Tales of the Ex-Apes by Marks Jonathan

Author:Marks, Jonathan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520285811
Publisher: University of California Press

TABLE 1 Contrasting classifications of living humans and great apes

Species here are not “natural” units, but “natural/cultural” units. They are not built up from facts of nature, but are made as well from the concerns and interests of the classifier, who works partly according to the cultural mind-set and issues of the age. One major scientific concern today is conservation. Most primate species are threatened in the wild. Legislation written to protect them has tended to focus on species. It may be in corporate interests, then, to define the range of a species very widely, so that they can cut down the forest over here, but there will still be some members of the species left over there. And to restore the spirit of the law, we declare that the primates over here are a different species from the one over there, and they are both endangered. That’s why textbooks twenty-five years ago said there were about 170 species of primates, but textbooks today say there are over 400. We haven’t discovered many new ones, and they aren’t speciating like mad. But they are multiplying. Most of the “speciation” is really the recognition that two groups of animals that had previously been considered subspecies, races, varieties, or local populations ought now to be considered as separate species.14 We universally accept that conservation is the most important issue facing both primates and primatologists. After all, without primates there can be no primatology. It is simply far more important to preserve them than to tally them up. So the primates win, the environment wins, and all we have had to do is subtly reconceptualize a species from a unit of evolution to a unit of conservation. This is known as “taxonomic inflation” and is not limited to primate taxonomy. To understand it, you have to realize that a species is not a unit of nature, but a unit of nature/culture or bio-culture. You can certainly argue about what you think a species is or ought to be, but eventually you run into the fact that it is quite simply more important to save the primates than it is to count them—except, perhaps, to some kind of heartless pedant or corporate shill.

The point is that fossil hominid species are products of nature/culture, and so are the living primate species. It’s not that there is no reality; it’s just that the nature of reality is different from what you may have thought it was.

These are not scientific facts whose true qualities could be discerned by a truly objective observer, someone who could manage to free themselves of the confounding effects of culture, and see the world clearly. Thomas Huxley suggested pretending that you’re from Saturn. Jared Diamond, many years later, suggested pretending that you’re from Mars. This is, of course, no science argument at all, but a science fiction argument, built to reinforce the unexamined arrogance of ethnocentric scientific judgments. Those scholars had no better idea about how extraterrestrials would think than you or I do.

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