Search results for query: *

If the person is Native American?

People can be racist without being white supremacist. People with Native Anerican background, for example, can be racist against blacks, Asians, or any other group without being white supremacist.

Not sure I may not be breaking forum rules by singing out posters who haven't even been active in this thread, but Derec and Trausti come to mind.

I honestly have no idea what any of that means. You suspect you have a multiple personality "disorder" and therefore prefer a pronoun that doesn't strongly imply the singular?

That's not the scenario we're talking about though. People in 1990s Austria were very much accustomed to sex-segregated restrooms. They were the norm. They just weren't universal. Let's let her speak for herself: The way I parse that is that her preferred solution would indeed be no trans...

I'll try not to get involved in your two goading (or not goading) each other, but linguistics is what I have a degree in. And from a linguistic perspective, it's clear that singular "they" is at least as old as Modern English. Here's an example from Shakespeare: " There's not a man I meet but...

Also, the religious justifications of cultural practices are often pretty post-hoc. You mentioned the "sworn virgins" of Northern Albania and Montenegro early in the thread. What you didn't mention is that it is a practice that was shared by Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Muslim groups, as well...

I'd be willing to argue that the spread of Christianity was the most immaterial aspect of the transformation I mentioned which European societies underwent in the second half of the first millennium AD. For one, a large part of the Continent was already Christian by 500 AD - all of the Roman and...

Can you give an argument for "The introduction of sheep didn't materially alter Dine culture"? That seems like a very preposterous claim. Next you're going to tell me the introduction of horses didn't materially alter Mapuche culture? At any rate, absent contemporary sources before the...

I'm sorry that's just not true. It's not even remotely plausible from the get go. As it did anywhere else in the world, the end of the last glaciation brought massive climate change to Australia. A culture cannot remain "essentially the same" when their old ways no longer work. What's more, we...

Is culture ever static, though? 21st century Catholicism is arguably a very different beast from 18th century Catholicism, and again from 15th century Catholicism. Even in more down to earth areas like what crops and animals we farm four what purposes, there are significant changes over time...

I don't think it's that hard to define. An instinctive behaviour is one that requires no environmental input, or only very unspecific input, to emerge, and, within the "normal" range of environments, doesn't co-vary with variation in the environment. To circle back to gender roles, soccer being...

Wherever interindividual learning is faithful enough to produce recogisable shared patterns of behaviour beyond the instinctive ones, there is culture. It is probably true that in most instances, the capacity for social learning was and continues to be selected because of the benefits of...

Of course, as is usually the case in biology, there is a fuzzy line and feedback loops galore. Back in the pleistocene, when some wolf packs learned to exploit human leftovers, staying close to humans without attacking them or provoking attacks was a culturally learned behaviour among wolves. It...

Of course it has, that's what evolution does. The capacity to learn, the processes by which learning (and more rarely, though prominently in humans, teaching) occur, and the possibility space of what can be learned by a given organism, are. The content of what is being learned, within the...

A rhizome several kilometers long? There's got to be an extended twilight zone where the light gradually diminishes...

It's a similar result produced by a very different process. In one case, evolution of instincts, in the other case, learned behavior based on, but qualitatively different from instincts.

Ants have been farming aphids for millions of years. That doesn't imply they have a culture of farming, the way humans have. When the Spanish brought sheep to the new world in the 16th century, the Diné/Navajo quickly learned to farm them, but that is not instinctive behaviour. If you'd...

Politesse didn't just say "learn", but "learn new patterns of behavior". Obtaining information about a food source or a foe from a conspecific and doing exactly as you would do if you'd found out yourself isn't learning in that sense. It isn't a new pattern of behaviour, it's applying an innate...

it certainly is if you consider behaviour and cognition as isomorphic. I'm not sure that's a notion most cognitive scientists today would subscribe to. How many of these species' recent evolution includes a fairly rapid decrease of sexual dimorphism, plausibly triggered by the ancestral male...