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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

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)

General Anthropology

Editors

Christopher A. Furlow Conrad Phillip Kottak Kathryn A. Kozaitis

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General Anthropology ISSN 1537-1727 is published semiannually by the Gerneral Anthropology Division of the American Anthropological Association. © 2016 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. The goal of General Anthropology is to provide useful, timely, and readable information and ideas from the four fields of anthropology and applied anthropology. All requests for reprints and copyright permission should be sent to [email protected] or by mail: Wiley-Blackwell Permission Controller, Blackwell Publishing Ltd., PO Box 805 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2ZG, United Kingdom Correspondence should be sent to Conrad Phillip Kottak, [email protected]; Kathryn A. Kozaitis, [email protected], or Christopher A. Furlow, [email protected].

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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

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

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

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

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.

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

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