I invite discussion of Anatoly Protopopov's ideas
During the conference "Biology: from Molecules to the Biosphere," a plenary lecture and a round table with Anatoly Protopopov are planned. He is a well-known human ethologist and the author of the widely known work "A Treatise on Love as Understood by a Terrible Bore," which has generated considerable controversy. During the conference Anatoly I...
By established tradition, the opening of the young scientists' conference "Biology: from Molecules to the Biosphere" features plenary lectures by senior researchers, both visiting speakers and Kharkiv scholars. This year, as planned, one such lecture is to be delivered by the well-known Russian human ethologist Anatoly Ilyich Protopopov. Protopopov's lecture is a rare event, as Anatoly Ilyich seldom participates in public events.Anatoly Protopopov is best known as the author of "A Treatise on Love as Understood by a Terrible Bore." This work was published in 2002, became a bibliographic rarity in print, but gained substantial popularity on the Russian-language internet. The reason is that in it the author ventures into terra incognita: he examines the instinctive foundations of mate choice in humans.For a humanities-oriented view of the human being, it is characteristic to believe that human behavior is explained almost entirely by culture. This is related to the fact that the action of human instincts is not reflected in consciousness, but is reflected in motivation. The mate-choice mechanisms reconstructed by Protopopov, which are characteristic of many of us, may be disconcerting in their lack of logic. There is nothing surprising about that: at the time when these instincts were forming, they could not rely on the outcome of logical analysis of the situation. Instinctive responses are triggered by rather simple "signatures" - signals. The reactions elicited by the "Treatise..." are varied: from outrage at slander against human nature to deep interest and agreement with many of the author's propositions. At present the author is prepared to revise some positions of the "Treatise...", but by no means in the direction of abandoning recognition of the importance of instincts for our behavior.I invite everyone interested to read the "Treatise..." and other works by Anatoly Protopopov on his website (if the site is displayed incorrectly, select the encoding "Cyrillic (Windows-1251)"). To some extent, my columns devoted to related topics ("Double Morality," "Why Do Women Need to Be Beautiful?," "The Reward for Beauty," and "Strategies We Do Not Consciously Recognize") may also help in understanding Protopopov's views, or facilitate discussion of them. In them I agree with Anatoly Ilyich in many cases, while in some places I place the emphasis differently than he does. A new book by Alexey Vyazovsky and Anatoly Protopopov is currently in press. We can hope that the author will present it at the conference in Kharkiv.We hope that Anatoly Ilyich will deliver a lecture at the opening of the conference on November 22, 2011 and conduct a round table on November 23. We invite all interested parties to these events!