Genetics as political ideology

I just finished writing a brief essay  for the journal Sociology, for a retrospective on an important book, Dot Nelkin and Susan Lindee’s (1995) The DNA Mystique: The Gene as Cultural Icon.  It actually had a major intellectual impact on me, when I reviewed it for the American Journal of Physical Anthropology in 1995.

Susan  Lindee in 1999 with me and my Caipirinha 

Nelkin and Lindee’s book was a wonderful cultural analysis that showed how embedded scientific discourses about heredity are in cultural or folk discourses about heredity.  And those cultural discourses are invariably political.  After all, ancestry only came to be important in the first place because of the need to divide great-grandpa’s stuff among his heirs.  They show that these are political discourses about hierarchy, worth, and inequality, and scientific claims are easily framed to be hung in the gallery of pseudo-scientific justifications for hereditary aristocracies.

By implication, then, the only way to understand claims about human genetics is to understand that they are never value-neutral, and are invariably politically valent.  This means that scientists ought to be just as accountable to justify the deducible political implications of their work as they are to justify the data collection and statistics.  Nelkin and Lindee stop short of saying this, but I think it as the only way to make sense of the situation. 

It has seemed to me for a longtime that the most horrible question that geneticists can ask themselves is not ”Did I do the right statistical test?” but a far darker question, the question that goes “Gee, what is it about me that the Nazis like so much?”

In other words, at some point, since this science is so politicized, the scientist can’t afford to be naive about its bio-political nature.  You see science, and especially human biology, is particularly suitable to be used by people with, for the sake of argument, evil intentions – by which I mean increasing the amount of misery in the world, reinforcing social, political, and economic  inequalities, causing harm without benefit.  That science should not be done.  It violates the basic charter that we, the civilized people of the world, made with Francis Bacon in the earth 17^th century.  “Your project sounds good, for it promises to improve our lives.”  But science that makes people’s lives worse?  "Let’s pass on that."

For all intents and purposes, that charter was reinforced with the development of bioethics in the late 20^th century.  That is to say, we are all for the progress of science, but when science butts up against human rights, human rights wins, hands down.  We needed to codify that point, because for most of the 20^th century, the scientific question of “What can I do?” was often difficult to differentiate from the moral and practical question “What can I get away with?”

I think what often gets lost, and perhaps even deliberately obscured, is the political stakes involved in naturalizing human cultural history.  People have been asking about the sources of large scale social inequality for around 10,000 years; that is to say, since the beginning of large-scale social inequality.  The Bible isn’t very helpful here.  Is says God favors some kings, and curses other kings, but doesn’t actually say why there are kings at all.  Most of the time, it just takes kings for granted, except for one passage in First Samuel, Chapter 8,  in which the Tribe asks the judge for a king, and the judge tries to talk them out of it, by explaining why kings suck.  But otherwise, hereditary monarchies are taken to be part of the natural way of things.

By the 19^th century, as the long-standing hereditary aristocracies were being threatened by democracy and new wealth, there were two opposing theories  for the origin of those hereditary aristocracies.  Why aren’t you king?  Well, accident of birth; you’d be a good king, you just unluckily came from ancestors who had been historically victims of economic and political injustices.  Here you explain the observation of social inequality by the inference of historical injustice.  The solution is to work for social justice.  Science has no role; we haven’t even mentioned science.

Second theory: Civilization depends on the aristocratic classes.  They have founded every civilization everywhere, which eventually collapsed when their blood was diluted.  They are thus constitutionally better than the lower and upwardly-mobile classes, and to get rid of them would foretell the doom of civilization.  Here the same observation (social inequality) is not caused by injustice, but by the facts of natural difference.  All we need to do is to identify the nature of those gifts.  Here social justice is not desirable, for the very need for it is denied; and science may have a role, in convincing us that the secret to aristocratic success is in the shape of their head, or the number of answers they can get right on a standardized test, or their DNA sequence.

That’s the back story.  That’s why Nelkin and Lindee saw the gene as a bio-political element, a “cultural icon” back in 1995.   The point is that we now know about “genetic essentialism” – also Nelkin and Lindee’s phrase – as an outmoded ideology, and with a history of bad political baggage, to boot.  Can we not reject it on that basis, as one rejects creationism in science?

I think scientists ought to be expected to articulate and explain the politics in their research, and not be permitted to pretend that their work is value neutral, and that ethics, morals, values, and politics is somebody else’s problem.

Here are my guidelines for reviewers of papers in human behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology:

Does the paper adequately assess its possible political implications?

What stand does the paper take on those political implications?

After all, in any inter-disciplinary research, you can't pay attention to only one of the relevant intellectual domains.  All you’d have to do is broaden the “Conflicts of Interest” statement to include political conflicts of interests, which, if you’re submitting a paper that has political implications, might be a reasonable expectation.  I can imagine that had they answered the questions, there would be far less uncritical derivative citations of Derek Freeman’s attack on Margaret Mead, Richard Jantz’s attack on Franz Boas, and Ralph Holloway’s scurrilous attack on Stephen Jay Gould.  Sure, the lunatics would still cite them, but they’d be self-identified, and uncredible in the community of scholars.

This is political and has always been.  The people who are the most political tend to be the ones claiming self-consciously to be the most scientific, and tend to be the ones whose science stands up the worst.  That's another reason to study history.  It’s time to stop allowing people to pretend that this science isn’t political, and claiming the higher scientific ground for their thinly cloaked politicized science; they are entitled only to the lower scholarly ground and the lower moral ground.  That’s is not where science belongs.

Meet Joe Science

The flap in the last couple of weeks over Jared Diamond’s publicity for his book, The World Until Yesterday, and Napoleon Chagnon’s publicity for his book, Noble Savages needs a little context, which happens to be a specialty of anthropology.

Anthropology is coming off of a year that was described in the leading science journal in these here United States as an annus horribilis.   And you know damn well, that when Americans resort to Latin to describe something, it’s got to be pretty bad.  Of course in the background we have the perpetual war against the creationists and the racists, both of whom see anthropology as their enemy. 

So we elect a President whose mother was an anthropologist, and you think that might bode well for the public appreciation of our field.  But we get Florida governor Rick Scott, upset by his daughter’s choice of a major, declaring it to be not the kind of major we want in Florida.  And shortly thereafter, the big business publications – Kiplinger and Forbes – publicly branded it as the worst major.  It seems almost as if the Republicans had declared war on anthropology, along with the creationists and the racists.

Then we have the one-two punch from the guys claiming to be Joe Science.  Jared Diamond pretends to be an anthropologist, but does things that no competent anthropologist would do, and interprets other peoples as no competent anthropologist does.  That is to say, he soft-pedals the historical context of other cultures, and imagines them to be stand-ins for his own ancestors.  He tells Stephen Colbert that we don’t call New Guineans “primitive” because it’s politically incorrect, apparently unaware that we don’t call them “primitive” because the term connotes a false, ancestral relationship between “them” and “us”.

Napoleon Chagnon is a sadder story, because he is not a pseudo-anthropologist, but an incompetent anthropologist.  Let me be clear about my use of the word “incompetent”.  His methods for collecting, analyzing and interpreting his data are outside the range of acceptable anthropological practices.  Yes, he saw the Yanomamo doing nasty things.  But when he concluded from his observations that the Yanomamo are innately and primordially “fierce”  he lost his anthropological credibility, because he had not demonstrated any such thing.   He has a right to his views, as creationists and racists have a right to theirs, but the evidence does not support the conclusion, which makes it scientifically incompetent.

And so, after the New York Times runs a puff piece on Chagnon in the Magazine, and a critical review of his book simultaneously in the Book Review section, it seems as though the best we can hope for is a draw.  But wait!  Into the fray comes their distinguished science reporter Nicholas Wade, with a second puff piece on Chagnon.

WTF?  His work isn’t that important to anthropology, except as a methodological counter-example.  Why is it so important to the Times?

Again, some context,  Nicholas Wade once co-wrote a good book on scientific fraud.  Judging from his work since then, I am inclined to attribute its meritorious aspects to his co-author.   More recently, Wade has been pushing genetic determinism as hard as he can from his pulpit at the Times.  And you know who his antagonists are going to be. 

Wade’s 2007 book,  Before the Dawn, was marketed as a celebration of anthropological genetics.  Except that anthropological genetics means something different to anthropological geneticists than it does to Wade.   To anthropological geneticists, it means the mutual illumination of genetics and anthropology, often using the technology of the former to study questions framed by the latter.  To Nicholas Wade, however, it means that the Chinese excel at ping-pong because of their genes for it (p. 197).

The book was reviewed in the leading science journals by leading anthropological geneticists.  The reviewers in Nature found it to be a work of social darwinism (that phrase is not bandied about as a compliment these days).  Rebecca Cann in Science had this to say:

As a graduate student … I often wished that there were science writers energized to follow the new insights from geneticists as closely and rapidly as others reported interpretations of fragmentary fossils. Well, be careful what you wish for.

And she continued,

The book also reveals some unpleasant truths about science writing that currently passes for objective and informed. Only smugness that one’s sources must be correct because they represent a scientific elite group having new and exclusive truths about human evolution makes it possible to write, in 2006, sentences such as “The Australian and New Guinean branch [of our phylogenetic tree] soon settled into a time warp of perpetual stagnation."

In other words, the 19^th century idea that in looking at other people we are seeing our ancestors, against the modern anthropological view that we are seeing people with other histories, is what unites Chagnon’s, Diamond’s, and Wade’s books.  It is a false and outmoded ideology, one that knowledgeable scholars – or, for the sake of argument, “scientists” -  have rejected.

Nicholas Wade, however,  is undeterred.  In an interview with the Anthropology News in 2007, he told them , "Anyone who’s interested in cultural anthropology should escape as quickly as they can from their cultural anthropology department and go and learn some genetics, which will be the foundation of cultural anthropology in the future."  In other words, he wants to return to the pre-modern era of anthropology, before E. B. Tylor separated “culture” from “race” or “nature” – because what we think is cultural is really better studied by geneticists.  That was actually a “pro-science” stance a century ago, but it is by no stretch of the imagination “pro-science” today.  It is decidedly anti-science.  It fact it sounds almost as if he is beginning to believe his own bullshit.

So, let’s see what he has to say about Napoleon Chagnon this week, throwing the weight of his reputation in the New York Times around, to balance their recent Chagnon pieces as 2-1 against anthropology. 

He starts off, “What were our early ancestors really like…?” – a good question, but one to which Napoleon Chagnon’s work is irrelevant.   Bad start, though, because it means that even now, neither Chagnon nor Wade apparently understands what the Yanomamo actually tell us about anything.

“One of Dr. Chagnon’s discoveries was that warriors who had killed a man in battle sired three times more children than men who had not killed.”  Not exactly a discovery, though; more of an assertion, which was published in Science, and shown convincingly to be based on a misinterpretation of the data. Chagnon’s interpretation is that his data have no historical context, and are simply the Yanomamo doing what is natural – not only for them, but for us as well.  Brian Ferguson’s interpretation is universally taken to be more insightful then Chagnon’s, because it incorporates politics and history.  But neither of the pieces puffing up Chagnon, and publicizing his hatred of his colleagues, even acknowledges the existence of alternative interpretations of Chagnon’s work.  The problem, simply put, is that Chagnon's statistics were rubbish, because he neglected to include the children of killers who had themselves been killed.

As Science reported it over a decade ago,

Chagnon's figures on reproductive success did not include dead unokai. The obvious question, in Ferguson's view, was whether the greater reproductive success of unokai was offset by higher mortality. Responding in American Ethnologist, Chagnon calculated the same figures without the headmen and came up with a correlation similar to, although smaller than, his previous figure. But, Chagnon told Science, he “didn't record at the time the status of unokai men who were killed,” which is necessary to respond to Ferguson's second objection. “But from what I know,” he says, “it looks as though [Ferguson's] hypothesis doesn't hold up.”

Here is a translation into scientific terms.  Chagnon's apparent statistical conclusion linking killers and babies is bogus because of a flaw in the data, which means that it is invalid to derive the conclusion that Chagnon derived.  The best he can do is claim impressionistically that he hopes Ferguson is wrong.  But that defeats the purpose of pretending to be a scientist and doing statistics in the first place.

So now, the best Wade can come up with is to repeat Chagnon’s claim that he represents science against “the ideology of his fellow anthropologists.  The general bias in anthropological theory draws heavily from Marxism, Dr. Chagnon writes.”  Kind of makes it sound as if he’s got a list of names that he wants to give to Senator McCarthy.  Damn commies.  (See my previous post for the commies.)  The point is that if the ostensible statistical relationships are mirages, then the only people they are going to be able to convince are other cult members.  But science is supposed to be able to convince skeptics, not other cult members.

And finally, explains Wade, the entire field of anthropology is like, totally anti-science, even the American Anthropological Association.  “In 2010 the A.A.A. voted to strip the word 'science' from its long-range mission plan and focus instead on ‘public understanding.’ Its distaste for science and its attack on Dr. Chagnon are now an indelible part of its record.”

Sure sounds like the American Anthropological Association is indelibly anti-science.   Actually, though, that  "distaste for science" is very delible.   How delible is it?  Well actually, that change (to remove the word “science” as a way to emphasize that anthropology incorporates both scientific and humanistic study, and thus is not limited by the scope of science) was suggested by a committee, and was rejected by the membership of the AAA.  Wade is wrong, wrong, wrong.  Instrumentally, perniciously, and anti-intellectually.

So on one side you’ve got the creationists, racists, genetic determinists, the Republican governor of Florida, Jared Diamond, and Napoleon Chagnon – and on the other side, you’ve got normative anthropology, and the mother of the President.  Which side are you on?

****

AAA response to The New York Times Magazine story.

AAA President Leith Mullings response.

A Rootin', Tootin' Blog Post

The newest issue of the Yearbook of Physical Anthropology contains some provocative material (including my own article, “Why Be Against Darwin? Creationism, Racism and the Roots of Anthropology”), but one other article in particular is provoking this rant – “Two Faces of Earnest A. Hooton” by Eugene Giles.1

Giles’s ambition here is to clear the air about Hooton, who was a leading public intellectual at Harvard during his term there (1913-1954), and trained the first generation of “modern” (i.e., post-WWII) biological anthropologists.  Hooton was also the leading scientific authority on race in the US, and a long-term advocate of the science of eugenics (along with nearly all the other natural scientists in the US), and Giles sets himself the task of defending Hooton from the charges of being a racist and a eugenicist.

Was Hooton a racist?  Well, obviously that’s a term that doesn’t translate well across the generations.   Giles correctly notes that Hooton was the mentor of an African American M.A. student, Caroline Bond Day, and had a good relationship with both Howard University and the NAACP.  But first things first.  Who says Hooton was a racist (whatever that term might mean, applied retrospectively to someone who indeed worked with Franz Boas against Nazi anthropology)?  Giles blames the American Anthropological Association’s “Race: Are We So Different?” website.

http://www.understandingrace.org/home.html

Opening of "Race: Are We So Different?"
at the Discovery Place in Charlotte, last year. 

Disclaimer: I had nothing whatsoever to do with that website, or the traveling museum exhibit (although I have no idea why Peggy Overbey didn’t invite me into it). I do like it, though. I was quoted in it, and attended its opening in Charlotte, and did a public radio show to promote it.

Giles does catch some inaccuracies, to be sure, but they are fleas on a big dog.  In the first place, there is no definitive work on Hooton, and those of us with historical interests have been waiting for many years for Giles himself to provide it.  Perhaps if he had done so, the AAA exhibit would have been able to get their facts straighter.

Washburn blowing out the candles
on his birthday cake for the last time.

But more significantly, the AAA Race website certainly was not the ultimate source of the accusation that Hooton was a racist.  His former student (and AAA President in 1962-3), Sherwood Washburn, had been saying that for half a century.  By the time I met Washburn, just a few years before his death, if I mentioned Hooton, Sherry would say, “He was a racist, you know”.  

There are two things that come through clearly about Hooton.  First, he did not take himself all that seriously.  And second, his views evolved.   Consequently, although it may be tempting to try and find a “real” Hooton behind all the verbiage and sometimes the outward silliness, that is probably an essentialist fallacy.  My reading of his work is that although his ideas about the meaning of race evolved – I allow students to compare his 1926 and 1936 papers on race in Science, in the latter of which he is desperately trying to differentiate his good American racial anthropology from bad German racial anthropology2,3 – he consistently maintained an anachronistic view that there was a direct and deterministic relationship between how you looked and how you thought.  This is what united Hooton’s interests in race, criminal anthropology, eugenics, and constitutional anthropology; and what his later students rejected after World War II.

I think that, like a lot of Americans, Hooton took a swing to the right after World War II.  In the case of the “constitutional anthropology” of William H. Sheldon, which asserted a direct connection between body build and personality, Hooton should have been smart enough to see through it, like his later students, but couldn’t; and he was actually hurt when it got back to him that he was being called a fascist.  Washburn, with whom he was still on good terms,  wrote him quite poignantly, “To put the matter bluntly, none of your pupils think that you are at all a fascist.  But, anyone reading Sheldon’s last book, taking the last 100 pages for what they say, and then hearing that you believe in Sheldon’s system, might call you a fascist with some justification.  What we need is the separation of the sane study of body-build from Sheldon’s system.”4

But Hooton was also genteel and non-confrontational, preferring to criticize someone behind their back rather than to their face.  Madison Grant’s 1916 The Passing of the Great Race was a bestselling classic of scientific racism, called “my bible” by Hitler, and invoked at the Nuremberg Trials as evidence that the Germans accused of war crimes had been inspired by American ideas; but Hooton, like many scientists, served under Grant in the American Eugenics Society.  In 1918, Hooton writes a little throwaway line in the context of a review of a different book in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, “Only the Prussians and Madison Grant now believe that the Nordics are a race of supermen and archangels.”5  Cute, huh?  But he never uses his stature as a Harvard expert on race to challenge Madison Grant.  And when Grant sends him a copy of his 1933 book, The Conquest of A Continent (i.e., more of same), Hooton writes him back politely after reading only the first chapter, “I don’t expect that I shall agree with you at every point, but you are probably aware that I have a basic sympathy for you in your opposition to the flooding of this country with alien scum.”6

Of course, he is referring to my grandparents there.  So fuck him.

After Grant’s death, Hooton had some race-nerd fun at his expense:

Madison Grant had a vivid personality and a long head, but, as I remember him, rather a swarthy complexion.  I was curious about his conception of Nordicism; so I tackled him on the subject of my own racial type.  I said, “Mr. Grant, I have a round head with a cephalic index of 85, brown hair, mixed eyes, a moon face and a blobby nose – all these attractive features going with a muddy complexion.  How would you classify me as to race?  I should call myself a mixed Alpine.”  He asked, “Are you not of purely British ancestry?”  I replied, “Yes, my father is an Englishman and my mother is a Scotch Canadian.”  He said, “Then, damn it, you’re a Nordic.”  That is the only occasion when I have been so classified.7

(I published that last bit in my Current Anthropology paper earlier this year.)8

Anyway, when it came to eugenics, Hooton’s views were not very nuanced, but he believed that all races had comparable proportions of the unfit, and they should all be extirpated.  It took him till 1936 to resign from the Advisory Board of the American Eugenics Society, and even then, he kept up his membership.  The American Eugenics Society lost most of its members by 1933, with the Great Depression and the accession of the Nazis.  Even its Secretary-Treasurer, Leon Whitney, had to quit in 1932 because they couldn’t afford to pay him (Whitney went on to become an authority on animal breeding) – but it limped along, with stalwarts like Hooton. 

21 Feb 1937

21 March 1937

So, yes, Hooton was a eugenicist, and to his discredit, he continued to be one long after it fell out of fashion in the scientific community.  In 1937, Hooton gave a talk at the Harvard Club in Kansas City, which made the front page of The New York Times.  He called for a biological purge upon the unfit. Oh, sure, he was just being a wry wag, wishing he were James Thurber, but this was 1937 already, and the Nuremberg Laws were already on the books.  You think Hooton read the newspapers?  A month later, the Times got a hold of that elderly cultural anthropologist from Columbia, Franz Boas – with whom Hooton had a respectful relationship – to slap him down.

(And yet, the Times also covered Hooton’s 1944 NAACP address, with the headline, “Dr. Hooton Assails Racial Prejudice.”  As I say, he was complicated.)

I think it was my old professor, Hermann Bleibtreu, who first showed me Hooton’s illustration of the Jewish face.9  No, that definitely hasn’t aged well.  In fact it is so bizarre that it's hard to believe he intended for it to be taken completely seriously.  As Hooton wrote a few pages later, "Without going into excessive detail, these are then my impressions of the cause of the physical distinctiveness of many Jewish individuals.  I may be wrong.  This subject has not been completely or scientifically explored, and I am recording impressions rather than the results of detailed surveys."  (Washburn was also quick to identify Hooton as an anti-Semite, but Hooton’s first student was Harry Shapiro, later a long-time curator at the AMNH.  I once heard a story that Hooton brought Shapiro to the notoriously anti-Semitic Galton Society in New York, to educate them as to what a “good Jew” was.)

Hooton’s  doggerel in “Subverse” is far more horridly sexist than racist.  But he clearly aspired to be the Dorothy Parker of old-school physical anthropology:

The Bushman’s stature is not great,

His jaw is quite prognathous;

Within his yellow, wool-starred pate

His skull is not capacious.

His seamed membranous lips are thick;

His molars are protrusive;

He sprays his words with dental click,

His speech is most effusive.

He squints with epicanthous eye

Across a nose prodigious;

He likes his ostrich-eggs quite high,

His women steatopygeous.

That’s better than I could do, and it’s a guilty pleasure of mine, even if there are some errors of physical anthropology in there.  But as long as we’re on the subject, Hooton was definitely not in Ogden Nash’s league – here is Ogden Nash on anthropology:

Why does the Pygmy

Indulge in polygmy?

His tribal dogma

Frowns on monogma.

Monogma's a stigma

For any Pygma.

If he sticks to monogmy

A Pygmy's a hogmy.

Anyway, back to Hooton.  His ideas about race, and about human biology generally, certainly weren’t the worst ones around at the time, but that’s faint praise.  I think my biggest problem with Hooton, since it’s hard to know exactly what he did believe at any point in time, is that he did not use his position as an authority to confront and repudiate the worst elements of racial science in America. He went after the Germans, which was safe, and although he tried to differentiate his racial science from theirs, he ultimately was not very successful, because his physical anthropology was in fact only subtly different from theirs. 

Sherry Washburn once told me a story about the time he first met Theodosius Dobzhansky, both of whom were on the faculty at Columbia.  Washburn visited  Doby, who eyed him warily, and asked, “So you were a student of Hooton’s?  So what exactly does he mean by “racial type”?  I just don’t understand it .”  And Sherry replied, “I have no idea, and I think neither does he.”  At which point Doby shook his hand, and they became fast friends.

(Probably bullshit, of  course, but Sherry did tell it to me.)

I think Giles’s main mistake was in trying to defend Hooton rather than trying to complexify him.  And there is a certain irony in Giles going after the AAA’s race website, rather than real source of the harsh judgment of Hooton, which was from Sherry Washburn.  Washburn got on quite badly with Hooton’s first two students, Harry Shapiro and Carleton Coon, both of whom were fiercely loyal to Hooton.  Shapiro was cold to Washburn when he taught at Columbia Medical School, and was studying the growth of rat skulls.  Coon was giving clandestine assistance to the segregationists, and was a target of Washburn’s 1962 AAA Presidential address,10 which consigned racial anthropology to the dustbin of history, as Washburn had been arguing for a decade.  (In fact, Washburn also recalled Dobzhansky, at the time a member of the American Anthropological Association, rushing up to be the first to shake his hand after the address.)

That was the point of Washburn’s famous, paradigmatic paper on “The New Physical Anthropology” (1951).11  I’m sure you can guess who embodied the old.

References

1. Giles, E. (2012) Two faces of Earnest A. Hooton.  Yearbook of Physical Anthropology (Supplement of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology), 149, Supplement 55:105-113.
2. Hooton, E. A. (1926) Methods of racial analysis.  Science, 63:75-81.
3. Hooton, E. A. (1936) Plain statements about race.  Science, 83:511-513.
4. Washburn to Hooton, 20 August 1951, Earnest A. Hooton papers, Harvard University.
5. Hooton, E. A. (1918) American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 1: 365.
6. Hooton to Madison Grant, 3 November 1933, Earnest A. Hooton Papers, Harvard University.
7. Hooton, E. A. (1940) Why Men Behave like Apes and Vice Versa.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
8. Marks, J. (2012) The origins of anthropological genetics.  Current Anthropology, 53:S161-S172.
9. Hooton, E. A. (1939) Twilight of Man.  New York: Putnam.  (plate opposite p. 236).
10. Washburn, S. L. (1963) The study of race.  American Anthropologist, 65:521-531.
11. Washburn, S. L. (1951) The new physical anthropology.  Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, Series II, 13:298-304.

So, est-ce la science?

The American Anthropological Association’s one hundred and tenth annual meeting, held in Montreal, is over.  Over six thousand people registered, more than ever before, but certainly fewer than next year, barring another San Francisco chambermaid strike (which, you may recall, made us international laughingstocks just a few years ago).

               Had a pretty good time.  Saw a lot of people I like, and didn’t see too many I can’t stand.  (Those people tend to avoid the AAA, anyway.)  Overall, it was kind of cold, kind of inconvenient, and kind of expensive.

               So, Is This Shit Science?  Actually the session was called, Science in Anthropology: An Open Discussion.  (I know, I left out the “merde” in the title of this post, but I don’t know where to put it.)  Ad-libbed a line about how Whether or not this is science, I needed a fucking GPS to find this room.  Got a titter.  I think the only substantive thing I had to say was that there is no anti-science conspiracy in anthropology, and only a paranoiac would keep saying it.  Now the paranoiacs are out to get me. 

               Neither the organizer (Peter Peregrine) nor the chair (Virginia Dominguez) really had much to say.  I held in reserve the fact that the Association was going to present its “Anthropology in Media” award the following night to someone who runs a pseudo-scientific internet dating site based on an updating of the Hippocratic humors – in which you are governed by testosterone, estrogen, dopamine, or serotonin – as if that is something that brings honor to the practice of anthropology.  But it never came up.  (The site is called chemistry.com, and is not about to be honored by the American Chemical Society anytime soon. )

               Russ Bernard had some interesting demographic facts, but didn’t convince me that the primary issues are demographic.  (I’m still mad at having been told back in the 1980s that there were all these anthropologists about to drop dead, and there would be all these jobs available...)  From the floor, Karen Strier seemed to agree that the problem was ecological/demographic (people fighting over resources), rather than ontological (the complexity of rigorous thought in a subject that spans biological and symbolic processes).  I still like to cite an old paper by Ralph Linton, who observed in 1938 (in one of those great old review articles in Science that you just don’t see any more):

This current tendency to bring physical anthropology into closer liaison with a whole series of natural sciences may widen still further the gap between it and cultural anthropology. The connection is already so tenuous that a complete break between the two seems well within the bounds of possibility. The phenomena with which the two disciplines deal are of different orders and the question is whether there is any real link between these orders.

               I saw eye-to-eye with Dan Segal on most of the issues, except one – the “Evolution is just a theory” warning-sticker-on-the-textbook issue.  Dan seemed to say that it’s true, and actually is a teaching moment for the philosophy/anthropology of science.  Both clauses are right, but I don’t think you can so easily dismiss the fact that it really is about fundamentalist Christians trying to undermine science education in the United States.  I think it would be a great idea for scientists to actually learn something about science before trying to teach about it (rather than how to do science, which they are good at), but allying with the creationists (or even the allowing the perception thereof) is not a winning formula.  There’s a too-clever-for-his-own-good sociologist of science named Steve Fuller, and a philosopher named Jerry Fodor, who have gone down that road, to the extent that nobody listens to them, in spite of the fact the they do indeed have something interesting to say.  (In fact, a really good historian named David Livingstone recently sent me a manuscript on that very subject.)

               On the other hand, the teaching of anthropology is also under unprecedented threat.  Not just in Florida, either (where the Republican governor, apparently frustrated by his daughter’s enlightened choice of a major, called anthropology out as singularly undesirable.  I can understand why – Edward Tylor had defined it as “a reformer’s science” way back in 1871.)   Actually, one of the creepiest bits of information I picked up (at the business meeting) is that there are no longer any departments of anthropology in any of the historically black colleges in the US.  Frankly, I haven’t seen the evolutionary biologists flocking to our defense.

               Maybe something else interesting was said.  It made The Chronicle of Higher Education’s blog the next day.  Julienne Rutherford keeps threatening to post a video of it. 

---------------------------------------------

http://chronicle.com/article/Anthropologists-Seek-a-More/129823/

Fodor JA, Piattelli-Palmarini M. 2010. What Darwin Got Wrong. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux.

Fuller S. 2008. Dissent Over Descent: Intelligent Design's Challenge to Darwinism. New York: Icon Books.

Linton R. 1938. The present status of anthropology. Science 87: 241-48.

Tylor EB. 1871. Primitive Culture. London: John Murray.

http://www.livinganthropologically.com/2011/11/22/anthropologys-challenge-better-stronger-bigger/

http://blogs.plos.org/neuroanthropology/2011/11/22/the-montreal-anthropology-meetings-recap-of-aaa-coverage/


P.S. -  Dan Segal articulates his position on how to engage creationism on his blog, here:
http://daniel-segal.blogspot.com/2011/08/republican-candidates-attacks-on.html

P.P.S. - Here's the audio:
http://blog.aaanet.org/2011/11/28/science-in-anthropology-session-at-aaas-annual-meeting/

Everybody’s favorite Nazi vacuum-cleaner mogul

               Once upon a time there was an incredibly hot Danish model, named Inga Arvad.  How hot was she?  She was named Miss Denmark, 1928.   She parlayed that crown into a movie career, although that career only lasted for two movies: most notably, Flugten fra Millionerne, something like “Fleeing from the Masses”.   She marries the director, a charismatic Hungarian doctor/explorer/filmmaker named Pál Fejös, whom we will call Paul Fejos.

               Fejos has some wealthy friends, including the founder of Electrolux Vacuum Cleaners, a Swedish industrialist named Axel Wenner-Gren.   Axel has branched out from vacuum cleaners to munitions, and some of his biggest clients are the Germans.  Inga decides that she’d rather do journalism than acting and modeling, and through Axel, she manages to get the first exclusive interview with Hermann Göring, Hitler’s right-hand man, and with Adolf himself.  At the 1936 Olympics (the Jesse Owens games), she sits in Hitler’s box and is introduced by him as the epitome of Nordic beauty.

               Inga emigrates to America shortly thereafter, and settles in New York, where she enrolls in the journalism school at Columbia University in 1940.  Her classmates, however, quickly tire of hearing her complaints about the Jews, and they put the FBI onto her as a possible Nazi spy.  When the G-Men break into her apartment, they discover that she has an autographed picture of Hitler on her mantelpiece, and so they conclude that she is not a Nazi spy – because what kind of a Nazi spy would have an autographed picture of Hitler in their living room? – but they decide to keep her under surveillance as a sympathizer. 

               She is still under surveillance, and still married, when she moves to DC to start writing a gossip column for a local paper, The Washington Post-Herald, and starts schtupping the dashing second son of the wealthy former US ambassador to England.  The former ambassador is Joseph P. Kennedy.  The son is John F.

               Suffice it to say, J. Edgar Hoover lived for shit like this.  He gets a hold of Papa Joe, and mentions that his son, in the Navy, is frolicking with this Nazi sympathizer.  Papa Joe mulls it over, and finds only three things wrong with his son’s amorous activities.  One, she’s married.  Two, she’s a Nazi.  And three, she’s a Protestant. 

               So he leaks the relationship to the columnist Walter Winchell, who writes on January 12, 1942:  “One of ex-Ambassador’s Kennedy’s eligible sons is the target of a Washington gal columnist’s affections.  So much so she has consulted her barrister about divorcing her exploring groom.  Pa Kennedy no like.”  The tryst is outed, and abruptly terminated, and Kennedy has his son sent first to South Carolina, and thence to the Pacific theater. 

               Winchell’s column, however, raised an interesting question:  Where was her “exploring groom”, and why wasn’t he at home with his smoking hot Nordic beauty queen columnist wife?

               Answer: Machu Picchu, of all places, with his old buddy Axel Wenner-Gren.  It seems as though Axel Wenner-Gren has some money in US accounts, and the Fed doesn’t like his politics, and are threatening to take it away from him, unless he does something philanthropic with it.  So Axel wants to start a fund for his side interest, Nordic studies, and would like Fejos to run it.  They compromise that it will be named after Wenner-Gren’s anthropological interest, but will be administered by Fejos according to normative anthropological ideas and interests.  And Fejos cables his wife (soon to be ex-wife), “Well, here it is, your first break in the greatest institution of newspaper writing in the U.S.  You made Winchell’s column.”

               Paul Fejos kept the Viking Fund, later the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, resolutely anthropologically mainstream.  He consulted with the great ones at Columbia – Ralph Linton, Sherry Washburn – for suggestions about what to fund, and helped subsidize the development of radiocarbon dating, and disseminating Washburn’s new physical anthropology, etc. – to his everlasting credit, and to that of his successors.

               Because it could easily have been otherwise.  Around the same time, a wealthy textile merchant named Wickliffe Draper was looking to start a philanthropy by which to support like-minded scientists. He called it The Pioneer Fund, and tapped the eugenicist Harry Laughlin to be its first president, in 1937.   Laughlin had been awarded an honorary doctorate from Nazi-controlled Heidelberg University the year before, in recognition of his pioneering work in the field of encouraging the modern state to sterilize its citizens involuntarily.  The Pioneer Fund, throughout its history, has chosen its beneficiaries quite differently from The Wenner-Gren Foundation.  A list of their grantees reads like a Who’s Who of Anachronistic Biological Determinism, resolutely faithful to the principal scientific and political interests of its benefactor, all those years ago.  Its current president is the psychologist J. Philippe Rushton.

Lombardo, P. A. (2002) '"The American Breed": Nazi Eugenics and the Origins of the Pioneer Fund', Albany Law Review, 65: 743-830.

Rushton, J. P. (2002) 'The Pioneer Fund and the scientific study of human differences', Albany Law Review, 66: 207-262.

Tucker, W. H. (2002) The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

************************

I should add, old Axel Wenner-Gren sure knew how to make a vacuum cleaner.  My mother bought an Electrolux in 1950, and it still works.

A first lecture on primate taxonomy (with obvious debts to Robert Benchley and Will Cuppy)

               To begin with, In 1987 there were about 170 species of primates.  Today there are over 400.  Go Primates! 

               For the sake of argument, let us say that there about 400 species of primates, ±75%.

               The first kind of primates are called prosimians.  Actually, however, they are not really a kind of primate, but two kinds of primate: lemurids of Madagascar, and lorisids of Asia and Africa.  To be absolutely fair, however, we have to acknowledge that there are two kinds of lorisids – fast-moving galagos and slow-moving lorises, although at the speed of light they may seem identical – so the first kind of primate is really three kinds of primates.

               But we should also include the fourth kind of primate in this first kind of primate, because the tarsier isn’t quite a monkey, and that’s what prosimians are – “not quite monkeys”.  According to cladists, the tarsier should be reclassified with the monkeys because phylogenetically it is almost one of them.

               The first four kinds of one kind of primates share an arbitrary property: namely, that they are still alive, and have not gone extinct.  Yet.   Consequently we need to expand our first kind of primates to incorporate the adapids and omomyids, two other kinds of the first kind of primates, now extinct.  The most interesting feature of the adapids and omomyids is that we don’t know what they evolved from and we don’t know what they evolved into, but we’re pretty sure that they evolved.  Don’t tell the creationists. 

               And before the adapids and omomyids were the plesiadapids, who only had a few of the primatey features by which we identify primates as primates and not as colugos, or flying lemurs, which are not actually even lemurs, so it’s hardly even worth asking whether they really fly.  But they do seem to be transitional forms between other mammals and primates, and you can tell the creationists that for me. 

               Fortunately, the diversity of the second group of primates is more precise.  The group we contrast with the prosimians is not, as you might think, the antisimians, but rather the simians themselves, although only Europeans really call them that.   We officially call them anthropoids, which means “sort of like people” from the Greek, and they should most definitely not be confused with the hominoids, which means “sort of like people” from the Latin, and comprise only a subset of the ones from the Greek.

               There are two kinds of anthropoids, and we distinguish them on the basis of geography and their noses.  There are other things we could focus on, like the form of their skull sutures, or the number of premolar teeth they have, but no, we focus on their noses.  The kind of monkey found in the Americas is really two or five kinds of monkey.  One or more of them is the marmosets, also known as the marmosets and tamarins.  Their principal distinction is how small they are. 

               How small are they?  They are so small that they never grow wisdom teeth.  Marmosets are also widely regarded as the stupidest anthropoids.  That is probably just a coincidence, however.  

               The pygmy marmoset is actually smaller than the dwarf marmoset, but it is the other way around for people.

               The other kind of New World monkey is known as everything else.  They include monkeys that hang by their tails, monkeys that hang out at night, monkeys that resemble The Phantom of the Opera, and even monkeys that resemble monks, which sounds more reasonable than it should.

               The other kind of anthropoid is actually two kinds of monkeys and one or several kinds of apes.  They all have the same number of teeth as us, or at least they would if we didn’t have our teeth pulled.  They are called Catarrhini, on the basis of their noses, from the Greek “flowing downward”.  You probably don’t want to know what that’s referring to, but suffice it to say, if you were a New World monkey, you would go through Kleenexes twice as fast.

               The Catarrhini consequently include the vervet monkey, known to biomedical research as The Monkey; and the rhesus macaque, known to neurobehavioral research as The Monkey.   Nobody remembers Jimmy Durante anymore, so the future of the proboscis monkey is in doubt.   Baboons should never be described as polygamous, since they do not have marriage.  They should be called polygynous instead.  In addition to the monkeys of the Old World are the Hominoidea or apes.  They lack a tail, unlike the Old World Monkeys, which all have a tail, except for some of the macaques. 

               The apes are all adapted for hanging from the trees, including humans, who do not hang from trees.  Extinct apes were very diverse, but that didn’t help them.  Today there are two or more kinds of apes.  The lesser apes are gibbons, who are very speciose, but probably not for long.  If they were smart enough to know about The Great Ape Project, they would probably get really upset.  The gibbons are monogamous, because there is no such word as “monogynous”. 

               The hominids come from the Latin for “even more like people”.  They may or may not include the great apes.  The great apes include the orangutan; the gorilla, known to evolutionary psychology as Koko; and the chimpanzee, known to evolutionary psychology as the human.

               The hominins are the Tribe Hominini.  Chimpanzees are the Tribe Panini.  When chimps  cannibalize the dead infants of their species, they may be confusing them with sandwiches.  To cladists, australopithecines never existed.  Australopiths existed.  But it makes them seem kind of naked without a Latin-sounding suffix.

               Hominin evolution, also known as hominid evolution, includes those hominids, also known as hominoids, who became bipedal, or at least had their canine teeth shrunk.  Stone tools, also known as culture, coincide with the origin of the genus Homo.  Some experts believe that there are 12 species recognizable within the genus Homo, of which 11 are now extinct.  I guess culture wasn’t such a great adaptation, after all.

**************

I know it’s a stretch, but George S. Kaufman and Robert Benchley were both members of the Algonquin Round Table.

Clades versus Rhizomes

Cladistic analysis is certainly a powerful, logically rigorous tool for the determination of relatedness among species.  In the simplest case you have three species and want to know which two are most closely related.  You look at features shared by two of the three.  But since evolutionary rates can vary widely in different lineages, two of the three might look similar because the third one changed a lot, not because those two are actually closest relatives.  So you look for a subset of shared features, the shared derived features, (or synapomorphies, from the Early Hittite), which you determine by finding a species slightly more distantly related from the three that you are really interested in. Then you tally up the traits shared by two of the three, and not by the outgroup. Those are your synapomorphies and, in principle, they should tell you which two of any three species are closest relatives. 

It’s quite straightforward, actually.  Trust me.

[In fact, aside from the Hittite vocabulary, much of the philosophy of phylogenetic reconstruction is articulated in William King Gregory’s 1910 monograph on The Orders of Mammals, which was thrust into my hand back in 1983, when I attempted to raise the subject with Dr. Simpson.  Some history-of-science graduate student really ought to “do” Will Gregory, BTW.]

But a cladistic analysis contains a number of important assumptions.  First, it presumes that the species only get their features vertically, through a process of what Darwin called “descent with modification”.  The goal of the method is to establish relatedness by descent.  If traits are acquired some other way, such as horizontally, by airborne viruses, by Lamarckian inheritance, or by dirty toilet seats, then the system breaks down, for then there is no way to establish synapomorphy, which is what the method is predicated on.  Shared derived features might be there either by virtue of proximity of descent, or by virtue of infection, or perhaps even by sheer force of will in different animals. 

Second, it only works on species.  After all, if the taxa in question could receive their similarities via gene flow, the system would likewise break down.

There are also other constraints.  The outgroup can’t be too distant, and the rate  of convergent evolution can’t be very high.  One simply assumes that a single character distributed across three taxa in two states, is the result of a single evolutionary change from one form to another, inherited in the two species that share it, from their common ancestor.  Not from parallel mutations, or miasmas.

So I just don’t get how people can build research programs based on the application of cladistics to cultural traits, where the method logically fails.  Worse yet, that’s why paleoanthropological systematics will never get cleared up.  To do cladistics, you need species, and the surest way to get species in paleoanthropology is to “split” fossil samples, and pretend that the groups you name correspond to some biological reality.  Yet a cladistic analysis is the most straightforward paper in the field.  One measures a bunch of things and throws the mess into PAUP (for a phylogenetic analysis using parsimony).

But suppose the taxa you are making nested phylogenetic clusters out of, aren’t phylogenetically nested in the first place?   Suppose, for example, they were linked bio-historically like a rhizome, or a trellis, or a capillary system (as indeed, generations of physical anthropologists have thought)? 

Hooton, E. A. (1946) Up From the Ape, 2d edition, New York: Macmillan.

Holliday, T. (2003) 'Species Concepts, Reticulation, and Human Evolution ', Current Anthropology, 44: 653-673.

Possibly because they were actually members of rather few  real biological lineages. 

The point is, that if you impose four species on Homo (as the authors of The Human Lineage seem to, although they do some mighty fancy tap dancing around that issue) or if you impose 12 species on Homo (as the authors of The Last Human do – ridiculously, but at least clearly), you are not just having a sterile disagreement about a sterile issue of classification.  You are actually disagreeing over what you can fundamentally do methodologically. 

Cartmill, M. and Smith, F. H. (2009) The Human Lineage, New York: Wiley-Blackwell

Sawyer, G. and Deak, V. (2007) The Last Human: A Guide to Twenty-Two Species of Extinct Humans, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

A cladistic analysis is done on species, not specimens, and is meaningless below the level of the species.  The best you can do is a “numerical taxonomy” analysis – the kind of thing that Chris Stringer was doing back in the 1970s – and that will (if you’re lucky) tell you what is most similar to what else.  But it won’t make false assumptions about how they got that similar, which the cladistic analysis probably does. 

I confess, I’m an just ol’ country anthropologist, but you know what?  I think human evolution is strongly rhizotic, just like the post-modernists might-or-might-not have said. 

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, St. Paul, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

[For the love of God, please don’t give me a quiz on this one, but I know it says something about the rhizome as a powerful metaphor.]

But here’s the scary (i.e., challenging) thought:  What if it’s rhizomes all the way down?

Arnold, M. (2009) Reticulate Evolution and Humans: Origins and Ecology, New York: Oxford University Press.

Simpson story #1

Back in Tucson in 1983-4, I worked as G. G. Simpson’s secretary, during the last couple of years of his life.  But I was also inspired by the emerging analytical tools of cladistics, and drew particular intellectual inspiration from Niles Eldredge and Joel Cracraft’s Phylogenetic Patterns and the Evolutionary Process.  So inspired was I, in fact, that I even named my adopted cat Willi, after the godfather of phylogenetic systematics, Willi Hennig.

               Unfortunately, I didn’t know much about caring for cats, and I overfed Willi, and he became a fat blob, and one day he just exploded.  Well, he didn’t explode actually, but he died, in my shower stall.  I was quite broken up about it.

               So that afternoon I went in to do some typing for Dr. Simpson, and as we sat in his study he could tell I was a little upset, and I told him that my cat had died earlier in the day.   “Too bad.  What was his name?” asked Dr. Simpson.

               I told him.  “Willi”.

               “Mm,” said Dr. Simpson, without even looking up.  “Who’d you name him after?”

               Um....  Holy Shit!  I couldn’t tell Simpson that I had named my cat after Hennig.  That would be like saying I had named my cat after Charles Manson or Josef Stalin, he’d never talk to me again.

               Um... Um...  Um...  “Mays,” I finally said. 

               “Oh,” said  Dr. Simpson.  “Good ballplayer.”  And he continued his work.

**************

It’s mildly interesting that chimps are born facing in the same direction as humans are (toward the westward sky?) as a recent report has it. 

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=chimps-give-birth-like-humans

But whatever merit the observation may have is more than negated by the authors’ articulation of  its meaning.

Although the study does not tackle that question, it certainly helps to quash the outmoded idea that humans are distinct from the rest of the animal kingdom. "In a broad sense I think humans tend to believe we are unique," says Hirata, "but that belief is not based on facts."

The fact that a chimp couldn’t possibly articulate that thought as he did, is, ironically, too obvious to be noted by the scientist.  GGS, in The Meaning of Evolution (1949) followed Julian Huxley in ridiculing this pseudo-scientific attitude as “nothing-butism”. 

After all, since they understood evolution to refer to the production of difference, the statement that "we are not unique" could reasonably be construed to mean "we have not evolved," could it not?

Why Anthropomics?

Because anthropology isn’t science.  Everybody knows that.  Anthropology wasn’t science at the University of Arizona, when I was a graduate student, nor was it a science at Yale when I taught there.  It always amused me that the students couldn’t get science credit for Primate Functional Anatomy – a dissection course! – or Primate Ecology, or Human Paleontology, much less for my own classes, like the only undergraduate course focusing on human genetics offered in Yale College, or even my course like Human Biology and Culture, which (the biology department actually told me) couldn’t possibly be science because it had the word “culture” in it.

Their course in Tissue Culture notwithstanding...

Anthropology is scholarly, and as such it is bigger than science, but isn't science.  At any rate, if you can't even convince your dean what it is, don't try and convince me.  And between us both, the people who insist the most loudly that anthropology really is a science, tend to do the crappiest fucking science themselves.

Which reminds me that I should probably warn you that my appreciation for, and invocation of, the English language not uncommonly extends beyond the decorous.  I was in fact indignantly chastized only last week for using the word “moron” in a podium paper at a scholarly meeting.

No kidding.

No names, of course, or name-calling, such as “douchebag retard,” but just an observation that my interlocutor was adopting an age-old sleight of hand to avoid discussing the substantive issues, more about which some other time.

The point is that since anthropology isn’t science, we need a word to signify a sciencey engagement of anthropology.  The kind of work that maybe involves expensive machines with flashing multicolored lights, and somber people with greasy hair in white lab coats.  You know, science.  Drawing authoritative-sounding conclusions about the state of being human from ridiculously thin bits of data.

But that’s evolutionary psychology, and we need a word to distinguish ourselves from that, don’t we?

Hence, “anthropomics”.  It jettisons the scholarly implications of “-ology” (from Greek logos, word/knowledge) in favor of the trendily scientistic “-omics” (from an obscure homage to Tom Mix, silent screen cowboy). 

Seriously, though, Robert Proctor had a very interesting article on naming processes in science a few years ago. 

Proctor, R. (2007) “‐Logos,”“‐Ismos,” and “‐Ikos” The Political Iconicity of Denominative Suffixes in Science (or, Phonesthemic Tints and Taints in the Coining of Science Domain Names).  Isis, 98(2): 290-309.

All right, get back to work.