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.

Bad Anthro Theatre

I haven’t really reviewed a movie since my days in graduate school at the Arizona Daily Wildcat, but I watched a really bizarre and horrid one the other night that kind of begs to be belittled.

               It’s called “Alleged” – and it’s unclear just what the title actually refers to, because it’s about the famous “Monkey Trial” in which John T. Scopes was charged with, and convicted of, the crime of teaching evolution in Dayton,Tennessee in 1925.  Nobody ever said he was innocent during the trial; his defense was basically about the badness of the law.

               This weird movie purports to be the “real” story of the Scopes Trial, unlike the classic play and movie “Inherit the Wind,” which contains numerous errors.  Well let’s start right there.  “Inherit the Wind” contains no errors at all, because it is a work of fiction, a “roman-a-clef”.  There is no John Scopes, there is Bertram Cates; there is no Clarence Darrow, only Henry Drummond, no William Jennings Brian, only Matthew Harrison Brady; and no H. L. Mencken, only E. K. Hornbeck.  Further, it is about the McCarthy era, not the Roaring Twenties.  Sure it takes place in the Roaring Twenties, but the play was about the political suppression of ideas, which was the issue in the 1950s, when it opened.

               “Alleged,” however, self-consciously asserts its verisimilitude, even going so far as to use the real names of the famous principals, as it butchers the very reality it claims to imitate.  The movie takes place in a preternaturally clean rural Southern town, free of class prejudice and the Ku Klux Klan, much less the fire-and-brimstone caterwauling  of the age. 

               The movie then integrates a eugenics sub-plot to tie evolution to eugenics.  Now this is something I am a bit sympathetic to, since I’ve written about it over the last few years.  There’s only two problems with this plot contrivance.  First, eugenics didn’t actually come up at the trial.  And second, the people the movie demonizes – Darrow and Mencken – are the ones who actually wrote eloquently against eugenics (shortly after the trial ended).  In Mencken’s literary magazine, The American Mercury, Darrow called the eugenicists “irresponsible fanatics”.  In the Baltimore Sun, Mencken  called eugenics “mainly blather”. 

               William Jennings Bryan was very much the pacifist and isolationist, and was ahead of his day in his views on equality and his views again social Darwinism.  But he didn’t write specifically against eugenics.  Darrow and Mencken did. 

               In fact, Darrow published his critique of eugenics in H. L. Mencken’s literary magazine, The American Mercury.   When the very first biologist to make a public critique of eugenics comes forward, it is H. L. Mencken’s friend, the Johns Hopkins geneticist Raymond Pearl.  And he publishes as well in The American Mercury, and it is so newsworthy that it gets picked up by the wire services and makes headlines all across America.  Story goes that it even cost Pearl an offer of a professorship at Harvard.   The point is that, far from being the eugenicist that the film depicts, it is hard not to see Mencken’s hand all over the mobilization of American opinion against eugenics.

               What little there is of the famous cross-examination of Bryan by Darrow – the climax of “Inherit the Wind” – is actually condensed into a single minute of this ridiculous movie.  This Bryan (played by former Senator Fred Thompson) is serene, thoughtful, and implacable for his minute of cross-examination.  The event actually took place on July 20, 1925, on a Monday after most of the journalists (including Mencken) had left town.  Serene, thoughtful, implacable.  This movie’s cross-examination gives us no glimpse of whatever inspired The New York Times to include in their next day’s Page One headline, “Angered, He Shouts That He Is Fighting for God against America’s Greatest Atheist”.

               What’s even weirder is that this film plays around with the actual court testimony just as egregiously as “Inherit the Wind” did, except that his film claims not to be doing so, which means that it is more of a lie than “Inherit the Wind” could possibly be.   For example, when William Jennings Bryan  volunteers that he believes that the “days” of creation may have been indefinitely long periods of time (he wasn’t tricked into it, as “Inherit the Wind” implies), this movie has Darrow respond “You do not!”

               The truth is much more interesting.  Darrow was surprised to learn that Bryan accepted the age of the earth, but would certainly not accuse Bryan of perjuring himself by lying about his beliefs under oath.  But District Attorney Tom Stewart immediately realized Bryan’s answer was a big problem, and interrupted.

STEWART: I want to interpose another objection. What is the purpose of this examination?

               But he was too late.  Bryan was already orating.

BRYAN: The purpose is to cast ridicule on everybody who believes in the Bible, and I am perfectly willing that the world shall know that these gentlemen have no other purpose than ridiculing every Christian who believes in the Bible.

               But Darrow hardly ever let an adversary have the last word.

DARROW: We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States, and you know it, and that is all.

               So Bryan continued speechifying.

BRYAN: I am simply trying to protect the Word of God against the greatest atheist or agnostic in the United States. I want the papers to know I am not afraid to get on the stand in front of him and let him do his worst. I want the world to know that agnosticism is trying to force agnosticism on our colleges and on our schools, and the people of Tennessee will not permit that to be done.

               Cue the applause.  The day ended about a half-hour-later, and not at all serenely, as this movie suggests.  In fact, “Inherit the Wind” captures the chaos a lot better.  Here is how the day ended, not at all suggested in Senator Fred Thompson’s portrayal.

BRYAN: Your Honor, I think I can shorten this testimony. The only purpose Mr. Darrow has is to slur at the Bible, but I will answer his questions. I will answer it all at once, and I have no objection in the world. I want the world to know that this man, who does not believe in a God, is trying to use a court in Tennessee to slur at it, and, while it require time, I am willing to take it.

DARROW: I object to your statement. I am examining you on your fool ideas that no intelligent Christian on earth believes!

JUDGE RAULSTON: Court is adjourned until nine o'clock tomorrow morning.

               I thought it was pretty weird also when Darrow reviews human evolution privately with his scientists and reduces the fossil evidence to Java Man, Nebraska Man, and “Boxhole Man”.  I think the screenwriters probably meant “Boxgrove”.  You’d think the scientists would have been even passingly familiar with “Neanderthal Man” and “Piltdown Man” (both of which were indeed known at the time, although the latter turned out to be unreal, like the Paluxy River footprints that prove humans lived with dinosaurs). 

               Nebraska Man is interesting, because it does represent an egregious example of scientific overreach.  By 1927 it was understood to be a peccary.   Isolated, worn teeth are sometimes not as clearly diagnostic as we might like, but it certainly wasn’t something solid enough to bludgeon the creationists with, and often quite snarkily.  Historian Constance Areson Clark discusses this in her very interesting recent book, “God or Gorilla”.

              The plot of “Alleged” is actually a clumsy, vapid romance between a budding newsman and his budding girlfriend, set against the backdrop of the trial.  The newsman has no family except a dead father, and the girlfriend has a black half-sister, which isn’t at all scandalous in clean, rural 1925 Tennessee.

               The real problem is the idea that a counter-lie must be put out there to offset a prior lie, in this case,  the filmmakers’ perception of “Inherit the Wind”.  This is, I think, related to the stupid creationist idea that there are exactly two sides to any story: the scientific and the Biblical.  And since it is a zero-sum game, anything bad for science must ipso facto be good for the Bible.  So making Mencken look bad must make Jesus look good. 

               The biggest lie of all, however, is actually in the credits.  After placing the story in the backdrop of “actual” events and “real” personages, in order to claim a degree of verisimilitude that they don’t actually deserve, the producers actually show the standard disclaimer.

Paradoxically, that is probably the truest thing about the movie.

Gorilla my dreams, I adore you

What to do about geneticists?  On one hand, they are so smart that we should accept whatever they say, no matter how absurd, inaccurate, or even racist it may be.  (See Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn).[1]   On the other hand, they’re ignorant and arrogant assholes and they should be thrown in jail (See Trofim Lysenko).[2]  There has got to be a middle ground.

The gorilla genome is now out, and when combined with human, chimpanzee, and orangutan, it allows us to do a phylogenetic comparison.[3]  We have known since the 1980s that human-chimp-gorilla genetically is a very close call, with DNA tending to place humans and chimps a little closer, but only with a lot of discordance or statistical noise.  (That is in fact exactly what the ill-fated DNA hybridization showed, although it was infamously misrepresented.)  When the mtDNA data first came out [4] they linked human to chimp pairwise, but only if you ignored the fact that over half of the phylogenetically informative DNA sites did not in fact show it to be human-chimp.   Those data showed it to be chimp-gorilla and human-gorilla.  The only way to extract human-chimp from those data was to treat the question like a Republican primary, where whoever gets the plurality of the votes wins the state.  So human-chimp was Mitt Romney, winning the nomination, but with barely 45% of the phylogenetically informative sites.

It then becomes a trivial task to explain away the discordant data, that is to say, the 55% of your data that you have decided is giving you the “wrong” answers.   You say it is “incomplete lineage sorting” or the result of ancestral polymorphisms, which have segregated into descendant taxa in a pattern different from the sequence of speciation.  Geneticists illustrate this with images that always seem to remind me of maps of the London Underground, with chimpanzees being Bakerloo and humans Victoria Station.

But I digress. It might also be parallel mutation or even backcrossing.  The problem, though, is that you have a lot of  homoplasy, and one of the assumptions of cladistic/phylogenetic analysis is that homoplasy (i.e., observed as discordance) is very, very low compared to synapomorphy (i.e., the shared derived characters that you think are tracking the actual branching history of the species).

This is the equivalent of simply choosing the most parsimonious solution to the phylogenetic problem.  Most of the data that give a pairwise resolution give this pairwise resolution, therefore it must be the right one.  But there is an inherent contradiction in this logic.  You are choosing the most parsimonious solution in a system that is not obviously very parsimonious.  In other words, if you are willing to accept the possibility that 55% of your phylogenetically informative sites are homoplasies (that is to say, are giving you the “wrong” answer), then how can you reject the idea that 70% of your sites might be giving you the “wrong” answer?  I talked about this many years ago in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.[5] 

The model that fits the data best is not a model of two successive bifurcations, but what we called at the time a “trichotomy” and now would call “reticulate” or even “rhizotic” evolution.[6] [7]

The geneticists working on this problem have been hampered by the cladistic necessity of regarding speciation as events, rather than as processes – when their ape data are showing speciation as processes, not as events.  The new paper on the gorilla genome says that 30% of their phylogenetically informative sites are discordant.  This is how the new paper imagines the genomic relationships of humans, chimps, and gorillas – as indicating two temporally isolated speciation “events” and whatever the hell is going on in the middle there.

The creationists jumped all over this inconsistency, and it really is just the result of sloppy thinking by the scientists.

http://www.opposingviews.com/i/religion/30-gorilla-genome-contradicts-supposed-evolutionary-phylogeny-humans-and-apes

In trying to plug the genomic data into sequential speciation events, we are committing the square-peg-round-hole fallacy. There are historical and ideological reasons for depicting it as two successive, temporally distinct “events,” but that certainly misrepresents the evidence, and most likely misrepresents the biological history.  One of the most bizarre illustrations was in a recent introductory textbook, which showed this to students:

It’s trying to say that there were two speciation events, 7 mya and 6 mya, but has located the 7 mya event incorrectly.  If you look at the scale, you’ll see that it’s actually drawn at 8 million, to put a separation between them that shouldn’t be there.  The same text draws it this way a bit later. with very little (vertical) time separating the two “events” at 7-8 mya and 5-7 mya, but a lot of (horizontal) space.  That ought to learn ‘em!

Obviously, that’s not the text I use. 

The new paper on the gorilla genome, I might add, sets the “speciation events” at 6.0 and 3.7 mya.  The 3.7 mya date for the divergence of human and chimpanzee is simply, to the extent that anything can be falsified in the fossil record, false - although it is oddly congruent with some of Vince Sarich and Allan Wilson’s early writings on the subject in the 1960s.[8]  The (myriad) authors of the new paper go on to argue that they can juggle some of the parameters in their computer program to make the dates come out to about 6 and 10 million years ago – as if that is supposed to give us confidence!

For the Alternative Introduction, I drew this figure to illustrate the problem.

Rather than prurient talk about cross-species buggery on the part of early hominids, how about speciation here as a temporal process, and populations through time as anastemosing capillary systems (Earnest Hooton’s metaphor, expressing the same point as rhizomatic and reticulate evolution).  It is also noteworthy that we tend to model and depict the gene pools of all three species as equivalent, when we’ve known for years that chimps and gorillas, even as relict populations, have gene pools that are considerably more extensive than that of our own species.  That is to say, Homo sapiens is relatively depauperate in genetic diversity.  The only study to try and incorporate that information into a phylogenetic analysis, many years ago, found that it completely obscured the phylogenetic “signal” and that it was therefore a fool’s errand to try and extract two successive bifurcations from a genomic analysis of human, chimpanzee, and gorilla.[9] 

Interestingly, the new paper actually did look at diversity in gorilla genomes, but didn’t incorporate that into their phylogenetic analysis.  Bottom line:  Human evolution is probably more interesting than the geneticists realize.

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[1] Wade N. 2006. Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors. New York: Penguin.

[2] Medvedev Z, and Lerner I. 1969. The Rise and Fall of TD Lysenko. New York: Columbia University Press.

[3] Scally A, Dutheil JY, Hillier LW, Jordan GE, Goodhead I, Herrero J, Hobolth A, Lappalainen T, Mailund T, Marques-Bonet T et al. . 2012. Insights into hominid evolution from the gorilla genome sequence. Nature 483(7388):169-175.

[4] Horai S, Satta Y, Hayasaka K, Kondo R, Inoue T, Ishida T, Hayashi S, and Takahata N. 1992. Man's place in hominoidea revealed by mitochondrial DNA genealogy. Journal of Molecular Evolution 35(1):32-43.

[5] Marks J. 1994. Blood will tell (won't it?)? A century of molecular discourse in anthropological systematics. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 94:59-79.

[6] Marks J. 1995. Learning to live with a trichotomy. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 98:211-213.

[7] Arnold M. 2009. Reticulate Evolution and Humans: Origins and Ecology. New York: Oxford University Press.

[8] Sarich VM. 1968. The origin of the hominids: An immunological approach. In: Washburn SL, and Jay PC, editors. Perspectives on Human Evolution I. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. p 94-121.

[9] Ruano G, Rogers, Jeffrey A., Ferguson-Smith, Anne C., Kidd, Kenneth K. 1992. DNA sequence polymorphism within hominoid species exceeds the number of phylogenetically informative characters for a HOX2 locus Molecular Biology and Evolution 9(4):575-586.

Simpson story #3

One day in 1983, while I was over at the Simpsons’ doing the typing, I mentioned that the local PBS station in Tucson was about to start re-running the Richard Leakey series, “The Making of Mankind”. Anne Roe Simpson thought it would be lovely to watch over lunch, and George agreed, and so we toodled off from the library into the house and turned on the TV.

Anne made George his lunch (two martinis, every day for half a century) and sat down to knit some booties for their new great-grandchild.  The show begins; it’s the introduction to the series.  Richard Leakey comes on.  Anne mentions how they happened to be visiting Rusinga Island when his mother Mary found that Proconsul fossil.  Remember, G?  (She called him ”G”.  Nobody else did.)  GGS starts sucking down his lunch and zoning out.

Richard Leakey comes back on, announcing to the audience that there are some wonderful new ideas in evolutionary theory, and we’re going to hear about them from the amazing and wonderful Stephen Jay Gould.  Gould comes on and says, “Stasis... blah blah blah ... change ... blah blah blah ... punctuated equilibria”.  Simpson, who had only a minute earlier been fading fast, suddenly straightens up, as if detecting the subtle presence of another adult male Hamadryas baboon nearby.  From behind the Coke-bottle eyeglasses, his eyelids pop open, like Mister Magoo’s.

“The great man is about to speak,” said the graduate student in my head, “So listen carefully.”   Gould’s star had risen to the apex of evolutionary biology – I had been an avid reader of his Natural History columns since starting graduate school in the late 1970s.  And now I was going to hear what George Gaylord Simpson had to say about his work.

Simpson leaned forward.  The future faux historian in me froze the moment.  And Simpson said, “Boo!  Boo!  Boo!”   Even Anne joined in:  “Hiss!  Boo!”

And that is what I remember, for all time:  George Gaylord Simpson booing at Stephen Jay Gould on the fucking television set.

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          Simpson felt as though Gould had been making his own reputation in part by putting him down.  In particular, he didn’t like Gould’s argument that Simpson “had it” in Tempo and Mode in Evolution (1944) but “lost it” in The Major Features of Evolution (1953).  He felt, to some extent rightly, besieged by the punctuated equilibriists, the cladists, and the vicariance biogeographers – all of whom were bouncing their new ideas off of Simpson’s – without being able to see that as a testament to the scope of his impact upon the field.  Once I suggested that one could make an analogy to Darwin’s first (1859) and last (1872) editions of The Origin of Species.  The first is the one that made a mark on the modern world, the one that caused the sensation by presenting a bold and convincing naturalistic explanation for adaptation and the taxonomic hierarchy, which had previously not had one.  The last edition is flabbier, because it incorporates rebuttals and side arguments that don’t really add much, over a century later.  So maybe the first one is the more important one to read, all things considered, and maybe the same holds for Gould’s point about the importance of Tempo and Mode in Evolution.

Frankly, I have no idea where I got the balls to say such a thing to Dr. Simpson.  I  can only guess that it must have been after lunch, so he was a bit mellow.  He just growled, “The sixth was the one that Darwin intended for posterity.”

Years later, though – Darwin’s own Victorian inbred sexist intentions be damned! - I recommend  the first to students.  That was the important one.

Gould's essay, though, pissed off Simpson so much that when Gould subsequently published a Natural History piece on how his three idols while growing up were his father, Joe DiMaggio, and George Gaylord Simpson, GGS wrote him a nasty letter that ended something like, “and I don’t want to be your idol any more, either!”  True to his word, when PBS did a profile of Gould a few years later, Gould looked straight into the camera and told the audience how his three idols while growing up had been his father, Joe DiMaggio, and ... Charles Darwin.

Gould SJ. 1981. G. G. Simpson, paleontology, and the modern synthesis. In: Mayr E, and Provine, W., editor. The Evolutionary Synthesis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. p 153-172.

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Here’s something new, a book on applied evolution, based on a wonderful Darwin Bicentennial Symposium in Melbourne, back in ’09 (as Victoria was on fire, I recall). 

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521760550/

I’m essay #16, in between Douglas Futuyma and Michael Ruse, here to remind you what a lousy idea it was to try to apply evolution to human society a century ago.  Anthropologists are such killjoys, aren’t we?  

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. 

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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.

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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.

Brain fart?

Eleven years ago, the psychologist Philippe Rushton sent a lot of social scientists a little booklet, which was an abridgement of his book, Race, Evolution, and Behavior.  Rushton’s work is easily appreciated as falling within the generally constituted domain of scientific racism, for example in his belief that the average IQ of native Africans is 70 (or the equivalent of a European with mild Down’s syndrome).  Pretty much any knowledgeable scholar can see the primitive racist assumptions guiding the work – the misapplication of evolutionary theory, mistaking the facts of social history for those of biological microevolution, overblown claims about innateness of IQ, and the use of idiotic surrogate variables, like crime rate and degree of civilization, for intelligence – not to mention penis size and libido for reproductive rate.  Len Lieberman did a nice critique of Rushton’s nonsense  a while back.  Joe Graves did such a good job revealing the utter biological incompetence in Rushton’s work that if I remember correctly, Rushton may have actually threatened him with litigation.

[Lieberman , L. 2001. How "Caucasoids" Got Such Big Crania and Why They Shrank: From Morton to Rushton. Current Anthropology 42:69-95.]

[Graves, J. 2002. The misuse of life history theory: J. P. Rushton and the pseudoscience of racial hierarchy. In Race and Intelligence: Separating Science from Myth, edited by J. Fish. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 57-94.]

When Rushton’s awful book was published, sociobiologist David Barash, fearing that it might give human sociobiology a bad name (as if such a thing were possible), reviewed it in the British journal Animal Behaviour in terms that merit quoting in order to properly admire them.  “I don’t know which is worse,” wrote Barash, “Rushton’s scientific failings or his blatant racism.”  Methodologically, said Barash, Rushton cherry-picks data of very dubious quality to make his pseudo-scientific argument, which amounts to

the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit.

[Barash, D. P. 1995. Book review: Race, Evolution, and Behavior. Animal Behaviour 49:1131-1133.]

Damn, I wish I had said that.  My hat goes off to Barash for saying it.  I would argue, further, that racism should be no more tolerable in science than creationism is.  (In fact I do argue that, in a forthcoming essay for a volume called Pragmatic Evolution, edited by Aldo Poiani, and being published someday by Cambridge.)

Oddly, though, some otherwise reputable scholars had trouble critically evaluating Rushton’s work.  I have occasionally referred to these scholars as ”Mr. Eds”,  being knowledgeable about their narrow area, but so unfathomably ignorant outside that narrow area that they are essentially talking horses.   Mathematical geneticist Henry Harpending, for one, was so uncritical about Rushton that Rushton excerpted a blurb from Harpending’s review in the aforementioned pamphlet. 

"Rushton's Race, Evolution, and Behavior.. .is an attempt to understand [race] differences in terms of life-history evolution.. . . Perhaps here ultimately will be some serious contribution from the traditional smoke-and-mirrors social science treatment of IQ, but for now Rushton's framework is essentially the only game in town."

[Harpending, H. 1995. Human biological diversity. Evolutionary Anthropology, 4 (3):99-103.]

He missed what most others found to be retrogressive, incompetent, and galling in the book.  In the same review Harpending also expressed his admiration for The Bell Curve, which a lot of people had problems with, and which also included a pre-emptive defense of Rushton in an appendix, since it cited about twenty of his papers.  Another senior biological anthropologist, Ralph Holloway, also had trouble reading Rushton critically, and defended Rushton’s work to an early internet chat group in 1999: “I know Phil Rushton, and have had the pleasure of his visit to my lab, and even was able to talk to him at the last AAPA Meetings, and while I disagree with his theories, I have not found him to be a ‘bigot’.” “In short, a ‘racist’ he may be, but I don’t see the ‘bigotry’ myself, despite to what uses his theories might be put.”

Whatever.  As if a guy who ass-rapes evolutionary ecological theory in order to show that Africans have an innate intellectual ability equivalent to mentally handicapped Europeans, might merely be a racist but not a bigot – and may not be responsible for how other people will use his objective, scientific work?

As cranial anatomists go, Holloway is a distinguished one, but if you’re going to talk about race, you have to be able to read the literature critically.  After all, there is supposed to be a distinction between, say, neurobiology and phrenology, which may not be readily apparent to outsiders.  And anyone who can’t read Rushton’s work critically simply isn’t competent to teach anthropology, much less to represent it publicly.  I wrote a monthly column in the Anthropology News (formerly, the Anthropology Newsletter) for the General Anthropology Division, and when we received Rushton’s Abridgement, I said something about it:

Which reminds me, did you all get your copies of the Special Abridged Edition of J Philippe Rushton’s book, Race, Evolution & Behavior? The mass mailing was bankrolled by the Pioneer Fund, an organization outed in a famous essay in the New York Review of Books on Dec 1, 1994 by Charles Lane. With friends like Henry Harpending (Utah) and Ralph Holloway (Columbia), Rushton shows how just hard it is to tell bio-anthropological science from racist pseudo-science.

            [Anthropology News, February 2000, p. 60]

The other day my attention was called to Holloway’s recent writing on the subject.  In 2008, Holloway published an old fart memoir in the Annual Review of Anthropology, and included the following statement.

Indeed, Jon Marks claimed he “outed” me as a “racist” (Marks 2000; see Holloway 2000 for reply) in his biological section of the American Anthropologist Newsletter because I had the temerity to defend Arthur Jensen against Loring Brace’s assertion that Jensen was a bigot. I had read much of this literature (e.g., Jensen 1998) including Jensen’s infamous 1969 piece in the Harvard Law Review and did not find him a racist.

 [Holloway, Ralph L. 2008. The Human Brain Evolving: A Personal Retrospective.  Annual Review of Anthropology,. 37:1–19]

Let’s overlook Holloway’s inability to judge Arthur Jensen’s infamous claim that blacks are innately intellectually inferior to whites as racist.  Let’s also overlook that the periodical was called the Anthropology News, not the American Anthropologist Newsletter.  Finally, we'll overlook that it was in the General Anthropology Division column, not the Biological Anthropology Section column (which I had in fact edited a few years earlier).  Now let’s start looking.  First, I associated Holloway with Rushton, not with Jensen.  Rushton and Jensen are indeed associated any number of ways, and they co-wrote a particularly horrid review article in 2005, but Holloway is inventing the Jensen connection, or confusing me with Loring Brace (I’m the one without the ponytail).  Second, since I simply named  Holloway as a defender of Rushton, the only way that Holloway can say I outed him as a racist is if he equates Rushton’s work with racism.  That’s his inference.  (Of course, I’m willing to accept the possibility that the shoe might fit...)  And third, I clearly used the word “outed” in relation to the Pioneer Fund, not to Holloway as a racist.

[Rushton, J. P., and A. Jensen. 2005. Thirty years of research on race differences in cognitive ability. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 11 (2):235-294.]

There isn’t even that much there to misquote, but he sure managed to.  Unfuckingbelievable, Wilbur.

The really amazing thing is that I wrote that Anthropology News piece pre-tenure.  Looking back, I probably said a lot of things without tenure that a smarter person would have waited until having tenure to say.






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[@tristanoman: 

No guns or smoke.  Holloway made six mistakes in his single sentence about me in the Annual Review of Anthropology in 2008.  Measuring brains must be real easy compared to that.  It’s possible that he has rethought Rushton over the last decade or so; I certainly hope so.  The Gould-Morton business was mildly interesting when it came out in Current Anthropology in 1988. ]

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.

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