In the past few years I’ve been writing papers on my lifelong interests. Here are the first three.
Hunter-Gatherer Diets and Activity as a Model for Health Promotion: Challenges, Responses, and Confirmations Melvin Konner and S. Boyd Eaton, Evolutionary Anthropology 2022, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1002/evan.21987.
This paper updates the paradigm that Boyd Eaton (first author) and I first fielded in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1985. Here we describe the science behind the “Paleo diet” hype, and answer our critics over four decades.
Is History the Same as Evolution? No. Is It Independent of Evolution? Certainly Not. Melvin Konner, Evolutionary Psychology 20(1), 1-18, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/147049211069137.
The teacher who influenced me most was Dora Venit, with whom I took two years of World History. She taught that a dark human nature could be inferred from our dismal past. I believed we could be anything we want to be. Sixty years of research and theory in evolution, genes, brain, and mind—as well as ongoing history—prove she was right.
Nine Levels of Explanation: A Proposed Expansion of Tinbergen’s Four-Level Framework for Understanding the Causes of Behavior Melvin Konner, Human Nature 32, 748-793, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-021-09414-8.
This paper describes a model I have taught for half a century. The great ethologist Niko Tinbergen named four levels of explanation: evolution, development, physiology, and environmental triggers. I broke evolution into phylogeny and natural selection; development into genetics, maturation, early environment effects, and general environmental shaping; physiology into slow (hormones and metabolism) and fast (neural circuits) processes; and immediate triggers, yielding nine levels.
These papers may not be my last word, but nobody lives forever, and I wouldn’t mind if they capped my intellectual legacy. Given time enough and mind, I might add one on cultural transmission and one on hunter-gatherer childhood. We will see.
Glad to see you back in action.
I met you in the 80’s at a conference in Connecticut and have respectfully followed your work since. Do keep writing. You are a touchstone of sanity in this complex, frustrating, out of control capitalistic world we currently inhabit.
Best,
Anne bergman
I remember well, Anne. Thank you for your kind words. Please forgive the long delay, and be well.
I have a question after reading Women After All. I’m wondering if the Siberian Silver Fox Domestication Experiment might offer some hope for the future of the human species. For a very long time, the most murderous warriors often had an advantage in passing on their genes to future generations. Now that women today, more often than in the past, get to choose who the father of their children will be, isn’t it likely that they might choose someone more like Mister Rogers than Atilla the Hun? Could we already be in the process of evolving into a more humane species?
Sorry for the delay. I think the answer is yes, both past and future. Here’s my review of a book by Richard Wrangham suggesting that the elimination of hyper-aggressive men can help explain how we became human—although he thinks it was by killing them, while I agree with you that female choice could have done the job. https://www.melvinkonner.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Konner-review-of-Wrangham-How-Early-Humans-Handled-Aggression-The-Atlantic.pdf
The Y Fully Sequenced
Article CNN today
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/25/world/y-chromosome-fully-sequenced-scn
Dr..Mel
Wondering if you take part in or follow
these studies and how it’s relatable to ‘maleness’ in Women After All?