Critical Hominin Theory

[Note: Both reviewers recommended publication of the following essay for Paleoanthropology, but it has not yet been accepted. If you like it and want to cite it, go ahead and cite this page. I'll let you know if it ever gets officially published.]

Introduction: Physical anthropology as pseudo-taxonomy

At one time, the field of physical anthropology was occupied primarily with establishing the number and natures of the elementary natural units of the human species. Radical biologists, like Ernst Haeckel (1868) , W. C. Osman Hill (1940) and Reginald R. Ruggles Gates (1944) even held the different varieties of living peoples to be themselves species, rejecting the familiar interbreeding criterion. Nevertheless, once that question was resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, in the early 1960s, (e.g., Barnicot 1963), the question still remained about how to understand the elementary units of the human species taxonomically below the species level. 

In Nature, Campbell (1962) formally identified H. sapiens sapiens, H. sapiens afer, H. sapiens asiaticus, H. sapiens americanus, H. sapiens australasicus, and H. sapiens neptunianus. Concurrently, based on serological genetic considerations, Boyd (1963) proposed thirteen human “races,” clustered into seven “groups” in Science.  Garn (1961) identified nine “geographical races” and 32 “local races”. Coon (1962) identified five subspecies of living Homo sapiens (ignoring the additional nonsense about their having evolved in parallel from five subspecies of Homo erectus, and its possible bearing on school integration), namely: Caucasoids, Mongoloids, Negroids, Capoids, and Australoids.

In the intervening decades, we stopped thinking about and teaching about human variation that way in physical anthropology.  We have learned to talk about human variation without formal biological taxonomy. The actual empirical biological structure of our species is “regarded as constituting a widespread network of more or less interrelated, ecologically adapted and functional entities” (Weiner 1957: 80), or in contemporary language, a “structured metapopulation” that defies taxonomic precision.  The groups that compose our species are created for particular purposes, and while they may correlate with some biological patterns, they do not represent natural divisions, but political identities. Classifying our species as Linnaeus did turned out to be a square peg – round hole problem (Livingstone 1962). Race can thus be modeled on the classic anthropological example of African witchcraft (Evans-Pritchard 1937; Fields and Fields 2012), which structures people’s lives in spite of not having any material, naturalistic existence.

Indeed, partly as a result of the historical baggage associated with treating the human species in such a pseudo-taxonomic fashion, we terminated physical anthropology altogether and rebranded ourselves formally as biological anthropology. Yet even as biological anthropology, we retain the urge to try and make sense of the ostensible lineages in our ancestry taxonomically (e.g., Wood and Boyle, 2016; Reed et al., 2023), a daunting task that even Linnaeus himself never faced back in the 18^th century.

A popular science bestseller, Harari’s (2014) Sapiens, told readers on its back cover that “[o]ne hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth”. That, of course, might indeed be true. What are the six species he identified 100,000 years ago? One, Homo sapiens, modern people. Fair enough, if a bit on the robust side. Two, Homo neanderthalensis. Indeed, according to the best genetic data thirty years ago (Krings et al. 1997); but now the geneticists say I may have 2% Neanderthal DNA, which presumably changes the status of Neanderthals, or the status of species, or both (Harvati and Ackermann 2022; Weasel 2022). Three, Homo denisova. Yet even the geneticists, who are the only people to whom it is visible, say this is a genomic subgroup of Neanderthals (Meyer et al., 2012) – who, as just noted, may not even be their own species in the first place. Four, Homo erectus. That is largely uncontroversial as a taxon; but not at 100,000 years ago, unless perhaps we regard species #6 as H. erectus. Five, Homo floresiensis. Clearly, the mysterious and isolated H. floresiensis was something (Madison 2023). And six, Homo soloensis, named for a different set of Indonesian fossils than H. floresiensis, which are generally regarded as archaic H. sapiens (Swisher et al., 1996) on account of their anatomical continuity with both H. erectus and H. sapiens.

All of a sudden, we are down from “at least six different species” to humans, the hobbit, and possibly Neanderthals. This is not to single out Harari for criticism, but rather to note that biological anthropologists know that all of these species are vexatious at best (e.g., Athreya and Hopkins 2021; Bae et al., 2023), while outside of biological anthropology, the nuanced winks that generally accompany these taxa tend to get lost.

The problem is not a new one. Reviewing mammalian systematics in 1945, G. G. Simpson was frustrated by the difference he encountered between paleontological and paleoanthropological taxonomy. Since human are mammals, it stands to reason that an expert on mammalian species should be able to make sense of extinct hominin[1] species. Like any other biological taxonomic enterprise, there is a proper taxonomic scheme, reflecting a proper understanding of the fossil species in that particular evolutionary lineage. It’s simply a matter of finding it. Some people see too few species (lumpers), and some people see too many species (splitters), while a competent paleontologist should produce results that are as Goldilocks found the baby bear’s porridge: just right.

The problem, however, is not simply that everybody fancies themselves to be the baby bear; but rather, lies more fundamentally in the assumption that the elementary units in paleoanthropology and the elementary units of paleontology are equivalent. I think it is time to call that assumption into question. The units of paleontology, and of biology more generally, are different from the units of paleoanthropology, in that the latter are units in a story of our ancestors, and the ancestors are invariably sacred.

What are primate species?

A species, like a culture or a gene, is infamously difficult to define precisely and satisfactorily. Species appear to be units of nature of some sort, but different kinds of units than species among plants or bacteria (Godfrey and Marks 1991; Barraclough 2019). Nevertheless, for multicellular animals at least, it appears to be an elemental unit of ecology, as a cell is an elemental unit of physiology, a genotype is an elemental unit of a population genetics, and an organism is an elemental unit of society. If we restrict ourselves just to the more familiar mammalian and primate species, we can ideally identify several properties possessed by a species: (1) it is composed of organisms related to one another as either potential mates or competitors for mates, thus bounded by the limits of a gene pool; (2) it constructs and is adapted to a niche, filling a role in a dynamic ecosystem; (3) it has a locus in space and a duration in time as an evolutionary lineage; and (4) it can replicate, making more species, each slightly different from itself. Different definitions of species, from Buffon (1753; Farber 1973) through Mayr (1942) and beyond, highlight one or another of these features.[2]

A more recently-appreciated feature of species is that they are also units of conservation legislation, and thus partly cultural as well. That is why the number of extant primate species has risen so dramatically in recent decades, from about 170 in the mid-1980s (Richard 1985) to over 500 today (Strier 2022). It is not simply that the number of species is being taxonomically inflated, and is thus less accurate than it used to be (Rosenberger 2012); or that new species are finally being recognized, and their number is thus more accurate than it used to be (Groves 2014). In a sense, comparing the number of living primate species 35 years ago and today is simply unfair, because they are actually tabulating different things than they used to.

 However entropic the universe of extant primate species seems to have become, it is disconnected from extinct primate species, which are of course unaffected by conservation legislation. They nevertheless have their own issues, and their status is constantly being negotiated by the community of primate paleontologists. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the closer we get to ourselves, the more complex things seem to become (Kimbel and Martin, 1993).

Hominin species seem just as vexed today as they did to Simpson back in 1945. His explanation was that the people doing the paleoanthropology were generally coming from medical anatomy, and simply didn’t understand taxonomy well enough: “much of the work on primates has been done by students who had no experience in taxonomy and who were completely incompetent to enter this field, however competent they may have been in other respects” (Simpson 1945:181). In particular, he noted, “Dart's placing of Australopithecus in a family ‘Homo-simiadae’ (1925) only served to exemplify the total ignorance of zoology so common among the special students of these higher primates (although, of course, Dart's work is excellent in his own field)” (Simpson 1945:188).

The ontology of hominin species

The underlying presupposition is that hominin biological history is composed of zoological units that are equivalent to species, however species may be defined biologically. Thus, Homo naledi, Homo longi, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo luzonensis, etc., either are or are not distinct phylogenetic lineages, and only a proper taxonomy will resolve and describe it.
Suppose, however, that there are no recoverable biological species in the history of our lineage, perhaps because much of that history is occupied biologically by a structured meta-population rather than by distinct species (Pääbo 2015; Scerri et al. 2019). Perhaps because there is more at stake in identifying our ancestors than there is in identifying the ancestors of other species. Perhaps because the names themselves represent not so much biological ancestors, as anthropological ancestors.

What do I mean by an anthropological ancestor? I mean the subject of a sacred narrative about our past, a story intended to explain who we are and how we came to be here. The diverse manners by which peoples construct relations of (horizontal) kinship and (vertical) ancestry was among the earliest discoveries of anthropology (Morgan 1871; Franklin & McKinnon 2001). And while we have talked for decades about looking at science as a culture (Snow 1959), we are only recently actually getting around to doing it (Franklin 1995). I want to suggest that the reason that hominin taxonomy is, and has always been, so vexed, is because its elements are not biological species. The species that compose our own lineage are mythic ancestors, which are intended to resemble biological species. But they are actually elements in a story, the bricolage (Lévi-Strauss 1962) out of which scientific narratives of our origins (Landau 1985) are constructed.

In one story, the actor in a creation story might be Mother Corn Spirit. In another, it might be Homo luzonensis. In still another, it might be Homo soloensis. And they might have precisely the same ontological status: as nonexistent naturalistic entities in human ancestry. As some other kind of entities, namely as characters in an origin narrative, they may have a very different kind of existence.
The persistent confusion over hominin taxonomy is a result of misunderstanding the nature and existence of hominin species. It is not that there is a correct taxonomic interpretation of the fossils, which will reveal itself under the proper analytic technique. It’s that (1) this taxonomic practice is different from other ostensibly zoological taxonomic practices, by virtue of being reflexive; (2) the origin of this difference lies in the fact that it is naming and describing our own ancestors, and (3) ancestors are invariably sacred (in the broad anthropological sense of “special”, rather than in the narrower sense of “holy,” although the ancestors may of course sometimes be that too; Zerubavel 2012).

Figure 1: A notoriously sacred ancestor,
Eoanthropus dawsoni, or Piltdown Man.

Anthropologically speaking, hominin species are sacred ancestors. In some cases, this is more obvious than others. The role of Eoanthropus dawsoni as a sacred British ancestor (Figure 1), which effectively precluded its exposure as a hoax for decades, is well-known (Weiner 1955). Another notable example is Sinanthropus pekinensis. We often retell the story of the loss of the Peking Man fossils on Pearl Harbor Day. They were being transported for safe keeping to the naval base in Hawaii to protect them from the Japanese, who were very interested in taking control of the fossils (Roberts et al. 2021). We never tell a parallel story in Europe: After all, there were hominin fossils scattered around Europe in 1941, but they didn’t require special protection from the Germans. Why did Peking Man require protection from the Japanese? Presumably, because the fossils were regarded as ancestors of the Chinese (Sautman 2001; Schmalzer 2008), and thus possessed symbolic power and value to East Asians, which was quite different from the cultural meanings of European fossils.

And it wasn’t even Homo erectus at the time, but Sinanthropus pekinensis. That is what all of these names represent: not elements of biological history, but elements of stories about biological history. They are attempts to create formal biological characters and distinctive elements in order to convey a story of human origins, where there are, in fact, no such formal biological distinctions in nature.  This situation is familiar from the neontological end of physical anthropology, in the form of two centuries of misguided racial classification. I am suggesting that the problem with paleoanthropological taxonomy today is the same problem with racial taxonomy decades ago: namely, a fundamental confusion of categories, mistaking units of symbolic culture for units of biological nature.

Figure 2: An ancestor (STS-5 or Mrs. Ples)
on a postage stamp 

Some famous fossil ancestors have appeared on national postage stamps (Figure 2), an unusual location for scientific data. My point is that studying and narrating one’s own ancestry is a culturally powerful activity. The elements of a scientific story of our ancestors are species, and those species are not like other species, by virtue of being our ancestors (Walker et al., 2021). We are humans studying human ancestors; the reflexivity is built into the system. In order to break out of the loop (Huxley 1863:69), we can pretend to be space aliens (“scientific Saturnians, if you will”), but that is hardly a scientific solution to any problem.

We no longer teach the pattern of extant human variation as being taxonomically structured, because we have come to realize that the taxonomies of race did not in fact represent what they purported to: the existence of a fairly small number of fairly discrete and fairly natural clusters of people. By shifting the ontological status of race from the biological to the cultural (obviously, sometimes correlated with a bit of biology), race has become no longer a subject of formal biological taxonomy. Consequently, whether the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature recognizes Homo sapiens afer as a valid subspecies is irrelevant, for it isn’t actually a biological thing. It is simply one of the many cultural ways that humans form politically salient groups, and consequently one of the identities that are available for people to adopt in a particular time and place. 

Similar reasoning can be applied to human ancestry. We may begin to regard Homo heidelbergensis, for example, as ontologically equivalent to Homo sapiens asiaticus. That is to say, as an attempt to apply scientific taxonomic rigor where it is inapplicable, by naming something and thus willing it into existence. This is the fallacy of reification, or misplaced concreteness. There is no Homo sapiens asiaticus, although we can certainly discuss the peoples of East Asia, their gene pools, and their adaptations. We do not recognize Linnaean subspecies taxa as describing our species at present. Are the Linnaean species taxa that ostensibly describe our ancestry any realer? Or are they primarily serving to conceal the actual structure of human prehistoric biology? It is, after all, at least conceivable that the human lineage was more like a structured metapopulation than like a clade, all the way down. If that were true, then gene flow would presumably be occurring, which becomes a mechanism for the horizontal transmission of derived characters. If derived characters are transmitted horizontally by gene flow, rather than vertically by common ancestry, that would render any ostensible phylogenetic analyses untenable; in which case the goal of establishing a proper taxonomy and phylogeny for recent hominin fossils (e.g., Bae et al., 2023) would be impossible.

Conclusion

Figure 3: Five official kinds of living people, from 1911 

            We talk today about a species Homo sapiens, and even about a subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens, without further formal taxonomic structure, although with real and studiable patterns of biological diversity below that level. But instead of characterizing Homo sapiens europaeus as if it were a naturalistic taxon, today we ask instead why scientists thought it existed as such for two or three centuries when it actually doesn’t (Figure 3). Instead of asking how many and what the human races are, we ask how and why they get made, and what work they do. We may look similarly at the question in paleoanthropology of how hominin species get made and manipulated – without necessarily assuming that hominin species are biological things, because that is what we think our prehistory is supposed be composed of. It may be that the quest for a proper and correct taxonomy of hominin species is itself a vain one.

The 18th century Linnaean tree of classification does not map perfectly on to the 19th century Darwinian tree of phylogeny. Why not? Because adaptive Darwinian divergence creates paraphyletic Linnaean categories – such as invertebrates (minus vertebrates), fish (minus tetrapods), reptiles (minus birds), monkeys (minus hominoids), and apes (minus humans). Consequently, 21st century cladistic classifications often have weird components, as they attempt to make all recognized taxa monophyletic (Withgott, 2000). Nevertheless, even Linnaeus was not faced with trying to incorporate extinct taxa into his work; he didn’t even believe in extinction. Moreover, Linnaeus did not know about macro-and micro-evolution when he formulated his system, and the distinction has vexed systematists ever since, since speciation is a process and not an event, and thus reproductive isolation (if that is your criterion of species) is often incomplete (Dobzhansky, 1937).

The recent paper by Meneganzin and Bernardi (2023) about Neanderthal specieshood underscores the problem. With imprecise definitions of what “human,” “Neanderthal,” and “species” mean, the Linnaean system simply breaks down here. They may well be right: Neanderthals may indeed be a “good” species, assuming that species actually mean something real and biological in this context. But I would suggest that Neanderthals are neither a “good” species nor a “bad” species; the imposition of biological species labels where the species are at best biologically ambiguous is the problem. That would be a problem anywhere on the “tree” of life; but Neanderthals have the added burden of sitting on the boundary between the human and the nonhuman, which is about as singularly symbolically charged as any place you can imagine. 

Perhaps hominin species do more harm than good at present, when it comes to understanding the bio-historical processes and patterns that got us here. Perhaps hominin species are examples of scientific pareidolia: projecting patterns like faces onto objects like clouds and tortillas. If you really want them to be there, you can always find them. The problem lies in convincing everyone else that they are there.

References

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[1] Although I reject the two premises that led to the adoption of “hominin” (only naming clades, and privileging our genetic intimacy with the apes over our ecological difference from them), I use the term for its hipness.

[2] I regard a species to be a group of organisms composed of potential mates and competitors for mates, and representing a temporarily stable state in a biopolitical field of evolution, ecological relations, capitalism, conservation science, and governmental action.

Fire, Corn, and Creationism

At the Royal Wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in May 2018, the Episcopalian Bishop Michael Curry sermonized on the power of love and fire. On the latter subject, he invoked the writings of the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

[According to Teilhard] the discovery or invention or harnessing of fire was one of the great scientific and technological discoveries in all of human history. Fire to a great extent made human civilization possible. Fire made it possible to cook food and to provide sanitary ways of eating which reduced the spread of disease in its time. Fire made it possible to heat warm environments and thereby made human migration around the world a possibility, even into colder climates. Fire made it possible, there was no Bronze Age without fire, no Iron Age without fire, no industrial revolution without fire.

Fire was indeed a great biocultural development in human evolution, for the apes have neither sufficient brains nor sufficient thumbs to create and control it. The direct ancestors of humans were doing it hundreds of thousands of years ago; we know this because they left us the remains of their hearths.

The Greeks, who knew nothing of prehistoric archaeology, at least knew where fire came from. It was given to people  by Prometheus, against the wishes of Zeus, who punished him for the deed in a classically Zeusian way: by chaining him to a rock and having an eagle peck out his liver on a daily basis.

Ha! Those silly Greeks! But did you ever wonder what the Bible says about where fire came from?

The answer is easy. Nothing. Fire was such an obvious part of being human that the Bible doesn’t even have an origin myth about it.  It was just always there with people. They didn’t have to discover it, or learn to control it. The Book of Jubilees, which expands on Genesis and figures prominently among the Dead Sea Scrolls, has a detail that Genesis doesn’t. After getting expelled from Eden, Adam and Eve make “an offering of frankincense, galbanum, and myrrh, and spices,” which implies the control of fire, since God generally doesn’t take raw offerings, only roasted offerings. If we go just with canonical books of the Bible, the first offerings are those of Cain and Abel.

            The problem is that there is no learning curve. Neither Adam and Eve, nor their children, apparently have to experiment with fire, or are even given fire. One day they are just using it. Perhaps they simply cadged it from the cherubim brandishing the flaming sword at the entrance to the Garden of Eden; or perhaps they just ate from the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of How to Make Fire – but if so, the Bible doesn’t say.

The anti-intellectualism of the biblical literalist has tended to be focused on biological narratives, specifically denying that our species is descended from ape ancestors over last few million years. But the battleground of archaeology is even more problematic for a 21^st century believer in the inerrancy of the Bible, but one rarely confronts it because of the blinding light of Darwin and biology.

 Consider the economic prehistory of the human species. The early 1860s saw the publication of two important English works on the subject: Charles Lyell’s The Antiquity of Man (1863) and John Lubbock’s Pre-Historic Times (1865). Between them, they cemented a significantly non-biblical story about human ancestry: namely, that the earliest state of humanity was a long time of living off the land, without agriculture, as contemporary hunter-gatherers (whom they regarded as “savages”) did.

Now, of course, the discovery and spread of food production is one of the most fundamental issues in archaeology. Humans began to transform animals and plants from wild to domesticated forms, by controlling their breeding, starting around 12,000 or so years ago, thus ensuring a stable supply of food. The problem faced by scholars in the mid-19^th century is this:

The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. (Genesis 2:15)

According to the Bible, there was never any hunting and gathering. People were farming from day one; or rather, from Day 6. And the disparity between archaeology and the biblical text created a problem for anyone wanting to understand contemporary foragers in places like Australia and South Africa and America in the 19^th century. If farming was invented and learned, then contemporary foragers were just people who hadn’t learned it.  If, on the other hand, farming was there from the beginning, then they were degenerates who had abandoned that God-given knowledge. So which was it – were living foragers primordial or devolved? Lyell and Lubbock settled the matter: Hunting-and-gathering was how our ancestors long ago made a living off the land, and only subsequently was agriculture eventually developed. The alternative idea is not only anti-empirical, but also a bit racist.

                Moreover, agriculture arose in different parts of the world, using different available wild resources: In one place wheat; in another, rice.  And that leads to an important and incontrovertible conclusion from modern archaeology: God did not make corn.

                People made corn. In particular, people of Mesoamerica made corn over the course of a few thousand years, from a grass called teosinte, which is still capable of hybridizing with corn. We have their learning curve, in the form of dated ancient cobs. The learning curve for food production is critical, since the Bible directly implies that there shouldn’t be one. Moreover, all the evidence for early corn is in Mesoamerica; there was no corn in the Garden of Eden. (And of course, wherever the King James Version says “corn,” you should read “grain” – because what the Bible says and what the Bible means are often not the same. And while you’re at it, where you encounter the word “unicorns” in the King James, you might want to read “wild oxen”.)

                 With both the creationists and evolutionists transfixed on Darwin, perhaps the scholarly community might take a step back from apes and DNA, and try attacking biblical literalism/inerrancy on a different battlefield. Make the creationist explain fire and corn. Any explanation will necessarily be unbiblical, at the very least, in addition to being inaccurate.

Then you can share a bowl of popcorn with your new friend.

You tell me that it's evolution, well, you know...

It has been a frustrating several decades for science since John Whitcomb and Henry Morris published The Genesis Flood in 1961, the book that laid the groundwork for modern biblical literalist creationism. Those authors just flatly denied what science had appreciated since the early 1800s: that the earth is very old, and has been populated at different times by diverse creatures that were quite different from living ones, although frequently resembling them. While there has always been religiously-based resistance to Darwinism, it was a rare anti-intellectual who dared venture into “young-earth creationism”. Even William Jennings Bryan, Clarence Darrow’s antagonist in the famous Scopes trial, volunteered the fact that he was an “old-earth” creationist, to the surprise of both sides in the courtroom. 

DARROW:  Would you say the earth was only 4,000 years old?
BRYAN:  Oh no, I think it is much older than that.
DARROW:  How much?
BRYAN:  I couldn't say.
DARROW:  Do you say whether the Bible itself says it is older than that?
BRYAN:  I don't think the Bible says itself whether it is older or not.
DARROW:  Do you think the earth was made in six days?
BRYAN:  Not six days of twenty-four hours.
DARROW:  Doesn't it say so?
BRYAN:  No, sir.

In other words, “young-earth creationism” was too stupid even for William Jennings Bryan in 1925.

The Genesis Flood, on the other hand, began in 1961 with the premise that the Bible relates literal history; the Bible says that the Earth is merely thousands of years old; therefore it must be; and therefore all species lived at the same time, not so long ago. Almost as an afterthought, evolution must be false as a simple consequence of this biblical revisionism. This begged the question of how animals actually came to be fossilized, short of having been magically petrified by the visage of the gorgon Medusa; or how particular fossils came to be very consistently deposited in similar formations of rock layers, in spite of all that sloshing of the flood waters. It left you to wonder how the modern lemurs made it to Madagascar, and nowhere else; or how the koalas made it from Mount Ararat in the Near East all the way to Australia, without eucalyptus forests in between.

Most importantly, though, The Genesis Flood enjoined the reader to simply reject lots and lots of real and scholarly geology in favor of some dopey alt-geology. Where might such a bizarre suggestion come from? Saying that science has gotten something wrong is not in itself threatening. After all, when we teach that science is self-correcting, that is quite specifically what we mean: Science has gotten something wrong and we are correcting it.

The context of modern biblical literalist creationism bears some examination. Today it is fashionable to regard creationists along with anti-vaccinators, anthropogenic climate-change deniers, and flat-earthers, as part of a vast conspiracy of stupid. But there are two problems with this view. First, science is, and has sometimes famously been, wrong. When American geneticists of the 1920s said that we needed to sterilize the poor and restrict immigrants on account of their “bad germ-plasm,” it was the anti-science mobilization of the civil libertarians, social scientists, political conservatives, and religious Catholics that we can admire in retrospect for standing up to the geneticists. And second, we don’t know the degree of overlap among the anti-vaccinators, anthropogenic climate-change deniers, flat-earthers, and creationists.  Although some of them rationalize their beliefs with Bible verses, only the creationists are actually religiously motivated. In fact, even the creationists think the flat-earthers are nuts. 

St. Augustine, a Hippo

In other words, creationism represents a special kind of anti-science, rooted in a particular hermeneutic treatment of the Bible: selective biblical literalism. It’s selective because, as even St. Augustine of Hippo  recognized, when you read that Adam and Eve’s “eyes were opened” after eating the fruit in the Garden of Eden, you simply can’t imagine that they had been walking around the Garden with their eyes closed, bumping into things. It has got to be a figure of speech, not to be taken literally.

There is a different context for looking at creationism, however. Scarcely a decade before The Genesis Flood, the scientific world was scandalized by a Bible-based book of a different sort. It was called Worlds in Collision, written by psychoanalyst named Immanuel Velikovsky.

Velikovsky was not a literalist, nor was he concerned with the book of Genesis. His interest lay in Exodus, but his biblical focus was rooted in an equally ridiculous premise: Since all myths and legends are ultimately based upon real events (rather than just being stories, like Cosette and the Thenardiers, or Oliver Twist and Fagin, or Luke Skywalker and the Death Star) then what actual circumstances might have been the inspiration for the miracle-infused biblical Exodus from Egypt? In particular, what might have started things off by turning the Nile to blood, Plague Number One of Ten – or at least to something that Bronze Age yokels might have mistaken for blood? The subsequent plagues of Egypt would also receive naturalistic explanations too – frogs making their own amphibious exodus from the now-toxic river, then hosting insect vermin as disease made its way up the food chain, eventually culminating in mass deaths – hazily misremembered and misrecorded as merely the Egyptian first-born.

But what started it off, turning the Nile river to blood?

Velikovsky had an answer, and peppered his biblical exegesis as well with tendentious renderings of ethnographic and archaeological texts. What had turned the Nile red and undrinkable was red matter that had fallen into the Nile from the surface of the planet Venus. How did it get there? The planet Venus had just come into existence, having been expelled as a comet from the Great Red Spot of Jupiter; and was shooting through the solar system, eventually banging into Mars before both planets settled into their separate orbits just a few thousand years ago. It was an ingenious theory, with only one obstacle in its way: astronomy.  So Velikovsky invented his own alt-astronomy and settled into the #1 slot of the New York Times best-seller list in the Spring of 1950.

Needless to say, astronomers did not take this at all well. Sadly, though, they did a spectacularly poor job of engaging with Velikovsky’s work, beginning with threatening its publisher. Their fulminations were properly dismissive, necessarily technical, sometimes ad hominem, and occasionally incoherent. Eventually, though, Worlds in Collision faded from view, and today you can generally only find Velikovsky’s ideas by searching for them on the internet. Nevertheless, both Worlds in Collision and The Genesis Flood prominently cast themselves against science, and in favor of their particular interpretations of the Bible. One bluntly opposed astronomy, the other opposed geology. Yet the biblical text figures prominently in both, as misunderstood “history” in the colliding planets narrative, and as properly-understood “history” in creationist narratives.

We (in the human evolution community) have engaged most commonly with biblical literalist creationism as a false theory of biology, or as an archaic remnant of older modes of thought; but it is reactionary, not primitive, and treating it as a false story simply replicates the astronomers’ frustrating engagement with Worlds in Collision. It will always prove unsuccessful to engage with creationism as “our story is true and yours is false” – since at very least, many aspects of any story of human evolution are debatable or downright inaccurate. Indeed, both evolutionist and creationist narratives of human origins have at times freely incorporated racist elements.

But Velikovsky had fashioned a mold: a Bible-validating narrative, and the replacement of real science with his own. And he largely succeeded in focusing the resulting debate on the nature of the story he had to tell – science had theirs, and Velikovsky had his.

That was 1950. The Genesis Flood was 1961. And a decade after that, Erich von Däniken published his best-seller, called Chariots of the Gods?  Once again, the Bible figured prominently, but this time with God’s presence as mis-remembered and mis-reported visitations by ancient astronauts. And the only thing standing in its way was archaeology.

Yet while the colliding worlds astronomy scenario has all but vanished, young-earth creationism and the ancient astronauts are very much still with us. Creationism’s biology scenario is touted in evangelical churches across America, and the ancient astronauts archaeology scenario is touted on The History Channel. Approximately as any people believe it as believe creationism, and we have no idea how much those 40% or so of Americans overlap with one another. 

It’s not simply the rejection of science, but the arrogant construction of a different science, based in some measure on an idiosyncratic interpretation of the Bible. That is what connects the colliding worlds, young-earth creationists, and ancient aliens.  And one thing seems clear: arguing over whose story is right is not a successful strategy. “You” may believe that the planets have been more-or-less as they presently are for billions of years, but “we” believe that Venus is only 3500 years old. And why are you trying to disabuse us of that? Don’t we have a right to believe it? Come to think of it, aren’t you just being an intolerant archaic throwback to colonialist hegemonic practice?

The joint possession of secret knowledge is, after all, a pretty obvious form of social bond.  People who believe the Jets are going to the Super Bowl have something to agree on and to hope for together, regardless of any basis it might have in reality.

Would it give you pleasure to try and convince them otherwise? To me, that's a bit sadistic. I agree rather with H. L. Mencken, who said something like: Everyone is entitled to the belief that their spouse is attractive and their children are smart. 

Talking people out of their delusions can be fun, don't get me wrong. I just don't think it should be the goal of science education. It's one thing to teach what scientists believe, and quite another to insist that everyone believe as you do. 

Instead, we should be focusing on how scientific stories get made, and why their odd beliefs aren’t science. How do we explain appropriate scholarly practice to those who have never experienced it? That's the pedagogical challenge. But this is the complementary intellectual domain of the humanities:  turning the conversation away from the content of the science itself, and towards the nature of scientific epistemologies. That is to say, what makes something scientific knowledge as opposed to unscientific knowledge.

And sure, if you want to go for broke, why, in most contexts, scientific knowledge is more reliable than unscientific knowledge.

But this will necessarily be a humanistic conversation, and it may not be one that scientists are comfortable with, but it is probably a conversation that has a better chance of making a difference than just insisting that they’re wrong and you’re right.

Or, to put it in the non-scientific domain of morality: Don't be an asshole.

Annoying books, cont'd: Matt Ridley's "The Evolution of Everything"

Matt Ridley's book, The Evolution of Everything, answers the question, “What if everything in the universe were to be understood as differentially-replicating elements, whose bestest alternatives have been tested in free competition and have thrived to produce all the good stuff in the world?” The first few chapters deal primarily with the evolution of the natural order, and the remaining dozen with the evolution of socio-cultural forms, and the big message is: Systems spontaneously create and maintain themselves efficiently without governmental interference.

The meaning of evolution is that all social planning is bad. In fact, it’s creationist.  Leave it all alone, and the cream will rise naturally to the top, as it always has, and the future will be as rosy as the past.

In the midst of all this cry for freedom and deregulation – including the environment, by the way, which the author apparently believes can also take care of itself – we encounter the occasional grudging admission that such freedom might not actually evolve the best of all possible worlds. “The right thing to do about poor, hungry and fecund people is to give them hope, opportunity, freedom, education, food and medicine, including of course contraception” (p. 214). But Ridley never mentions how this “doing” and “giving” will come about, when his entire social desideratum involves allowing the free market of natural selection to work without any centralized plan. Perhaps I can be forgiven, then, if I doubt the author’s sincerity when he sheds a few tears on behalf of common folk.

Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and historian Richard Hofstadter are helpfully identified as Marxists, although the latter’s identity is merged with that of the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, who may or may not be a Marxist. Just in case you’re worried about who the Marxists are. 

Apparently the author is.  Perhaps his obsession with Marxists arises from the fact that he is a Conservative member of the House of Lords, holding the rank of Viscount.  Much of the book consists of historical vignettes, but Ridley’s history is notably bloodless; one without colonialism, slavery, destitution, or exploitation, on which Marxist histories tend to harp.   It’s a happy history, of free trade, free markets, and free progress.  In other words, someone whose ancestors were busily rigging the system so that your ancestors and mine would suffer, now wants to tell you that the system works fine, so leave it alone.  

I actually found myself trying to suppress a sense of moral outrage as I worked my way through this book. Ridley idealizes a system of social behavior that runs on greed, maximizes inequality, and fails to engage with issues like justice and fairness.  It is a troubling caricature of Darwinism, and I frankly came to see the book as an abuse of science, as an attempt to rationalize an evil social philosophy by recourse to nature. “The whole idea of social mobility,” he explains, “is to find talent in the disadvantaged, to find people who have the nature but have missed the nurture” (p. 166). Well, no.  Actually the idea of social mobility is to reduce the overall proportion of privileged, wealthy douchebags who think that they owe their station in life to their inherent virtues.

You know what? Fuck him. Fuck his ancestors too.  What some inbred twit thinks the about the evolution of human society is about as relevant as what a raccoon thinks. The reason this kind of pervy-Darwinistic thought was repudiated many decades ago is that it was recognized as the vulgar self-interested bio-politics of the rich and powerful. If there is a Darwinian lesson to be extracted from the history of the 20^th century, it is probably that the poor require constant protection from the ideologies of the overwealthy and underpigmented. 

Brief review of Tom Wolfe's "The Kingdom of Speech"

I really wanted to like this book, for the simple reason that any book that the obnoxious fruifly geneticist Jerry Coyne is that contempuous of, can't be all bad. But sadly, it really is all bad.

Tom Wolfe's new book is indeed as bad as advertised, but it isn't creationist. His big idea is taken from linguist Daniel Everett (Language: The Cultural Tool), that language isn't a biological autapomorphy, like eyebrows or valgus knees, but a discovery or invention, like bifacial handaxes. The possibility that the dichotomy might be a false one apparently occurs to neither of them.

If it were not in some sense a biological feature, then it is difficult to explain why our vocal tract differs from a chimpanzee’s; and why you can’t teach a chimp to talk, as psychologists from Robert Yerkes on down have tried and failed to do.  And if it were not a cultural feature, then it is difficult to explain why people speak so many different more-or-less equivalent languages, rather than just one really good language. 

The first half of the book is a child’s romp through the career of Charles Darwin, written in an overtly anachronistic, and frankly sophomoric, style. The second half of the book leaps to savage Noam Chomsky. You can get distracted by Wolfe giving Ian Tattersall a post at MIT (p. 149), or awarding Joseph Dalton Hooker a knighthood 20 years before Queen Victoria did (p. 32), or his antiquated use of “man” as a generic term for the species, but it really isn’t even worth the time.  “Even the smartest apes don’t have thoughts, “ he writes on p. 162, “so much as conditioned responses to certain primal pressures.”  Who knew there were any real Cartesians left?

What ties the two halves of this short book together is not so much the history of linguistics (no Saussure, and a passing mention of Edward Sapir), but the foregrounded information that science is a social activity, with rhetoric, persuasion, and alliance as components. Somebody really ought to write a book about that.

Wolfe’s rhetoric is mainly deployed to boost the work of Everett, who seems to be rather a better linguist than ethnographer.  He says that the Pirahã language lacks the feature of recursion, which Chomsky believes that all languages have.  This ought to be little more than classic “Bongo-Bongoism” – the ethnographic demonstration that the mythical people of “Bongo-Bongo” lack whatever facet of human behavior all people are supposed to have, as first-generation ethnographers aggressively liked to point out a century ago.   But when Everett writes about the overall simplicity and primitiveness of the Pirahã language and lifeways, Wolfe notes that the published comments in Current Anthropology were dubious. “They all had their reservations about this and that,” Wolfe writes (p. 119). But “this and that” were actually the articulated doubts about the basic competence of Everett’s ethnography.  That is serious, because it means that the stuff being said about the Pirahã is not quite reliable enough to be considered as anthropological data. They “had preserved a civilization virtually unchanged for thousands, godknew-how-many-thousands, of years” (p. 113). When Wolfe calls them “the most primit – er, indigenous – tribe known to exist on earth” (p. 142), the sophisticated reader may be forgiven for reading it as romanticized pseudo-anthropological nonsense.  

After all, every sophisticated reader knows that the most primit - er, indigenous tribe known to exist on earth are really the KhoiSan

Yanomamo 

Hadza 

Ache

Tasaday.  

Oh shit, maybe these guys really are!

Anyway, without differentiating between (vocal) speech and (cognitive) language, Wolfe eventually deduces that speech is what made us significantly different from other animals, something that “no licensed savant had ever pointed ... out before”.  So you had better not look too hard for licensed savants pointing it out.

Wolfe concludes with a radical taxonomic proposition: that humans are cognitively so distinct that we should be alone in a higher taxonomic category.  If you don’t know that Julian Huxley said as much in the 1950s, and Terry Deacon (1997) more recently – at the subkingdom and phylum levels, respectively – then you might find the suggestion original or threatening. It’s actually neither. It’s just a matter of how much or how little you choose to privilege phylogeny when classifying. 

All in all, the wrong stuff.