Posted By Marc on January 4, 2012
It is with a sad heart that I post this. My friend of nearly forty years, Bill Craig (aka the Reverend Doctor William Leonard Craig), died suddenly at his home in Toronto on Christmas day. He was truly a gentleman of the old school; a man of style, grace, viscious humour, a love of silly songs and widely read. He will be sorely missed by all who knew him.
Requiescat in pacem
Posted By Marc on December 23, 2011
Jason Antrosio over at Anthropology Report has collected over 100 Anthropology blogs by way of running a survey of the top 10 in 2011. It’s quite the list, and really does show how many different areas we work in.
Posted By Marc on November 8, 2011
Well, I haven’t blogged much this year for a whole variety of reasons, too long to go into here. Let me just say that, to quote Her Royal Highness, it has been a bit of an anno horribilis! Regardless of that, I actually have been working away at various projects, including one I’ll be posting on in the next week or so.
Posted By Marc on July 28, 2011
The recent attacks in Norway by Anders Breivik have some interesting features that are starting to come to light. Scott Stewart, of STRATFOR, just posted an analysis that is worth reprinting. I have a few observations after the article. ”Norway: Lessons from a Successful Lone Wolf Attacker is republished with permission of STRATFOR.”
Posted By Marc on May 25, 2011
It’s been a while since I last posted. In part, that’s because I have been busy and, honestly, also because I haven’t had any fully formed thoughts that I thought worth posting 
.
That said, I just got back from New York on tour with the OBC and our Carnegie Hall debut. It was certainly an “intense” experience but, on the whole, a LOT of fun. Here’s what the NY Times had to say about our Monday concert at Carnegie Hall.
Posted By Marc on October 12, 2010
This letter if from Harold Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Here is his letter of resignation to Curtis G. Callan Jr, Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society.
Anthony Watts describes it thus:
This is an important moment in science history. I would describe it as a letter on the scale of Martin Luther, nailing his 95 theses to the Wittenburg church door. It is worthy of repeating this letter in entirety on every blog that discusses science. (more…)
Posted By Marc on July 13, 2010
In the previous part of this series, I really concentrated on the environment of role expectations and especially, on the boundaries of these. As I was reading the CBC.ca news this morning, I found a story that just illustrated many of the points I made in the last post, especially the points about communications and flexibility around the interpretation of a behaviour. In this post, I want to finish up the remaining two environments in which components of ethical systems (patterns of behaviour and perception) are susceptible to selection pressure.
Posted By Marc on July 11, 2010
In the part 1, I tried to establish certain guidelines for how I am looking at ethics, morality and, to a much lessor degree, group dynamics surrounding these issues. The overarching model I use for this is taken fairly directly from Wm. Calvin’s work on Darwinian bootstrapping (op.cit.) which I have found to be both extremely useful and quite robust.
Posted By Marc on July 10, 2010
This set of posts is a first cut at integrating some ideas I have been working on in one form or another for several years now. While I am really interested in the general case of the evolution of moral and ethical systems within groups, for this specific set of posts, I will only be considering one system: Anthropological ethics regarding operations in war and near-war (i.e. COIN) conditions. My hope is to produce a rough model of a highly complex situation that, with more work, will be increasingly generalizable.
Posted By Marc on June 29, 2010
Apologies for not posting much in the past while. I have been prepping a new course that started last week and, what with my singing commitments, I just haven’t had the time or energy to do much posting. I am hoping to get a series of new posts out over the next week or so. Until then…..
JWC on 
Daniel Gallant on 
MM on 
Mr. Xyz on 
Marc on