they have studied. But those who return from work among
rural cultivators, especially when these are peasants (that is,
cultivators who are not autonomous but beholden in a major way to
members of another social class), may return with affection for a
few individuals but with only grudging respect, if any, for the
peoples they have studied. A typical complaint, for example, is
that the peasants assumed that anything the field-worker said was
a lie and of course felt free to lie to the field-worker."

Barkow in fact notes specifically that he is being "unscientific",
and I maintain that an attitude that "hunter-gatherers never lie"
and "peasants always lie"  make any data offered by the author
based on talks and interviews with the subject to be hopelessly biased and invalid
for comparative study.

   And now he makes again exactly the same demands and claims of 
   powers to detect flaws in anthropological studies instantaneously. 

   No, Sigurdsson. It's time for *you* to put up or shut up. Where 
   is *your* evidence? Give us data to prove your claim that hunter-
   gatherers have higher birth rates and infant mortality rates than 
   agriculturalists. Don't use outmoded editions of texts -- use a 
   contemporary one, or, if you prefer, referred journal articles. 

No problem. Now you quote us some numbers, please.

"Low fertility among nomadic !Kung foragers of the northern Kalahari Desert of Botswana has been
    hypothesized to be an adaptation to scarcity of food.... 
More food appears to have substantially increased !Kung reproductive success by
    reducing infant and child mortality rates to levels observed among the Herero. These findings
    suggest that low !Kung fertility and mortality reflect contact with the Herero, who began
    expanding in large numbers into !Kung territory in the 1950s."

Pennington, Human Biology, _64_ 497 1992

ie !Kung infant and child mortality decreased after contact with 
pastoralists led to increased food supplies.

and there is:

"The present study reveals that the migrant Oraon possess significantly higher fertility
    and (infant) mortality than the sedentary Oraons even though they are a genetically similar
    group."

From Piplai, Human Biology _63_ 697 1991 a study on sedentary and
migrant populations of east india.


and finally

"
Details of the population pyramid of living Herero and Mbanderu of Botswana suggest that infant
    and childhood mortality of males has been substantially greater than that of females.  Direct
    tests from reproductive histories show that the hazard ratio is approximately 3 to 1 in favor
    of female survival in infancy and 2 to 1 in childhood.  This biased mortality began in about
    1960 in concert with recovery from infertility.  A model of asymmetric fitness benefits between
    siblings is weakly supported.  Logistic regression shows that heterogeneity among mothers
    explains much of the mortality of children under 2 years of age.  A direct test for
    heterogeneity provides strong support for the hypothesis.  Field methods appropriate for
    anthropologists are contrasted with those that are standard in demography.  Finally, a contrast
    between these data and those from south Asia suggests that strong sex preferences may exist
    without being culturally articulated.  Cultural norms do not necessarily coincide with
    behavior."

Harpending and Pennington Humna Biology _63_ 329 1991

The final two sentences are particularly interesting.

If I may go further a field, Birdsell in Man the Hunter suggests
15-50% infanticide rates in the Pleistocene h-g groups.

Laughlin compares life expectancy of two eskimo groups and concludes
"Longevity is obviously and considerably greater in an area of good,
accessible resources and high technological development."

in "Population, Ecology and Social Evolution" Hassan estimates
20% child mortality before age 4 using Nag's data. And models
for h-g populations allow for child mortality of to 50%,
maternal mortality of up to 10%, sterility of 12% and fetal
mortality of 12%.
For comparison, child mortalities of 10% in agricultural
societies in modern Africa are described as "horrendous"
and require emergency intervention.

Again from "Man the Hunter":
"Regardless of the statements made at the symposium
on the ease with which hunters obtain food some
of the time, it is still true that food was the
primary factor in limiting early human populations
as is shown by events subsequent to agriculture."

and "To call the hunters "affluent" (Sahlins chapter 9)
is to give a very special definition to the word."


   [I wonder if Sigurdsson is able to guess the reason for the 
   difference between the first and third editions of Bates & Plog?
   Hmm... probably more creeping multiculturalism or the growing
   power of the PC crowd...]

Gee Alan, did you even try to look in the chapter on population?
I'll go see if UC could afford the new edition when the library re-opens.

   I get the impression that Sigurdsson thinks he can establish 
   *his* position by means of a kind of pseudoacademic filibuster 
   against something he doesn't like: demand (unreasonable and 
   undoable) studies of precise "average" rates over all cultures.

Alan, you have categorically asserted that hunter gatherers had
lower infant mortality rates and higher life expectancies 
than agriculturalists. The only evidence you have presented are
references to Lees study on the time !Kung spend gathering food
(study that contrdicts some earlier work, at a time when 20% of
the !Kung worked for Bantu farmers and scavenged most of their
tools from the Bantu) and what sounds like a profound misunderstanding
of Sahlins "Zen" approach. Now, Sahlins made some good points, I
seriously question if you understand the context.
 
BTW any comparison of mortality and life expectancy only makes sense
if some average is compared. Singling out individual instances of
a "90 year old hunter gatherer who has 6 grandchildren all of
whom survived" and comparing it with a worst case famine in an
agricultural society is somewhat disingenious.

   Dismiss all case studies as contaminated. Eventually the other guy 
   will give up in total frustration. Apparently he think that this 
   establishes the truth of his view. Well, it doesn't. It merely 
   establishes pig-headedness.

Nope. I question Lee's methodoloy, you might also read the first
chapter to "Man the Hunter" on the problem of contamination
in modern studies of hunter-gatherers.

   As for his crack about the "big eco-words", I didn't make it up. 
   But, no I don't have a copy of the post in which he made it. I 
   don't archive most of my own posts. I archive none of his.

Alan, you made it up, I archive all my posts and there is no
such quote or intent in any of my posts. If you cannot provide
a reference I suugest you withdraw your claim and apologise.

The closes I have come in any of my posts to even the spirit of 
the quote you claim is the following

"I really wonder Alan, do you understand any of the
>big Maths words you use? Or do you just know them as buzzwords?"

This from when you were arguing that non-linearity of dynamical
systems implied inherent intractability and unpredictability.
As I have more than a passing familiarity with non-linear
dynamical systems I challenged some of your assertions.
Perhaps you confused this in your mind?


*  Steinn Sigurdsson   			Lick Observatory      	*
*  steinly@lick.ucsc.edu		"standard disclaimer"  	*
*  Just because there's a reason          			*
*  Doesn't mean it's understood              Specials, 1979	*