Arguments About Aborigines
Article
Arguments About Aborigines is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between July 01, 2025 and July 15, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “this comes from a book called Arguments About Aborigines”; “I’ve read (I think this was in Arguments About Aborigines , but not going to hunt for a full citation)”; “reading L.R. Hiatt’s Arguments About Aborigines”. It most often appears alongside Aborigines, America, Australian aborigines.
Metadata
- Category: Books
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: July 01, 2025
- Last seen: July 15, 2025
Appears In
- Links For July 2025
- Highlights From The Comments On Missing Heritability
- Book Review: Arguments About Aborigines
Related Pages
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- Aborigines (2 shared issues)
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- America (2 shared issues)
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- Australian aborigines (2 shared issues)
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- Cremieux (2 shared issues)
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- Wikipedia (2 shared issues)
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- 23andme (1 shared issues)
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- @alextisyoung (1 shared issues)
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- Aboriginal (1 shared issues)
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- Aboriginal Australia (1 shared issues)
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- Aboriginal society (1 shared issues)
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- Aborigine (1 shared issues)
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- Aborigines of Australia (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
45: Conception beliefs among Australian aborigines. Did you know that pre-contact aborigines didn’t know that sex caused conception? Wait, no, what if they did know it, and were just pretending not to? Wait, no, what if they sort of deliberately suppress the knowledge as a way of defusing paternity conflicts after traditional wife-swapping rituals? Wait, no, what if it’s racist to accuse aborigines of not understanding something obvious like this? Wait, no, what if it’s ethnocentric to call Western beliefs “obvious”? Wait, no! . . . this comes from a book called Arguments About Aborigines, which I have ordered on the strength of this chapter.
Inline links: Conception beliefs among Australian aborigines
In fact, I think the ways this picture presents an overly rosy view of village common sense go beyond that. I've read (I think this was in Arguments About Aborigines, but not going to hunt for a full citation) that in many poor uneducated parts of Europe until the 18th or 19th century, people still didn't agree on whether the mother gave any genes to the child, or whether she was just the "soil" in which the father's "seed" could grow. Aborigines had the opposite problem - they thought possible a spirit impregnated the mother, and the sex act helped summon the spirit but the father's "genetics" (to the degree that they understood the term) didn't matter. The ancient Greeks had an even weirder view, telegony, where the child's paternal genetics were the sum of everyone who the mother ever had sex with.
Inline links: Arguments About Aborigines, telegony
A thought I had throughout reading L.R. Hiatt’s Arguments About Aborigines was: What are anthropologists even doing?
Inline links: Arguments About Aborigines
If you want to know the exact contours of two hundred years of scholarly debates around Aborigines, Arguments About Aborigines - which is shockingly well-written for an academic book - is the text for you. It also had some unexpected answers to the original question: what are anthropologists even doing.