Francisco Gil-White
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Francisco Gil-White is an anthropologist who was Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and lecturer at the Solomon Asch Centre for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict. He holds a Masters Degree in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and a PhD in Biological and Cultural Anthropology from UCLA.
Gil-White's contract at the University of Pennsylvania, which began in September of 2001, has not been renewed. Gil-White claims that this was a politically motivated dismissal due to his controversial political theories, such as a refutation of the accepted version of the 1990s civil wars in Yugoslavia.[1], and a theory that the PLO traces its roots to Adolf Hitler's World War II Final Solution.[2] Gil-White has made public documents relevant to his dispute with the University of Pennsylvania,[3] and has stated publicly that he is planning to sue the university.[4] On 17 February 2005, Gil-White appeared on Hannity and Colmes (Fox News Channel) to discuss the termination of his University of Pennsylvania contract.[5]
Gil-White was assistant editor at the online magazine Emperor's Clothes[6] from 2002 to 2005, and now runs his Foundation for the Analysis of Conflict, Ethnic and Social (FACES), which supports his website, Historical and Investigative Research, which publishes his political writings. He stopped writing for Emperor's Clothes after disagreements with editor Jared Israel, who recently charged that Gil-White falsified documentation to support his accusation that Rabbi Steven Wise "got his wish" when the holocaust took place. [7]
He was born in Chicago and raised in Mexico City, and his father is Francisco Gil Díaz, Secretary of Finance and Public Credit in the cabinet of Vicente Fox.
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[edit] The evolution of prestige
While doing doctoral work at UCLA, Gil-White and colleague Joseph Henrich developed and later published a theory to explain the evolutionary origins of prestige in human societies. Unlike chimpanzees, which form linear dominance hierarchies based on agonism, human groups naturally assemble into more egalitarian social arrangements where status is determined by relative prestige. Henrich and Gil-White's theory explains how prestige based social arrangements operate in hunter gatherer communties, and how natural selection created cognitive biases that enable high-fidelity social transmission between prestigious mentors and their clients. The theory has garnered considerable attention in evolutionary psychology and cultural anthropology literatures.
[edit] Summary of prestige theory
The evolution of human cultural capacity - that is, for intergenerationally stable, high fidelity social transmission - created a new selective environment in which mutations improving the reproductive benefits of such transmission were favored. Human psychology thus evolved into an increasingly well-organized and specialized battery of biases jointly designed to extract reproductive benefit from the flow of socially transmitted information. Prestige processes emerged from this social learning psychology.
Cultural transmission is adaptive because it saves learners the costs of individual learning. Once some cultural transmission capacities exist, natural selection favors improved learning efficiencies, such as abilities to identify and preferentially copy models who are likely to possess better-than-average information. Moreover, selection will favor behaviors in the learner that lead to better learning environments, e.g., gaining greater frequency and intimacy of interaction with the model, plus his/her cooperation. Copiers thus evolve to provide all sorts of benefits (i.e., "deference") to trageted models in order to induce preferred models to grant greater access and cooperation. Such preferred models may be said to have prestige with respect to their "clients" (the copiers).
The above implies that the most skilled/ knowledgeable models will, on average, end up with the biggest and most lavish clienteles, so the size, and lavishness of a given model's clientele (the prestige) provides a convenient and reliable proxy for that person's information quality. Thus, selection favors clients who initially pick their models on the basis of the current deference distribution, refining their assessments of relative model worth as information becomes available through both social and individual learning. This strategy confers potentially dramatic adaptive savings in the start-up costs of rank-biased social learning. Finally, because high-quality information ("expertise," "performative skills," "wisdom," "knowledge") brings fitness-enhancing deferential clients, models have an extra incentive to outexcel each other.
[edit] List of published works
Papers on ethnicity
Gil-White, F. J. (1999) How thick is blood? The plot thickens...: If ethnic actors are primordialists, what remains of the circumstantialist/primordialist controversy? Ethnic and Racial Studies 22(5): 789-820.
Gil-White, F. J. (2001) Are ethnic groups biological 'species' to the human brain?: Essentialism in our cognition of some social categories. Current Anthropology 42(4): 515-554
Gil-White, F. J. (2001) Sorting is not categorization: A critique of the claim that Brazilians have fuzzy racial categories. Cognition and culture, 1(3):219-249
Gil-White, F. J. (2002) The cognition of ethnicity: Native category systems under the field-experimental microscope. Field methods 14(2):170-198.
Gil-White, F. J. (2003) Gil-White, F. J. 2003. "Ultimatum game with an ethnicity manipulation: Results from Khovdiin Bulgan Sum, Mongolia," in Foundations of Human Sociality: Ethnography and Experiments in 15 small-scale societies. Edited by J. Henrich, R. Boyd, S. Bowles, H. Gintis, E. Fehr, and C. Camerer. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gil-White, F.J. (2004) Ultimatum Game with ethnicity manipulation: Problems faced doing field economic experiments, and their solutions. Field Methods 16:157-183.
Gil-White, F.J. (2005) The study of ethnicity needs better categories: Clearing up the confusions that result from blurring analytic and lay concepts, forthcoming: Journal of Bioeconomics
Gil-White, F.J. (2005) How conformism creates ethnicity creates conformism (and why this matters to lots of things) The Monist, vol. 88, no.2 (pp.189-237)
Papers on prestige
Henrich, J., & Gil-White, F. J. (2001) The evolution of prestige: Freely conferred status as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission. Evolution and human behavior 22:165-196.
Papers on memes
Gil-White, F. J. (2001) L'evolution culturelle a-t-elle des règles? La rechérche Hors-Série No. 5(Avril): 92-97.
Gil-White, F.J. (2005) Common misunderstandings of memes (and genes): The promise and the limits of the genetic analogy to cultural transmission processes. in S. Hurley and N. Chater, Perspectives on Imitation: From Mirror Neurons to Memes, MIT Press.
Miscellaneous papers
Gil-White, F. J., and P. J. Richerson (2003) "Large scale human cooperation and conflict," in Encyclopedia of cognitive science. Edited by L. Nadel. London: Nature Publishing/MacMillan.
J. Henrich, R. Boyd, S. Bowles, C. Camerer, E. Fehr, H. Gintis, R. McElreath, M. Alvard, A. Barr, J. Ensminger, K. Hill, F. Gil-White, M. Gurven, F. Marlowe, J.Patton, N. Smith, and D. Tracer. (forthcoming 2005) 'Economic Man' in Cross-cultural Perspective: Economic Experiments in 15 Small Scale Societes, Behavioral & Brain Sciences.
Gil-White, F.J. (2004). "The postmodern biologist (cum psychologist)." Review of Susan Oyama's "Evolution's Eye" Theory and psychology 14(1): 134-137
Online books
"Resurrecting Racism: The current attack on black people using phony science." Historical and Investigative Research. 2004. http://www.hirhome.com/rr/rrcontents.htm
"The Crux of World History (Volume 1) The Book of Genesis: The Birth of the Jewish People." http://www.hirhome.com/israel/cruxcontents.htm
