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https://www.iop.org/about/news/2023-nobel-prize-physics-winners-announced

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Even if you're not an anthropologist, you've probably encountered one of this field's most influential notions, known as Man the Hunter. The theory proposes that hunting was a major driver of human evolution and that men carried this activity out to the exclusion of women. It holds that human ancestors had a division of labor, rooted in biological differences between males and females, in which males evolved to hunt and provide, and females tended to children and domestic duties. It assumes that males are physically superior to females and that pregnancy and child-rearing reduce or eliminate a female's ability to hunt.

Man the Hunter has dominated the study of human evolution for nearly half a century and pervaded popular culture. It is represented in museum dioramas and textbook figures, Saturday morning cartoons and feature films. The thing is, it's wrong.

Mounting evidence from exercise science indicates that women are physiologically better suited than men to endurance efforts such as running marathons. This advantage bears on questions about hunting because a prominent hypothesis contends that early humans are thought to have pursued prey on foot over long distances until the animals were exhausted. Furthermore, the fossil and archaeological records, as well as ethnographic studies of modern-day hunter-gatherers, indicate that women have a long history of hunting game. We still have much to learn about female athletic performance and the lives of prehistoric women. Nevertheless, the data we do have signal that it is time to bury Man the Hunter for good.

The theory rose to prominence in 1968, when anthropologists Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore published Man the Hunter, an edited collection of scholarly papers presented at a 1966 symposium on contemporary hunter-gatherer societies. The volume drew on ethnographic, archaeological and paleoanthropological evidence to argue that hunting is what drove human evolution and resulted in our suite of unique features. "Man's life as a hunter supplied all the other ingredients for achieving civilization: the genetic variability, the inventiveness, the systems of vocal communication, the coordination of social life," anthropologist William S. Laughlin writes in chapter 33 of the book. Because men were supposedly the ones hunting, proponents of the Man the Hunter theory assumed evolution was acting primarily on men, and women were merely passive beneficiaries of both the meat supply and evolutionary progress.

But Man the Hunter' s contributors often ignored evidence, sometimes in their own data, that countered their suppositions. For example, Hitoshi Watanabe focused on ethnographic data about the Ainu, an Indigenous population in northern Japan and its surrounding areas. Although Watanabe documented Ainu women hunting, often with the aid of dogs, he dismissed this finding in his interpretations and placed the focus squarely on men as the primary meat winners. He was superimposing the idea of male superiority through hunting onto the Ainu and into the past.

This fixation on male superiority was a sign of the times not just in academia but in society at large. In 1967, the year between the Man the Hunter conference and the publication of the edited volume, 20-year-old Kathrine Switzer entered the Boston Marathon under the name "K. V. Switzer," which obscured her gender. There were no official rules against women entering the race; it just was not done. When officials discovered that Switzer was a woman, race manager Jock Semple attempted to push her physically off the course.

At that time, the conventional wisdom was that women were incapable of completing such a physically demanding task and that attempting to do so could harm their precious reproductive capacities. Scholars following Man the Hunter dogma relied on this belief in women's limited physical capacities and the assumed burden of pregnancy and lactation to argue that only men hunted. Women had children to rear instead.

Today these biased assumptions persist in both the scientific literature and the public consciousness. Granted, women have recently been shown hunting in movies such as Prey, the most recent installment of the popular Predator franchise, and on cable programs such as Naked and Afraid and Women Who Hunt. But social media trolls have viciously critiqued and labeled these depictions as part of a politically correct feminist agenda. They insist the creators of such works are trying to rewrite gender roles and evolutionary history in an attempt to co-opt "traditionally masculine" social spheres. Bystanders might be left wondering whether portrayals of women hunters are trying to make the past more inclusive than it really was-or whether Man the Hunter-style assumptions about the past are attempts to project sexism backward in time. Our recent surveys of the physiological and archaeological evidence for hunting capability and sexual division of labor in human evolution answer this question.

Before getting into the evidence, we need to first talk about sex and gender. "Sex" typically refers to biological sex, which can be defined by myriad characteristics such as chromosomes, hormone levels, gonads, external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics. The terms "female" and "male" are often used in relation to biological sex. "Gender" refers to how an individual identifies-woman, man, nonbinary, and so forth. Much of the scientific literature confuses and conflates female/male and woman/man terminology without providing definitions to clarify what it is referring to and why those terms were chosen. For the purpose of describing anatomical and physiological evidence, most of the literature uses "female" and "male," so we use those words here when discussing the results of such studies. For ethnographic and archaeological evidence, we are attempting to reconstruct social roles, for which the terms "woman" and "man" are usually used. Unfortunately, both these word sets assume a binary, which does not exist biologically, psychologically or socially. Sex and gender both exist as a spectrum, but when citing the work of others, it is difficult to add that nuance.

It also bears mentioning that much of the research into exercise physiology, paleoanthropology, archaeology and ethnography has historically been conducted by men and focused on males. For example, Ella Smith of the Australian Catholic University and her colleagues found that in studies of nutrition and supplements, only 23 percent of participants were female. In studies focusing on athletic performance, Emma Cowley of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her colleagues found, only 3 percent of publications had female-only participants; 63 percent of publications looked exclusively at males. This massive disparity means we still know very little about female athletic performance, training and nutrition, leaving athletic trainers and coaches to mostly treat females as small males. It also means that much of the work we have to rely on to make our physiological arguments about female hunters in prehistory is based on research with small human sample sizes or rodent studies. We hope this state of affairs will inspire the next generation of scientists to ensure that females are represented in such studies. But even with the limited data available to us, we can show that Man the Hunter is a flawed theory and make the case that females in early human communities hunted, too.

From a biological standpoint, there are undeniable differences between females and males. When we discuss these differences, we are typically referring to means, averages of one group compared with another. Means obscure the vast range of variation in humans. For instance, although males tend to be larger and to have bigger hearts and lungs and more muscle mass, there are plenty of females who fall within the typical male range; the inverse is also true.

Overall, females are metabolically better suited for endurance activities, whereas males excel at short, powerful burst-type activities. You can think of it as marathoners (females) versus powerlifters (males). Much of this difference seems to be driven by the powers of the hormone estrogen.

Given the fitness world's persistent touting of the hormone testosterone for athletic success, you'd be forgiven for not knowing that estrogen, which females typically produce more of than males, plays an incredibly important role in athletic performance. It makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint, however. The estrogen receptor-the protein that estrogen binds to in order to do its work-is deeply ancient. Joseph Thornton of the University of Chicago and his colleagues have estimated that it is around 1.2 billion to 600 million years old-roughly twice as old as the testosterone receptor. In addition to helping regulate the reproductive system, estrogen influences fine-motor control and memory, enhances the growth and development of neurons, and helps to prevent hardening of the arteries.

Important for the purposes of this discussion, estrogen also improves fat metabolism. During exercise, estrogen seems to encourage the body to use stored fat for energy before stored carbohydrates. Fat contains more calories per gram than carbohydrates do, so it burns more slowly, which can delay fatigue during endurance activity. Not only does estrogen encourage fat burning, but it also promotes greater fat storage within muscles-marbling if you will-which makes that fat's energy more readily available. Adiponectin, another hormone that is typically present in higher amounts in females than in males, further enhances fat metabolism while sparing carbohydrates for future use, and it protects muscle from breakdown. Anne Friedlander of Stanford University and her colleagues found that females use as much as 70 percent more fat for energy during exercise than males.

Correspondingly, the muscle fibers of females differ from those of males. Females have more type I, or "slow-twitch," muscle fibers than males do. These fibers generate energy slowly by using fat. They are not all that powerful, but they take a long time to become fatigued. They are the endurance muscle fibers. Males, in contrast, typically have more type II ("fast-twitch") fibers, which use carbohydrates to provide quick energy and a great deal of power but tire rapidly.

Females also tend to have a greater number of estrogen receptors on their skeletal muscles compared with males. This arrangement makes these muscles more sensitive to estrogen, including to its protective effect after physical activity. Estrogen's ability to increase fat metabolism and regulate the body's response to the hormone insulin can help prevent muscle breakdown during intense exercise. Furthermore, estrogen appears to have a stabilizing effect on cell membranes that might otherwise rupture from acute stress brought on by heat and exercise. Ruptured cells release enzymes called creatine kinases, which can damage tissues.

Studies of females and males during and after exercise bolster these claims. Linda Lamont of the University of Rhode Island and her colleagues, as well as Michael Riddell of York University in Canada and his colleagues, found that females experienced less muscle breakdown than males after the same bouts of exercise. Tellingly, in a separate study Mazen J. Hamadeh of York University and his colleagues found that males supplemented with estrogen suffered less muscle breakdown during cycling than those who didn't receive estrogen supplements. In a similar vein, research led by Ron Maughan of the University of St Andrews in Scotland found that females were able to perform significantly more weight-lifting repetitions than males at the same percentages of their maximal strength.

If females are better able to use fat for sustained energy and keep their muscles in better condition during exercise, then they should be able to run greater distances with less fatigue relative to males. In fact, an analysis of marathons carried out by Robert Deaner of Grand Valley State University demonstrated that females tend to slow down less as the race progresses compared with males.

If you follow long-distance races, you might be thinking, wait-males are outperforming females in endurance events! But this is only sometimes the case. Females are more regularly dominating ultraendurance events such as the more than 260-mile Montane Spine foot race through England and Scotland, the 21-mile swim across the English Channel and the 4,300-mile Trans Am cycling race across the U.S. Sometimes female athletes compete in these races while attending to the needs of their children. In 2018 English runner Sophie Power ran the 105-mile Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc race in the Alps while still breastfeeding her three-month-old at rest stations.

The inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports. As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best. Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women's events because of the belief that they will make the women "artificially faster," as though women were not actually doing the running themselves.

The modern physiological evidence, along with historical examples, exposes deep flaws in the idea that physical inferiority prevented females from partaking in hunting during our evolutionary past. The evidence from prehistory further undermines this notion.

Consider the skeletal remains of ancient people. Differences in body size between females and males of a species, a phenomenon called sexual size dimorphism, correlate with social structure. In species with pronounced size dimorphism, larger males compete with one another for access to females, and among the great apes larger males socially dominate females. Low sexual size dimorphism is characteristic of egalitarian and monogamous species. Modern humans have low sexual size dimorphism compared with the other great apes. The same goes for human ancestors spanning the past two million years, suggesting that the social structure of humans changed from that of our chimpanzeelike ancestors.

Anthropologists also look at damage on our ancestors' skeletons for clues to their behavior. Neandertals are the best-studied extinct members of the human family because we have a rich fossil record of their remains. Neandertal females and males do not differ in their trauma patterns, nor do they exhibit sex differences in pathology from repetitive actions. Their skeletons show the same patterns of wear and tear. This finding suggests that they were doing the same things, from ambush-hunting large game animals to processing hides for leather. Yes, Neandertal women were spearing woolly rhinoceroses, and Neandertal men were making clothing.

Males living in the Upper Paleolithic-the cultural period between roughly 45,000 and 10,000 years ago, when early modern humans entered Europe-do show higher rates of a set of injuries to the right elbow region known as thrower's elbow, which could mean they were more likely than females to throw spears. But it does not mean women were not hunting, because this period is also when people invented the bow and arrow, hunting nets and fishing hooks. These more sophisticated tools enabled humans to catch a wider variety of animals; they were also easier on hunters' bodies. Women may have favored hunting tactics that took advantage of these new technologies.

What is more, females and males were buried in the same way in the Upper Paleolithic. Their bodies were interred with the same kinds of artifacts, or grave goods, suggesting that the groups they lived in did not have social hierarchies based on sex.

Ancient DNA provides additional clues about social structure and potential gender roles in ancestral human communities. Patterns of variation in the Y chromosome, which is paternally inherited, and in mitochondrial DNA, which is maternally inherited, can reveal differences in how males and females dispersed after reaching maturity. Thanks to analyses of DNA extracted from fossils, we now know of three Neandertal groups that engaged in patrilocality-wherein males were more likely to stay in the group they were born into and females moved to other groups-although we do not know how widespread this practice was.

Patrilocality is believed to have been an attempt to avoid incest by trading potential mates with other groups. Nevertheless, many Neandertals show both genetic and anatomical evidence of repeated inbreeding in their ancestry. They lived in small, nomadic groups with low population densities and endured frequent local extinctions, which produced much lower levels of genetic diversity than we see in living humans. This is probably why we don't see any evidence in their skeletons of sex-based differences in behavior. For those practicing a foraging subsistence strategy in small family groups, flexibility and adaptability are much more important than rigid roles, gendered or otherwise. Individuals get injured or die, and the availability of animal and plant foods changes with the seasons. All group members need to be able to step into any role depending on the situation, whether that role is hunter or breeding partner.

Observations of recent and contemporary foraging societies provide direct evidence of women participating in hunting. The most cited examples come from the Agta people of the Philippines. Agta women hunt while menstruating, pregnant and breastfeeding, and they have the same hunting success as Agta men.

They are hardly alone. A recent study of ethnographic data spanning the past 100 years-much of which was ignored by Man the Hunter contributors-found that women from a wide range of cultures hunt animals for food. Abigail Anderson and Cara Wall-Scheffler of Seattle Pacific University and their colleagues report that 79 percent of the 63 foraging societies with clear descriptions of their hunting strategies feature women hunters. The women participate in hunting regardless of their childbearing status. These findings directly challenge the Man the Hunter assumption that women's bodies and childcare responsibilities limit their efforts to gathering foods that cannot run away.

So much about female exercise physiology and the lives of prehistoric women remains to be discovered. But the idea that in the past men were hunters and women were not is absolutely unsupported by the limited evidence we have. Female physiology is optimized for exactly the kinds of endurance activities involved in procuring game animals for food. And ancient women and men appear to have engaged in the same foraging activities rather than upholding a sex-based division of labor. It was the arrival some 10,000 years ago of agriculture, with its intensive investment in land, population growth and resultant clumped resources, that led to rigid gendered roles and economic inequality.

Now when you think of "cave people," we hope, you will imagine a mixed-sex group of hunters encircling an errant reindeer or knapping stone tools together rather than a heavy-browed man with a club over one shoulder and a trailing bride. Hunting may have been remade as a masculine activity in recent times, but for most of human history, it belonged to everyone.

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The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong

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The influential idea that in the past men were hunters and women were not isn’t supported by the available evidence

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Faster Than We Thought Possible - Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 Explained

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A Chinese court has sentenced He Jiankui, the scientist who sparked global controversy last year when he claimed to have created the world's first "gene-edited" children, to three years in prison for violating medical regulations.

He shocked the scientific community when he announced at a conference in Hong Kong that he had created genetically modified twin sisters, dubbed Lulu and Nana, and that a third child was on the way.

The court in Shenzhen found He guilty of "illegal medical practices" and in addition to the prison sentence fined him 3m yuan (£327,360), according to the state news agency, Xinhua. Two others on He's research team received lesser fines and sentences.

"The three accused did not have the proper certification to practise medicine, and in seeking fame and wealth, deliberately violated national regulations in scientific research and medical treatment," the court said, according to Xinhua. "They've crossed the bottom line of ethics in scientific research and medical ethics."

He said he used a gene-editing procedure known as Crispr-Cas9 to rewrite the DNA in the girls' embryos. The scientist claimed the modifications would make the children immune to HIV by turning a gene called CCR5 into a mutant form that prevents the virus from invading cells.

But the court found He had forged documents from an ethics review panel that were used to recruit couples for the research. The couples that enrolled had a man with HIV and a woman without and were offered IVF in return for taking part.

Zhang Renli, who worked with He, was sentenced to two years in prison and fined 1m yuan. Colleague Qin Jinzhou received an 18-month sentence, but with a two-year reprieve, and a 500,000 yuan fine.

He's experiments, which were carried out on seven embryos in late 2018, sent shockwaves through the medical and scientific world. The work was swiftly condemned for deceiving vulnerable patients and using a risky, untested procedure with no medical justification. Earlier this month, MIT Technology Review released excerpts from an early manuscript of He's work. It casts serious doubts on his claims to have made the children immune to HIV.

The HIV virus gets inside cells by latching on to a protein encoded by the CCR5 gene. But a small percentage of people carry a natural mutation that the virus cannot attach to, making them effectively immune to the disease. He attempted to recreate this mutation by rewriting the DNA in the embryos that couples donated. Fyodor Urnov, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, told MIT Technology Review that He's claim to have recreated the CCR5 mutation was "a deliberate falsehood". Instead, the team created new mutations in the target gene and apparently elsewhere in the genome, too, the consequences of which are unknown.

Even as the scientific community turned against He, the scientist defended his work and said he was proud of having created Lulu and Nana. A third child has since been born as a result of the experiments.

Robin Lovell-Badge at the Francis Crick Institute in London said it was "far too premature" for anyone to pursue genome editing on embryos that are intended to lead to pregnancies. "At this stage we do not know if the methods will ever be sufficiently safe and efficient, although the relevant science is progressing rapidly, and new methods can look promising. It is also important to have standards established, including detailed regulatory pathways, and appropriate means of governance."

These aspects are being looked at by the Academies Commission and by a WHO committee, both of which are due to report in 2020.

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Chinese scientist who edited babies' genes jailed for three years

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A Chinese court has sentenced He Jiankui, the scientist who sparked global controversy last year when he claimed to have created the world's first "gene-edited" children, to three years in prison for violating medical regulations.

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HISPANIC HISTORY 21st CENTURY GREAT DEPRESSION ASIAN HISTORY WORLD WAR I WORLD WAR II COLD WAR IMMIGRATION

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Explore National Geographic. A world leader in geography, cartography and exploration.

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Joe Biden, America's president, urged Israel's prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, to extend a four-day truce with Hamas, which is due to end on Monday, to allow for the release of more hostages...

Israeli forces killed eight Palestinians in the occupied West Bank...

Nearly 100 people died as a result of flooding in Somalia, according to the country's news agency...

China's industrial profits rose 2.7% year on year in October, marking a third consecutive month of growth...

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The Economist | World News, Economics, Politics, Business & Finance

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Authoritative global news and analysis. Offering fair-minded, fact-checked coverage of world politics, economics, business, science and tech, culture and more

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A People’s Journey, A Nation’s Story | National Museum of African American History and Culture

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A new analysis identifies four life-size human figures and an 11-foot rattlesnake drawn on the ceiling of an unnamed cavern

Megan Gannon

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A new analysis identifies four life-size human figures and an 11-foot rattlesnake drawn on the ceiling of an unnamed cavern Megan Gannon Get the History newsletter By signing up for this email, you are agreeing to receive news, offers, and information from Smithsonian magazine and our partners. Click to visit our Privacy Policy.

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TRADING ECONOMICS | 20 million INDICATORS FROM 196 COUNTRIES

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View more than 20 million economic indicators for 196 countries. Get free indicators, Historical Data, Charts, News and Forecasts for 196 countries.

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The Bodleian Libraries is a group of 26 libraries that serve the University of Oxford, open to staff, students and other readers.

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Music is a versatile and culturally diverse art of organizing sound to express emotions and it may mean different things to different people. Music is a universal form of expression; it is defined as a sound made by someone or something that can be heard.

While different people have their own set of musical meanings, music also refers to the combining of several elements such as rhythms, melodies, tonality, harmony, and scales in order to create a composition or song.

Key Takeaways

Music is the art of arranging sound to communicate, entertain, or convey emotion on an emotional level.

Music is combining rhythms, melodies, harmony, and more to create songs and compositions, each with its own personal meaning.

The history of music goes way back to ancient times, long before it was recorded.

Melody is formed by different musical notes in a sequence to make a memorable and catchy tune.

Rhythm in music is the pattern of beats and timing.

Harmony adds richness and complexity to music by combining different notes or sounds in a way that complements the melody.

Music serves as a universal language that conveys ideas and messages without words.

Music can have many meanings for different people. Music can be healing, comforting, educational, and it can even inspire ideas (such as in the case of songwriters). Music is an important part of most people's lives and it often provides an outlet to express feelings that otherwise might not find their way out.

Music takes on many forms and can be used to communicate different things; it can appear very positive and uplifting, or it can seem tragic and depressing. Music can make you feel happy, sad, or even inspire you to create something new. Music is very influential and it will continue to enrich our lives in many ways.

What is the real purpose of music?

Music is an art form that has been around for many years. Through music, we can express ourselves and communicate with others. Music may have begun as a form of entertainment, but it can become therapeutic when people listen to it to help work through issues they are struggling with.

This goes to show how powerful music is because it can affect people in various ways, depending on how it's defined and expressed. There are many purposes and meanings to music; they differ depending on how it's communicated or defined.

The origins of music date back to prehistoric times, long before recorded history. Music likely began when early humans discovered they could make sounds by using their voices, body percussion, and primitive instruments such as drums, flutes, and simple stringed instruments.

In essence, music has been important in human history since ancient times. People from different cultures used it to express themselves, and it became a language everyone could understand and love.

Melody is the most important component of music. It is like the tune or the main musical line you can sing or hum. Melody is made up of individual notes that are grouped together to carry the most memorable and recognizable notes.

Rhythm is the element of music that deals with time, specifically those elements known as meter and tempo. Rhythm gives music its groove and helps musicians play together in time.

It also makes the music come alive and gets us excited, and scientists have discovered that it's closely linked to our emotions and other psychological elements.

Harmony is the use of multiple pitches to create a chord. It is a combination of notes that acts as the basis for melody. These notes are usually played simultaneously and add extra layers of sound that make music more interesting and beautiful.

Music can have many different types of chords, each providing a foundation for harmony and the overall structure of a piece of music. If there is no harmony in music, it might consist solely of a single melody line, which can sound simple, monotonous, or less engaging.

Music doesn't possess a singular, fixed meaning; rather, its definition varies depending on individual perspectives and contexts. Comprising elements like melody, rhythm, and harmony, music is a multifaceted art form.

Originally, music was for fun and bringing people together, but it became much more. People now use it to express themselves, connect with others worldwide, and even for therapy. Music has been around for ages, and it will keep influencing future generations.

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Music is a versatile and culturally diverse art of organizing sound to express emotions and it may mean different things to different people. Music is a universal form of expression; ... Read more

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international convention against doping in sport

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for just, inclusive, resilient and democratic societies

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Psychology Today: Health, Help, Happiness + Find a Therapist

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View the latest from the world of psychology: from behavioral research to practical guidance on relationships, mental health and addiction. Find help from our directory of therapists, psychologists and counselors.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fields_Medal

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I often argue against labeling art-especially our own art-"Good" or "Bad". I believe there's something to be learned and gained from every piece of art we make, even if it's just a release of mental blobbies.

But our judgment often creeps in anyways, so it's worth digging into how we respond to our art.

4 Theories for Judging Art

Your response to your art stems from what you believe art is and what its overall purpose is. There are 4 main theories for judging whether a piece of art successful: Imitationalism, Formalism, Instrumentalism, and Emotionalism.

Chances are, you already believe in one of these theories, even if you've never heard of them. Realizing which theory resonates most with you can help you make crucial decisions in your artmaking. Or perhaps you'll find that you thought you believed one theory, but you actually believe another!

I purposefully did not include example artworks below, because I don't want to influence which theory you are drawn to based on the pieces I chose. Try to really see which theory fits best with your true core beliefs!

Ok, let's take a look at the four theories.

Imitationalism

Art is good when it imitates reality.

An Imitationalist artist focuses on mimicking and representing real life. In a successful piece of art, the textures, light, shadows, human proportions, and perspective are all highly realistic, as if you could reach out and touch them.

Formalism

Art is good when it masters the artistic elements and principles.

A Formalist artist focuses on an artwork's form-the way its made and what it looks like. In a successful piece of art, the visual features are most important: line quality, color, composition, and other artistic elements and principles.

Instrumentalism

Art is good when it communicates a message.

An Instrumentalist artist focuses on context and message. A successful piece of art is an instrument to persuade the audience or provide commentary. It is often political, social, moral, or thought-provoking.

Emotionalism

Art is good when it evokes an emotional response.

An Emotionalist artist focuses on the expression of emotion. A successful piece of art communicates an emotion, but more importantly, it pulls out an emotional reaction from the viewer.

What Makes Good Art to You?

Personally, I'm a mix of Emotionalism + Formalism. I focus on the expression of my own emotions and moods and aim to evoke those same emotions in the viewer. However, my background is in Graphic Design, so I also have a strong love for the formal aspects of an artwork, like composition, line, and color.

I am farthest away from Imitationalism, though it may be the most commonly held theory. I certainly believe it's technically impressive when art can imitate reality, but I have no desire to do so myself, and my personal belief is that realism is not the most important aspect of an artwork.

To find which theory (or a mix of theories) fit you best, you'll need to think about where your artmaking desires and your personal belief in what makes a piece of art good align.

What Theory Are You?

It's important to remember there is no right or wrong theory. Art is subjective, and the judgment of whether an artwork good or bad is a matter of personal opinion.

But realizing which theory you naturally gravitate to can help you recognize what you do or don't like about your own work. When we can see more clearly why we believe our art is good or bad, we use that knowledge to nudge our art more in the good direction.

So which theory fits best with you?

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What Makes Good Art?: 4 Theories for Judging Your Art

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I often argue against labeling art-especially our own art-"Good" or "Bad". I believe there's something to be learned and gained from every piece of art we make, even if it's just a release of mental blobbies. But our judgment often creeps in anyways, so it's worth digging into how we respond to our art.

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In Tom Stoppard's play Night and Day, two journalists are talking about the newspaper they work for.

"This is an objective fact-finding organization," one says.

The second person nods knowingly. "Yes, but is it objective-for or objective-against?"

There is scant little that can be called "objective" when it comes to history. History is not about the past but stories of the past. Every historian, from Herodotus to Niall Ferguson, has an agenda. They choose what to include and what to cut, what to emphasize and what to downplay. If we're looking for facts - indisputable, undeniable facts - we have precious few about anything pre-20th century. And so we rely on imagination, guesswork, and narrative.

History is a story, and we know who the storytellers are. Richard Cohen's book Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past is an impressive 750-page effort to unpack the creation of history. Here are a few of the book's most influential figures: the people who wrote our history.

Ancient Greece and Persia

Cicero once called Herodotus "The Father of History." Perhaps more astutely, Plutarch dubbed him "The Father of Lies." It's from Herodotus that we learn about the brave, underdog Greeks defeating the overwhelming Persian hordes. However, Herodotus' job in recounting the Greco-Persian Wars was not documenting history but spreading propaganda. He claimed that the Persian forces bankrupted cities as they passed by, and, as Cohen puts it, if "his suspiciously precise figure of 5,283,220 men" were true, then the Persian column would have run from eastern Greece to western Iran.

Herodotus was not a historian in any modern sense (his contemporary, Thucydides, does a much better job). It would be more accurate to call him a researcher and retitle Histories as "My Travels." He claims to have witnessed a thousand exciting events first-hand. Some were plausible, but others involved gold-digging ants and talking animals. Herodotus was not in the business of writing a factsheet. His Histories is an entertaining adventure involving local beliefs, folklore, and mythology - with some history scattered in and among the legends.

Judea

The Old Testament is the story of a people building a nation through narrative and theology. As such, if you're hoping to do history, it's best treated as a single, biased source. The Oxford theologian John Barton, author of The History of the Bible, puts it like this: "There is probably not a single episode in the history of Israel as told by the Old Testament on which modern scholars are in agreement."

That is not to say the Old Testament is filled with lies. Some of it can be verified and fact-checked by other sources, such as Persian historians. However, a lot, especially the earlier events, cannot.

As Cohen writes, "We do not have external evidence that kings called Saul, David, or Solomon ever existed - no traces that archaeologists can examine, no mentions in the records of other nations in the region."

However, these stories' placement in the Bible made them immune to historical critique for much of Western history. For instance, the Catholic Church excommunicated the Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza in 1656. Among his 36 acts of wrongdoing was claiming that the Bible should be no more privileged as a source of history than any other document. For this heinous crime, he was cut off from civil society and even had attempts on his life.

Shakespeare

Shakespeare's plays are typically divided into three categories: comedies, tragedies, and histories. But it's absurd to think that a playwright - a man whose job is to entertain people - would suddenly become a paragon of historical rigor for a third of his plays. Shakespeare had no more duty to historical fact than Mel Gibson.

Shakespeare himself seems to mock the idea. He claimed King Lear, a play about a king in legend only, was a "true chronicle history" while The Taming of the Shrew was "a kind of history."

The problem is that so many of Shakespeare's exaggerated or utterly invented depictions have entered our historical understanding. Because of Shakespeare, we imagine Cleopatra as indescribably beautiful and Mark Antony as a drunken boor. He portrayed Tudor kings as noble, handsome, martial, and wonderful (his royal patrons being the Tudors) and Richard III as a hunchback, infanticidal git who was the bogeyman of English history for centuries. Today, we compare all that's bad to Hitler. For the English, that person used to be Richard III. And it's all down to Shakespeare.

The novelists

If asked to imagine an archetypal Scot - a fancy dress version of Scottishness - most people would think kilts and bagpipes. The problem is that these are almost entirely the 19th-century inventions of Walter Scott. Bagpipes originated in Egypt, and kilts were new arrivals. The point, though, is thatthey are Scottish now. Scott's Scotland reveals a good point: The last two hundred years have been the work of the historical novel.

So much of our cultural understanding of particular historical periods comes from novelists. Leo Tolstoy defined the Napoleonic Wars, and Victor Hugo the French Revolution. James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans established popular opinion regarding Native Americans and frontiersmen. More recently, Hilary Mantel, Julian Fellowes, and Bernard Cornwell have all defined history. It's history written by novelists.

That all said, we should not disparage the historical novelist. Tolstoy did more research and first-hand investigation than most historians when he wrote War and Peace. Charles Dickens had his friend, Thomas Carlyle, send him cartloads of books when writing of A Tale of Two Cities. And Hilary Mantel refuses to change any facts that are known about a period when dramatizing it.

The lessons of history

History is written by historians, and historians are people. Whenever you hear a fact or are given a stereotype, it's always a good idea to check where that comes from because the voices we heed and the books we read will ultimately define how we see ourselves.

As George Orwell famously wrote: "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." And with President Xi rewriting history books and the ongoing debates around what we should teach our children, learning who wrote our history and why is more important than ever.

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How storytellers (and their biases) crafted our history

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There are few facts when it comes to history. Every historian has to choose what to present and how they present it.

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Art news, comment and reviews from one of the world's most respected art magazines. Exclusive interviews with leading artists, curators and collectors. Covering everything from antiquities to contemporary art.

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CHAPTER EIGHT: Objectivity, Evidence, and Truth in History on JSTOR

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Joe Friggieri, CHAPTER EIGHT: Objectivity, Evidence, and Truth in History, Counterpoints, Vol. 462, My Teaching, My Philosophy: Kenneth Wain and the Lifelong Engagement with Education (2014), pp. 124-136

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If a medical study seems too good to be true, it probably is, according to a new analysis.

In a statistical analysis of nearly 230,000 trials compiled from a variety of disciplines, study results that claimed a "very large effect" rarely held up when other research teams tried to replicate them, researchers reported in Wednesday's edition of the Journal of the American Medical Assn.

"The effects largely go away; they become much smaller," said Dr. John Ioannidis, the Stanford University researcher who was the report's senior author. "It's likely that most interventions that are effective have modest effects."

Ioannidis and his colleagues came to this conclusion after examining 228,220 trials grouped into more than 85,000 "topics" -- collections of studies that paired a single medical intervention (such as taking a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug for postoperative pain) with a single outcome (such as experiencing 50% relief over six hours). In 16% of those topics, at least one study in the group claimed that the intervention made patients at least five times more likely to either benefit or suffer compared with control patients who did not receive the treatment.

In at least 90% of those cases, the team found, including data from subsequent trials reduced those odds.

The analysis revealed several reasons to question the significance of the very-large-effect studies, Ioannidis said.

Studies that reported striking results were more likely to be small, with fewer than 100 subjects who experienced fewer than 20 medical events. With such small sample sizes, Ioannidis said, large effects are more likely to be the result of chance.

"Trials need to be of a magnitude that can give useful information," he said.

What's more, the studies that claimed a very large effect tended to measure intermediate effects -- for example, whether patients who took a statin drug reduced their levels of bad cholesterol in their blood -- rather than incidence of disease or death itself, outcomes that are more meaningful in assessing medical treatments.

The analysis did not examine individual study characteristics, such as whether the experimental methods were flawed.

The report should remind patients, physicians and policymakers not to give too much credence to small, early studies that show huge treatment effects, Ioannidis said.

One such example: the cancer drug Avastin. Clinical trials suggested the drug might double the time breast cancer patients could live with their disease without getting worse. But follow-up studies found no improvements in progression-free survival, overall survival or patients' quality of life. As a result, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2011 withdrew its approval to use the drug to treat breast cancer, though it is still approved to treat several other types of cancer.

With early glowing reports, Ioannidis said, "one should be cautious and wait for a better trial."

Dr. Rita Redberg, a cardiologist at UC San Francisco who was not involved in the study, said devices and drugs frequently get accelerated approval on the basis of small studies that use intermediate end points.

"Perhaps we don't need to be in such a rush to approve them," she said.

The notion that dramatic results don't hold up under closer scrutiny isn't new. Ioannidis, a well-known critic of the methods used in medical research, has written for years about the ways studies published in peer-reviewed journals fall short. (He's perhaps best known for a 2005 essay in the journal PLoS Medicine titled, "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.")

But the scope of the JAMA analysis sets it apart from Ioannidis' earlier efforts, said Dr. Gordon Guyatt, a clinical epidemiologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, who was not involved in the work.

"They looked through a lot of stuff," he said.

Despite wide recognition that big effects are likely to disappear upon further scrutiny, people still "get excited, and misguidedly so" when presented with home-run results, Guyatt said.

He emphasized that modest effects could benefit patients and were often "very important" on a cumulative basis.

--
eryn.brown@latimes.com

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Striking study results, little reliability

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Dramatic findings in medical research often don't hold up, an analysis shows.

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Philosopher Peter Singer explores the impact of AI on animals, using historical parallels in how humans have previously used technology to exploit nature. He discusses AI's current applications in factory farming and wildlife management, which are already raising ethical concerns.

Singer believes AI should not only serve human interests and that we should consider how it impacts all sentient beings as we continue to develop it.

He also delves into the philosophical question of AI surpassing human intelligence and its potential consciousness and moral status, emphasizing the need for government standards akin to animal welfare regulations.

PETER SINGER: here are quite a few things that concern me about AI. It clearly has both positive and negative aspects.

PARROT: Okay, Google, what's the weather?

GOOGLE: Right now, in Orlando, it's 86 degrees.

SINGER: There are a lot of factors, and one of those concerns is about the impact of AI on animals. When you look at past technologies, they have always been used to the disadvantage of animals in various ways. We invented the wheel, a great invention, of course, they help us move around, but that means that we've tied horses and oxen and various other animals, effectively enslaving them to pull the carts that we've made with wheels.

Similarly, with AI, we are already using it on animals in a variety of ways. Factory farms are starting to use AI to run factory farms and to remove humans even further from the animals in the factory farms. In New Zealand, there are feral possums that had been imported from Australia for fur, but they're damaging to New Zealand's native forests, which never had possums. The drones are being used to kill them. And in general, when you look at studies of AI ethics, It tends to talk about AI must be used for human benefit. But I don't think that's enough. We share this planet with other species who are capable of feeling pain and whose interests must be counted. So I think the statements of AI ought to instead talk about AI being used for the benefit of all sentient beings.

There are other broader concerns that are somewhat more philosophical. One is about whether AI could become more intelligent than us, a super-intelligent artificial general intelligence. We've already created vast numbers of conscious beings. We're creating animals all the time, and we vary them in their nature by breeding. I don't see any in principle reason why you couldn't get something similar happening in something that isn't a carbon-based life form that is made of silicon chips.

If AI becomes conscious, if we develop an artificial intelligence that is itself a conscious sentient being, how can we tell whether it's mimicking consciousness or whether it's genuinely conscious? And what would its moral status be? Would its moral status be similar to that of humans? Would it be more like animals or would it still be a tool we could use as we pleased? The question is, then will we treat them as the other non-human conscious beings we've created who we have mostly exploited for our particular purposes?

Just as I believe governments should set standards for animal welfare, they should not permit the treatment of animals in the way they're now treated in factory farms. So I would think governments will need to set standards for the treatment of sentient conscious AI.

And then there are reasonable concerns about will we be able to control it? The Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom has a fable about a group of sparrows who think that it would be terrific if they had an owl to help them with some labor tasks. Owls are much bigger and stronger than they are. And so they think about getting an owl egg and hatching the owl and then training the owl to do what they want. And there's one wise old sparrow who says, well before we actually hatch this egg, shouldn't we make sure that we can train the owl to do what we want? And the other sparrows say, oh, no, it's going to be so wonderful. So let's keep going. The point of the fable, of course, is that owls eat sparrows. And once you have hatched an owl, the sparrows are not gonna be able to control it. So is a super-intelligent AI going to be like the owl would have been to the sparrows?

NARRATOR: Want to dive deeper? Become a Big Think member and join our members-only community. Watch videos early and unlock full interviews.

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Can AI and animals coexist? Philosopher Peter Singer gives us a nuanced take on the issue.

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"At the very beginning of history, we find the extraordinary monuments of Paleolithic art, standing as a problem to all theories of human development, and a delicate test of their truth."
-R.G. Collingwood

This quote and the problem it describes drives The Entanglement by Alva Noë, a new book on art, philosophy, and what it means to be human. Almost as far back as we want to go in the story of humanity, there is art standing in a central, pivotal location. The question that Noë, a philosopher at the University of California-Berkeley, wants to understand is simple: Why? Why is art so central to our development that we cannot tell the story of humanity without it?

The centrality of art

In the modern world, we tend to view science and technology as the most important achievements - the true pinnacles of human ability. While we acknowledge that art is something only humans do, it tends to get relegated to the domain of "mere" beauty or pleasure. In this view, art is important, in its own way, but it simply does not have the same sort of cosmic relevance as the theory of general relativity or the standard model of particle physics.

The key point of The Entanglement, however, is that this kind of hierarchy is a profound mistake. Art is just as much about revealing the essential as science is. You might even say that the making of art comes before science in reaching down to our very roots - those deep philosophical underpinnings that allow human beings the ability to unveil hidden truths.

The fact of art's central place in human development speaks to the problem Collingwood identifies in the quote above. We are physically embodied. That is the central fact of our lives. We don't start off as brains in a vat contemplating the perfect platonic abstractions of mathematical physics. Instead, we begin with the constraints of being in bodies. But being human also means we are constrained by our cultures. By this, I mean the simple fact that we emerge into the world as part of a community of other language users from whom we are given the shape of our world of experience. This includes the norms of social behavior and the tools that shape the material facts of daily life. From our earliest origins as Homo sapiens living in small tribes, we both have been made by the world as much we make it. And that is why art has always been central to human experience.

As Noë puts it: "To say that art and life are entangled is to propose not only that we make art out of life - that life supplies art's raw materials - but further that art then works those materials over and changes them. Art makes life new " [emphasis added].

Freedom from constraints

What Noë means here is that while we are given the world and constrained by it, we always have pushed back against those constraints in a way that seeks to free us from them. Noë points to the example of language. We can use language to "speak plainly," meaning to describe things and make plans that further our project of surviving in the world. But then comes the possibility of irony, the ability to use language in a way that subverts itself. In that subversion, what was plain, ordinary, and even habitual suddenly stands out on its own. The use of irony - one form of many that can be used in art - is a kind of attempt at emancipation from the brute facts of our embodiment. In this way, it is a key step that opens an entirely different way of encountering the world. As Noë says, art requires that "we work ourselves over and make ourselves anew, individually and ensemble."

That "making ourselves anew" is why I find Noë's ideas so compelling and relevant for science. For me, science is not simply the picking up of "facts" that are lying around. Instead, it's a kind of sympathetic creative exchange with the world in which we are enmeshed through embodiment. The world is not simply "out there," and science is not simply a view through " God's eyes." Instead, we are always entangled with the world.

What Noë shows is how that essential act of "making" art is more than just an act of pleasure. What it really encompasses is a radical act of inquiry into our entanglement. It's the first recognition of the inescapable fact that it's always us and the world. We recognize that fact by understanding that we have the possibility of re-seeing the world and remaking it through the making of art. For me, it's only through that kind of recognition that true science and its abstractions become possible.

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Why the truth of art is greater than the truth of science

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Art isn't a side note in human history; it's the main text. The act of creating art is a deep inquiry into our relationship with the world.

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These real-world issues about human sciences will help you to explore knowledge questions, analyse the latest events and issues related to this AOK, and apply TOK terms, ideas, and concepts to authentic situations.

If you're a member of the site, skip to the bottom of the page, and view our exploring TOK padlet, which features the very latest events and issues for this aspect of the course.

Explore this AOK via the latest real-world situations

The exploring TOK padlets (which we update every month) enable you to dive deeper into TOK via media sources, unpacking suggestions, guidance on the key concepts, and other support. Check out this sample padlet (for history), and join us to gain access to the rest!

Our TOK newsletter helps you explore and make sense of the most important events and issues going on today, and fully grasp how TOK concepts manifest in the real world. Read a recent edition here, subscribe to the free version here, and gain access to the premium version by joining theoryofknowledge.net.

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Gain an authentic understanding of this TOK area of knowledge - the human sciences - via these varied and engaging real-world issues.

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Stay on top of Science and Technology latest developments on the ground with Al Jazeera's fact-based news, exclusive video footage, photos and updated maps.

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Aesthetica Magazine - The Art & Culture Magazine

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Aesthetica is a worldwide destination for art and culture. In-depth features foreground today's most innovative practitioners across art, design, photography, architecture, music and film.

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In 2017, Boston public schools changed the world-or at least, its map. Boston schools changed their world maps from the common Mercator projection to the Peters projection. The result? Europe and the United States appeared to shrink overnight. Understanding how this could be, requires diving into the connection between maps and racism.

Saying that maps and racism are connected doesn't mean that the standard Mercator map is inherently problematic or less accurate than the alternative. In fact, both maps are accurate, just in different ways. It's the overuse of the Mercator projection that distorts our understanding of the world.

TAKE ACTION

* Consider these . How do different projections influence your perception of the world? What surprised you about the differences between the two? Discuss your ideas with a friend or family member.

* Support a child, parent, or educator in getting a Peters projection map as an alternative to the standard Mercator projection.

It's impossible to create a flat map of the surface of a round object without creating distortion, either in area or shape. That's why it's impossible to get an orange peel to lie perfectly flat on a table. The Mercator projection was created in 1519 for naval navigation. The north-south and east-west lines on a rectangular Mercator map cross at right angles and correspond with north-south and east-west lines on the actual globe. To achieve this, areas closer to the north and south poles are enlarged, while regions at the equator are made comparatively smaller ( CNN, The Guardian).

Picture a standard Mercator map of the world with parallel vertical lines running north-south. In reality, all those parallel north-south lines meet at the two poles. To display those vertical lines as parallel to each other in a way useful to navigators, the top and bottom of the map must be stretched compared to the middle.

The maps in textbooks, on classroom walls, and on the mobile version of Google Maps are all the Mercator projection ( The Verge). But nobody depends on any of these maps to conduct 16th-century seafaring. So why has it become the default?

Since the Mercator projection enlarges areas closer to the poles and compresses areas at the equator, North America and Europe are enlarged, giving European and North American mapmakers more room to fill in details of their home countries. But the fact that most people only ever see this map projection creates biases in our understanding of the world.

Here's a Mercator projection compared to the actual relative size of countries. The light blue shows the size of each country depicted in the Mercator projection. The dark blue represents the actual size of each country. By analyzing the differences, you can see how an everyday person would believe that North America and Europe are far larger than other continents.

On a Mercator projection, Greenland looks as large as the continent of Africa. In reality, Africa is 14 times larger. Africa is larger than North America, India, Argentina, and Tunisia combined. Greenland is closer in size to the Democratic Republic of Congo ( CNN, The Guardian).

"The world maps that prevail today have been embedded in Western imaginations since the British empire. They continue (to prevail) despite many challenges to their fairness and accuracy because they underpin the ongoing Anglo-Euro-American presumption that the world belongs to them, and pivots around these geo-cultural axes," says Marianne Franklin of the University of London.

The Mercator projection exaggerates not only the size of the United States but also its rivals. "If you take the Mercator projection, where Russia looks huge, give it a bright red color and then compare it to the rest of Europe, you see how dangerous it can look," says International Cartographic Association President Menno-Jan Kraak. And the standard map is always oriented with the north at the top, with wealthy and powerful North American and European countries conveniently sitting atop the rest ( The Guardian).

Consider how different the Mercator projection appears compared to this Peters projection oriented with south at the top:

Because all maps of our round planet create distortions, the Peters projection isn't more or less accurate than the Mercator projection. While the Mercator projection preserves parallel lines at the expense of distorting the area of shapes, the Peters projection distorts countries' shapes to preserve their correct relative regions. Boston students are shown the two maps side by side to compare and contrast, enriching their understanding of geography and correcting misconceptions about the world. This shift allows us to better understand our world, maps, and racism, all at once.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
* Some schools are changing from the Mercator to Peters projection for world maps.

* The Mercator projection greatly exaggerates the size of areas closer to the poles, like the United States, compared to those closer to the equator, like much of Africa.

* All maps create distortions, but the universal use of the Mercator projection distorts our understanding of the world.

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How Maps Distort Our Perception of the World

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Some schools are switching from the universally used Mercator projection, igniting discussions on how maps influence our worldview.

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The Film Magazine | Movie News, Reviews, Features and Lists

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A place for cinema - The Film Magazine offers in-depth, insightful and engaging movie reviews, lists, essays, news, features and podcasts on the latest in film.

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Some quotes are clever; some only superficially so. Often, we are so awed by a statement that we don't ever question its veracity. Take, Betteridge's law of headlines, for example. The maxim assets that every headline ending with a question mark can be answered with a "no." A straightforward analysis points that the law only applies 25% of the times. Probably, the originator didn't consider genuine uses of having a question as a headline.

"History is Written by Victors." The quote gets attributed to Winston Churchill, but its origins are unknown. It implies that history is not grounded in facts, rather it's the winners' interpretation of them that prevails. The victors can force their narrative down on the people. (Actually, there could be multiple interpretations. The term 'winner' itself is ambiguous. So, I have made certain assumptions.)

To an extent, this happens. Mercedes had to apologize for tweeting a quote of Dalai Lama after receiving a backlash form the Chinese. Why? Because he's considered a terrorist in the mainland. Debate on Tibet's sovereignty aside, it's obvious that PRC has tried to disseminate a twisted version of the history.

However, there are so many things wrong with the phrase that it can't be taken seriously (unless you were to severely limit its scope.)

First, history isn't set in stone. When new facts emerge, it gets revisited. The Wright Brothers, who were celebrities in their heyday, believed so strongly in their innovation that they never considered that they are crossing the line in enforcing patents. Such was their stature that they won every major lawsuit. Today, those actions are rightfully considered patent trolling. Of course, the public view is still in their favor today. But, that's only because what they did was truly revolutionary.

You might win history for a certain time period, but that doesn't imply no one will question you actions in the future.

Second, it's difficult to assume that a person or a regime can force an interpretation unless they were to be highly oppressive. Promoting and mantaining a false image of the past would mean to oppress all the facts and mediums of free speech. After all, it only takes one dissenter to take down the whole narrative. Some regimes, like North Korea's, have been exceptionally successful at this. Amid deep surveillance, and strict control on access to information, the public is fed with patently false information: "South Korea is poverty-stricken," "North Korea ended WWII," and "Koreans are a pure and superior race."

But, how far can one go when there's a little bit of democracy and free speech? China is known suppress all accounts of Tiananmen Square Massacre, but that hasn't erased the knowledge of the event from the nation.

The counterexamples to the phrase are numerous.

The Reality

Sometimes, historical facts do get twisted for petty gains. Sometimes, people are made to buy a blatant lie. I can recall a book that proudly claimed that plastic surgery, nuclear weapons, aeroplanes and big bang theory were already discovered in ancient India.

But, that doesn't have to do anything with who's the winner or the loser. The driving factor here is who stands to gain the most. It's fairly simple to bolster citizens' self-image by harping about the glorious past. Hence, the Indian politicians' sustained efforts to do.

History is written by everyone. The more accurate quote would be, "History is temporarily twisted by people who're going to profit from it in the short term."

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"History is Written By Victors" is a Foolish Phrase

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Some quotes are clever; some only superficially so. Often, we are so awed by a statement that we don't ever question its veracity. Take, [Betteridge's law of headlines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines), for example. The maxim assets that every headline ending with a question mark can be answered with a "no."