Davis wastes first Massey lecture

Pop anthropologist Wade Davis, the first of whose CBC Radio Massey lectures¹ just ended in the Atlantic time zone, obviously has a lot of knowledge to impart about the Earth's diverse human cultures. So why did her  waste a good half of the opening talk shooting racist fish in a 19th Century barrel? Davis's point was that the errant 19th Century "science" of physical anthropology dripped with colonial arrogance, but the thinly disguised subtext seemed to be Davis's own moral superiority to these imperial prigs. The effect was both distasteful and boring, like listening a 21st Century astrophysicist satirize the Ptolemaic...