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Tales of the Ex-Apes How We Think About Human Evolution Tales of the Ex-Apes How We Think about Human Evolution Jonathan Marks university of california press Tales of the Ex-Apes This page intentionally left blank Tales of the Ex-Apes How We Think about Human Evolution Jonathan Marks university of california press University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2015 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Marks, Jonathan (Jonathan M.), author. Tales of the ex-apes : how we think about human evolution / Jonathan Marks. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-28581-1 (cloth, alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-520-28582-8 (pbk., alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-520- 96119-7 (electronic) 1. Social evolution. 2. Human evolution. I. Title. gn360.m37 2015 599.93′8—dc23 2015006790 Manufactured in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 In keeping with a commitment to support environmen- tally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fi ber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper). For Peta, who made this possible This page intentionally left blank contents Preface ix 1. Science 1 2. History and Morality 27 3. Evolutionary Concepts 53 4. How to Think about Evolution Non-reductively 80 5. How Our Ancestors Transgressed the Boundaries of Apehood 107 6. Human Evolution as Bio-cultural Evolution 129 7. Human Nature/Culture 156 Notes 183 Index 217 preface This book is not about paleoanthropology. It does not analyze the supraorbital torus of Homo erectus, or the feet of Australopithecus sediba. This book is about how to make sense of information like that; it’s about thinking. Further, it is premised on an uncontro- versial point. Humans are universally interested in who they are and where they come from. Sharks, elephants, bats, chimpan- zees, and other species are not. Or if they are, it is only in ways that are inaccessible and unfathomable to us, and always will be. This fact immediately establishes the case for human excep- tionalism. We are diff erent from other species in that we do attempt to situate ourselves in a social and historical universe, and thereby make sense of our existence. We are sense-making creatures—that is one of the functions of our most prominent organ, the brain—and we create that sense in many diff erent ways, culturally. The study of how people make sense of who they are and where they came from is kinship, the oldest research program in anthropology, which is predicated on the oldest sys- tematic observation in anthropology, that diff erent cultures ix x / Preface make their own sense of who they are related to and descended from, and their sense-making systems somehow work. Our own ideas of relatedness are always in some degree of fl ux, and are particularly responsive to economy, politics, and technology.1 Our own ancestry is important to us, and the authoritative voices about it are of course those of science. Science itself is cultural, a fact-producing mode of thought, but when it pro- duces facts about our ancestry, those facts are heavily value laden, and thus are often diff erent from other classes of scientifi c facts. Understanding how those human facts diff er from, say, cockroach facts, is the fi rst step toward reading the literature on human evolution critically. And the simplest answer is, Little is on the line, and few people care about cockroach facts. (Of course urban apartment dwellers and the manufacturers of insecticides may sometimes care strongly about cockroach facts; but those cares are quite specifi c and localized.) In addition to being facts of nature, human facts are political and ideological; history shows that clearly. It doesn’t mean that human scientifi c facts are unreal and untrue—just that one needs to scrutinize them diff erently, because there are more variables to consider. This is not about theories of evolutionary progress or biologi- cal teleology, which see evolution as culminating with our spe- cies, and which have been a traditionally popular way to recon- cile scientifi c and theological ideas about human origins. These teleological theories have often been accompanied by a view of nature as a linear hierarchy, a Great Chain of Being—which sounds more erudite in Latin (scala naturae) and sexier in French (échelle des êtres). Personally I don’t think we sit atop anything but the food chain, but I don’t see how the point can be established without standing outside of the system itself, which is mani- festly impossible. One such proof that I recently read explained Preface / xi to readers that “the history of life told by other organisms might have diff erent priorities. Giraff e scientists would no doubt write of evolutionary progress in terms of lengthening necks, rather than larger brains or toolmaking skill. So much for human supe- riority.”2 But the validity of this argument against human “supe- riority” involves invoking a rhetorical universe of superintelli- gent giraff es who apparently require neither big brains to produce scientifi c thoughts, nor hands to write them down. In other words, the argument dethroning humans ends up estab- lishing exactly the opposite point—because you have to invent human giraff es in order to dethrone human humans. Our grasp of who we are and where we came from begins with an appreciation that we are the products of naturalistic evolutionary processes, but we are also not separate from the things we are trying to understand; consequently our project is scientifi cally refl exive. That is the central point of this book: Our ancestors were apes and we are diff erent from them, and we want to know how that happened. We are bio-cultural ex-apes trying to understand ourselves. This book, then, is about two reciprocal themes: how to think about anthropology scientifi cally, and how to think about the science of human origins anthropologically. This will be a pre- sentation of human origins, then, which begins with recent work in science studies, to articulate an evolutionary anthropology that is consistent both with modern biology and with modern anthropology, and is more scientifi cally normative than evolu- tionary psychology or creationism. My thesis is that what diff er- entiates biological anthropology (the study of human origins and diversity) from biology (the study of life) is refl exivity, the breakdown of the distinction between subject and object that characterizes modern science. One simply cannot have the same xii / Preface relationship to boron or to the planet Jupiter that one has to the ancestors or neighbors. Our scientifi c narratives of human origin and diversity are just that—narratives, with properties endowed by the “epistemic virtues” of science, notably, naturalism, ratio- nalism, and empiricism. Nevertheless, since they are narratives specifi cally about who we are and where we came from, they are simultaneously narratives of kinship and ancestry, which are universally culturally important. I explored the genetic meanings of evolutionary relatedness and ancestry in What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee (University of California Press, 2002). My next project involved engaging more broadly with science studies. Given C. P. Snow’s famous assertion that science could be understood as an anthropologist understands culture, it stands to reason that our understanding of science could be improved by the introduction of anthropo- logical theory and analyses.3 Recent trends in the history and sociology of science have involved integrating anthropological knowledge and methods to the extent that the fi eld of science studies, while intellectually diverse, generally has a recogniz- able anthropological element. I attempted to explore the nature of science, calling specifi c attention to the scientifi c ambiguities of biological anthropology, in Why I Am Not a Scientist (Univer- sity of California Press, 2011). The present book focuses specifi - cally on the study of our origins, and situates it as a cultural and scientifi c narrative, with attendant implications for understand- ing the nature of the facts it produces. This book was mostly written in 2013–14 during my year as an inaugural Templeton Fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, for whose support I am immensely grateful. The NDIAS staff —Brad Gregory, Don Stelluto, Grant Osborn, Carolyn Sherman, Nick Ochoa, and Eric Bugyis—created a Preface / xiii stimulating and congenial environment in which to write, and of course the John Templeton Foundation made it possible. I am grateful to the other 2013–14 Fellows of the NDIAS, who allowed me to bounce ideas off of them, and gave me very helpful feed- back: Douglas Hedley, Robert Audi, Justin Biddle, Brandon Gallaher, Carl Gillett, Cleo Kearns, Scott Kenworthy, Daniel Malachuk, Gladden Pappen, Scott Shackelford, James VanderKam, Peggy Garvey, Ethan Guagliardo, and Bharat Ran- ganathan. I am especially indebted to the input of the external visitors to my four NDIAS seminars: Agustín Fuentes, Susan Guise Sheridan, Jim McKenna, Jada Benn Torres, Donna Glowacki, Neil Arner, Matt Ravosa, Phil Sloan, Melinda Gorm- ley, Grant Ramsey, and Candida R. Moss. My undergraduate assistants, Iona Hughan and Sean Gaudio, also provided invalu- able help in the preparation of this book.
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