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.

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.

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/

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.