Author: Patrick Clarkin

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A Final Middle Finger

I’ve been thinking a lot about adversity and resilience lately, both in a general sense and due to events going on in the lives of my students, friends, and extended family (as well as my own). There’s a lot to say about these things from a theoretical perspective, but that does not fit here. Instead, this one is personal, about my Uncle Jimmy.

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A dear uncle of mine passed away recently. He was a great guy – a jokester and a ballbuster, but also a generous and kind soul, a good father and husband. As a prank, he once clandestinely paged a coworker every day for years, just for fun, to watch him glance down at his pager in confusion. (I don’t think he ever discovered who was behind it).  When I was a boy, he was my Little League coach. As an adult, when I returned home from graduate school in order to be closer to family while I wrote my dissertation, he and my aunt asked their upstairs tenants not to renew their lease so that my wife and I could have their apartment (with rent at a family rate discount). “Blood is thicker than water,” he said.

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Part 6. Humans are (Blank) -ogamous: Many Intimate Relationships

This is the sixth part on the evolution of human mating behavior, comparing evidence for promiscuity and pair-bonding in our species. Please see the Introduction here.

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“So be sure when you step, Step with care and great tact. And remember that life’s A Great Balancing Act.” – Dr. Seuss

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…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Varieties of Intimate Relationships. Click for larger image. (from Informationisbeautiful.net)

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David McCandless at “Information Is Beautiful” gave me permission to reproduce the above image. I though it fit well with the series I started months ago titled Humans are (blank)-ogamous, which looked at the evidence for pair-bonding and promiscuity in human evolution. In the first post of the series, I wrote:

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To begin, let me say that I side with Sapolsky. Individuals may figure out what works best for themselves in terms of balancing sex, love, intimacy, and commitment, but collectively we are a tragically confused species. …

Across the spectrum of human cultures, we can find examples of heterogamy, endogamy, polyandry, polygyny, monogamy, non-monogamy, polyamory, and so on. However, these do not all occur in equal frequencies, so I don’t think we are truly “blank-ogamous.” There is also lots of room for variation within each culture. Being good Popperians committed to the principle of falsifiability, it is probably easier to say what we are not than what we are. One thing is clear: we are not simple.”

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Trayvon Martin, Zimmerman & Apology

Amazingly gracious for a mother who lost her son.

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“If I had an opportunity to talk to George Zimmerman, I would probably give him the opportunity to apologize. I would probably ask him if there was another way he could have helped settle the confrontation that he had with Trayvon, other than the way it ended, with Trayvon being shot.” – Sybrina Fulton, Travyon Martin’s mother. 

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To me, it’s yet another example of the need for reconciliation, or at least understanding, under difficult circumstances. It reminds me of some of the many other instances of apology/forgiveness described on this blog:  Kim Phuc & John Plummer;  Pham Thanh Cong & William Calley; Jack Jacobs & Pham Phi Huang; Poles & Russians; Croatians, Serbs & Bosnians, El Salvador & El Mozote; etc. It can be done.

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Related Posts

Reconciliation, Biology, and the Second Indochina War 

Reconciliation and the Second Indochina War II

Further Strides Toward Reconciliation

Peace with the ‘Enemy’

Making Peace with the Past

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HBA/AAPA Portland, OR 2012

Next week is the annual joint conference for the Human Biology Association and the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, which I’ve attended fairly regularly since graduate school. This year the conference will be held in Portland, Oregon. My talk is scheduled for the afternoon of Apr 12th, though I’ll be around from the 10th to 13th. Looking forward to seeing old friends, meeting new colleagues, learning, and sightseeing. My abstract:

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“Toward a human biology of war.” Clarkin PF. Department of Anthropology,University of Massachusetts, Boston, Massachusetts.

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Over a decade ago, Leatherman and Goodman (1998) proposed that biological anthropologists and human biologists increase research efforts toward better understanding what they termed the ‘biology of poverty.’ Similarly, we now may be poised toward studying the human biology of war. Historical records demonstrate that war consistently creates an array of physiologically taxing stressors that extend beyond competing military forces into nearby civilian populations. Exposure to such stressors (infection, malnutrition, psychological stress, etc.) may vary in duration, but they result in predictable, though variable, biological outcomes contingent on local circumstances.

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This paper reviews some of the epidemiological and biology literature related to the various ways that war-related experiences become embedded within human bodies. Additionally, it suggests future potential areas of research, and delineates possible approaches and pitfalls. Epidemiologists and humanitarian organizations have led the way in studying health outcomes in refugees and other groups affected by war. However, human biologists and biological anthropologists – with their intellectual traditions rooted in evolution, variation, and plasticity – may add substantively to the understanding of such patterns that extend beyond physical trauma and mortality into more subtle aspects of biology.

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Furthermore, such a research agenda seems relevant in applying human biology toward understanding ‘real life’ problems. Rather than viewing examples such as the Dutch Hunger Winter or the Biafra famine as ‘natural experiments’ and opportunities for testing given hypotheses, it seems necessary to maintain a complex perspective which views war as an interaction of human agency and shifting ecological conditions that impact health.

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The Meaningful Life of Manophet

Manophet Lonebuffalo was an amiable, kind-hearted man who lived in the small town of Phonsavanh in northeastern Laos. His primary job entailed working for the Japanese Mine Action Service, a nonprofit organization that helps to clear unexploded ordnance in Laos, among other places. But that was only one of many activities that occupied his time. He was also a tour guide for foreigners, a teacher of English, a football coach and referee, and a single father of three boys, at least one of whom was Hmong and adopted.

Manophet stands at his 'podium' (a damaged relic on the Plain of Jars)

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On the Odds of Your Existence

Last week I volunteered to read a story for my older son’s 3rd grade class. The book I selected was Dr. Seuss’ “Oh the Places You’ll Go” because I think it does a nice job of conveying the theme of perseverance in a kid-friendly way, which is the reason I read it often to my boys at home.

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Cosmically Connected Primates

“For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.”                 

– Carl Sagan, Contact

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Three different people have shared the inspirational video below with me in the past two days, and I thought it deserved to be disseminated as widely as possible. It’s the response of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson to the question: “what is the most astounding fact you know about the universe?” In his answer, Tyson elaborates on the majestic idea that the heavier elements crucial for organic life owe their origins to the incredible pressures created within aging stars. Those stars then exploded and released their newly forged contents into surrounding space, some of which eventually coalesced into us (to make a long story short).

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By itself, that concept is sublime, and it should be enough to sustain one’s sense of awe for a long while. But Tyson also goes a bit farther, speculating on why this idea elicits such an emotional response within us. 

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Reconciliation & the Second Indochina War, II

“Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.” – Dalai Lama

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I wrote this post, titled Reconciliation, Biology, & the 2nd Indochina War, about a year ago, and I consider it one of the more meaningful things on this site. It addresses:

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(1) Examples of profound case studies in reconciliation and making peace with the past (Kim Phuc and John Plummer; the My Lai massacre, Pham Thanh Cong, and William Calley; various national-level apologies for past injustices).

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(2) The significance, evolution, and neurobiology of guilt and forgiveness.

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(3) Lingering injustices and problems caused by the war, as well as a few reasons for optimism. 

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Admittedly, it is a bit long, and if you don’t make it to the end, it concludes on a hopeful note:

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Human Nature, Humility, & Homosexuality

“And, in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.” -Lennon/McCartney

“Is that true?” – Chris Farley

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Steve Silberman pointed his Twitter followers to a piece in Salon about the biography of Maggie Gallagher, the point person for fighting against same-sex marriage in the United States. Toward the end of the article, it quotes Gallagher on her views on homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and human nature, where she makes an analogy to Communism:

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“One of the lessons I learned as a young woman from the collapse of Communism is this: Trying to build a society around a fundamental lie about human nature can be done, for a while, with intense energy (and often at great cost); but it cannot hold.”

The author of the article, Mark Oppenheimer, then writes this about Gallagher:

Same-sex marriage is just a big lie, she believes, like Communism.  It is weak at its foundations, like the Iron Curtain. It may get built, she seems to concede — in 10 years, or 20, there may be more states that recognize same-sex marriage, more shiny, happy couples raising rosy-cheeked, well-adjusted children, children who play with dogs and go to school and fall from jungle gyms and break their arms, children often adopted after being abandoned by the heterosexuals who did not want them or could not care for them — but in time (big time, geological time, God time) the curtain will be pulled back, or it will fall. Because it has to. It cannot be otherwise.” 

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Further Strides toward Reconciliation

One of the major themes of this blog has been reconciliation and cooperation under difficult circumstances. Below are three pertinent, hopeful stories on reconciliation that I’ve collected over the last few months.

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1. Colombia to Spend $30 B to Compensate War Victims (AlertNet; Jan 24, 2012)

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Reparations to victims of Colombia’s long, bloody armed conflict will reach as much as $30 billion in the next 10 years, the government said on Tuesday… The reparation program will benefit more than 3 million victims of the war, which has dragged on for nearly five decades.”

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