Caste in India 2 Mar 2010 3 Quarks Daily has an excellent essay on the evolution (cultural, of course) of the Varna and Jati system in India. This is often referred to by westerners as “the” caste system. Politics Religion Social dominance Social evolution
Evolution Natural selection fails with Man – W. R. Greg 12 Feb 2009 In the Descent of Man, Darwin cites a paper published about 5 years earlier by W. R. Greg, which argues that natural selection is not active among humans (or, as the convention had it then, “Man”). It is most interesting that he does, because Greg is the intellectual father of… Read More
Epistemology I’m about to give a keynote… in Poland 4 Jul 20124 Jul 2012 This is a brave new world. I’m about to give a keynote address to the Naturalizing Religion conference in Kazimierz Dolny in Poland. Or I would be if their internet hadn’t just died completely. Stay tuned for further news of the way things go wrong at the very last moment… Read More
Creationism and Intelligent Design Expelled producer admits lying to atheist interviewees 4 Jan 2009 Well, he admits that it was a theist diatribe from the beginning, and not the even handed interaction between science and faith doco he told Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers among others. Always nice to find out that those who assert that only with faith in God can we have… Read More
Its rather nice. Hierarchy when it is flexable does resolve problems and tension. Perhaps why it has been around for so long. When it becomes rigid it cannot fuction effectivly. Social tension increases, the lines become even more rigidly drawn between competitive social groups. Culture that is shared particularly material artifacts that may be used by all members of an ethnos will be made to look distinct. At times of tension they will start to bare ethnic markers and symbols. Diffrence has a high value under such circumstances. But it is in part I think an understanding of ethnicity and how it is used to negotiate and change identity that is playing out in modern India. As it certainly is in other parts of the world as understanding and cultures evolve. Just as it has always done. As the subject of ethnology did in the mid. 19th cen. when it found it’s methodology and first spoke in the ethnological socities of London and Paris into a sea of considerable noise. Some shamless flag waving for ethnology but it is an important subject I think.
The Indo-Aryan Theory has been quite rigorously disproven with genetic evidence. They occupants of the Indian sub-continent are all from the same original source. The Indo-Aryan theory is just another product of racist Europeans deciding that White people had to have started all great civilizations. It’s no different from the theories that used to propose that the ruins in Africa where from ancient European colonists and not native ancestors. It’s just Nazi science, pure and simple.