Anthropological Taxonomies

Paying attention to the production of scientific knowledge is not limited to human diversity. We may ask a simple taxonomic question like: How many species of primates are there? In the classic texts from thirty years ago or so, you would get a number around 170 (Richard 1985; Smuts et al. 1987). In the authoritative works of the modern age, there are over 400 (Campbell et al.

2011; Strier 2016). That is a lot of speciating. As these newer books explain, this is about conservation. Dividing up the primates reinforces legislation intended to protect them in the wild. And there is no necessary reason why these units of conservation should map onto whatever units we were tabu-lating thirty years ago. For me, this says that primate species are not units of nature, but units of nature / culture, the results of complex negotiations between biological information and political, symbolic, meaningful infor-mation, but also no less real for being co-constituted by the natural and the cultural. Indeed, as partly units of political action, one could argue that mod-ern primate species are more real than the more abstract primate species of a generation or two ago.

But if living primate species are not properly understood as units of na-ture, how can we possibly understand extinct primate species as units of nature? A recent bestseller by a historian starts off with the casual statement

that 100,000 years ago there were at least six species of humans (Harari 2014). Now, that might be a true statement. The problem is that we have no way of knowing. His presumptive taxa at the 100,000-year horizon are Homo sapiens, H. neanderthalensis, H. erectus, H. soloensis, H. floresiensis, and H. denisova. Suffice it to say that the introductory text I teach from gives no more than four lineages, and if you asked a roomful of biological anthropologists how many human species were alive 100,000 years ago, few would answer “six,” and of those, even fewer would specify these particular possible six.

Clearly the paleoanthropological species is not an unproblematic fact of nature. Nationalism, funding, ego, and prejudices of various kinds all go into the construction of these facts. While Homo soloensis denotes a small group of fossils with particular anatomies, as a unit of nature – as a species in our ancestry – it has roughly the same ontological status as Mother Corn Spirit.

Homo soloensis is a marker for a part of the narrative of human origins, and it labels part of a network of human populations connected over space and time; it is a zoological metaphor, certainly not a ‘real’ species in any famil-iar sense of the word. Nor is this anything new. Back in his monograph on mammalian classification, Simpson found the taxonomy of the human line so frustrating that he wondered, tongue in cheek, whether it would not be better for the “zoological taxonomist” to forget the whole thing, and set the human family apart and “exclude its nomenclature and classification from

… studies” (Simpson 1945, 1988). Simpson, however, lacked the theoretical apparatus and interest in describing the nature of the problem. The assump-tion that we are dealing with facts of nature here is false; we are dealing with facts of nature / culture, the units of our origin myth are of a different sort than the units of paleo-horses or salamanders.

We commonly talk about lumping and splitting in paleoanthropological systematics, dividing our colleagues into those who attribute anatomical variation to factors such as sex, age, and microevolution (i. e., lumping the fossil record into a single lineage), and those who interpret anatomical vari-ation largely taxonomically (i. e., splitting the fossil record into many distinct lineages). But this makes it sound more capricious than it really is, for lump-ing and splittlump-ing are instrumental, not ignorant, acts. Most importantly, they create different narratives about human evolution (Figure 4). The lumper story is one of the continuity and survival of the lineage; the splitter story is one of diversity and extinction of different lineages. These are rather dif-ferent scientific stories to be told from the same empirical database. Once again, this turns on the hermeneutics of science, not the empirics of science.

Moreover, the lumper story is principally one of microevolution, and the

splitter story is principally one of macroevolution. But if our use of the term

‘species’ here really is under-determined by the nature of the fossil record itself, and we cannot empirically distinguish between these two narratives, then we have to appreciate that this is where macro- and microevolution in-tergrade into one another, and human diversity and human ancestry become parts of the same story.

Of course, human diversity has its own set of narratives to identify and confront, especially about the power and transcendence of heredity. When James Watson infamously told Time Magazine in 1989 that “our fate is in our genes” as a way to drum up public funding for the nascent Human Genome Project (Jaroff 1989), he was articulating an old bio-political narrative about the transcendence of heredity for the purposes of self-interest. Nearly a cen-tury earlier, in the first English textbook of Mendelian genetics, the epony-mous Reginald C. Punnett, now known to biology undergraduates for the

‘Punnett Square,’ left his reader with this parting thought:

Permanent progress is a question of breeding rather than of pedagogics; as our knowl-edge of heredity clears, and the mists of superstition are dispelled, there grows upon us with ever-increasing and relentless force the conviction that the creature is not made but born (Punnett 1905, 60).

Figure 4. Lumping and splitting the fossils in our lineage produces different narratives of our ancestry.

now

time

then The lumper narrative The splitter narrative

Once again, this is not an empirical fact, but a bio-political fact, familiar to us not through well controlled genetic experiments, but through stories like the cryptic Hebrew ancestry of Moses and the upper-class pluck of Oliver Twist who both ultimately come to prevail over the course of their lives as an Egyptian and slum rat, respectively. Genetic ideology and genetic science, as we noted earlier, go hand in hand.

The very act of determining our elementary units of biological analysis creates divergent narratives, and since different species do have distinct hard-wired attributes, ideological narratives of human microevolution and macroevolution can converge. To one late-surviving scientific racist, a bo-tanical geneticist named Reginald Ruggles Gates, the interbreeding crite-rion, which sufficiently impressed most contemporary scholars as to place all living humans in a single species, did not impress him (Gates 1948).

Plants, which were his frame of reference, are quite profligate outside the recognized boundaries of species, so he had no difficulty in seeing humans as constituting multiple species. Human micro- and macroevolution are parts of the same bio-political story.