Today, the BBC’s science section reported a new finding published in Nature on the origins of social behavior among primates. The report includes a few excerpts from an interview with the lead scientist on the study, Dr. Suzanne Shultz of Oxford University.
The geniuses at the BBC conclude the article as follows:
Human societies likely descended from similar large, loosely aggregated creatures, Dr Shultz explained, but the key difference, she pointed out, is that our closest cousins’ societies do not vary within a species, while humans’ do.
“In human societies we have polygyny… we have monogamy, and in some places we have females leaving the group they were born in, and in others males leave,” she said.
Why this difference exist [sic] is still unclear.
“Why this difference exists is still unclear.” No, sorry, but that is simply not the case. Differences in the family structures of various human societies are not a mystery. They can be explained quite clearly, and, in fact, one of the best theories on the topic is now over 100 years old. The differences have to do with the division of labor within those societies. It’s quite simple, really.
Furthermore, if Shultz cannot explain the difference between an ape and a human, then how can she explain the fact that she has a job at a university where she studies apes? Did this contradiction never occur to her?
We, the editors of Selecting Stones, advise the employees of the BBC as well as Dr. Shultz herself to read up a little bit more on the topics that they discuss, lest they make absurd claims. We suggest, first of all, the works of prominent nineteenth-century American anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan, and then, much more importantly, an excellent extended review of Morgan’s work by a man named Frederick Engels. Go look up a little book called The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, and you might learn something. A short little article called “The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” might prove quite enlightening, as well.
Much of the factual information that Engels was working with is now out of date, but the important point is not what Engels argues, but how he argues it. Evolutionary biologists, to this day, still make the basic error of assuming humankind (and, indeed, other animals, too) to have only a passive relationship to nature. In fact, however, there is an active side, too, as everything from the stone axe to the space shuttle immediately attest. Evolutionary biologists would do well to look at the whole picture, rather than only half of it. And, outdated as he may be in places, old Frederick Engels might nevertheless be of some help here.
But, then again, there are many other reasons, as well, why a professor at Oxford might choose to overlook the writings of Frederick Engels, and why she might choose to remain ignorant of the fact that the origin of science lay in the primitive selection of stones.
Mark Walker (@neutronneedle)
November 16, 2011
Apes are not the antecedents of Man.
I have not doubt you are aware of this, but seriously that headline is ridiculous. Even if you have a way of interpreting the headline in a manner that does not parallel The Scopes Trial mindset, the wording is still unlikely to help clear up the ever spawning misunderstandings about Darwinian evolution.
selectingstones
November 16, 2011
Yes, yes, the “ape” is actually mankind’s sibling, not his parent, and this is a common misconception, indeed. “Ape” here, of course, is actually meant to say “the common ancestor of both Man and Ape”, but that was too wordy, as Engels himself knew. Indeed, basic semantics is one of the reasons why Darwin is so frequently misunderstood and misapplied, but it truly is his followers–rather than Darwin himself–to blame for all the monstrous theories which followed from the misconception of Darwinism as biological determinism. On the other hand, one of Darwin’s flaws is his lack of a notion of teleology, which gave Spencer et al. free reign to introduce their own teleology and, thereby, create hideous racial theories. Our main point in this little note was to point out the primary flaw in contemporary evolutionary biology and, even more so, primate anthropology: a mere change in genome cannot be posited as a purely causal relationship, especially with regard to mankind, to the actions of a species. The key thing about mankind which sets us apart from animals is that we transform ourselves and our environment without having our genome transformed. Since everyone knows that the significant changes in mankind (i.e., walking on the moon) came subsequent to the time when our species halted the Darwinian cycle by creating a new thing called society, then we cannot conclude that our biology pushed us to travel to space, and yet, at least popular science still looks at matters in this contradictory way. The species Homo sapiens is only the basis for mankind: what mankind is is our ability to transform ourselves through work.