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1 March 2022
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My early historical work focused on the links between neurobiology, evolving information technologies, and the evolution of thought globally— involving processes that can be simulated in intelligent agent computer models. My work in the late 1990s involved some of the first work anywhere in cultural neuroscience. Some of my early work in this field is noted below. More recently I've been involved with colleagues in the Systems Biology Group, in Palo Alto, California, in studying the connections between systems biology and cultural drivers of chronic inflammation and diseases of aging. Recent studies here have involved collaborative work with the evolutionary biologist and botanist Ulrich Kutschera, at the University of Kassel and the Carnegie Institute at Stanford University, in studies of global warming issues. For a brief biography of me at the Systems Biology Group, go here. Papers recently given or in preparation:
Steve
Farmer, Ulrich Kutschera, et
al.
The
inflammatory
model of chronic disease: Evolutionary strategies to
prevent or reverse diseases of aging and early
development.
One
revolutionary part of the paper describes a novel
test of chronic inflammation that can be used to
guide behavioral strategies to prevent or reverse
inflammatory disease from childhood to extreme old
age.
Steve Farmer, Myths of global disaster in the early Anthropocene: Neurobiological, historical, and ecological perspectives. Lessons for the modern world. Delivered last June at the 12th Annual Conference of the International Association for Comparative Mythology (IACM), held at Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan. I've served on the Board of Directors of IACM since the organization was founded at a joint Conference sponsored by Harvard University and Peking University in Beijing in 2006. We've held other conferences elsewhere in Japan and in China, Russia, France, Beijing, Armenia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Scotland, the Netherlands, and the US in the last decade. Steve Farmer, Ecological collapse and modern myths: A predictive model. Prepared for a conference at the University of Tartu, Estonia, held in June 2019. The paper makes a number of testable predictions about negative political and cultural impacts expected globally as climate collapse rapidly accelerates in the next decade. Two books-in-progress Evolution and diseases of civilization: Surviving in a world of lethal foods, toxic medicines, and inflammatory lifestyles. A popular book on the inflammatory model of disease that our research group has developed in recent years. Brains and history: The evolution of thought. Integrates in popular form the conclusions of my early studies of cultural neurobiology. This book has long been on a back burner due to my work in systems biology, but I hope to return to it soon. Book-length
case study of how premodern systems evolved in the
manuscript age. Syncretism
in the West: Pico's 900 theses (1486).
The book approaches one of the strangest Latin texts ever
written as a case study of how premodern religious,
philosophical, and cosmological systems evolved in
manuscript traditions. Important parts of the
brain-culture model I developed in later studies can be
traced to my early work of this extreme syncretic
text. On these links, and suggestions of how the evolution
of these systems can be studied in computer models, see
the text and notes in that book's Theoretical
Conclusions, pp.
91-6. Links to articles and working papers on this
modeling can be found in other sections below.
•
• • • •
One
partial list of some of my talks in recent years on the
evolution of premodern myth and related topics.
Lecture
at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, 8-10 June
2017:
Brain-Culture
networks and political mythologies: The rebirth of
hypernationalism in biological perspectives.
Paper delivered at Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, 26-28 May 2016. Steve Farmer, Yoga Traditions and Comparative Mythologies: Ongoing Revolutions in Yoga History. (Click for Long Abstract.) Paper delivered at Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland, 11 June 2015. Steve Farmer, Talking with the Gods: Neurobiology, Auditory-Visual Hallucinations, and the Evolution of Premodern Myths, Religions, and Philosophies. (Click for Long Abstract.) Invited Lecture, University of Miami at Ohio, 21 November 2014. Steve Farmer, Brains, Networks, and the Evolution of Human Thought. Paper given at the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia, Yerevan, Armenia, 25 May 2014. Steve Farmer, Brain Research and Global Mythologies. (.Click for Abstract.) Invited Lecture at Columbia University, 25 September 2012. Steve Farmer, Neurobiology and Manuscript Cultures: The Evolution of Premodern Religious and Cosmological Systems. ( Click for Abstract.) Lecture at the University of Strasbourg, France, 9 October 2011. Steve Farmer, Twisted Tales: Spurious Claims of Postural Yoga in Ancient India. (Click for long abstract.) Mainly fictional accounts of the origins of yoga are used in the paper to discuss common problems in studies of comparative mythology in general and premodern India in particular. Lecture at Harvard University, 8 October 2010. Steve Farmer and Michael Witzel, Indus Valley Fantasies: Political Mythologies, Academic Careerism, and the Poverty of Indus Studies. (Click for long abstract.) The title "Indus Valley Fantasies" is reserved for a book on distortions of ancient history promoted by right-wing Indian nationalists and Western archaeologists and Indologists too meek to challenge them. That failure is not innocuous, given the uses these distortions serve in supporting reactionary social structures in India that affect hundreds of millions of so-called Dalits or "untouchables," etc.
•
• • • •
Link
to the Indo-Eurasian_Research
List,
which covers scholarly research on premodern Eurasia
in general
The
list is moderated by me (Steve Farmer,
comparative history, cultural neurobiology,
systems biology), Michael Witzel (Harvard:
Indology, comparative
mythology, linguistics), Lars Martin Fosse
(Oslo: Indology, linguistics), and Benjamin
Fleming (University of Pennsylvania: Indology,
comparative religion). The List focuses on
premodern studies globally. Core members are
located in South Asia, Iran, China, Russia,
Eastern and Western Europe, Australia, Japan,
and the United States. The List is mainly
aimed at professional researchers, but lurkers
are welcome. My collaborator Michael Witzel and
I began the list in 2004.
Below
is a list of some my top article downloads.
-
Steve Farmer, The
neurobiological origins of primitive religion:
Implications for comparative mythology
(preprint). Just appeared in October 2010 in New
Perspectives on Myth (Proceedings of the
2nd Annual Conference of the International
Association
of Comparative Mythology, Ravenstein, The
Netherlands.) Introduces the first testable
neurobiological model of the origins
of religion and includes an historical overview
of earlier naturalistic models.
S Farmer et al. Simulating the Past and Predicting the Future: Brain-Culture Networks and the Evolution of Thought. The paper deals with how brain-culture networks have been transformed by demographic forces and innovations in communications from the first extensive appearance of external symbols ca. 50,000 years ago through the present information revolution. - Steve Farmer, Neurobiology, stratified texts, and the evolution of thought: From myths to religions and philosophies (Harvard and Peking University International Conference on Comparative Mythology, Bejing. A slightly revised version of this paper (unfortunately omitting the abstract) appeared in 2009 in Cosmos (Edinburgh, pub. date given as 2006). The paper traces the evolution of my work from traditional comparative history to cultural neurobiology over the last two decades and includes a capsule summary of simulations of how traditional religious and philosophical systems arose over long periods. Tests of the brain-culture model developed in the paper are proposed that include the so-called Indus script and newly discovered Chinese tomb texts.
Another
list of lectures on a some of the topics mentioned
above.
Still
more links (including many to early slide shows) on
the so-called Indus script problem. Public discussion in the popular press (often quoting people whose whole careers or nationalist views are intimately entwined with the Indus-script myth) has been so distorted, in 2004-5 we added the links in the box below for fun. Our "One Sentence Refutation" is totally valid, but it is only one of a dozen or so arguments, others far more formal, that can be used to debunk the script myth. (No one will ever collect our $10,000 prize, which one of these days we'll raise to $100,000 or more without losing sleep):
- Sixth Harvard University Indology Roundtable, 8 May 2004. The mythological functions of Indus inscriptions: Eight conclusions arising from the nonlinguistic model of Indus symbols. 3.6 meg pdf including many slides. Introduces new data, some still unpublished, on the magical origins, later ritual, administrative, and political uses, and sudden disappearance of the Indus symbols. Also gives prima facie evidence of human sacrifice in the Indus Valley. (We know for sure it was there but know little yet of its scale. I've repeatedly made suggestions at conferences, most recently this past May, as to where to dig, but no one has taken those suggestions up yet, in part because of security problems at the Harappan site [in Pakistan]).
2.5. Fifth Harvard University Indology Roundtable, 10 May 2003. Five cases of 'dubious writing' in Indus inscriptions (1.6 megs). Working paper that presents the first detailed evidence that the Indus symbols did not encode speech. The statistical arguments developed here are now superceded by materials presented in Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel 2004; but much of the data here even now remains unpublished.Additional background materials on the so-called Indus script .
The following papers on extreme Hindu nationalist manipulations of ancient history are all related to the famous 'Horseplay in Harappa' incident (2000). - Michael Witzel and Steve Farmer, Horseplay in Harappa: The Indus Valley Decipherment Hoax, [cover story] Frontline 17 (19) (13 Oct. 2000): 4-11. Widely read in university classes. At the time Michael and I wrote this, we hadn't yet entirely rejected the old script model; hence the discussion of the "direction of writing"in a sidebar story. On that topic, which we know now is a non-issue (nonlinguistic symbols don't necessarily have a fixed "reading" order), see the important and often overlooked footnote 5 in our 2004 paper (Collapse of the Indus-script thesis).Miscellaneous (Renaissance studies).
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