The Un-Textbook of Biological Anthropology
This is a collection of essays designed to be read alongside the standard weekly format of a textbook in bio-anthro. Its purpose is to introduce more anthropological relevance into the standard intro bio-anthro curriculum. The essays are not intended to be as comprehensive as a stand-alone textbook would necessitate, nor as copiously illustrated, but will hopefully introduce students to a range of issues that are most likely side-stepped by whatever textbook they are using. These would include issues like colonialism and paleoanthropology; the value of genomics for understanding the production of biological novelty and its lack of value for understanding pretty much anything else of relevance to anthropology; the ideologies that permeate primate classification; why people are saying hominin instead of hominid and what difference it makes; and the limitations of generalizing about human behavior from that of nonhuman primates.
Each essay begins with a pedagogical theme, and ends with a sketch of an influential relevant scholar.
These essays are in Adobe pdf format.
1. Science and anthropology
2. Development of the modern biological world-view
3. Darwinism
4. The emergence of a theory of heredity
5. Microevolutionary principles
7. Primate origins and diversity
8. Primate behavior
10. Paleoanthropology: A diachronic science
11. Understanding the early hominid fossil record