Volume 23, No. 1 Bulletin of the General Anthropology.docx

Volume 23, No. 1 Bulletin of the General Anthropology
Division Spring, 2016
Tales of the ex-Apes
By Jonathan Marks
UNC-Charlotte
The GAD Distinguished Lecture, given
November 20, 2015, is based on a book
of the same title, recently published by
the University of California Press.
This will be an exploration of meaning
in human evolution without paleoanthro-
pology. I’m not talking about the foot of
Australopithecus sediba or the supraor-
bital torus of Homo erectus; I want to
talk about who we are and where we
came from. I am talking about origin
myths; I am talking about kinship. I am
not talking about human evolution; I’m
talking about how we talk about human
evolution.
Human evolution as bio-politics
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
his book which purported to demonstrate
that the reason that Africans were eco-
nomically and politically subjugated by
Europeans is that they hadn’t been mem-
bers of our species for very long, be-
cause whites had evolved into Homo
sapiens 200,000 years before blacks did.
And I’m happy to say that most of his
contemporaries smacked him down, and
in particular he got into a heated ex-
change with the great fruit fly geneticist
Theodosius Dobzhansky, who, I might
add, was a member of the American An-
(See Marks, page 2)
When the Mines Closed:
Heritage Building in North-
eastern Pennsylvania
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)
Distinguished Lecture American Heritage
Winners of GAD Awards
for 2015

Diana Forsythe Prize
Gabriella Coleman
for her book Hacker, Hoaxer,
Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of
Anonymous, Verso Press 2014.
Sharon R. Kaufman
Honorable Mention
for her book Ordinary Medicine:
Extraordinary Treatments, Longer Lives,
and Where to Draw the Line, Duke
University Press 2015.
GAD Prize for Exemplary Cross-
Field Scholarship
Noah Tamarkin
for “Genetic Diaspora: Producing
Knowledge of Genes and Jews in
Rural South Africa,” which appeared
in Cultural Anthropology, vol. 29,
issue 3, pp. 552-574.
In This Issue

Marks on Tales of the Ex-Apes....Page 1
Shackel and Westmont on American
Heritage in Appalachia….……..Page 1
Recent Finds in
Paleoanthropology......................Page 10
Ethnographic Reviews................Page 14
Film and Video.........................Page 15
Page 2 © 2016 by the American Anthropological
Association. All Rights Reserved. General
Anthropology
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
(Marks continued from page 1)
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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 © 2016 by the American

Anthropological Association. All Rights Reserved.
Page 3
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
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
Anthropology
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-
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

Page 5
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
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-
a l ly one con t inuous popu la -
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
Anthropology
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

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
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.
Page 7
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
Coyne, J.
2009 Why Evolution Is True. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Diamond, J.
1992 The Third Chimpanzee. New
York: HarperCollins.
Gee, H.
2014 The Accidental Species: Mis-
understandings of Human Evolution.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Haeckel, E.
1868 Natürliche Schöpfungs-
geschichte. Berlin: Reimer.
Huxley, T.
1863 Man's Place in Nature. Lon-
don: Williams and Norgate.
Huxley, T., and J. S. Huxley
1947 Touchstone for Ethics, New
York: Harper and Brothers.
Jones, S.
1992 Eugenics. In: The Cambridge
encyclopedia of human evolution, edited
by S. Jones, R. Martin, and D. Pilbeam.

New York: Cambridge University Press.
Landau, M.
1991 Narratives of Human Evolu-
tion. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
Osborn, H. F.
1926 The evolution of human races.
Natural History, 26:3-13.
Simpson, G. G.
1949 The Meaning of Evolution,
New Haven: Yale University Press.
Simpson, G. G.
1964 Organisms and Molecules in
Evolution, Science, 146: 1535-1538.
Zuckerkandl, E.
1963 Perspectives in Molecular
Anthropology, in: Classification and
Human Evolution, edited by Washburn,
S. L. Chicago: Aldine, pp. 243-272.
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
Coon, C. S.
1968 Comment on “Bogus Science”
Journal of Heredity, 59:275.
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
(Mines Continued from page 1)
——————————————————————————
Varieties of Knowing in Science and Religion
with Pat Bennett and John A. Teske, “The Road Is Made by
Walking: An Introduction”;
J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, “Can We Still Talk about ‘Truth’ and
‘Progress’ in
Interdisciplinary Thinking Today?”; Jonathan Marks, “What If
the Human Mind
Evolved for Nonrational Thought? An Anthropological
Perspective”; Phillip Cary,
“Right-Wing Postmodernism and the Rationality of Traditions”;

Margaret Boone
Rappaport and Christopher Corbally, “Human Phenotypic
Morality and the Biological
Basis for Knowing Good”; Christian Early, “Philosophical
Anthropology, Ethics, and Love:
Toward a New Religion and Science Dialogue”; Warren S.
Brown, “Knowing Ourselves as
Embodied, Embedded, and Relationally Extended”; and John A.
Teske, “Knowing
Ourselves by Telling Stories to Ourselves.”
WHAT IF THE HUMAN MIND EVOLVED FOR
NONRATIONAL THOUGHT?
AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
by Jonathan Marks
Abstract. Our knowledge of the evolution of human thought is
limited not only by the nature of the evidence, but also by the
val-
ues we bring to the authoritative scientific study of our
ancestors.
The tendency to see human thought as linear progress in
rational
(i.e., problem-solving) capacities has been popular since the
Enlight-
enment, and in the wake of Darwinism has been extended to
other
species as well. Human communication (language) can be used
to
transmit useful information, but is rooted in symbolic processes
that
are nonrational—that is, they involve choosing among
functionally
equivalent alternatives, any of which is as good an option as
any other.

The evolution of human thought cannot be realistically isolated
from
the evolution of human society or human communication,
neither of
which is rooted in obvious rationality.
Keywords: anthropology; cultural evolution; evolution; human
nature; language; science
Human thought is rational thought, as scholars since Aristotle
have noted.
Yet obviously people do stupid things. Perhaps that is a result
of the Fall
in Eden, as a strain of early Christian thought had it; Eve’s
disobedi-
ence was not only the origin of sin and immorality, but of
foolishness
and error as well. And thus one might hold the natural human
state to
Jonathan Marks is Professor in the Department of
Anthropology, University of North
Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA; e-mail:
[email protected]
[Zygon, vol. 52, no. 3 (September 2017)]
www.zygonjournal.org
C© 2017 by the Joint Publication Board of Zygon ISSN 0591-
2385 790
Jonathan Marks 791
be reason, and unreason to be its corrupt, post-Edenic taint
(Harrison

2007).
Reasoning about our own direct past, as we do in biological
anthropol-
ogy, is scientifically fraught, since our knowledge of it is so
limited. We
have bones and context, but we have lost phylogeny,
physiology, society,
language, and even taxonomy—relying on the judgments of
experts to
tell us what species were present in our ancestry, and what their
relation-
ships were. This science differs from the science of life
generally in that
our ancestors are always sacred—that is about as solid a
generalization as
one can make in anthropology—and consequently to imagine a
society of
scientists able to regard their own ancestors dispassionately,
logically, and
value-neutrally would be to imagine them as fundamentally
nonhuman.
We think about our ancestors as we think about other things—
symbolically and meaningfully—only more so, since they are
our ancestors,
and it is through them that we have families and relatives
generally. Human
scientists are of course capable of confronting their intellectual
biases (espe-
cially after they are pointed out). In the present essay, I explore
a widespread
assumption in thinking about human evolution—that our brains
evolved
to produce ever-increasing amounts of reason, our basic thought
processes

being rational, the most extreme such thought in the animal
kingdom. I
would like to consider the coevolution of human thought, human
society,
and communication. Human thought, in this view, evolved to be
rational,
irrational, and nonrational simultaneously.
If we understand rationality to refer to formal syllogistic logical
rea-
soning, then we define much of our species out of it, and
introduce
apparent discontinuities into our species (Lévy-Bruhl 1922). If
we un-
derstand rationality more broadly to refer to intellectual
coherence, then
we are more ethnographically inclusive, but introduce apparent
discon-
tinuities at the boundary of our species (Lévi-Strauss 1962).
And if we
understand rationality yet more broadly as making proper
decisions about
what to do and how to behave, in order to successfully live and
breed,
then we blur the discontinuities at the boundaries of our species
(de Waal
1982).
“Rational” in this latter sense means adaptive—that is, directed
toward
facilitating one’s survival or reproduction or general well-
being. If we take
“culture” to refer to our “extra-somatic means of adaptation”
(White 1959;
Binford 1962), then it follows that culture is fundamentally
rational and its

apparent irrationalities require explanation. This becomes a
scientifically
secularized version of the medieval “fall of man” narrative.
And yet culture is not reducible to its material elements, for it
con-
sists in large measure of the construction of imaginary worlds.
These
imaginary worlds—of rules, taboos, obligations, stories,
remembrances,
and possibilities—are only partly rational, in that they
constitute a local
intellectual framework within which any social human can
survive and
792 Zygon
breed. But these worlds are mostly nonrational, in the sense that
they
are arbitrary and fictitious, and not directly related to the
Darwinian
imperatives.
Consequently, the assumption that human culture is adaptive is
certainly
true, but only partly so. Culture involves, for example, taboos.
Why pro-
hibit edible foods, like human corpses? Indeed, why prohibit a
loving sexual
partner, like a first cousin? Nevertheless, all human societies
place limits on
what can be eaten, and who is an appropriate sexual partner. A
first cousin
is culturally as much a preferred spouse (like Charles Darwin

and Emma
Wedgwood) as a taboo one, regardless of the elevated
inbreeding coeffi-
cient. Chimpanzees eat dead baby chimpanzees, but humans are
generally
repelled by such a thought, regardless of the nutritional value of
the meat.
An ape mother eats the placenta after giving birth; but (with the
exception
of some modern-day Americans) humans universally treat the
placenta
ritualistically, not naturalistically, for it is more like a corpse
than like a
steak. On the face of it, this metaphorical thought makes little
Darwinian
sense, if our raison d’être is to eat and breed. If it is edible, and
the apes
eat it, then it seems irrational for us not to. The human strategy,
however,
transcends the caloric value of dead babies and the family-
directed libido.
Rather, the human strategy is to create imaginary, portable
worlds—in
this case, rules or prohibitions or taboos—as buffers between
the organism
and nature, red-in-tooth-and-claw. This aids in maintaining a fit
between
the organism and its surroundings (i.e., adaptation), yet also
enmeshes the
human in “webs of significance he himself has spun” (Geertz
1973, 4),
which are often arbitrary and silly.
Humans are thus not “in” culture, but are co-constructed by
culture;
any attempt to abstract a specific human mind from its social

context,
and to study its properties independently of the culture that
formed it, is
necessarily limited by the simplicity of that assumption. Human
thinking,
human relationships, and human language are connected in
complex ways
with one another, and possess distinct properties.
CULTURE IS NOT RATIONAL BEHAVIOR
Anthropology was born in the nineteenth century as a contrast
between the
irrational ways of the savage and the rational ways of the Euro-
American. It
matured toward the end of the century with the recognition that
there was
plenty of irrationality in our own behavior (Tylor 1871): rituals’
holdovers,
ideas of politeness, dress codes, myths, food taboos, or merely
calling your
mother’s sister and your father’s brother’s wife the same thing,
even though
one is a blood relative and the other is not.
And thus we transformed a literary trope as least as old as
Montesquieu’s
The Persian Letters (1721)—how arbitrary and bizarre our own
customs
must seem to an outsider—into a science. But it is still an
important and
Jonathan Marks 793

often underappreciated fact that so much of what we—and
everybody
else—do in the minutiae of our daily lives is largely arbitrary,
and due to
the vicissitudes of history, and not to the deterministic,
optimizing hand
of nature.
This recognition has set anthropology apart from other sciences
that have
interests in human behavior. Ethnography shows that human
behavior is
universally inefficient and nonrational. Nor is it clear that any
society is
fundamentally more rational than another. After all, why eat a
cow or
chicken, but not a horse or a grasshopper or a cat, when they are
all edible?
The answer lies not in the caloric world, but in the symbolic
world (Beattie
1964). Thus, when the geneticist Charles Davenport (1911)
promoted a
scientific program for breeding a better form of citizen by
having people
“fall in love intelligently,” the anthropologist Franz Boas
(1911) was obliged
to point out the ridiculous self-contradiction implied in that
goal. Decades
later, when first-wave sociobiologists tried to apply kin
selection to human
behavior (Wilson 1975), the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins
(1976) was
obliged to point out that no known human society understands
or interacts
with their relatives in the mathematized way that
sociobiologists expected

them to. More recently, anthropologist David Graeber (2011)
has shown
that economic interactions where both parties try to “get the
most for the
least” do not characterize human societies generally, and
consequently that
economic models which presume such rational goals as basic
human nature
are flawed.
To the extent that we are rational beings, then, it is a
constrained
rationality. People simply cannot be counted on to make the
adaptively
right decision, as, for example, a Vulcan or a computer might.
When
Margaret Mead (1928) gave Samoans an IQ test that asked them
to choose
the best path from point A to point B, she noted that they
generally
chose not the shortest path (which was the right answer), but the
prettiest.
To value precision and efficiency as desiderata in human
behavior is an
ethnocentric assumption, regardless of its rational basis.
There is always logic and reason, to be sure, but it is based on
local
premises about how the world works. Early anthropologists
observed, for
example, that natives could explain quite sensibly why having
sex and
making babies were unrelated (Malinowski 1929), or why
witchcraft caused
buildings to collapse (Evans-Pritchard 1937). Moreover, these
unscientific

beliefs might function in adaptive ways that participants do not
even realize;
there might be a subconscious rationality to the functions of
diverse human
beliefs and rituals (Durkheim 1912; Rappaport 1966).
In addition to witchcraft, early anthropologists were at pains to
explain
the seemingly ridiculously irrational economic behavior of
native peoples.
British anthropologists analyzed “cargo cults” in Melanesia and
later Poly-
nesia (Worsley 1957), while American anthropologists grappled
with the
“potlatch” of the northwest coast (Boas 1888). In both cases,
economically
794 Zygon
counterproductive behaviors resulted from complex political,
religious, and
social circumstance.
Indeed, in the wake of World War I, it was hard to see human
cultural
behavior as very rational at all. Thus, Alfred Louis Kroeber
writes:
As long as [people] are concerned with their bodily wants, those
which
they share with the lower animals, they appear sensible and
adaptable. In
proportion however as the alleged products of their intellects
are involved,

when one might expect foresight and reason and cool
calculation to be
influential, societies seem swayed by a conservatism and
stubbornness the
strength of which looms greater as we examine history more
deeply.
. . . . Of course, most individual men and women are neither
idiotic nor
insane. The only conclusion is that as soon and as long as
people live in
relations and act in groups, something wholly irrational is
imposed on them,
something that is inherent in the very nature of society and
civilization.
There appears to be little or nothing that the individual can do
in regard to
this force except to refrain from adding to its irrationality the
delusion that
it is rational. (Kroeber 1923, 276–77)
Group life and group think here impose a superorganic
irrationality
upon a fundamentally rational organic human thought. Humans,
in this
view, are fundamentally motivated to maximize their chances
for survival
and reproduction, and yet as group members, they may have that
basic
rationality stifled. Certainly one can contest the degree to which
a person’s
properties and interests may conflict with group properties and
interests,
and the extent to which individual choices and actions may
affect social
and political history, but the crucial point is that group-level
properties and

histories of human societies are neither reducible to, nor
predictable from,
those of the individuals that compose them. However naturally
rational a
human being may be, a society composed of such beings is not
necessarily
constrained by that rationality. Thus, the rationality of the
human mind
and the rationality of the human group are phenomenologically
discon-
nected from one another. Group membership not only allows us
to do
things we cannot do as individuals, it allows us to do things we
would not
do as individuals.
The brain is thus not simply an organ of rationality, but an
organ of
many kinds of thought. After all, whether it is in dreaming of a
better
life, praying to invisible powers, crying over fictitious events,
or just basic
insecurities and phobias, humans have far more irrational
thoughts than
other kinds of animals do, as much a product of our large brain
as the
rational kind. And since human history shows quite well that
people can
be very highly motivated by those irrational thoughts, it
becomes difficult
to argue that they would have been less of an impetus in our
evolution
than the rational thoughts are.
Human evolution, though, is a story that tends to be told as an
as-

cent of rational thought. The brains enlarge, the tools improve—
both
Jonathan Marks 795
strikingly evident in the archaeological record—and together
they produce
better solutions to bigger problems. It seems hard to deny the
adaptive
consequences of natural selection at work, making us cleverer
and better
philosophers than our ancestors, possibly wiser, and even
approximating
the admirable properties that we may attribute to God (van
Huyssteen
2006). Nevertheless, we also know that nonadaptive
evolutionary change
is a statistical consequence of demographic factors, and that
early human
populations composed of small, mobile bands of foragers
possessed exactly
the kinds of demographic factors that promote genetic drift, the
agent of
nonadaptive change to the gene pool (Harris 2010; Schroeder et
al. 2014).
The existence in local gene pools of genetic variants that are
neutral or
that cause disease (Cavalli-Sforza 1969) is ample testimony to
the work of
random factors in our evolutionary ancestries.
WALKING:FOOT::THINKING:BRAIN
Where the evolution of cognition has traditionally stimulated

philoso-
phers and psychologists, the evolution of bipedalism generally
has not.
Bipedalism is less interesting, and consequently thinking about
its evolu-
tion is simpler and less encumbered by the assumptions and
mythologies
we bring to the origins of human thought. Since the 1970s, with
the dis-
covery of “Lucy” (Australopithecus afarensis), bipedalism has
constituted
the paradigmatic case for how we think about human evolution
(Johanson
and Edey 1981).
Around 6 million years ago (mya), a distant ancestor who had
the ability
to walk on two legs a bit (clumsily and for short distances, as
the living apes
do) committed to doing it more frequently. Its terrestrial
descendants, by
about 4 mya, could do nothing but. At 3.2 mya, Lucy had long
arms, curved
fingers, and strong shoulders for arboreality, but when on the
ground she
walked upright (with a pelvis and knee unlike an ape’s) and did
not use her
hands in locomoting, as apes do.
We can tell you a lot about how this transformation happened,
because
the relevant body parts are bones, which fossilize. The pelvis
changed shape
to support the weight of the upper body; in response to the new
distribution
of weight and biomechanics of striding, our ancestors developed

the lumbar
curve in the spine, the enlargement and alignment of the big toe,
the
inward-pointing knee, the large heel, and even moved the head
atop (rather
than in front of ) the spine (Tuttle 2014). But we do not have a
sense of
why it happened. Or more precisely, we have a lot of
conjectures, any or
all of which might be true. We became bipedal
(1) To survive deforestation.
(2) To see over tall grass.
(3) To intimidate predators.
796 Zygon
(4) To carry things.
(5) To run.
(6) As a sexual display.
(7) To trek over long distances.
It had to be good for something; after all, it slowed us down. If
a
chimpanzee is chasing you, it will catch you. Not only that, but
as Wilton
Krogman (1951) noted, bipedalism has also affected us
adversely in other
ways. Various sorts of afflictions, from hemorrhoids to varicose
veins to
hernias, all seem to be consequences ultimately of taking a
brachiating ape’s
body and standing it upright on terra firma.

We can talk sensibly about the process, but not about the cause.
So,
we generally take a page from Isaac Newton (“Hypotheses non
fingo”) and
we tend to ignore cause. We focus on the questions that we can
possibly
answer, not on the ones that we cannot.
When we compare human and ape, two body parts seem to be
the most
different—conserved across the apes, but specialized in humans:
the foot
and the brain. The human foot is composed of more or less the
same
parts in more or less the same relationships as the chimpanzee
foot, yet
the chimpanzee foot is adapted for grasping (like the feet of
other apes)
and the human foot for weight-bearing. A human foot can be
trained to
grasp to a certain extent, but that is not its primary function.
With very
similar forms, the human foot and chimpanzee foot have quite
distinct
functions.
Nearly anything you can say about the evolution of the foot you
can
also say about the brain. Thomas Huxley successfully
demonstrated over a
century ago that there is no part of the human brain that is
absent from
the ape’s brain (Cosans 2009). They are homologous and
similar; there
are differences of size, shape, and orientation of parts (Preuss
2016). The

most glaring difference is that our cerebral cortex is close to
three times
as big as the ape’s. This is analogous to the enlargement and
reorienta-
tion of the big toe, the most obvious difference between the
human and
ape feet.
Once again, we can describe the transformation, at least to a
degree.
We have fossil evidence on the size of the brain, and some
impressions of
the cortical surface, preserved on the inside of fossil skulls, but
much of
what we are interested in is soft tissue and that only rarely
fossilizes. (The
australopithecine known as the Taung child, found in South
Africa in the
1920s, actually includes a fossil impression of the external
features of its
brain).
Yet we cannot say why the brain grew, only how it grew. We
just tend
to assume that it was for thinking better thoughts, thus
permitting more
vexing problems to be solved. But of course our divergent brain
does
Jonathan Marks 797
something else as well, which often lurks in the background
because it does
not fossilize at all, yet crucially disconnects us from the apes: It

gives us a
zoologically unprecedented way of communicating. Or at least,
if such a
precedent exists, it is certainly not revealing itself to us readily.
Language, like bipedalism, was apparently such a good thing
that it
evolved despite creating certain problems, requiring other
solutions. The
most glaring complication is the coevolution of a cognitive
apparatus for
language with a sound-production anatomy for speech (de
Saussure 1916).
While the causal chains are difficult to establish securely, the
anatomi-
cal features are correlated, and the connection among them is at
least
plausible.
(1) One cannot speak intelligibly through large, interlocking
canine
teeth. Reducing them may have involved lessened or modified
forms
of classical sexual selection, but would also leave an ancestor
rela-
tively defenseless. This dental feature—small, nonsexually
dimorphic
canine teeth—seems to have evolved relatively early in our
lineage.
(2) To make these sounds, our larynx is positioned lower than
an ape’s,
which makes our food and air passages crisscross. It is far
easier for a
human to choke than for an ape.

(3) The structure of the throat and tongue is subtly altered,
reflecting
the use of the tongue for speech and control of breath. (Chimps
vocalize while inhaling or exhaling; humans vocalize only while
ex-
haling.) More importantly, chimps dissipate heat by panting.
Our
ancestors, using their tongue for speech, thus compromising
their
thermoregulation, evolved a different method of heat
dissipation:
evaporative cooling—we have a much higher density of sweat
glands
than chimps. Yet evaporative cooling only works efficiently if
the skin
is exposed to air, which prompted our body hair to degenerate,
and to
become thin and wispy. (We have the same density of hair
follicles as
an ape.)
(4) Language is learned over the course of one’s life. At what
age is it
mastered? A colt can locomote properly a half-hour after being
born.
A human takes a couple of years before it can locomote
reliably. It
takes even longer to learn to communicate reliably. This reflects
a
tremendous investment in immaturity (Konner 2010); it takes
nearly
twice as long for a human to grow wisdom teeth as for a chimp.
This commitment to adapting by learning over an extended
period
of immaturity is the behavioral hallmark of our species, and
what is

most important to learn is our unique form of communication. It
is certainly reasonable to suppose that this is in large measure
why
our neonatal heads are so big, and thus why parturition is so
difficult
compared to an ape.
798 Zygon
SYMBOLIC THOUGHT AND SPEECH
Language requires a big brain because it is very difficult.
Chimpanzees
are about as good at it as they are at walking on their hind
limbs; that
is to say, they can be trained to do it a little. But they are not
built for
either walking or talking, as we are (Corbey 2005). It is also
axiomatic that
human language and human thought are intimately connected
(Bloomfield
1914). They are both in a broad sense symbolic, by which I
mean that they
arbitrarily associate things that have no necessary or obvious
connection to
one another.
A fundamental example is pointing, which a human child is
doing by
six months, but a chimpanzee never does. There is no
connection between
your fingertip and the object, except the one that you make, and
that
creatures with similarly wired brains make. It is a nonexistent

connection,
not present in the real world, the physical world. The
connection between
fingertip and object is entirely imaginary and metaphorical.
(Technically,
pointing may be considered indexical, rather than fully
symbolic, since
the pointer is usually making the imaginary connection to the
thing itself,
rather than to an abstraction of the thing. The crucial element,
however,
is the nature of the connection between fingertip and object:
nonphysical
yet specific, imaginary yet real.)
We rarely stop to think just how weird language really is, being
likewise
rooted in the arbitrary, invisible, and the imaginary. Classically,
there are
four nested symbolic processes at work in language, of which
apes can
barely scratch the surface.
First, the many sounds made by the human mouth are assigned
meaning,
and the meanings are local. The “zh” in Zsa-Zsa, the “ch” in
Chanukah,
and the “rr” in perro (Spanish for “dog”) are all meaningless
and foreign to
a native English speaker. French nasal vowels and southern
African clicks
help to demonstrate that only a small range of human sounds are
actually
used by any language. These meaningful sound elements are
often called
phonemes.

Second, combinations of sounds are assigned meaning. There is
no
necessary connection between a book and the sounds of “book.”
One
could just as easily refer to the object as libro or sefer or biblos.
The arbitrary
sounds are thus assigned arbitrary meanings; for the sake of
simplicity, let us
call them words. But the fact that you could call a book literally
anything,
and that there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of things a book
indeed is
called in different languages, bespeaks an incredibly inefficient,
redundant
system. As the authors of the Tower of Babel story in Genesis
11 realized,
if everyone had the same lexicon, they could get a lot more
done. (As far
as I am aware, we have no better scientific answer to the
question, “Why
are there different languages, rather than just one really good
hard-wired
language?” See below.)
Jonathan Marks 799
Third, diverse rules constrain the order of words. “John hit the
ball”
means something different from “the ball hit John.” This is
familiar as
grammar or syntax, and again consists of locally specific rules.
The idea
that the human mind is “hard-wired” for grammatical structure

(Berwick
and Chomsky 2016) is tangential to the fact that any
grammatical form is
ultimately an arbitrary option, for there are simply many
equally effective
ways of being grammatical.
And fourth, mastering the sounds, the vocabulary, and the
grammar still
does not permit you to speak the language like a native. The
tone of voice
can impart meaning, as can gestures. A sarcastic comment might
mean
the exact opposite of what it sounds like, so you have to know
how to
detect sarcasm from the tone and context (Basso 1979). This
dimension
of language is often known as pragmatics.
This is quite a lot of symbolic thought. It is not that apes are
not
smart enough to learn human language; it is rather that their
brains sim-
ply do not work that way (White 1962; Deacon 1997). Quite
analo-
gous, I think, to the fact that their feet do not support their body
weight
well.
Certainly language permitted our ancestors to communicate
valuable
and useful information: “Don’t eat that purple plant; it’s
poisonous!” But we
also rarely confront the fact that much of the information
communicated
by language is useless or false or evil or stupid or just irritating.

The same
referential faculty that permits us to instruct also permits us to
mislead.
The same faculty that permits us to praise also permits us to
insult. The
same faculty that allows Og to gain useful real knowledge about
that
purple plant, also allows you to imagine Hamlet imagining his
dead father
imploring, “If thou didst ever thy dear father love, revenge his
foul and
most unnatural murther.”
Suffice it to say, there is a lot more to language than useful
informa-
tion, to help you survive and procreate in a Darwinian universe
(Noble
and Davidson 1996). The dance of a bee or song of a gibbon is
far more
efficient, for its meaning is real and clear. In fact, to extract the
useful
information from the mass of useless jibber-jabber that
constitutes hu-
man communication probably requires a high degree of
intelligence—a
sophisticated spam filter, so to speak. Indeed, for every true
statement that
could now be communicated linguistically, there were many
more false
statements that could be communicated just as easily. A bigger
brain might
well have been simply necessary to tell them apart.
A chimpanzee, after all, has to navigate a complex social
hierarchy on a
daily basis, being appropriately dominant or affiliative, making

transient
alliances, and trying not to be beaten up by the alpha male. But
one thing
a chimpanzee does not have to do is to decide whom to believe
when one
friend says, “Trust me”; another says, “You can’t trust that one;
I’m your
real friend”; and a third says, “You can’t trust either of them;
I’m the only
800 Zygon
true friend you’ve got.” Language complicates social relations
(Barnard
2016; Marks 2016).
We do not know why language evolved, but it is certainly a
zoologically
unusual form of communication. Its properties are very different
from those
of scent-marking, bird calls, pheromones, and pant-hoots. It
enables us to
talk about the world as it is, continuous with the communication
systems
of other species—but it also enables us to talk about what is
not, what was,
what might be, and what ought to be. It thus opens up a world
of story, of
remembrance, of possibility, and of morality. But it also opens
up the world
of having conversations with ghosts, formal terms of address,
advertising,
evangelism, uninformed opinions, tasteless jokes, boring
anecdotes, and

offensive profanity. What strange things to preoccupy the mind
of an
intelligent ape, who principally needs to know, as all creatures
do, how to
eat and mate successfully!
To the extent, then, that the structure of language reflects the
structure
of human thought, we are led to see it as unconscious “choices”
from
a host of options, any of which is as good as any other (Sapir
1921).
The sounds we make, the meanings we assign to their
combinations, the
organization of those meaningful sounds, and the tones, facial
expres-
sions, and gestures that we associate with them, all seem to
work just as
well—for the purposes of expressing any thoughts that one
human might
intend to convey to another—as their alternatives. Where no
option is
superior to any other, it seems as though rationality itself is
irrelevant
or superfluous. If anything, the structure of human symbolic
thought
seems to be profoundly nonrational, while nevertheless being
capable of
producing ideas, statements, and deeds that may be used or
deployed
rationally.
Language thus supersedes two classically rational primate
behaviors:
threatening and grooming. Without large canine teeth, a typical
primate

threat coming from an early human would be very unimpressive,
and
ineffectual. Language, however, permits us to replace primate
“threat dis-
plays” with actual threats. The nature of this threat is less
immediate
than those communicated by the canine teeth, for the verbal
threat can
suggest retaliation, and the possibilities and future planning it
implies.
The social function of grooming in primates may be replaced by
praise
(Dunbar 1996), substituting auditory stimuli for tactile stimuli.
In both
cases, though, the message is very clear and effective, but only
to those who
know the meaning of the relevant sounds.
MAKING THE IMAGINARY REAL
This new world of story, remembrance, possibility, and morality
is an imag-
inary world. That is to say, it does not exist in any tangible or
perceptible
way, except indirectly, as artifacts. This is essentially what
anthropologists
Jonathan Marks 801
mean by “culture.” Like the imaginary connection between your
fingertip
and the object you are pointing at, humans inhabit a largely
imaginary
world—one of law, obligation, marriage, political inequality,

aesthetics,
values, and hope. Ethologists use the term “culture” in a
different way, to
facilitate cross-species comparisons, by removing the imaginary
and replac-
ing it with “learned behavior” (e.g., Whitehead and Rendell
2015). What
that does, however, is to conceal what is particularly human
about human
evolution. Human evolution increasingly involves the ability to
imagine
things into existence.
The most fundamental things that our ancestors imagined into
existence
were social bonds not found in the apes. The difficult human
parturition,
a result of the large-headed infant programmed to learn a
difficult but
valuable way to communicate, creates a problem that humans
solve socially.
Where an ape generally squats alone, has the baby, and moves
on (after
eating the placenta!), a human almost invariably has someone
else around.
We make birthing social (Trevathan and Rosenberg 2016).
Moreover, where
other adult apes are a significant threat to a newborn, a human
mother
needs others, and consequently has a far more tolerant attitude
toward
others handling her baby (and arguably, toward others in
general) than an
ape does (Hrdy 2009).
The framework of these new non-ape social relationships is the

study of
kinship—that is to say, an imaginary network of reciprocal
obligations that
allows you know immediately, without even having met
someone, what
you can expect from them and what they can expect from you
(Lowie 1920;
Malinowski 1930). In the last few hundred years, that kind of
information
has been supplanted by other kinds of cultural information—for
exam-
ple, nationality, or religion, or neighborhood, or alma mater—
that feed us
shorthand knowledge of how akin we feel to someone else
(Franklin and
McKinnon 2001; Carsten 2004). In remote times, our ancestors
gauged
how akin they felt toward someone by literally establishing
them as kin—as
so-and-so’s spouse, so-and-so’s descendant, so-and-so’s clan or
tribe, so-and-
so’s fifth cousin, so-and-so’s in-laws, bearing so-and-so’s
name. Importantly,
none of these is necessarily a natural status; all are at least
partly imag-
inary (Zerubavel 2012). It may help to unpack these imaginary
statuses
a bit.
(1) Spouse: Modern anthropologists do not restrict their use of
the term
“marriage” to heterosexual monogamy, but rather use it to
encompass
the many ways in which families are ritually created and
legitimized
in human societies (Coontz 2006). Marriage is not pair-bonding;

it is
an agreement, not an instinct. And that is important because it
takes
two parties to have an agreement, but only one to have an
instinct.
The parties here are often not simply individuals, but their
families.
The agreement involves mutual understandings, social networks
and
802 Zygon
statuses, economic obligations, and possible future generations;
there
is little of “nature” that is strictly comparable (i.e.,
homologous) to
the social bonds of nonhuman primates here.
(2) Descendant: There are many ways that people fool Mother
Nature
in the area of descent, for example, by adoption, assimilation,
and
name-changing. Remote ancestry is biologically negligible, like
ge-
netic homeopathy: 300 years ago, you had well over a thousand
lineal
ancestors; 1,200 years ago, you had a quadrillion ancestors (Hitt
2005)—so frankly, we might as well both be remote descendants
of
the same ancestral eagle.
(3) Clan or tribe: Tribal membership is notoriously flexible;
even though
it may mean the difference between life and death, a binary

assign-
ment invariably misrepresents the natural relations among
neighbor-
ing groups who trade and intermarry.
(4) Fifth cousin: A fifth cousin is a negligible biological
relationship.
To put it in perspective, two first cousins have a 12.5% chance
of both receiving the same allele from the same common
ancestor.
(Hence the recognition of cousin marriage as a risk factor for
many
genetic diseases). The corresponding probability for a fifth
cousin
is 0.05%, about 250 times smaller, and for all intents and
purposes,
zero. There is nothing significantly natural about a fifth cousin,
except
to a genealogist.
(5) In-laws: These are established by agreement, and are
socially united
through the biological bodies of offspring. Mother-in-law is a
mean-
ingful (and often dangerous) relationship cross-culturally. The
pre-
modern anthropologist James Frazer observed, “The awe and
dread
with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law
are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology” (Frazer
1900,
I, 288). Chimpanzees have neither mothers-in-law nor jokes
about
mothers-in-law.
(6) Namesake: Since apes do not give one another names, being

a name-
sake is meaningless to them—naming is a distinctively human
prac-
tice, and subject to local rules. Obviously other animals can tell
one
another apart—by smell, looks, voice, or behavior—but, as far
as we
know, associating a particular body or object with an arbitrary
com-
bination of sounds (as opposed to simply memorizing the
association
they have already been given, as other species can do) is a
uniquely
human act. But of course, names are not part of the real world;
they
are arbitrary fictions of the human collectivity. To survive as a
human,
you need to know what’s what and who’s who, and the way we
do it is
by the reciprocal processes of naming (i.e., individual
identification)
and grouping (classification).
Jonathan Marks 803
My point is that all of this makes no sense from the standpoint
of biology,
or nature, or rationality. It is a make-believe world, a fantasy, a
bunch of
rules that we are born into, and which end up structuring and
giving
meaning to our lives (Fortes 1983), often largely in defiance of
biology.
In the family we have the origins of obligations, rule-governed

behavior,
and the transcendence of death, since the relationships that
constitute your
family, your relatives, and your lineage were there before you
were born,
and will be there after you die. A bright chimpanzee has to deal
effectively
with other chimpanzees; a wise human must deal effectively
with fathers,
mothers-in-law, teachers, traders, sworn enemies, distant
relatives, dead
ancestors, unborn descendants, ghostly apparitions, and gods.
Yet these
emergent human social relations are not organic properties; the
important
developments in human evolution here are not going on within
human
brains, but between human brains (Teske 2013; Marks 2015).
CONCLUSION
As human beings, we traffic in image (Hedley 2016), story
(Gottschall
2012), metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), and in sets of
arbitrarily
assigned, yet mutually understood, sounds and motions. This is
a symbolic
universe, a step removed from natural relations, fictive and
imaginary, yet
as real and as distinctively human as the bipedal stride. This is
culture, as
elusive as the “species” or the “gene” to define or to identify
satisfactorily,
yet nevertheless also representing a fundamental concept for
scholars to
work with.

Culture is the way our ancestors survived and thrived, and
inheres in
the meanings we assign to sounds and acts. It has another
function, how-
ever, as boundary maintenance, in the formation of identity.
One does
not learn to speak, think, and act, but to speak, think, and act
properly,
differently from those people over there. That is to say, culture
makes dif-
ference. “We” are distinct from “them”—although rarely in
ways that we
would consider genetic or naturalistic. Yet being different for
the sake of
being different is hardly adaptive or utilitarian. It solves no
problem, and
reduces the cooperative possibilities. It emerges as a
consequence of arbi-
trary, yet meaningful, decisions—often unconscious—that our
ancestors
made. While we may focus on human thought as fundamentally
ratio-
nal thought—at least since the eighteenth century—there is no a
priori
reason to take that basic rationality for granted (Boas 1911). We
evolved
to be at least as nonrational as rational. We think and speak in
symbols,
but outside of The Da Vinci Code, symbols do not solve
problems. Sym-
bol systems can be deployed effectively for adaptive or
utilitarian ends,
but that quality does not inhere in symbolic thought itself.
When we
speak, it is not even necessarily to other people, much less

strategically
useful or interesting. Expecting people to behave like
calculating machines
804 Zygon
is unrealistic; and to model their evolution on that expectation
is very
unrealistic.
In sum, human thought is fundamentally symbolic and
metaphorical,
yet capable of producing acts that are rational, nonrational, and
irrational.
Likewise for the collective institutions it produces. Magical,
animistic,
or religious thought would thus not be primitive thought (contra
Tylor
1871 and Dawkins 2006), but simply human thought (Tambiah
1990).
What may require a special explanation is the origin,
establishment, and
privileging of rational, literal, accuracy-driven, utilitarian
thought. That
is to say, as such an unusual way to think, science probably
requires an
explanation more than religion does (Marks 2017).
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I thank Elise Berman and John Teske for comments.
NOTE

A version of this article was presented at the 62nd Annual
Summer Conference of the
Institute for Religion in an Age of Science (IRAS) entitled
“How Can We Know? Co-Creating
Knowledge in Perilous Times” held on Star Island, New
Hampshire, from June 25 to July 2,
2016.
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1
Who Am I?
Genes and the Problem of Historical Identity
KEITH WAILOO

13
��
A fundamental conundrum at the heart of the new genetics is the
question “Who
am I?” Despite what we may believe about ourselves—based on
our family lore, our
photographs, our documented past, or the recollections and
memorabilia of our
ancestors—genetics makes possible bold claims about self and
family that may be
at odds with these long-relied-upon artifacts of identity. When
seeking historical
guidance as to who we are, we can look backward in multiple
ways—the matrilin-
eal line, the patrilineal line (along which names are often, but
not always, trans-
ferred), some combination of family lines (the mother’s father’s
family line, for
example), or in ways totally outside the biological family.
Genetic science has
emerged from the laboratory and clinic in recent years to add
new complexity to
this already complex process, and to revise our self knowledge.

No longer promising only that “new breakthroughs can cure
diseases and save
lives,” genetic technologies have entered the courtroom, the
genealogy business,
and popular culture, posing profound challenges to older ways
of knowing ourselves.1
For Americans like me, who look back across an ocean for links
to ancestry and the
past and who pine for answers about heritage, the possibilities
inherent in the
new genetics have been exciting. With a cheek swab, a thousand
dollars or less,
and a sophisticated analysis, comparing my genes to those in the
company’s
database, which have been gathered from several populations
around the world,
the mystery of my roots can be unlocked.
Over the past decade or so, popular media—for example,
multiple covers
of Time magazine—have suggested that DNA’s insights are far
reaching. DNA,
some speculate, may define our religiosity and our compulsion
to “seek a higher

power”; “infidelity,” too, “may be in our genes”; an “I.Q. gene”
just might explain
our intellectual capacity; and a “gay gene” might explain our
sexual orientation.2
Whatever I believed about myself—my behaviors and
predilections or other
features of who I am—can be opened via genetic analysis. Or,
so we are
relentlessly told.
Wailoo, Keith, Nelson, Alondra, and Lee, Catherine, eds.
<i>Genetics and the Unsettled Past : The Collision of DNA,
Race, and
History</i>. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
2012. Accessed September 8, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from uci on 2022-09-08 23:19:17.
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Spencer Wells’s 2002 National Geographic documentary,
Journey of Man: A

Genetic Odyssey, begins with an audacious assertion—that the
blood coursing
through my veins is “the greatest history book ever written.”
Such narratives of
genetic insight and omniscience have taken a new turn—with
the rise of genetic
genealogy now also claiming to reopen one’s past and to
divulge new realities
about my family heritage or about the true lineage of a
community. The argument
at the heart of this captivating made-for-TV drama was simple
and shocking: that
none of us can truly know who we are without genetic analysis.
We might speculate
and dream, but the blood and genes would reveal the truth. The
power of Wells’s
program stems from skillfully borrowed science fiction tropes—
in this case, a merging
of the time machine/time travel theme of H. G. Wells (no
relation) with the mar-
velous 1966 into-the-body motif of the film Fantastic Voyage,
in which a miniaturized
team of scientists venture into a man’s body in order to destroy
a blood clot and

save his life. As Spencer Wells travels the world, collecting
blood and comparing
its patterns to the vast database of already-collected samples, he
stages a new fan-
tastic voyage—an odyssey, not only into the body, but back in
time, weaving a com-
pelling set of stories about how each of us is connected to one
another, how we all
have migrated out of Africa, and yet how we have come to be so
different today.
Before geneticists began to visit the past in this fashion, each of
us had well-
established and complex, often conflicted, ways of knowing
ourselves, of pointing
to a past, and of situating ourselves in the present. The
fierceness with which we
hold onto these older beliefs about ourselves explains, in part,
the skepticism that
confronts genetic revisionists. In what follows, my argument is
simple: Rather
than seeing a fundamental tension between genetic knowledge
and other non-
genetic ways of answering the question “Who am I?” there is
rather a curious way

in which genetic knowledge gains plausibility, not through any
inherent power of
science, but by reinforcing already-existing cultural and
political forms of imagin-
ing self and the past in films, popular media, public
commemoration, family lore,
nationalistic display, and so on. Yet, all efforts to connect to the
past are bound to
be speculative, fraught with supposition, and troubled by
problems of evidence.
Indeed, selective editing and interpretation is just as prevalent
in the fashioning
of historical identity using genetic analysis as it is in the use of
other evidence,
from family photos to genealogical archives. To put it another
way, whatever
the data we draw upon to answer the question who am I
(whether photographs,
family trees, birth certificates, or genetic analysis), we engage
in a willful paring
down of multiple lines of descent, choosing between mothers
and fathers in crafting
the story of one’s self. Genetic analysis, then, like other forms
of historical memory,

is as much about making meaning in the present as it is about
the past. Hence
it is as deeply mired in the politics of identity as are these other
forms.
LET ME OFFER A PERSONAL CASE in point on the
complexities surrounding
“who I am.” Since I was eight years old, my identity has been
that of a migrant—an
immigrant from South America, and (by sixteen) a naturalized
American citizen.
KEITH WAILOO14
Wailoo, Keith, Nelson, Alondra, and Lee, Catherine, eds.
<i>Genetics and the Unsettled Past : The Collision of DNA,
Race, and
History</i>. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
2012. Accessed September 8, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from uci on 2022-09-08 23:19:17.
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