Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Slavery is one of humanity’s gnarliest, most shameful scars. So uncomfortable is the subject that we rarely glide past the mandatory history class checklists. But understanding the complex mechanisms and historical contexts of slavery is key to grappling with everything from contemporary race dynamics to modern-day slavery like human trafficking and labor exploitation. Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade offers a fascinating record of the mass abduction and abuse of an estimated 12.5 million Africans traded with just about every country bordering the Atlantic between 1501 and 1867.

Overview of the slave trade out of Africa, 1500-1900

Volume and direction of the transatlantic slave trade from all African to all American regions

The book, authored by leading historians David Eltis and David Richardson, features nearly 200 original maps from Emory University’s Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, an online portal covering a range of unsuspected factors that played a role in the development of the slave trade ranging from the topography of coastal areas to the migration of sugar cultivation.

Migration of sugar cultivation from Asia into the Atlantic

Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade has been called the Rosetta Stone of slave historiography. But, more than that, it’s a compelling example of something we believe will be of growing importance in the coming years — the cultural value of database-driven storytelling, an increasingly fertile intersection of science and the humanities.

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The Decline of Marriage and Rise of New Families

Why four in ten people are timetravelers from 1960.

From pop culture diversions like Modern Family to serious political and human rights issues like Proposition 8, there seems to be a palpable cultural shift in the concepts of marriage and the family. The Decline of Marriage and Rise of New Families, a new study by Pew Research in partnership with TIME, aims to qualify and quanitfy that shift.

Some of the most curioius findings — which, if we were cruder than we are, which we aren’t, we could summarize as “So, Americans are still sexist homophobes who believe money buys happiness and human beings are innately evil.” — can be found below:

The Class-Based Decline in Marriage

Much of the 20% drop in marriage rates since 1960 has happened along class lines. But contrary to our liberal conceit that more and more educated young adults are choosing domestic arrangements other than marriage, those with a high school diploma or less have been the ones dodging marriage the most. The reason? They place a higher premium on financial stability than college graduates as an important reason to marry, but lower education equals lower pay within that demographic, hence lower marriage rates.

Marriage en Route to Obsolescence

4 in 10 people believe marriage is becoming obsolete, up from 28% in 1978. Even so, more Americans (67%) remain optimistic about marriage than about the educational system (50%), the economy (46%) or human morality (41%). In other words, people think you’re more likely to get married than to get a good education, live comfortably or be a decent human being.

The Resilience of Families

Despite views on marriage, faith in the family as a social unit remains strong. 76% of people identify their family as the most important thing in their life and 80% say the family they live in now is as close or closer than the one they grew up in. Unsurprisingly, however, married couples gave far more positive responses than the unmarried.

In the past 50 years, women have reached near parity with men as a share of the workforce and have begun to outpace men in educational attainment.”

Changing Spousal Roles

While the survey cites the six-in-ten working wives, double the number from 1960, as a sign of social progress to be celebrated, we were actually surprised by how low that number is. What about the other four? Worse yet, only 62% of people believe the husband and wife should both work and share household and childrearing responsibilities — which means 38% don’t. Two thirds believe a man should be a breadwinner in order to be “ready” for marriage, yet only a third say so about a woman.

The Definition of Family

Most people don’t see marriage as the only route to having a family. However, while 86% say a single parent raising a child constitutes a family, nearly 20% fewer think a gay or lesbian couple raising a child does — a disheartening bit of bigotry as we ask ourselves how one parent could possibly be better for a child’s emotional, physical, mental and social well-being than two, regardless of what gender the two may come in.

Read the full study here and draw your own conclusions.

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Denis Dutton’s Provocative Darwinian Theory of Beauty

Why the cultural conditioning of your eye has nothing on the evolutionary biology of it.

What, exactly, is beauty? This question has been occupying the minds of philosophers, anthropologists, neuroscientists, art critics and ordinary people alike for centuries of human history. And while many may subscribe to the “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” theory, this, it turns out, may not be the case. Earlier this year, we had the fortune of seeing Arts & Letters Daily editor and philosopher Denis Dutton give one of the most fascinating TED talks we’ve ever seen, presenting a provocative Darwinian theory of beauty. This week, Duttons’ talk was released online and animated by one of our favorite illustrators, Andrew Park of The RSA — it’s the smartest thing you’ll watch this week, likely this month, and possibly this year.

I have no doubt whatsoever that the experience of beauty, with its emotional intensity and pleasure, belongs to our evolved human psychology. The experience of beauty is one component in a whole series of Darwinian adaptations. Beauty is an adaptive effect, which we extend and intensify in the creation and enjoyment of works of art and entertainment.” ~ Denis Dutton

Dutton debunks the commonly accepted academic explanation of beauty as something in the “culturally conditioned” eye of the beholder by demonstrating that beauty, or aesthetic appreciation, in fact travels across cultures rather easily, hinting at some deeper, universal underpinning of what we find beautiful. To explain this, Dutton reverse-engineers our present aesthetic taste by constructing a fascinating Darwinian evolutionary history of our artistic expression and aesthetic taste

For us moderns, virtuoso technique is used to create imaginary worlds in fiction and in movies, to express intense emotions with music, painting and dance. But still, one fundamental trait of the ancestral personality persists in our aesthetic cravings: The beauty we find in skilled performances. From Lascaux to the Louvre to Carnegie Hall, human beings have a permanent innate taste for virtuoso displays in the arts. We find beauty in something done well.” ~ Denis Dutton

So is beauty in the eye of the beholder? No! It’s deep in our minds, it’s a gift handed down from the intelligent skills and rich emotional lives of our most ancient ancestors. Our powerful reaction to images, to the expression of emotion in art, to the beauty of music, to the night sky, will be with us and our descendants for as long as the human race exists.” ~ Denis Dutton

For a deeper dive into Dutton’s work and insights, be sure to grab his brilliant 2008 book, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution. The New Yorker, in reviewing the book, said that Dutton has done for art what Steven Pinker has for language, philosophy and religion in offering a compelling Darwinian explanation — we wouldn’t disagree. Sample it with this hour-long but very much worthwhile talk by Dutton, part of the Authors @ Google series.

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