Work
In Race, Baker explores, among other things, the nature of civilization, giving 23 criteria by which civilizations may be identified. He explores the relationship between the biological traits and the cultures of five civilizations. Based on these criteria, Baker declared that Mesoamerican societies such as the Aztecs and Maya were not civilizations, and that no indigenous civilizations ever arose in Africa. Baker rejected the methodological relativism that has characterized anthropology since the days of Franz Boas, instead going back to earlier ideas of hereditarianism and cultural evolution.
Together with Michael Polanyi, Baker founded the Society for Freedom in Science in 1940. In March, 1958 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Read more about this topic: John Baker (biologist)
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.”
—Nadine Gordimer (b. 1923)
“In some withdrawn, unpublic mead
Let me sigh upon a reed,
Or in the woods, with leafy din,
Whisper the still evening in:
Some still work give me to do,—
Only—be it near to you!
For I’d rather be thy child
And pupil, in the forest wild,
Than be the king of men elsewhere,
And most sovereign slave of care:
To have one moment of thy dawn,
Than share the city’s year forlorn.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Henry David Thoreau, who never earned much of a living or sustained a relationship with any woman that wasn’t brotherly—who lived mostly under his parents’ roof ... who advocated one day’s work and six days “off” as the weekly round and was considered a bit of a fool in his hometown ... is probably the American writer who tells us best how to live comfortably with our most constant companion, ourselves.”
—Edward Hoagland (b. 1932)