Plotz biology

Yet through all this juggling, I detect no sign of fraud or conscious manipulation.

                        S. J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 1981: 69.

A couple of weeks ago a paper came out in PLoS Biology – an online, open access journal – that had some tongues wagging.  Various bloggers blogged about it, some journalists wrote it up – the one about Stephen Jay Gould fudging his data in accusing craniologist Samuel George Morton of fraud 150 years earlier.

"The Mismeasure of Science: Stephen Jay Gould versus Samuel George Morton on Skulls and Bias"

            The problem with the paper is a fundamental one: It purports to be a contribution to the area of “science studies” but is signally poor as such.  It may be a contribution to revisionist positivism studies, but that’s about the most charitable thing I can say about it.  Even the conclusion is completely ass-backwards, which is something of a giveaway.  The conclusion they come up with, after arguing that Gould fudged, is that there is less fudging in science than is widely thought, rather than more – strange, given that they had presumably just added to the stock of fudge.

            There is an informal rule-of-thumb in the anthropology of science, that goes, “When smart people say stupid things, they’re usually doing it for a reason.”  Let’s start there.  What is this paper even about?  What makes it novel and interesting?  Why are they writing it?  (Sorry to sound like a science studies fan, but I think that’s what they might ask.)  The authors tell us: 

Gould’s analysis of Morton is widely read, frequently cited, and still commonly assigned in university courses (refs.).  Morton has become a canonical example of scientific misconduct...

Let’s pause right there.  Who says it’s an example of misconduct at all, much less a canonical one?  Gould didn’t; Gould argued that Morton fudged unconsciously.  I wrote chapters on “Bogus Science” and on  “Scientific Misconduct” in my book, Why I Am Not a Scientist  (their Ref. 4), and didn’t mention Gould’s  treatment of Morton, and I mentioned Morton himself only in passing, as a phrenologist.   (Perhaps unsurprisingly , that interest of Morton’s – the scientific aspects  of head bumps – doesn’t get a mention in the new paper.)

            So why didn’t I cite it as a canonical example of misconduct?  Two reasons:  First, Gould himself didn’t think it was; and second, even Gould’s argument for unconscious fudging had been convincingly challenged in a paper published in Current Anthropology 23 years ago (their ref. 14).

            In fact, not only didn’t I cite Morton as they were bemoaning, but (if their central assertion is true) only one other reference in their list might reasonably be expected to cite Morton, as a work of “science studies” analyzing scientific misconduct – The Great Betrayal, by Horace Freeland Judson (their ref. 16).  And Judson doesn’t mention Morton either.

Michael, J. S. 1988. A new look at Morton's craniological research. Current Anthropology 29:348-354.

Judson, H. F. 2004. The Great Betrayal. Orlando, FL: Harcourt.

Marks, J. 2009. Why I Am Not a Scientist: Anthropology and Modern Knowledge. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

            So who do they cite in support of the statement that Morton is a canonical case of misconduct?  Works by three skeletal biologists: Loring Brace, Della Cook, and Jane Buikstra.  The problem is that the authors of this new paper seem to be criticizing the science studies literature for the perceived failings of skeletal biologists.  This is unfortunate, but not the problem of people working in science studies. 

            In fact, if you take the trouble to read Brace's Race is A Four-Letter Word (their ref. 11), you'll be more industrious than the authors of the new article. Why? Because in the context of an extensive and erudite discussion of Morton, Brace goes on to cite Gould's analysis in precisely the opposite way than the new paper claims.

            As far as science studies goes, then, the paper is erecting and attacking a straw man.  They produce no evidence that people who work in this area regard Gould’s critique of Morton as canonical, important, or valid.  The only two relevant works they cite do not in fact mention it.  One of the three references by skeletal biologists they cite as accepting Gould is actually completely dismissive of Gould (and I don't have access to the papers by Cook and Buikstra).   The central argument of this paper, then, is to correct the way that some skeletal biologists are mis-citing an obscure historical issue. 

            That is not new, interesting, or important.

            The bulk of the paper is indeed devoted to establishing a point that has been widely known for over two decades, and is widely accessible  because it was published in a major journal:  that Gould did not even reliably establish that Morton had indeed fudged unconsciously.  That paper is their ref. 14.  So their industry brings positive knowledge: Now we know, for absolutely sure, that Gould did not even reliably establish that Morton had indeed fudged unconsciously.

            Which brings us to the next question:  What do the authors themselves  think is new, interesting, or important about this?  What lessons do they think are to be drawn from their labors, of establishing something that was already known, and is unfortunately occasionally still mis-cited by people in physical anthropology?

            Here are their parting words:        

That Morton’s data are reliable despite his clear bias weakens the argument of Gould and others that biased results are endemic in science. Gould was certainly correct to note that scientists are human beings and, as such, are inevitably biased, a point frequently made in ‘‘science studies.’’ But the power of the scientific approach is that a properly designed and executed methodology can largely shield the outcome from the influence of the investigator’s bias. Science does not rely on investigators being unbiased ‘‘automatons.’’ Instead, it relies on methods that limit the ability of the investigator’s admittedly inevitable biases to skew the results. Morton’s methods were sound, and our analysis shows that they prevented Morton’s biases from significantly impacting his results. The Morton case, rather than illustrating the ubiquity of bias, instead shows the ability of science to escape the bounds and blinders of cultural contexts.

I must say, I had to read this several times in order to grasp the enormity of their illogic.  First, by vindicating Morton, they believe they have shown that “biased results” are not  “endemic in science”.  Well they certainly  still are in physical anthropology.   Physical anthropology is just now being discovered by historians of science, but its secrets are fairly well known.   What about Hooton’s criminological work (describing the statistical physical differences between inmates and volunteer firemen in three states)?  The physical difference may well have been real, but his interpretation of it was so crude that Harvard  never published the successor volume to Hooton’s 1939 The American Criminal, Volume I.  What about the nationalistic, racial, and anatomical biases that permitted Piltdown Man to go unchallenged for decades?   What about national traditions between Japanese and American primatologists?  Haven’t you ever noticed how Chris Stringer always seems to find the evidence for Replacement, and Milford Wolpoff always seems to find the evidence for Multiregional Continuity?  Do you think that’s a coincidence?

            It’s biased any number of ways, but it’s still science, and it may or may not be true.

            Let me give a relevant example, because it concerns a literal successor of Morton’s  - Carleton Coon of the University of Pennsylvania, sitting President of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in 1962.  Coon published his book, The Origin of Races, as a scientific manifesto for the segregationists.  How do we know this?  Because we have his mail.  He worked with the segregationists and gave them preprints of his book, which tried to demonstrate that Africans had become Homo sapiens 200,000 years after Europeans – and which, he coyly suggested, may explain their backwardness and uncivilizability.

Coon, C. S. 1962. The Origin of Races. New York: Knopf.

Jackson, J. P., Jr. 2001. "In ways unacademical": The reception of Carleton S. Coon's The Origin of Races. Journal of the History of Biology 34:247-285.

———. 2005. Science for Segregation. New York: NYU Press.

            The author, Professor Coon, wanted his work to be judged independently of the circumstances of its production.  He worked hard to conceal his ties to the segregationists, and wanted people to read it  as if it were an objective work of science.  But it never was an objective work of science, and to read it today as if it were such a work, is to accept the author’s highly political dissimulation.  It was a scientific work written for the segregationists, and cannot be read honestly today as anything but that.

            So whatever Morton may or may not have done, and Gould may or may not have done, it has nothing to do with understanding the role of ideology in co-producing the facts of human science.

            Their second conclusion is even less logical:  That although the biases of the investigators are ubiquitous, a scientific fact can transcend them.   I suppose so, in theory.  But what particular fact are we talking about here, exactly?  That  a sample of African  skulls measured by a creationist phrenologist polygenist may have a smaller average volume than a sample of European skulls?

            Morton, whose work the new paper wants to convince you was shielded from cultural bias, actually was so engrossed in the differences among the sets of skulls that he was unable to see them as belonging to a single species, as the products of a single origin.  Does that sound like culturally unbiased scientific work?  Do the authors of the new paper believe that fact shines through the cultural bias as well?  If not, why not?

            The ideological bias is so overwhelming, that these authors can’t even see it themselves.  It resides in the question: What do you actually think you are explaining in documenting a difference in cranial volume between two non-representative samples?  Morton really thought that a difference of an average cubic inch in cranial volume explained why black people were enslaved.  Do you?  If you don’t, then why do you think this is important?  Morton’s conclusion about the hat size of races is not now, and never was, an important scientific fact.

            Earnest  Hooton really believed that he was explaining criminality by nailing down “the criminal look” of the head.  Carleton Coon really believed he was explaining racial problems in America not as the products of social history and injustice, but of evolutionary  biology.  In the 21^st century, explaining human social facts by recourse to human biological facts is passé as science.  Go find another reason to measure heads. 

            That, to me, was the brilliant lesson of The Mismeasure of Man – it put the craniologists and psychometricians on the defensive, and forced them to justify themselves.  (And they eventually did so a few years later, I suppose, with The Bell Curve.)

Herrnstein, R., and C. Murray. 1994. The Bell Curve. New York: Free Press.

            But this brings me to the dirtiest thing of all about this paper.  Its model isn’t any admirably truth-seeking science; it’s inspired by the venomous nonsense of Derek Freeman.  Freeman was the maniacal Australian anthropologist who attacked Margaret Mead’s 1928 bestseller, Coming of Age in Samoa.  What was weird wasn’t so much the zeal with which he pursued the half-century old work, but his extraordinary assumption that it was somehow a lynch-pin of modern anthropology.  By elevating the significance of Coming of Age in Samoa, Freeman thereby elevated himself; and moreover, in knocking it down, he would be leading the way to a new and better (sociobiological) anthropology.  Freeman permitted other ideologues, like Steven Pinker, to dismiss Margaret Mead, and by extension, normative anthropology, as having been simply discredited.

Mead, M. 1928. Coming of Age in Samoa. New York: Morrow.

Freeman, D. 1983. Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Pinker, S. 2002. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Viking Penguin.

Shankman, P. 2009. The Trashing of Margaret Mead: anatomy of an anthropological controversy. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

            I see a lot of that in here.  I don’t think Gould’s analysis of Morton was any more important to science studies than Coming of Age in Samoa was to anthropology.  By inflating its significance, the authors of this study themselves become that much more important.  And they see their own exceedingly parochial obsessive work as being somehow paradigmatic.  It just isn’t.

            So I will take away two lessons from this.  First, about  Stephen Jay Gould.  Gould, like everybody else in science, tended to see what he was looking for.   That’s a good science studies lesson.  Second, about this paper.  For the most part, it is paranoid positivist rhetoric mixed with slovenly-argued bombast, and a warmed-over critique of Gould, not a significant new contribution to knowledge.  If it were, it might have been publishable in a real journal, like Current Anthropology.

*******

I met Steve Gould once or twice.  He autographed my copy of Ontogeny and Phylogeny, “To Jonathan – May the creationists never have a day of peace!”  Years later, he did get me hooked me up with the Annals of Improbable  Research, which awards the IgNobel prizes annually, and for that I am grateful to him.  G. G. Simpson hated his guts, but that’s a story for another time.

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.






*******
[@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 Carlin story, of sorts

               George Carlin said 39 years ago – if you can fucking believe that! – that there are seven words you can’t say on television, to wit: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits.  He was wrong.

               A couple of years ago I was contacted by a British producer who was doing a TV series on race.  One of the shows was going to be on “The Human Zoos” and discuss the story of Ota Benga (the central African pygmy who visited New York in 1906, and was kept as a display in the Bronx Zoo for a couple of weeks, essentially as a wildly successful publicity stunt).  They were going to contextualize it in terms of the scientific racism of the age, and I had written some stuff about it, and would I care be interviewed?

Brownell, S., ed.  (2008) The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: Sport, Race, and American Imperialism, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. 

Bradford, P. V. and Blume, H. (1993) Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo, New York: Delta.

                Sure, I said, always being up for a free trip to England.  Well, actually I got a free trip to Lynchburg, Virginia, where, it so happens, Ota Benga tragically ended his days.

               They found a hot empty warehouse in which to interview me (the significance of which I never fully grasped).  We did it over 2 or 3 hours, with the producer asking me good, leading questions off-camera, and me free-associating answers in full sentences, recapitulating the questions, turning a clever phrase here and there, and trying to give him things he could use.  I read some excerpts from my         autographed copy of Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916), a horrid classic of American racist thought.  Grant, it turned out, had more-or-less masterminded the stunt.

Spiro, J. (2009) Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant, Burlington, VT: University Press of Vermont.

               As the summer afternoon wound down and we had exhausted everything he wanted to ask and everything I wanted to say, and I was starting to think about getting to the airport for my flight back to Charlotte, he asked me if I had anything to add to what we had already covered.  I looked straight into the camera and smiled and said, “Yeah.  Madison Grant was a real fuck.  Put that on your television show!”

               And you know what?  They did.

               The point is, Carlin was wrong.  He was working under an ethnocentric assumption.  You can’t say those words on American television.  On the telly, however, things are a little different.

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

According to The Sunday Times, 1 November 2009:

“He was a real f***, by the way. Put that on your television,” added Professor Jonathan Marks, an angry academic from the University of North Carolina [@Charlotte!].

               http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-human-zoo-sciences-dirty-secret

Simpson story #2

               Maybe I sensed that I would evolve into a faux historian even back in graduate school.  But when I used to visit Dr. Simpson and do his typing and filing, back in 1983-84, I occasionally would drop names and get his reactions.  And they were always candid, especially after the two martinis he had for lunch.

               One day I dropped the name of the old dinosaur paleontologist, Ned Colbert.  [Edwin H. Colbert, 1905-2001]  I knew that they had overlapped at the American Museum for many years, and that everyone who had ever spoken about him had said he was a really sweet old guy.  I figured GGS would have some stock anecdote about a drinking binge together or something.

               Instead the ambient temperature in his library dropped about five degrees, and he snarled something at me, which I swear was no more than 5% different from: “That son of a bitch fucked me over back in 1937!”

               Needless to say, even as a smarty-pants graduate student I was momentarily at a loss for words.  I also tended to develop a stutter when talking to him.  “But D-d-d-doctor Simpson,” I said, “This is 1983.  That was like almost 50 years ago.”

               He growled angrily, “That means nothing to a paleontologist,”  then smiled.  I changed the subject.

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

Léo Laporte properly set the fight between Colbert and Simpson in 1958, after Simpson had the tree fall on him in the Amazon. 

Laporte, L. (2000) George Gaylord Simpson: Paleontologist and Evolutionist.  New York: Columbia University Press.

John Ostrom (1928-2005) later told me that he had gone to Columbia to work with Simpson on mammals, but since Simpson was a huge celebrity academic and was never there, he moved over to Colbert instead, to do  birds and dinosaurs.

I did learn an important life lesson from that exchange, though.  Grudges are expensive to maintain and generally aren’t worth it.

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?