People/Characters Derek Freeman

1.) Derek Freeman (MBE), was a dog breeder who is famed for his work with the UK charity, Guide Dogs for the Blind Association, which he joined in 1959. He reared over 20,000 puppies and also regularly appeared on Blue Peter, a British children's television programme

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2.) John Derek Freeman (15 August 1916 – 6 July 2001) was a New Zealand anthropologist known for his criticism of Margaret Mead's work on Samoan society, as described in her 1928 ethnography Coming of Age in Samoa. His effort "ignited controversy of a scale, visibility, and ferocity never before seen in anthropology."

Freeman initially became interested in Boasian cultural anthropology while an undergraduate in Wellington, and later went to live and work as a teacher in Samoa.

He later profoundly altered his view of anthropology, changing his interests to looking at the ways in which human behavior is influenced by universal psychological and biological foundations. From then on Freeman argued strongly for a new approach to anthropology which integrated insights from evolutionary theory and psychoanalysis, and he published works on the concepts of aggression and choice.

This new interest in biological and psychological universals lead him to take issue with the famous American anthropologist Margaret Mead who had described Samoan adolescents as not suffering from the "coming of age" crisis which was commonly thought to be universal when the study was published in 1923. Generally, Freeman's critique has been rejected by the anthropological community. Several Samoan scholars who had been discontent with Mead's depiction of them as happy and sexually liberated thought that Freeman erred in the opposite direction. But Freeman's arguments were embraced enthusiastically among scholars who prefer an evolutionary approach to the study of human behavior, such as that taken in the fields of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology.

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