Hi, everybody. This is Scott Satt. I hope that the New Year is treating you well.

Today I wanted to talk briefly about a controversy between two anthropologists, Margaret Mead and Derek Freeman.

Margaret Mead is one of the, in some sense, legendary anthropologists of the 20th century.

She was a doctoral student of Franz Boas, who was a Columbia professor of anthropology.

And he was really the guy who started the movement of cultural relativism.

Cultural relativism is a parasitic idea that I discuss in the parasitic mind because it basically purports that,

you know, everything when you're studying culture is driven by idiosyncratic realities, whether they be historical realities or cultural realities.

So there is no such thing as a universal human nature, and hence cultural relativism

results in the type of the generacy of moral arguments, such as, who are you to judge

whether we should cut off the clitoris

of five-year-old girls. If that's what they do in their culture, then those are the idiosyncrasies

of their culture and you have to study it from that relativistic point of view. Now, why am I talking

about this today? Of course, it's very relevant to my own work in evolutionary psychology where you're

trying to tease out how much of nature versus nurture plays into a particular phenomenon.

But today what I'd like to talk about is this book, The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead,

written by Derek Freeman, who I didn't know.

I thought he had passed away, but I wasn't sure.

And so I decided, oh, let me go back and see, maybe I could invite him on the show.

And I quickly realized or perhaps remember that he had died in 2001.

Well, the main claim to fame, the thing that put Margaret Mead on the map, was that she went to

Samoa as an anthropologist to demonstrate precisely that which her doctoral supervisor had

pioneered, namely this movement of cultural relativism, to show that even when it comes to something

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