conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Anthropologist with the genre: Science & Math, Nature & Ecology?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'The Immense Journey'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first three paragraphs for this book
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Immense Journey
  As a living fossil it had been dredged out of the North Atlantic sea bed almost a solid mile below the surface. A mile today is not a great depth compared with the six-mile depression of the Tuscarora Deep, but in the sixties of the last century—Sir Charles Thomson's time—it was below the level at which life was generally supposed to exist. Anything below three hundred fathoms was Azoic, lifeless—so wrote Edward Forbes, the first great oceanographer of the eighteen forties. Like many pioneers he was destined to be proved wrong, yet looking back, it is possible to sympathize. The cold, the dark, the pressure of those unknown depths was frightening to contemplate. The human mind shied subconsciously away from the notion that even here sentient beings had groped their way down into the primeval slime of the sea floor. It was the world of the abyss, supposedly as lifeless as the earth's first midnight.
  Today we know that the abyss is haunted. Through it drift luminous jack-o'-lantern faces with wolf-trap mouths and meager bodies, as though a head floating in that enormous darkness were more important than a body, which could almost be dispensed with in the lean economy of the night. It is a world of delicately groping yard-long antennae, or of great staring eyes that can pick up remote pinpoints of light and follow them through the restless luminescence of a firefly darkness. To Sir Charles Thomson, however, the abyss was more than haunted. It was the world of the past.
  The fascination of lost worlds has long preoccupied humanity. It is inevitable that transitory man, student of the galaxies and computer of light-years, should entertain nostalgic yearnings for some island outside of time, some Avalon untouched by human loss. Even the scholar has not been averse to searching for the living past on islands or precipice-guarded plateaus. Jefferson repeated the story of a trapper who had heard the mammoth roaring in the Virginia woods; in 1823 a South American traveler imaginatively viewed through his spyglass mastodons grazing in remote Andean valleys.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: three more paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The anthropologist had yet to subject native societies to careful scrutiny, or to learn that people of different cultures were remarkably like ourselves in their basic mental make-up. They were often regarded as mentally inferior, living fossils pushed to the wall and going under in the struggle with the dominating white. Wallace, as we have already seen, stood somewhat outside this Victorian prejudice, and having himself endured economic want, almost alone among the great biologists of his time, sought for another key to the development of man.
  His thoughts led him in a somewhat mystical direction, yet certain of the facts he recorded were valid enough. He wrote early, however, so that natural explanations which could now be offered were, understandably, not available to him at that time. It is impressive that Wallace observed, though he did not understand, what we today call the pedomorphic features of man—his almost hairless body, his helpless childhood, his surprisingly developed brain—which he rightly judged to be in some manner related to the uniqueness of man. His conclusion that the linguistic ability of natives is in no way inferior to that of "higher" races—a commonplace today—was, in its own time, a courageous statement made in considerable contradiction to beliefs widely held even among scientists.
  Although there is still much that we do not understand, it is likely that the selective forces working upon the humanization of man lay essentially in the nature of the socio-cultural world itself. Man, in other words, once he had "crossed over" into this new invisible environment, was being as rigorously selected for survival within it as the first fish that waddled up the shore on its fins. I have said that this new world was "invisible." I do so advisedly. It lay, not so much in his surroundings as in man's brain, in his way of looking at the world around him and at the social environment he was beginning to create in his tiny human groupings.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Swap the first and the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: It lay, not so much in his surroundings as in man's brain, in his way of looking at the world around him and at the social environment he was beginning to create in his tiny human groupings. They were often regarded as mentally inferior, living fossils pushed to the wall and going under in the struggle with the dominating white. Wallace, as we have already seen, stood somewhat outside this Victorian prejudice, and having himself endured economic want, almost alone among the great biologists of his time, sought for another key to the development of man.
  His thoughts led him in a somewhat mystical direction, yet certain of the facts he recorded were valid enough. He wrote early, however, so that natural explanations which could now be offered were, understandably, not available to him at that time. It is impressive that Wallace observed, though he did not understand, what we today call the pedomorphic features of man—his almost hairless body, his helpless childhood, his surprisingly developed brain—which he rightly judged to be in some manner related to the uniqueness of man. His conclusion that the linguistic ability of natives is in no way inferior to that of "higher" races—a commonplace today—was, in its own time, a courageous statement made in considerable contradiction to beliefs widely held even among scientists.
  Although there is still much that we do not understand, it is likely that the selective forces working upon the humanization of man lay essentially in the nature of the socio-cultural world itself. Man, in other words, once he had "crossed over" into this new invisible environment, was being as rigorously selected for survival within it as the first fish that waddled up the shore on its fins. I have said that this new world was "invisible." I do so advisedly.The anthropologist had yet to subject native societies to careful scrutiny, or to learn that people of different cultures were remarkably like ourselves in their basic mental make-up.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last five paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: It is said by men who know about these things that the smallest living cell probably contains over a quarter of a million protein molecules engaged in the multitudinous coordinated activities which make up the phenomenon of life. At the instant of death, whether of man or microbe, that ordered, incredible spinning passes away in an almost furious haste of those same particles to get themselves back into the chaotic, unplanned earth.
  I do not think, if someone finally twists the key successfully in the tiniest and most humble house of life, that many of these questions will be answered, or that the dark forces which create lights in the deep sea and living batteries in the waters of tropical swamps, or the dread cycles of parasites, or the most noble workings of the human brain, will be much if at all revealed. Rather, I would say that if "dead" matter has reared up this curious landscape of fiddling crickets, song sparrows, and wondering men, it must be plain even to the most devoted materialist that the matter of which he speaks contains amazing, if not dreadful powers, and may not impossibly be, as Hardy has suggested, "but one mask of many worn by the Great Face behind."
  A native of Lincoln, Nebraska, LOREN EISELEY was born into a family which homesteaded in that region when it was still a territory. His first contact with nature lay in the salt flats and ponds around Lincoln, and in the mammoth bones hoarded in the old red brick museum on the campus of the University of Nebraska. Receiving his A.B. degree there, he completed graduate work in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Returning to the Midwest for his first academic job, he taught at the University of Kansas. He later became head of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Oberlin College in Ohio, then returned to the University of Pennsylvania in 1947 to head the Department of Anthropology. He also was Curator of Early Man in the University Museum.
  For a number of years he was active in the search for early postglacial man in the western United States, and worked extensively in the high plains, mountains, and deserts bordering the Rocky Mountains from Canada into Mexico.
  At his death in 1977, Dr. Eiseley was Benjamin Franklin and University Professor of History and Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: It is said by men who know about these things that the smallest living cell probably contains over a quarter of a million protein molecules engaged in the multitudinous coordinated activities which make up the phenomenon of life. At the instant of death, whether of man or microbe, that ordered, incredible spinning passes away in an almost furious haste of those same particles to get themselves back into the chaotic, unplanned earth.
  I do not think, if someone finally twists the key successfully in the tiniest and most humble house of life, that many of these questions will be answered, or that the dark forces which create lights in the deep sea and living batteries in the waters of tropical swamps, or the dread cycles of parasites, or the most noble workings of the human brain, will be much if at all revealed. Rather, I would say that if "dead" matter has reared up this curious landscape of fiddling crickets, song sparrows, and wondering men, it must be plain even to the most devoted materialist that the matter of which he speaks contains amazing, if not dreadful powers, and may not impossibly be, as Hardy has suggested, "but one mask of many worn by the Great Face behind."
  A native of Lincoln, Nebraska, LOREN EISELEY was born into a family which homesteaded in that region when it was still a territory. His first contact with nature lay in the salt flats and ponds around Lincoln, and in the mammoth bones hoarded in the old red brick museum on the campus of the University of Nebraska. Receiving his A.B. degree there, he completed graduate work in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Returning to the Midwest for his first academic job, he taught at the University of Kansas. He later became head of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Oberlin College in Ohio, then returned to the University of Pennsylvania in 1947 to head the Department of Anthropology. He also was Curator of Early Man in the University Museum.
  For a number of years he was active in the search for early postglacial man in the western United States, and worked extensively in the high plains, mountains, and deserts bordering the Rocky Mountains from Canada into Mexico.
  At his death in 1977, Dr.