Identity and Ancestry

Since that first generation of Darwinians, many spokespeople for evolution have continued to find greater scientific value in the continuities of human and ape than in the discontinuities. That value is the same as it ever was, rhetorical and instrumental. Another way of imposing continuity is to re-draw the playing field, so that instead of linking us to the apes, we declare ourselves to be apes. Maybe gussied up a bit, maybe naked (Morris 1967), but we are apes of some sort. That is our identity; that is what we are – apes.

Take that, creationists! And this, says geneticist Jerry Coyne, is an “indis-putable fact” (Coyne 2009, 192). Yet, it is a fact that is hard to reconcile to George Gaylord Simpson’s pronouncement, “It is not a fact that man is an ape, extra tricks or no” (Simpson 1949, 283). Simpson was a meticulous writer, so when he tells you this nearly monosyllabically, it means he thinks it’s important.

Simpson is actually echoing a sentiment of the biologist Julian Huxley, who ridiculed the idea that we are apes as a representation of the ‘nothing-but’ school: “[T]hose, for instance, who on realizing that man is descended from a primitive ancestor, say that he is only a developed monkey” (Hux-ley and Hux(Hux-ley 1947, 20). Julian Hux(Hux-ley had a celebrated grandfather, but he knew that your identity, what you are, is more than what your ancestors were. My ancestors were peasants, but if you call me a peasant on that basis, I would take some umbrage. My more remote ancestors were slaves. Some people’s more recent ancestors were slaves, and if you call us slaves on that

basis, we could probably at least both agree that it would be a bio-political statement, hardly a value-neutral fact of biology. Then we would move on, after you apologized.

And thus we enter the realm of bio-politics very quickly. We are not re-ducible to our ancestries, are we? Huxley and Simpson certainly did not 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. This is not to say that the geneticist is a royalist or oppressor of the masses, but it is to point out that the simple scientific state-ment that we are apes is loaded with value and articulates a non-empirical assumption that who we are is reducible to what our ancestors were, which we reject in other contexts. Why on earth should we accept it in this one?

Perhaps we can answer that question by raising another question, namely

“Cui bono?” or who gains by reducing identity (what we are) to ancestry (what we were), apart, of course, from the aristocrats?

It turns out that genetics has always been much better at detecting ances-try than at detecting novelty. Simpson and Huxley knew that. Indeed, we have known for many decades that, for example, the bloods of human and chimpanzee are more similar to one another than are the bloods of horse and donkey, which nevertheless are capable of hybridization (Hussey 1926).

Our blood, it seemed, was effectively ape blood, but nobody called us apes on that basis because they regarded the intimacy of the bloods to be inter-esting but not transcendent.

We evolved from apes, to be sure, but we became different from them (Simpson 1963). 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 is descent without modification. Human evolu-tion incorporates a great deal of modificaevolu-tion – physically, ecologically, be-haviorally – but not very much genetically. That is why we can use genetic change as a sort of clock, precisely because it does record, in any readily retrievable way, the physical, ecological, and behavioral changes that make us not-apes (Sarich and Wilson 1967; King and Wilson 1975; Li and Graur 1990).

Biochemist Emile Zuckerkandl showed decades ago that the structure of human hemoglobin and gorilla hemoglobin differed from one another only minimally, but he drew a myopic conclusion: “[F]rom the point of view of hemoglobin,” he argued, “gorilla is just an abnormal human, or man an ab-normal gorilla, and the two species form actually one continuous popula-tion” (Zuckerkandl 1963, 247). But cannot any reasonably observant person still distinguish a human from a gorilla quite readily? The paleontologist

George Gaylord Simpson, who effectively embodied normative evolution-ary biology in the mid-twentieth century (Gould 1981), responded by chal-lenging the point of view of hemoglobin, which fails to distinguish humans from gorillas: “From any point of view other than that properly specified, that is of course nonsense. What the comparison really seems to indicate is that … hemoglobin is a bad choice and has nothing to tell us about affinities, or indeed tells us a lie” (Simpson 1964, 1535). In other words, if you cannot tell the human from the ape, then you probably should not be a biologist.

Here is a hint: The human is probably the one walking and talking, and the ape is probably the one sleeping naked in trees and flinging its poo (Cuppy 1931; Marks 2002).

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 whether I am one of them, or whether I am different from them. Genetics shows the similarity of human and ape particularly well. What changed was not a discovery that we are apes but the normative value placed on genetic data in the late twentieth century, which show that genetically we are apes. Ecologically, anatomically, and be-haviorally, we are still quite different from apes. Indeed, one could say we actually became apes with the popular genetic reductionism that accompa-nied the Human Genome Project a couple of decades ago.

So, who benefits by reducing identity to ancestry, besides the aristocrats?

The geneticists. We privilege their data and narrative without even thinking about it, as if that were science, as if it were a fact of nature, when it is actu-ally a fact of nature / culture (Goodman, Heath, and Lindee 2003).

There is another way one could argue that we are apes: phylogenetically.

Chimps being closer to us than they are to orangutans, a relationship that is most readily demonstrable genetically (e. g., Hooton 1946, 45), we fall natu-rally in the midst of a group of living species constituted by the word ‘apes.’

So, in that sense, we may be apes. But in parallel with that argument, we can observe that coelacanths are closer to us than they are to tuna, but we don’t draw the conclusion on that basis that we are fish (Figure 2). Of course, there are interesting things to be learned by acknowledging our fish ancestry, such as why we gestate in an aqueous saline environment (Shubin 2009). But even though we fall phylogenetically within a group of species constituted by the word ‘fish,’ we do not say that we are fish. That would be ridiculous². We say,

2 Some radical biologists, indeed, do say this in the apparently sincere but misguided belief that declaring us to be fish will somehow make creationists more sympathetic to science. They do this by redefining ‘fish’ to include the sarcopterygians as well as their tetrapod descendants. At the very least, this affords more evidence that “we are fish” is not a fact of nature, but a contested and historically constructed fact.

rather, that our sarcopterygian ancestors diverged from the fish and evolved into land-dwelling, air-breathing tetrapods. We are not fish; we are ex-fish.

Likewise, our more recent ancestors 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 is evolution. Calling us apes, like calling us fish, is not a profound fact about our natures. It is just a superficial consequence of the way those colloquial groups are composed and constructed (Yoon 2009).

Indeed, by the strictly phylogenetic criterion, we would be not only apes and fish, but monkeys and prosimians as well. To make us monkeys in Figure 2, simply replace the orangutan on the left with ‘capuchin monkey’ and the chimpanzee on the right with ‘vervet monkey.’ To make us prosimians, insert

‘ring-tailed lemur’ on the left and ‘Philippine tarsier’ on the right. None of these is a phylogenetic category, and transforming them into phylogenetic categories defeats the purpose of classification, since it would make us into apes, monkeys, prosimians, and fish simultaneously³.

The statement that we are apes, then, because our ancestors were apes, may be a fact, but it is certainly disputable; it is not manifestly true, and it is not a necessary implication of evolution. It is a historically produced fact, the result of choosing to privilege genetic knowledge and phylogenetic re-lationships over other kinds of scientific knowledge and rere-lationships. Ge-netically, we are apes. Nearly any other way, we are ex-apes. It is not really about what we are, but about what scientific data we use to tell the story of what we are. “We are apes” articulates not a fact of nature, but a fact of nature / culture.

3 Other categories, such as Mammalia and Primates, do indeed designate phylogenetic units, at least for their extant representatives, and consequently one can legitimately say that we are primates and mammals.

Figure 2. The phylogenetic placement of humans within ‘apes’ directly parallels the placement of humans within ‘fish,’ but in both cases our ancestors diverged from an-cestral forms.

“Apes” “Fish”

Orangutan Human Chimpanzee Tuna Human Coelacanth