Volume 23, No.
1 Bulletin of the General Anthropology Division
American Heritage
Tales of the ex-Apes
When the Mines Closed:
Heritage Building in North- By Jonathan Marks
eastern Pennsylvania UNC-Charlotte
By Paul A. Shackel and V. Camille
Westmont
University of Maryland
Introduction
Since 2009, the Anthracite Heritage Pro-
ject has focused on social issues in
Northeastern Pennsylvania (NEPA).
NEPA is a resource rich, economically
poor area located in the northernmost
reaches of the Appalachian Region.
While anthracite coal was discovered in
this region in the late eighteenth century,
large scale extraction of this carbon fos-
sil fuel did not occur until the middle of
the nineteenth century with the develop-
ment of railroads and canal systems. It is
the fuel that helped propel American
industry to become an international
leader in manufacturing. Our goal in this
project is to study the rise and fall of the
anthracite coal industry, and to address
inequities in the community, past and
present, related to work, labor, gender,
race, and immigration.
The NEPA communities, including
the city of Hazleton, the focus of our
study, developed in the mid-nineteenth
century with a massive influx of newly
arrived foreign immigrants who were
necessary for the extraction of coal. This
migration also created a ready workforce
with more available workers than jobs.
Surplus labor allowed the coal operators
to keep wages relatively low with the
threat that there were always willing
workers available. The earliest immi-
grants to the coal fields came primarily
(See Mines on page 7)
Spring, 2016
Distinguished Lecture Winners of GAD Awards
for 2015
Diana Forsythe Prize
Gabriella Coleman
for her book Hacker, Hoaxer,
The GAD Distinguished Lecture, given Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of
November 20, 2015, is based on a book Anonymous, Verso Press 2014.
of the same title, recently published by
the University of California Press.
Sharon R. Kaufman
Honorable Mention
for her book Ordinary Medicine:
This will be an exploration of meaning
Extraordinary Treatments, Longer Lives,
in human evolution without paleoanthro-
and Where to Draw the Line, Duke
pology. I’m not talking about the foot of
University Press 2015.
Australopithecus sediba or the supraor-
bital torus of Homo erectus; I want to
talk about who we are and where we GAD Prize for Exemplary Cross-
came from. I am talking about origin Field Scholarship
myths; I am talking about kinship. I am
not talking about human evolution; I’m Noah Tamarkin
talking about how we talk about human for “Genetic Diaspora: Producing
evolution. Knowledge of Genes and Jews in
Rural South Africa,” which appeared
Human evolution as bio-politics in Cultural Anthropology, vol. 29,
issue 3, pp. 552-574.
Let me start off, then, with a sort of epi-
graph by Carleton Coon. Coon is not
remembered fondly today, because in the
early 1960s, as President of the Ameri-
can Association of Physical Anthropolo-
gists, he was secretly colluding with the
segregationists, giving them preprints of
In This Issue
his book which purported to demonstrate Marks on Tales of the Ex-Apes....Page 1
that the reason that Africans were eco-
nomically and politically subjugated by Shackel and Westmont on American
Europeans is that they hadn’t been mem-
Heritage in Appalachia….……..Page 1
bers of our species for very long, be-
cause whites had evolved into Homo
sapiens 200,000 years before blacks did. Recent Finds in
And I’m happy to say that most of his Paleoanthropology......................Page 10
contemporaries smacked him down, and
in particular he got into a heated ex- Ethnographic Reviews................Page 14
change with the great fruit fly geneticist
Theodosius Dobzhansky, who, I might Film and Video.........................Page 15
add, was a member of the American An-
(See Marks, page 2)
(Marks continued from page 1)
thropological Association and had many
close friends in the field. And Coon
(1968:275) finally replied, and this is the
one thing he said that I agree with, and
it’s important.
Were the evolution of fruit flies a
prime social and political issue,
Dobzhansky might easily find himself in
the same situation in which he and his
followers have tried to place me.
This isn’t fruit fly evolution; it’s human
evolution, and it’s played out on a far
broader intellectual terrain than fruit fly
evolution is. It is a bio-political terrain,
as Professor Coon realized as he precipi-
tously descended into scientific obscu-
rity.
And the nature of the bio-political
turf stems from the fact that this is in-
deed not about who fruit flies are and
where they came from. This is about
who we are and where we came from.
Now, there are scientists who study the
things that people believe about who
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Anthropology
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they are and where they come from, and
how they use those beliefs to structure
and create meaning in their lives. We
call those scholars anthropologists. And
although we have from time to time
turned the reflexive gaze upon ourselves,
one area that has tended to escape much
analytic scrutiny is human evolution.
There have been explorations of
Neanderthal gender issues, and some
science-studies work on primatology.
Misia Landau’s (1991) classic and
highly original work examined the struc-
ture of the scientific stories of human
evolution in the early 20th century as
hero-myths, with the hero primitive man,
gendered, overcoming obstacles and
being transformed into the fittest, on the
way to a happy ending, namely survival.
The elements may be rearranged, but the
framework is constant, a story about the
heroic ancestors. These are not the kinds
of stories we tell about the ancestors of
Drosophila pseudoobscura and Droso-
phila persimilis. These are our stories of
our ancestors.
Now in any other society, the study
of who we are and where we come from
would be considered the domain of kin-
ship and origin myth. In ours, it’s sci-
ence, in particular the science of biologi-
cal anthropology. This is a field that has
been defined by two major discoveries in
the last couple of centuries. First, in the
19th century, the discovery that we are
descended from apes. And in the 20th
century, the discovery that human varia-
tion and race are two very distinct do-
mains, and studying one is quite differ-
ent from studying the other. Now, I
think it is a measure of how significant
and meaningful these narratives of origin
and kinship are that they are aggres-
sively opposed by large segments of
society. We have racists rejecting our
scientific narrative of who we are, and
creationists rejecting our scientific narra-
tive of where we come from. But
they’re not interested in the races of
Drosophila or in its evolution.
The point is that unlike other sci-
ences, this one is engaged in a two-front
culture war, and taking as our model the
natural sciences is not going to help us,
because they aren’t engaged in a struggle
over who gets to compose the authorita-
tive scientific story of our natures and
our origins. This is our special science.
A science constrained by the data, but
also affording a lot of built-in room to be
creatively meaningful, in ways that or-
ganic chemistry simply isn’t and can
never be. As humans we seek meaning,
but science offers only accuracy (or the
closest available approximation thereof).
And of course we know that those
accurate narratives invariably encode
narratives of gender and race and power.
Nor is it a particular embarrassment; it
simply comes with the territory. After
all it would be nice to not be humans
studying humans, which precludes ob-
jectivity, and to be able to study our-
selves as one would study fruit flies,
where there is nothing at stake. Which is
why Thomas Huxley invented the
“pretend you’re an alien” trope. Trying
to convince his Victorian readership that
they are really similar to apes, a theme
I’ll return to, he wants to tell you that the
best way to classify humans is with the
apes, but appreciates that there is a sub-
jective element involved in deciding
your own position in the order of things.
And he says, Well, you don’t have to
take my word for this classification. If a
space alien from the planet Saturn were
here, that’s just how he’d do it. “Let
us imagine ourselves scientific Satur-
nians,” he writes (1863: 85), classifying
this “’erect and featherless biped’ which
some enterprising traveller has brought
back ... in a cask of rum.” They would
certainly classify us with the apes.
And perhaps they would, but you
can see the problem with the argument a
bit more readily when you see how the
paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn
(1926: 3) utilized it a few decades later.
“If an unbiased zoologist” (like me!)
“were to descend upon the earth from
Mars,” (where, by the way, we now
know the training they receive to be
vastly inferior to the training one gets on
Saturn) “he would undoubtedly divide
the races of man into several genera and
into a very large number of species and
subspecies.”
And somewhat later (“A zoologist
from Outer Space would immediately
classify us as just a third species of
chimpanzee...”) Jared Diamond’s muse
is a more generic extra-terrestrial who is
kind enough to give him the title for his
1992 book. And finally geneticist Steve
Jones (“A taxonomist from Mars armed
with a DNA hybridization machine
would classify humans, gorillas, and
General Anthropology
chimpanzees as members of the same ...
family”) returns us to Mars, where DNA
hybridization is widely used as a phy-
logenetic tool, as it was briefly on earth
in the 1980s.
It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that
there are two problems here. The first is,
obviously, the substitution of science
fiction for science in this argument, as if
you know what Martians would do better
than I know. But more importantly, if
there is one thing anthropologists have
learned, it’s that just on earth, systems of
classification are culture-bound, and
people classify for diverse reasons and
according to diverse criteria. The idea
that anybody else out there would neces-
sarily hit on phylogenetic classification
as the best system because you have, is a
hell of an ethnocentrism.
But it’s an interesting situation
when we can’t tell the science fiction
from the science, because the scientists
themselves are deliberately conflating
the two in order to make rhetorical argu-
ments on behalf of aspects of human
evolution that they can’t sustain by re-
course to reality. This is about relations
that may or may not be fictive; it’s kin-
ship. You see, Martians don’t even
bother trying to classify fruit flies.
And this exposes the great paradox
at the heart of anthropological science,
namely that we are humans studying
ourselves and there is no way out of that
reflexive loop. Pretending to be a Mar-
tian is not part of the canon of scientific
protocols. On the other hand, we do
want to be good Baconians and free our-
selves of the biases – Francis Bacon
called them idols – that produce inaccu-
rate readings of nature. We want to be
as scientific as possible. So we want our
stories to conform generally to the rules,
and to be guided by what philosopher
John Dupré calls the epistemic values of
science. Things like the assumption that
nature is something that can be brack-
eted and examined and discussed sepa-
rately from the world of spirit and mira-
cle; that theories are generally tweaked
to fit the evidence, rather than vice-
versa; that we can learn about nature by
isolating it in microcosm under con-
trolled conditions, and generalize our
results to the world at large; and of
course that accuracy is our transcendent
goal and the surest path to it is the appli-
cation of reason. And if you’re at all
General Anthropology © 2016 by the American Anthropological Association. All Rights Reserved.
familiar with various critiques, feminist,
post-colonial, etc., you know that those
political lenses are always there in the
science, and while it sometimes seems as
though anthropologists eat our own an-
cestors, actually what we’re doing is
identifying and correcting the biases of
earlier generations, so that even though
our own work can never be value-
neutral, its embedded values can at least
be more subtle and benign than those of
earlier generations.
As humans we seek meaning in sto-
ries of kinship and ancestry. We want
meaningful stories about who we are and
where we came from. Again, science
only offers accuracy. Of course, it’s not
that hard to imagine situations in which
maximum accuracy might not be desir-
able, such as polite conversation. More-
over, the power of science often lies in
revealing not so much what nature is, as
in helping us to make sense of what na-
ture is like. For example in the 17th
century it was widely imagined that the
universe was like a giant machine, and
that was certainly valuable, since you
understand a machine by understanding
the functions of its component parts, and
that turned out to be a useful way of
looking at the world – both mechanisti-
cally and theologically. But of course
the universe isn’t really a machine. In
the 19th century, and I think this is one
of the most underappreciated aspects of
his work, Charles Darwin undermined
that very metaphor. After all, when Dar-
win was at Cambridge he learned that an
organism was like a watch, the opening
lines of Paley’s Natural Theology. But
the argument he makes in The Origin of
Species is that a species is more like a
subspecies or variety, with a history in
descent with modification, than it is like
machinery, with an assembler. But of
course a variety is made in a sense by a
breeder; somebody actually selects,
unlike nature. So once again, the meta-
phor eventually breaks down. And fi-
nally Erwin Schrödinger suggested in the
1940s that it might be fruitful to think of
heredity as if it were like coded informa-
tion. And of course the language meta-
phors became the hallmark of molecular
biology: transcription, translation, splic-
ing, and a code. But again, it’s not liter-
ally a code or a language.
Well, none of this is particularly
earth-shattering; it’s Science Studies 1a,
the nature of scientific storytelling, and
we don’t teach it in science classes be-
cause it goes against the master narrative
that science is entirely data-driven. And
for those of you who are experimental-
ists, let me suggest a fun bit of empirical
ethnographic research. Go up to a mo-
lecular biologist and explain that there is
no genetic code literally, it is a metaphor
thought up by a physicist in the 1940s.
My hypothesis is that they will look at
you like you just killed their puppy, and
then after composing themselves, they’ll
call you anti-science.
And in exactly the same vein, when
I say evolution is a sacred narrative, if
you don’t believe me, just go up to a
biologist and deny it, and you’ll quickly
find out how sacred it is. We own this
story – who we are and where we came
from – and even though everybody feels
as though they own a piece of it, from
entomologists to evolutionary psycholo-
gists, it is ours, we are its custodians.
Because we control the data, the study of
human diversity and ancestry, and the
behavior and evolution of our closest
relatives, the primates. And of course
the stories we tell are necessarily con-
strained by those data – primatology,
paleoanthropology, ethnography, human
biology – and those are our data. We’re
the ones most familiar with their limita-
tions and the appropriate contexts of
their deployment.
The point I’m working towards is
that although we are constructing mytho-
logical stories about the ancestors, ours
is not just a made-up story, it is con-
strained. But the data that constrain it
are points, they’re dots, and of course the
dots come from somewhere, and have to
be connected. Storytelling is not an ap-
pendage to human evolution. It is hu-
man evolution, and the reason it is hu-
man evolution is that it is human nature,
to the extent that anything can be said to
be human nature.
Dialectics of nature
Now evolution leaves two reciprocal
patterns: Continuity and discontinuity.
That is to say, regardless of whether na-
ture makes leaps, a point Huxley and
Darwin disagreed on, the trail of descent
is a continuous one, for every organism
had two parents. The discontinuities
emerge from divergences in ecological
Page 3
adaptation, mate recognition systems, or
genomic structure, and allow us to iden-
tify two groups of organisms as different
in the first place. Darwin called it
“descent with modification”. Some peo-
ple focus on the “descent”. Some people
focus on the “modification”. I want to
focus on the “with”: To focus on the
modification or discontinuity alone
leaves you unable to contextualize the
origin of the human condition, whatever
that condition is. But focusing solely on
the descent or continuity is at least as
bad, because it leaves you unable to ob-
serve what is interestingly human about
human evolution. Our continuity with
the primates is not inherently meaning-
ful. After all, continuity with the apes
does not automatically imply descent
from them. They recognized that bio-
logical similarity even in the classical
world but didn’t worry about it.
A Roman poet named Quintus En-
nius observed how similar we are to the
horrid monkeys (“Simia quam similis
turpissima bestia nobis”), and although
his works are lost, the saying was pre-
served in the works of Cicero (De
Natura Deorum, I, XXXV), universally
studied by Latin students for centuries.
So when this new thing, science,
comes around, it’s quoted in two of the
big works: Francis Bacon’s Novum Or-
ganum, and Linnaeus’s Systema
Naturae. Linnaeus’s bold move to clas-
sify all species according to their simi-
larity in structure to other species, rather
than by their similarity to people, neces-
sitated classifying us with the monkeys,
apes, and lemurs – a century before the
meaning of that pattern became under-
standable as a trail of common ancestry.
So the similarity of human to anthro-
poids is thus not a big surprise. But it
must become a linchpin of Darwinism if
we ever want to convince anyone about
literal genealogical descent from those
creatures. And by the middle of the 19th
century, the discontinuities between spe-
cies were not contested. In earlier ages,
when the Great Chain of Being was the
dominant model of nature, there might
have been some disagreement over
whether everything intergrades into eve-
rything else or not, but since the late 18th
century the taxonomists, led by Lin-
naeus, were giving every species its own
pigeonhole. By the mid-19th century,
naturalists took the discreteness of spe-
cies for granted. What the early Dar-
Page 4 © 2016 by the American Anthropological Association. All Rights Reserved.
winians were faced with was re-
establishing the continuity between spe-
cies. Particularly ourselves and every-
thing else.
The problem was trying to convince
European readers that they were de-
scended from apes, in the absence of a
fossil record attesting to it. And this
rhetorical problem was solved by Ernst
Figure 1. (Courtesy of the Max Planck
Institute for the History of Science)
Haeckel, in his 1868 exposition of Dar-
winism. And here, on the frontispiece,
he shows you why we don’t need a fossil
record, for the continuity between Euro-
peans and apes is provided by the living
non-European peoples of the world.
And even though this illustration, or
its even worse revision, did not make it
into the widely-read English translation
of the work, The History of Creation,
there was no ambiguity, as the English
text faithfully presented the continuity
between what Haeckel called “the lowest
woolly haired races and the highest man-
like apes.” Now we know that origin
narratives carry political weight. We
know that archaeology is routinely util-
ized in the service of nationalism, and
there is politics in deep history as well.
Haeckel created continuity between hu-
man and ape where there in fact isn’t
any, and dehumanized most of the peo-
ples of the world in the service of bash-
ing the creationists. And in so doing, he
incurred a debt that serious students of
human evolution will have to be paying
off forever. And that debt is to be re-
sponsible stewards of the sacred narra-
tive; or in less relativistic terms, to main-
tain an engagement with ethical and hu-
manistic issues while we engage with the
science of human evolution.
Nevertheless, since that first genera-
tion of Darwinians, we have tended to
find greater scientific value in the conti-
nuities of human and ape than in the dis-
continuities. That value is the same as it
ever was, rhetorical and instrumental.
The problem is that it lets the creationists
drive the scientific agenda, and in some
cases, drive it off a cliff. The continuity
is there, but it is, at best, even if you get
it right, only half of the story.
Let me digress slightly at this point.
About twenty years ago, I was fortunate
enough to have been invited into a small
colloquium given by Jane Goodall.
Goodall, of course, has been emphasizing
the mental and behavioral continuity
between chimpanzees and humans for
over half a century, now in the service of
conservation, and presented the chimps
that way in her talk. At the end, a psy-
chologist asked her whether her concep-
tions of the chimpanzee mind as essen-
tially smaller than the mind of a human
might be slightly misleading. Were there
not ways in which the chimpanzee’s
mind might be seen as simply different
from the human, not less than the human
– where the Venn diagrams of their
minds might not overlap, since they are,
after all, different species. And Goodall
thought for a second, and said, “No, I’ve
been watching the chimps for decades
now, and I just don’t see ways in which
their minds and behaviors are actually
qualitatively different from ours.” At
which point, a voice came from the back
of the room – not mine, I hasten to add –
saying, “What about estrus?” [Or oestrus,
if you are from a different part of the
Anglophone world, referring to the fact
that sexual activity in chimpanzees is
generally stimulated by the purple and
pink swelling of the female’s perineum,
indicating visually to the community that
she is fertile, and a great deal of frantic
sexual activity, otherwise rare, ensues.]
And Goodall thought about it for a sec-
ond, and replied, “Well, yes, there’s
that.”
She was so committed to the narra-
tive of continuity that she was blind to
the discontinuities that she had actually
made famous.
For a more recent example, the pale-
ontologist and science editor Henry Gee
(2014: 13) is keen to dethrone humans
and deny our species any exceptional
status. “The history of life told by other
organisms,” he writes, “might have dif-
ferent priorities. Giraffe scientists would
no doubt write of evolutionary progress
General Anthropology
in terms of lengthening necks, rather than
larger brains or toolmaking skill. So
much for human superiority.” But let’s
pause just a second. He has created an
imaginary universe of giraffe scientists
who require neither large brains to think
scientific thoughts, nor hands to write
them down. Impressive abilities in an
artiodactyl. For you see, he has to invent
human giraffes in order to dethrone hu-
man humans. This is not about the empir-
ics of human evolution, it’s about the
hermeneutics.
Another way of imposing continuity
is to redraw the playing field, so that in-
stead of linking us to the apes, we declare
ourselves to be apes. Maybe gussied up a
bit; maybe naked, but we are apes of
some sort. That is our identity. “We are
apes.” Take that, creationists! And that,
says the modern fruit fly geneticist Jerry
Coyne (2009:192), is an indisputable fact.
So far be it for me to dispute it, but it is
hard to reconcile to George Gaylord
Simpson’s mid-century pronouncement
(1949: 283), “It is not a fact that man is
an ape, extra tricks or no.” And Simpson
was a meticulous writer and an inspira-
tion of mine, so when he’s telling you this
almost monosyllabically, that means he
thinks it’s important.
Now Simpson, right here, is echoing
a sentiment of the biologist Julian Huxley
(1947:20), who had ridiculed the idea that
we are apes as representative of the noth-
ing-but school: “those, for instance, who
on realizing that man is descended from a
primitive ancestor, say that he is only a
developed monkey…” He had a cele-
brated grandfather, but he knew that your
identity, what you are, is more than what
your ancestors were.
I mean, my ancestors were peasants,
but if you call me a peasant on that basis,
I would take some umbrage. And my
more remote ancestors were slaves.
Some people’s more recent ancestors
were slaves, and if you call us slaves on
that basis, frankly, fuck you.
But notice how we entered the realm
of bio-politics very quickly, didn’t we? I
mean we aren’t reducible to our ancestry.
Huxley and Simpson didn’t think so. In
fact, revolutions were fought over that
very point; the idea that you are just your
ancestry is the folk-biological bedrock of
the politics of hereditary aristocracy.
Which is not to say that the geneticist is a
royalist or oppressor of the masses, but
General Anthropology © 2016 by the American Anthropological Association. All Rights Reserved.
just to point out that the simple scien-
tific statement that we are apes is
loaded with value, and that it articulates
a non-empirical assumption, that who
we are is reducible to what our ances-
tors were, which we reject in other con-
texts. Why on earth should we accept
it in this one? Perhaps we can answer
that question by raising another ques-
tion, namely Cui bono or who gains by
reducing identity, what we are, to an-
cestry, what we were? Aside, of
course, from the aristocrats?
Well, genetics has always been
much better at detecting ancestry than
at detecting novelty. Simpson and
Huxley knew that. We’ve known for
over a century that, for example, the
bloods of human and chimpanzee are
more similar to one another than are the
bloods of horse and donkey, which are
nevertheless capable of hybridization.
But nobody called us apes on that ba-
sis, because they didn’t think that your
identity was the same as your ancestry.
Simpson made it clear that our
ancestors were apes, of course, but we
became different from them. That is to
say, we evolved. In fact, if you think
of evolution as Darwin and Simpson
did, as descent with modification – then
to call us apes is to deny evolution. It’s
descent without modification. Human
evolution incorporates a great deal of
modification - physically, ecologically,
behaviorally - but not very much ge-
netically.
That’s why we can use genetic
change as a sort of clock, precisely
because it doesn’t record in any readily
retrievable way the physical, ecologi-
cal, and behavioral changes that make
us not-apes.
The meaning of that fact started to
get queried in the early 1960s, as bio-
chemist Emile Zuckerkandl showed
that the structure of human hemoglobin
and gorilla hemoglobin differed from
one another only minimally. Thus,
“from the point of view of hemoglo-
bin,” he argued, “gorilla is just an ab-
normal human, or man an abnormal
gorilla, and the two species form actu-
ally one continuous popula-
tion” (1963:247). But is that sangui-
nary continuity with the gorilla tran-
scendent or illusory? After all, cannot
any reasonably observant person distin-
guish a human from a gorilla quite
readily?
The paleontologist George Gay-
lord Simpson (1964:1535), whom I
quote a lot because he pretty much em-
bodied normative evolutionary biology
in the mid-20th century, challenged the
point of view of hemoglobin, which
fails to distinguish humans from goril-
las: “From any point of view other than
that properly specified, that is of course
nonsense. What the comparison really
seems to indicate is that . . . hemoglo-
bin is a bad choice and has nothing to
tell us about affinities, or indeed tells
us a lie.”
In other words, if you can’t tell the
human from the ape, as the old-timers
would say, then you probably shouldn’t
be a biologist. Here’s a hint, the hu-
man is probably the one walking and
talking, and the ape probably the one
sleeping naked in trees and flinging its
poo. The domain where it is difficult to
tell them apart is science fiction.
Now let me make it clear, nobody
likes apes more than I do. This is not
about whether I am better than them; it
is about whether I am one of them, or
whether I am different from them. It’s
not about planes of existence, but about
adaptive divergences. Genetics shows
the similarity of human and ape ge-
nomes particularly well, and one could
say that we actually became apes with
the popular genetic reductionism that
accompanied the Human Genome Pro-
ject a couple of decades ago. What
changed was not the discovery that we
are apes, but the normative value
placed on genetic data, which show that
genetically, we are apes.
Which all goes to show that the
statement that “we are apes” is a pow-
erful narrative about human ancestry
and its relationship to human nature,
but it does not articulate a fact of na-
ture, but rather a fact of nature/culture,
privileging certain kinds of scientific
data and meanings over others. Impor-
tantly, privileging continuity and down-
playing emergence, in spite of the fact
that both are there, dialectically con-
structing our identity.
The phylogenetic fallacy
Now there’s another way in which
one could argue that we are apes, phy-
logenetically. We fall naturally in the
Page 5
midst of a group of species constituted by
the word “apes”. So in that sense, we
might be apes.
What is an ape, anyway? Well, the
term encompasses the orangutan of
southeast Asia. And it encompasses the
chimpanzee of Africa. But we humans
are more closely related to that chimpan-
zee, than the chimpanzee is to that
orangutan. So if the word “ape” is to
mean something phylogenetic, then we
fall within the group comprised by that
term, and we are apes. Fortunately, it
doesn’t mean something phylogenetic.
Ape is a contrast term to human. The
Superfamily Hominoidea is composed of
apes and humans, not just apes. You can
look this up.
But as long as I brought up the ques-
tion “What is an ape” in the context of a
descriptive category that is not a phy-
logenetic category, let me ask a parallel
question: What is a monkey? The term
encompasses the New World, or Platyr-
rhine monkeys, like the highly endan-
gered muriqui of Brazil. And it encom-
passes critters of the Old World, like
baboons, and the rhesus macaque. But
we humans are more closely related to
that rhesus macaque than the rhesus ma-
caque is to the New World monkey. So if
the word “monkey” is to mean something
phylogenetic, then we fall within the
group comprised by that term, and we are
monkeys. Fortunately, it doesn’t mean
something phylogenetic.
And while we’re at it, what is a
prosimian? That term encompasses the
lemurs of Madagascar, as well as the
tarsier of the Philippines. But we hu-
mans are more closely related to that
tarsier than the tarsier is to that lemur.
So if the word “prosimian” is to have a
phylogenetic meaning, then we fall
within the group comprised by that term
and we are prosimians. But fortunately it
doesn’t mean something phylogenetic.
And what is a fish? The term en-
compasses the tuna as well as the coela-
canth. But we humans are more closely
related to that coelacanth than the coela-
canth is to the tuna. So if the word fish is
to have a phylogenetic meaning, then we
fall within the group comprised by that,
and we are fish.
And that is a different statement than
saying that our ancestors were fish – or
prosimians, or monkeys, or apes – which
of course they were. There is certainly
Page 6 © 2016 by the American Anthropological Association. All Rights Reserved.
something to be learned from our fish
ancestry, such as why we gestate in an
aqueous saline environment. But to say
that we are fish is inane. Our ancestors
evolved into land-dwelling, air-
breathing tetrapods. What we are is ex-
fish.
Likewise, our more recent ances-
tors diverged from the apes and
evolved into walking, talking people.
What are we? We are not apes, as our
ancestors were. We are ex-apes. That’s
evolution. Calling us fish or apes is a
trivial statement about the way those
colloquial groups are composed and
constructed—and I apologize for this
word up front—paraphyletically—not a
profound statement about our natures.
You see, if you want to argue on
the basis of phylogenetic relations that
we are fish, and prosimians, and mon-
keys, and apes simultaneously, which is
what the phylogenetic argument that
we are apes implies, then you have
simply defeated the purpose of classify-
ing.
Why we are not apes
So to recap, there are five reasons
to call us apes, all of them wrong.
First, to call us apes helps us bash the
creationists. Except that emphasizing
continuity at the expense of discontinu-
ity misrepresents the biology, has a
terrible track record, and lets the crea-
tionists drive the scientific agenda.
What could possibly go wrong with
that? There are simply better ways to
bash creationism.
Second, it shows how unexcep-
tional we are. But to whom? Apes
don’t care how unexceptional we are.
Everybody thinking about and reading
about this issue is human. That fact
alone establishes the exceptionalism.
Moreover, the same people maintaining
our unexceptionalism will often turn
around and bemoan the environmental
degradation of the ape habitat that hu-
mans are wreaking. And that’s a fact.
Humans are driving apes to extinction
by habitat destruction, not vice versa.
But to acknowledge it involves ac-
knowledging the exceptionalism that
they are denying. The apes aren’t driv-
ing each other to extinction. We are
driving them.
Third, it reduces identity to ances-
try, which is fine if you want to defend
feudalism or the caste system. But that
puts you in a biopolitical position that
is difficult to defend in the modern age.
Those of us who engage on a regular
basis with scientific racism know how
significant the claim that you are re-
ducible to your ancestry is. Indeed it is
a position that the scientist does not
want to have to defend morally, be-
cause we now recognize it as odious.
And fourth, the cladistic argument
that reduces evolution to phylogeny, or
descent with modification to just de-
scent, indicated that we fall within the
group comprised by the apes, but the
argument that it makes us apes is ex-
actly the same argument that makes us
fish. It is a trivial statement about the
non-phylogenetic composition of those
groups.
Finally, in the last few weeks on
social media, I have seen biologists,
and even some biological anthropolo-
gists, avow that they are apes with such
vehemence that eventually I’ve had to
break down and concede that, “All
right, you’ve convinced me that you’re
an ape.” Although I can’t guarantee
that the linguistic message I sent and
the one they received were necessarily
the same ones. After all, the word ape
is not a value neutral term, is it? In the
second person—you are an ape—it
connotes a rhetorical state of subhu-
manity. In the first person—I am an
ape—it connotes a rhetorical state of
unexceptionalism. There is, actually,
quite a bit of anthropology here, and
only a little bit of it is biological.
The statement that we are apes,
then, may be a fact, but it is certainly
disputable, it is not manifestly true, and
it isn’t a necessary implication of evo-
lution. It is a historically produced
fact, the result of choosing to privilege
genetic knowledge and relationships
over other kinds of scientific knowl-
edge and relationships. What you see
genetically is how similar we are ge-
netically to the apes, who live more or
less like our ancestors did 5 million
years ago. It’s not really about what
we are, but about what scientific data
we use to tell the story of what we are,
and especially about the meaning we
impart to the relationship between de-
scent and identity.
General Anthropology
The human universe is a moral
universe
Perhaps you’ve noticed that I have-
n’t mentioned a single bone, tool, or
DNA sequence. I’m interested in the
bigger frame.
And one of the most important ele-
ments in the authoritative story of our
nature and origins is the relative balance
we ascribe to descent and modification in
the construction of that narrative. We are
neither apes nor angels, but people, with
apes for ancestors and perhaps aspira-
tions to be angels. And this is not the
domain of zoology, and a lifetime of zoo-
logical training cannot prepare you for
the responsibilities incurred in curating,
in a responsible and scholarly fashion,
the authoritative scientific story of who
we are and where we come from.
And it is kind of ironic that this is a
lesson for working on human evolution,
because it is also a reasonable lesson to
be taken from the text of Genesis. So let
me finish with a little sermon: Adam and
Eve are in a Garden world without Good
and Evil; that is to say, in a babylike or
animal-like state. Eating the fruit of the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil is
what makes them different from other
life, in the creation and occupation of a
moral universe in addition to the physical
universe, beginning with the recognition
that it’s wrong to be naked in public.
Once they enter that moral universe there
is no turning back; it is the world of
adulthood, of right and wrong, of good
and evil – the things that you have to
know in order for us to allow you to re-
main with us. Amorality is no longer an
option, perhaps sometimes excusable in
children, animals, or strangers or mythic
ancestors. Immorality, like killing your
brother and lying about it, the very next
story, is not an option either. What’s left
is the moral life, the human life, and the
lesson is far broader and deeper than the
concerns of contemporary creationists,
namely: You have to learn right from
wrong and do what’s right, or else you
are not welcome here. And that is as
applicable to modern age scientists as it
is to Bronze Age shepherds.
References
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Diamond, J.
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Gee, H.
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——————————————————————————
(Mines Continued from page 1)
from England, Wales, and Ireland. By
the end of the nineteenth and the turn
of the twentieth century, most of the
newcomers were from Eastern and
Southern Europe (Blatz 2003:27). The
anthracite coal industry thrived from
the 1850s through the early twentieth
century. While the coal industry peaked
during WWI, employing 180,000 people,
it soon began a gradual decline, coincid-
ing with the increasing use of other fuels,
like oil and natural gas. Although there
was a slight uptick in anthracite extrac-
tion during WWII, the coal industry in
Northeastern Pennsylvania collapsed in
the 1950s (Dublin and Licht 2005). To-
day, only a few hundred people work in
this industry.
With the downfall of the coal indus-
try, there was a significant outmigration
of the area’s younger generations who
found employment in New York, Phila-
delphia, and New Jersey. Although
NEPA attracted new businesses, the un-
employment rate soared in the 1950s to
about 18 percent (Dublin 1998:10).
Many women found employment in the
area’s garment factories. Some started
working while their husbands were still
working in the mines, while others began
when their spouses lost their jobs. In
many cases women became the main
economic backbone of the households
(Dublin 1998:29).
Hazleton’s population, which peaked
at 38,000 in 1940, declined to around
23,000 residents in 2000. Only five per-
cent of Hazleton’s population identified
as Hispanic in 2000, but five years later,
approximately 30 percent of the city’s
population of 31,000 identified as His-
panic. Anti-immigration fervor hit the
community in the early 2000s and the
city council quickly developed anti-
immigration legislation. Many Latinos
objected to the xenophobic sentiment of
the established community and moved
elsewhere. By 2010, the city’s population
had declined to about 25,000. Despite
this ethnic flight, the percentage of His-
panics has continued to increase steadily
and is now over 40 percent of the popula-
tion (Bahadur 2006; Englund 2007:887).
In much the same way that the commu-
nity’s European ancestors fled poverty
and oppression, many of the new Latino
immigrants are escaping similar circum-
stances. They are coming to Hazleton
and other communities in the region for a
new beginning, only to be faced with
overwhelming xenophobia.
The Implications of Heritage Building
in Northern Appalachia
While it is important to understand how
Page 7