By Scott Atran
What's it approximately human nature that makes our species in a position to pondering scientifically? encouraged via a debate among Noam Chomsky and Jean Piaget, Scott Atran strains the improvement of ordinary historical past from Aristotle to Darwin, and demonstrates how the technological know-how of vegetation and animals has emerged from the typical conceptions of folkbiology. the writer proceeds not just from the extra conventional philosophical, old or sociological views, yet from some degree of view he considers extra simple and essential to all of those: that of cognition.
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Additional info for Cognitive foundations of natural history: towards an anthropology of science
With every new train line that reached the coast, every new hotel that opened, and every new craving for a marketable resource, the region drew closer to the furious pace of change and consumption that possessed the rest of the nation—and then surpassed it. The Gulf had become America’s sea. None of this happened apart from nature’s influence. Embracing Homer’s truth that we cannot divorce ourselves from the physical context, this book diverges from the traditional historical narrative that leaves humans gamboling across unacknowledged landscapes, nature erased and dismissed.
For years, sporting journals had been extolling the sea in America’s backyard as an angler’s paradise, a last unspoiled frontier where wildlife still outnumbered people. Among all the outstanding fishing holes around the long, arcing coast from south Florida to south Texas, Homosassa was a perennial favorite. ”3 What also caught the attention of sporting journals was the distinct imprint of a historical place, one wholly excluded from the central narrative of the American experience. You could travel the coast all day without seeing another person, yet everywhere encounter signs of a vibrant human past in the countless aboriginal mounds that rose out of the flat wildlands.
In 1934, when the American poet Wallace Stevens was at Key West taking in watery sights of the Gulf of Mexico, he imagined at times he was looking out at another sea. ” Comparisons of this sort date back to early European contact, when observers were trying to recreate a familiar place in spite of obvious physical differences. The Mediterranean is younger, larger, deeper, and bluer than the generally shallow and greenish-blue Gulf of Mexico. Whereas the younger sea has barely detectable tides rising and falling on cliff-faced shores, the older has vivid ebbs and flows, and hardly a single rock, no vertical projections taller than sand dunes and the rare red-clay bluff.
Cognitive foundations of natural history: towards an anthropology of science by Scott Atran