The final for my very first anthropology class included an essay question, asking what made humans unique from the rest of the animal kingdom; and if we are no different than any other animal species, what makes us worth studying? Of course, every animal species has unique characteristics–things that define it as a separate species. Without those unique things, they wouldn’t be species, would they? Naturally, humans are no different. We are unique in many ways. That uniqueness, however, does not go nearly as far as we’ve congratulated ourselves. Copernicus moved us from the center of the universe; Galileo showed us that all Creation does not revolve around us; Darwin forced us to accept that we began the same as any other creature. Still we cling to the last balwark of our superiority; that we are still Hamlet’s “paragon of animals,” the natural end-point of billions of years of evolutionary progress. For untold millennia, we crawled up through the mud; a long epic of our victorious triumph eventually revealing us, in all our glory.

Driving home from my cousin’s wedding in North Carolina, Jason and I spent most of our time winding through the mountains of West Virginia. Until you’ve been there yourself, you cannot comprehend how appropriate - or understated - the state motto, “wild and wonderful,” truly is. The Appalachias are at their most dramatic in West Virginia: steep, tree-laden peaks surpass the clouds as mist rises up from the valleys below. And if that wasn’t enough, the mountains appeared to be flamboyantly showing off for us; we stopped at an overlook just in time to see a double rainbow stretching above two mountains. We saw two more rainbows on that same trip. West Virginia natives often refer to the state as “almost heaven.” Just from what I could see from the highway, all I can say is, “almost?”

One of the most common objections people pose against the anarcho-primitivist world view is that to adopt a hunter-gatherer way of life is to somehow “go back” to an inferior evolutionary stage that humans were supposed to have already gone through. This argument presupposes a number of inaccurate ideas about evolution in general and cultural evolution in particular. Biological evolution consists of adaptation to a given environment. When that environment changes, those best adapted to it die off. A popular example is the Neandertals, whose short, stout forms were extraordinarily well adapted to Ice Age Europe, but died off once the world began to warm. Neandertals were both physically more powerful than Homo sapiens sapiens and, despite popular belief, showed no signs of being any less intelligent. There is no evidence that this shows any kind of evolutionary “progress”; if anything, it might have been the opposite. Species do not “improve,” becoming more and more perfect over time. A successful adaptation to any environment can still kill a species off when that environment changes.

Blogs! They’re out to change the world! They nearly decided an election. They blew up scandal after scandal. We called bloggers 2004’s people of the year. They’re now featured on 24-hour cable news channels. Even people who barely know how to turn a computer on are hearing about blogs. 27% of Americans read blogs (well, no, not really…) In fact, about the only thing about blogs that’s still hard to come by is what the hell they are.

Gay and lesbian citizens of the Navajo Nation almost faced a serious setback last month when the tribal council unanimously voted to outlaw same-sex marriage. To anyone who’s familiar with traditional Navajo culture, the very idea seems absurd. These are the people who honored the nadleeh - the man with two spirits, one masculine, one feminine. Whenever such a man was born in a Navajo community, he would be permitted to dress like, act like, and perform the duties of a woman. He could even marry another man, and the community considered that to be equivalent to any heterosexual marriage. However, in recent years, the traditional Navajo point of view on homosexuality has been so devastated by western influence that… well, that we now have Navajos trying to ban same-sex marriage.

Ter Ellingson has an interesting thesis. In The Myth of the Noble Savage, Ellingson argues that the myth of the noble savage was never widely believed–a straw man made to be universally debunked. I haven’t read Ellingson’s account, so I can’t speak much to it except that it seems to contradict the entire body of Romantic thought. The term “noble savage” first appeared in English with John Dryden in 1672, though it originated earlier, in 1609, with Lescarbot’s Histoire de la Nouvelle France. Lescarbot noted that among the Mi’kmaq, everyone was allowed to hunt–an activity enjoyed only by Europe’s nobility. This led Lescarbot to remark that “the Savages are truly noble.” However, to trace the etymology of a popular phrase is a very different problem from the history of that idea it expresses.

What universities were to conservatives in past decades, primary and secondary school appear to be now. Last year, FOX News ran a powerfully unimportant story on teachers switching from red ink to purple ink for fear that red ink is too harsh and hurts a child’s self-esteem. More recently, two members of the ultra-conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, published One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture is Eroding Self-Reliance, the first chapter of which deals with the banning of dodgeball and tag in some schools.

Every species has something unique, something that defines it as different from everything else. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a distinct species, it would be some other species. In a sense, every species is a hypothesis being proven. Evolution is trial and error; every species is working out its hypothesis, to see whether or not it is true. Protosimians were a hypothesis that binocular vision and forward-facing eyes were a good idea. Primates tested the opposable thumb. Our genus, Homo, is testing a hypothesis, too. When we hear it, we may not be able to find any hint of it in the civilized world we inhabit, yet we can intuit its truth right down to our bones. It is the foundation of human nature, and everything that defines who we are. That hypothesis is that small, egalitarian communities of free people work best.