Anthropology 2226A/B Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Piltdown Man, Semiotics, Biological Anthropology
Document Summary
Biological (or, physical) anthropology focusses on the biological history, evolutionary relationships, and adaptive diversity of homo sapiens and other primate species (both extant and extinct) Marks notes science is commonly wrong but a self correcting system of knowledge. Piltdown man forgery = fossil of rst man found - link between apes and humans discovered to be fake. Ontology: philosophical study of the nature of being, becoming, existence, or reality. Epistemology: what can be known, and how we can know it (what science is) Semiotics: the study of signs, symbols, and signi cation. It is the study of how meaning is created, not what it is. Marks notes (p. 6) that science, in creating meaning, makes extensive use of metaphors . E. g. , the genetic code ; dna as the book of life ; adaptive landscapes in organismal biology and socioecology, etc. Sometimes ideas that are actually wrong continue to have supporters even years after they have been conclusively refuted .