Ed Hagen

@edhagen.net

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Professor of Anthropology at Washington State University. Faculty page: https://anthro.vancouver.wsu.edu/people/hagen/ Views expressed are my own and do not reflect those of my employer or other organizations I'm affiliated with.

A scatterplot of combined grip strength (y-axis) vs. serum testosterone (x-axis) in 3498 US adult men (18-60) from NHANES 2011 - 2014. A polynomial smooth regression line is completely flat. Combined grip strength is the sum of grip strength in both hands. Point sizes are survey weights.
Table showing the number and percentages of faculty members in Applied Sciences (10.4%), Education (4.7%), Engineering (10%), Humanities (17.2%), Math and Computing (8.8%), Medicine and Health (18.6%), Natural Sciences (24%), and Social Sciences (12.9%).
Ranking of confidence in 18 US institutions with science at #3 and higher Ed at #5
Plot with two panels. Top panel: Family size across the wife's lifespan, for varying ALB's. Family size increases as the wife grows older and has children every 3-4 years, with maximum family sizes being larger for longer with later ALB's. Bottom panel: Cumulative energy balance across the wife's lifespan. With later ALB's, total fertility goes up but cumulative energy balance goes down, becoming negative after around age 40
Plot showing simulated energy conxumption, production, and balance (production minus consumption) across the mother's lifespan for different ages of last birth. Energy balance is increasingly negative as ALBs increase
Plot showing that population energy balance is substantially lower, and often below zero, without juvenile food production
Avergage male and female daily energy production in 10 hunter-gatherer societies
Scatterplot showing foraging kcals/day for Hadza children
Learning, menopause, and the human adaptive complex. This paper presents a new two-sex learning- and skills-based theory for the evolution of human menopause. The theory proposes that the role of knowledge, skill acquisition, and transfers in determining economic productivity and resource distribution is the distinctive feature of the traditional human ecology that is responsible for the evolution of menopause. The theory also proposes that male reproductive cessation and post-reproductive investment in descendants is a fundamental characteristic of humans living in traditional foraging and simple horticultural economies. We present evidence relevant to the theory. The data show that whereas reproductive decline is linked to increasing risks of mortality in chimpanzees, human reproductive senescence precedes somatic senescence. Moreover under traditional conditions, most human males undergo reproductive cessation at the same time as their wives. We then present evidence that after ceasing to reproduce, both men and women provide net economic transfers to children and grandchildren. Given this pattern of economic productivity, delays in menopause would produce net economic deficits within families.
A chart showing the long postreproductive lifespans of humans and toothed whales, and the very short ones of non-human primates
Plot of the women's ages of first sexual intercourse to ages of first union in 74 countries. Left hand panel: Asia, Latin America, North America, Europe. Right hand panel: Africa and West Asia.
A logistic regression model of self-reported heterosexual experience vs. time since puberty, with a term for living in the boarding school. Girls living in the boarding school have a lower probability of heterosexual, ranging from close to zero near the onset of. puberty, to around 50% five years later. Other girls have a probability of around 37% near the onset of puberty to close to 90% five years later.
In the interests of full disclosure, there was another connection. Alan Dershowitz and I are friends and colleagues, and we taught a course together at Harvard. He often asks me questions about syntax and semantics of laws, most recently the impeachment statute. While he was representing Epstein, he asked me about the natural interpretation of one of the relevant laws, and I offered my opinion; this was cited in a court document. I did it as a favor to a friend and colleague, not as a paid expert witness, but I now regret that I did so. And needless to say I find Epstein’s behavior reprehensible. Since some of the social-media snark insinuates that I downplay sexual exploitation, it may be worth adding that I have a paper trail of abhorrence of violence against women, have celebrated efforts to stamp it out, and have tried to make my own small contribution to this effort. My review of the history of rape and battering in The Better Angels of Our Nature begins: “Rape is one of the prime atrocities in the human repertoire. It combines pain, degradation, terror, trauma, the seizure of a woman’s means of perpetuating life, and an intrusion into the makeup of her progeny. It is also one of the commonest of atrocities.”
Accurate age estimation in small-scale societies. Significance Understanding demographic and evolutionary processes shaping human life history diversity depends on precise age estimations. Inferring age is a challenge in small-scale societies, and especially in those societies that do not follow a calendar year. Our method opens possibilities in demographic and life history studies allowing cross-sectional data to be incorporated in cross-cultural comparisons and a better understanding of the adaptive importance of human life history variation.
Given the same data, reasonable people may calculate the probability of truth or falsity of an argument differently. Sometimes the subjective element is large. For example, when judging the veracity of the tales of sexual intrigue told to Mead by her young informants, different people hold widely different opinions on the probability that Mead could have been duped. Another test of the same question may have a very small subjective element. For example, there would be more unity ofopinion on the probability that 12 menstruating and thus presumably fertile girls could have engaged in sex for periods ranging from two months to four years without a single pregnancy occurring, as Mead claimed (1928).
The existence of the pastor’s boarding school for girls past puberty provided me with a rough control group. These girls were so severely watched that heterosexual activities were impossible; they were grouped together with other girls of the same age regardless of relationship; they lived a more ordered and regular life than the girls who remained in their households. The ways in which they differed from other girls of the same age and more resembled European girls of the same age follow with surprising accuracy the lines suggested by the specific differences in environment. However, as they lived part of the time at home, the environmental break was not complete and their value as a control group is strictly limited.
This study included sixty-eight girls between the ages of eight and nine and nineteen or twenty - all the girls between these ages in the three villages of Faleasao, Luma, and Siufaga, the three villages on the west coast of the island of Tau in the Manu’a Archipelago of the Samoan Islands.
There are a number of problems with Freeman’s hoaxing argument (Shankman 2009, 193-205; 2013), the most important being that, according to Fa’apua’a’s complete testimony, Mead did not ask her about her own sexual conduct or the conduct of Samoan adolescent girls. Nor did she independently provide Mead with information about her own conduct or the conduct of adolescent girls. Three separate interviews with Fa’apua’a were conducted in 1987, 1988, and 1993, resulting in 140 handwritten pages of testimony. From this material, Freeman selectively quoted one passage from the first interview that seemed to verify the hoaxing. However, the remainder of that interview and the other interviews, which Freeman does not quote or paraphrase, make it clear that Mead did not ask Fa’apua’a and Fofoa about their own sexual activities nor did they provide information to her about adolescent sexual conduct. Had Freeman simply published the entire first interview in translation, the hoaxing argument would have never gained credibility.
The weirdest people in the world? Abstract: Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers - often implicitly - assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these "standard subjects" are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species - frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior - hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.
Date: October 16, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final Byline: By Helen Fisher; Lead: NATURALIST By Edward O. Wilson. Illustrated. 380 pp. Washington: Shearwater Books/ Island Press. $24.95. Text: "BOOK burning, we are talking about book burning," Margaret Mead thundered during the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in November 1976. And a resolution to censure sociobiology was defeated --
In the Mead-Freeman controversy, Derek Freeman's historical reconstruction of the alleged hoaxing of Margaret Mead in 1926 relied on three interviews with Fa'apua'a Fa'amü, Mead's "principal informant," who stated that she and another Samoan woman had innocently joked with Mead about their private lives. In turn, Freeman argued that Mead believed these jokes as the truth and that they were the basis for her interpretation of adolescent sex in Coming of Age in Samoa. The unpublished interviews with Fa'apua'a became the centerpiece of Freeman's second book on the controversy, The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead (1999). Yet an analysis of Mead's relationship with Fa'apua'a demonstrates that she was not an informant for Mead on adolescent sex, and an examination of the three interviews used by Freeman does not support his interpretation of them. In fact, responding to direct questioning during the interviews, Fa'apua'a stated that Mead did not ask her questions about her own sexual conduct or about adolescent sexual conduct. Nor did she provide Mead with information on this subject. Crucial passages from these interviews were omitted by Freeman in his publications on the alleged hoaxing. Based on the interviews themselves, there is no compelling evidence that Mead was hoaxed
How well is Freeman's history of Samoan sexual conduct supported by the evidence? As we shall see, not very well. There are major problems with Freeman's reconstruction. Historically, Samoa was less restrictive than Freeman allows, and there was more variability in sexual conduct than Freeman discerns. This can be shown by a review of the traditional taupou system and its subsequent modification from the mid-19th century through the 1950s, a long interval of cultural stability, according to Freeman. Especially important is the period of World War II, when Freeman did his own first fieldwork in the islands. The sources used here are primarily those employed by Freeman himself in his critique of Mead, but Freeman often omits passages from these sources that do not support his position. Since Freeman's critique of Mead is, to a significant degree, a historical critique based on these sources, a reexamination of them is essential to validating the empirical basis of Freeman's account. Let us begin by considering Freeman's argument more fully.
Richard Dawkins tweet: Is Margaret Mead the most over-rated of scholars? Her rose-tinted Samoa chimed with what we wanted to hear, & she became guru to a generation. Alas, Derek Freeman (The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead) went back to Samoa, learned the language, & did the anthropology properly!
The fateful hoaxing of Margaret Mead by Derek Freeman (book cover)
According to anthropologist Paul Shankman, "Mead was anthropology’s most significant public voice during the twentieth century."[4] She is regarded as a founding figure in public anthropology[4][5] and visual anthropology.[6] Her ethnography of the South Pacific and Melanesia has been subject to vigorous academic debate.[7][8][9] From the 1920s to the 1960s, her fieldwork was widely discussed in the press[10] and she wrote a monthly column in Redbook magazine co-authored with partner Rhoda Métraux.[4] Her reports detailing the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures influenced the 1960s sexual revolution.[11] Mead's association with cultural relativism and the sexual revolution led to sharp criticism from conservatives.
Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation is a 1928 book by American anthropologist Margaret Mead based upon her research and study of youth – primarily adolescent girls – on the island of Taʻū in American Samoa. The book details the sexual life of teenagers in Samoan society in the early 20th century, and theorizes that culture has a leading influence on psychosexual development.
Coming of Age in Samoa title page
Margaret Mead with Samoan informants
The transition from a human diet based exclusively on wild plants and animals to one involving dependence on domesticated plants and animals beginning 10,000 to 11,000 y ago in Southwest Asia set into motion a series of profound health, lifestyle, social, and economic changes affecting human populations throughout most of the world. However, the social, cultural, behavioral, and other factors surrounding health and lifestyle associated with the foraging-to-farming transition are vague, owing to an incomplete or poorly understood contextual archaeological record of living conditions. Bioarchaeological investigation of the extraordinary record of human remains and their context from Neolithic Çatalhöyük (7100–5950 cal BCE), a massive archaeological site in south-central Anatolia (Turkey), provides important perspectives on population dynamics, health outcomes, behavioral adaptations, interpersonal conflict, and a record of community resilience over the life of this single early farming settlement having the attributes of a protocity. Study of Çatalhöyük human biology reveals increasing costs to members of the settlement, including elevated exposure to disease and labor demands in response to community dependence on and production of domesticated plant carbohydrates, growing population size and density fueled by elevated fertility, and increasing stresses due to heightened workload and greater mobility required for caprine herding and other resource acquisition activities over the nearly 12 centuries of settlement occupation. These changes in life conditions foreshadow developments that would take place worldwide over the millennia following the abandonment of Neolithic Çatalhöyük, including health challenges, adaptive patterns, physical activity, and emerging social behaviors involving interpersonal violence.
Ken Hagen, professor emeritus of Entomology at the University of California, Berkeley, died suddenly of a ruptured aortic aneurism on 10 January 1997. He was born in Oakland, California on 26 November 1919. His parents were from Norway, and his father was a seaman. Ken attended Fremont High School in Oakland, where he graduated in 1938 and then enrolled in San Francisco State College. He received there his A.A. degree in 1942. Ken then attended U.C. Berkeley, where he earned his B.S. in entomology in 1943. He then went to Officer Candidate School at Columbia University, where he was commissioned in the U.S.Navy. On a brief leave he married his fiancee, Maxine White, on 1 December 1943. A week later he went to Norfolk, Virginia to attend Amphibious Training School, and then was shipped out to Europe. During the war he served on the USS Anne Arundel, as a lieutenant in charge of a landing craft section, and saw action in the Neptune Invasion at Omaha Beach in Normandy, and the Dragon Invasion in the south of France in 1944. In 1945, he participated in the landings at Okinawa, where the fierce fighting stranded his boat on the beach overnight.
Meme Wait, it's all transposons? Always has been
Ternary plot: A triangle showing the distribution of the proportion of learning modes -- Vertical, Oblique, Horizontal -- for 59 kids in two ethnic groups.
First 10 of 59 children: ID ethnicity Vertical Horizontal Oblique <chr> <fct> <int> <int> <int> 1 KECKD09 Koygu 0 3 3 2 KACEG04 Koygu 1 0 6 3 KECAD06 Koygu 1 4 1 4 KACNB02 Koygu 3 2 0 5 NACPL06 Nyangatom 7 0 3 6 NACLN04 Nyangatom 0 4 3 7 NACMJ05 Nyangatom 5 3 4 8 KECKB04 Koygu 3 3 1 9 NECLJ04 Nyangatom 1 6 7 10 NMCNL10 Nyangatom 3 4 2
top left: most deplatforming by students, administrators and activists. top right: increase in campus deplatforming from 1998-2025, led by attacks from the right. bottom left: most attacks on scholars by students, administrators and activists. bottom right: steep increase in attacks on scholars starting around the start of the Trump era, with a huge recent spike of attacks from the right. Very bottom: dot chart of topics involved in each incident. The top 3 are race, political views, and gender, with more of each from the right than the left
Abstract In human populations, women consistently outlive men, which suggests profound biological foundations for sex differences in survival. Quantifying whether such sex differences are also pervasive in wild mammals is a crucial challenge in both evolutionary biology and biogerontology. Here, we compile demographic data from 134 mammal populations, encompassing 101 species, to show that the female’s median lifespan is on average 18.6% longer than that of conspecific males, whereas in humans the female advantage is on average 7.8%. On the contrary, we do not find any consistent sex differences in aging rates. In addition, sex differences in median adult lifespan and aging rates are both highly variable across species. Our analyses suggest that the magnitude of sex differences in mammalian mortality patterns is likely shaped by local environmental conditions in interaction with the sex-specific costs of sexual selection.
A plot showing that despite higher male mortality, the ratio of fertile men (18-60) to fertile women (18-40) is almost always greater than 1, and was probably around 1.4 to 1.5 fertile man per fertile women for life expectancies typical of hunter-gatherers.
hist(rbinom(10000, 100, 0.5)) produces a bell-shaped histogram
In this case study, readers will embark on an improbable journey through the heart of Africa to discover how indigenous people cope with the rapid-killing Ebola virus. The Hewletts are the first anthropologists ever invited by the World Health Organization to join a medical intervention team and assist in efforts to control an Ebola outbreak. Their account addresses political, structural, psycho-logical, and cultural factors, along with conventional intervention protocols as problematic to achieving medical objectives. They find obvious historical and cultural answers to otherwise-puzzling questions about why village people often flee, refuse to cooperate, and sometimes physically attack members of intervention teams. Perhaps surprisingly, readers will discover how some cultural practices of local people are helpful and should be incorporated into control procedures. The authors shed new light on a continuing debate about the motivation for human behavior by showing how local responses to epidemics are rooted both in culture and in human nature. Well-supported recommendations emerge from a comparative analysis of Central African cases and pandemics worldwide to suggest how the United States and other countries might use anthropologists and the insights of anthropologists to mount more effective public health cam-paigns, with particular attention to avian flu and bioterrorism.
Most scholars, after all, have no idea that their behavioral cream is getting skimmed for profit. If widely exposed, these next-level predations could build momentum for a nonprofit, academy-led alternative to the oligopolists. As historian Aileen Fyfe has chronicled, the current joint-custody arrangement—nonprofit universities and for-profit publishers—is a recent and reversible development. A community-owned infrastructure is, with slow care, getting built out, with the aim to support new and established scholar-led publishing initiatives.
Three high-impact journals from three of the five scientific publishing oligarchs: Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley
> lemmatize_words("dry") [1] "spin-dry"
The same top words, but organized semantically, with (roughly) hunting-related words to the left, population and group words in the middle, and food words to the right
prehistoric share birdsell information river composition diet recent kind importance represent mother feature determine vegetable region section ethnographic occur nature early ecological development modern chapter structure species tool relationship obtain similar person north land range base model wife territorial control variation collect subsistence organization type environment subsection record provide period datum world basis female exchange increase australia gather human child adult meat low rule culture involve plant game time food marriage family figure aborigine maintain pattern factor behavior relation relate reason age field fish social man hunt kill animal extend hadza evolution economic term eat community tribal square individual unit band group people density work forest eskimo report major varylarge bushman define society exist include hunter camp area deal live situation suggest hand site size life practice require archeological male population system local result south carry occupation marry condition woman tribe move study australian season supply territory difference gatherer percent water disease mean resource day note analysis pleistocene evidence formactivity coast level lee limit mile mammal simple cultural function primary central paper view material kinship find occupy sense total adaptation process common distribution degree remain question aboriginal residence account effect source discussion expect knowledge lack ecology discuss single
kinship how b another game few become although female because activity environment long wife since first both form australian show evidence resource must archeological period seem gatherer part through over gather even person organization use good case pattern little percent different individual time band should man also marriage any term food they one area with may range hadza give what know child its he them other by or among and hunt would my some to tribe age woman people his this far in as from social family australia society much a if the be on there it but all hunter when p i mean unit which that have only of camp can no their our size so who many within at point example include will for group than system such not live we same into do about datum between make population male small year large factor out study human animal where kind provide local present eskimo culture way however great very say early high important density fact type behavior suggest cultural condition old need three rule during site while life base find take subsistence model species material possible two numb work each see fish bushman member certain then problem think
The top 200 words in the original word cloud (not in order of frequency): settlement birdsell vary complex bear archeological specific winter average call understand residence change expect total adaptation region ecology move percent close record share central occupy disease exist feature vegetable community development knowledge common single territory analysis primary distribution occupation maintain reason territorial modern represent level chapter discussion nature increase relationship simple find kinship practice section estimate type water south period eskimo bushman species require condition economic organization subsistence base relate density pattern provide carry obtain north child size animal society evidence researchrule question ecological male tribe tie people life define family female activity gather band unit food forest square bring human model material marry rate kill structure form local time mile hunt marriage site note sense land adult evolution aboriginal fish live term hunter social early australia paper function determine world variation relation supply symposium degree person hadza population hand occur gatherer tool coast mother limit system include situation task variable woman behavior camp datum view plant extend factor resource mean ethnographic individual study detail source cultural tribal australian range remain result meat lack field aborigine suggest culture large game figure report discuss process difference environment importance table involve river pleistocene kind season control exchange collect similar wife mammal diet basis recent subsection prehistoric deal composition observe account
IM IN THE NATURAL HISTORY MUSUEM OMG OMG OMG [Photos of huge dinosaur fossil] OMGGGGGGGG
Azula, from Avata: The Last Airbender