During my formative years as a student of anthropology, I studied just about all the important pioneers of the history of American and European anthropology. Pardon the name-dropping, but for example, Jean LaMarck, Thomas Malthus, Charles Darwin, Lewis Henry Morgan, Herbert Spencer, E. B. Tyler, Emile Durkheim, Marcel Maus, Max Weber, Franz Boas, Alfred Kroeber, Edward Sapir, Robert Lowie, Ruth B…