The Lawrence Jacobsen Library
Books Received (Primate-Science/PrimateLit)

THE MONKEY IN THE MIRROR: ESSAYS ON THE SCIENCE OF
WHAT MAKES US HUMAN

Ian Tattersall


Harcourt, Inc. 2002



FROM THE DUST JACKET:


Widely regarded as one of the rare eminent scientists who is also a graceful writer,
Ian Tattersall takes up some of the most controversial questions in evolutionary
theory in this extraordinary set of essays. Tattersall stresses that living
creatures, including humans, are not finely engineered organisms with every component
perfectly adapted to their function. We are-thank goodness-jury-rigged, improvised
beings, owing as much to chance as to adaptation. And that's true of all living
creatures. Evolutionary theory isn't a finite set of conclusions based on
overwhelming evidence: it's our evolving effort to make sense out of a handful of
incomplete fossil remains.


The fundamental questions of our origins-and our evolutionary future-find new life
in this extraordinary book, full of delightful stories, scientific wisdom, and
fresh insight.


Ian Tattersall is a curator in the Division of Anthropology of the American Museum
of Natural History, and the author of many books and articles. His most recent book,
Becoming Human, won the distinguished W. W. Howells Prize of the American
Anthropological Association. An expert on both fossil humans and lemurs, he is
responsible for creating the Hall of Human Biology and Evolution at the American
Museum and has done fieldwork in places as varied as Madagascar, Yemen, and Vietnam.
He lives in New York City.



CONTENTS


Preface     ix


Chapter One
What's So Special about Science?      1


Chapter Two
Evolution: Why So Misunderstood?     29


Chapter Three
The Monkey in the Mirror     56


Chapter Four
Human Evolution and the Art of Climbing Trees     79


Chapter Five
The Enigmatic Neanderthals     107


Chapter Six
How Did We Achieve Humanity?     138


Chapter Seven
Written in Our Genes?     169


Chapter Eight
Where Now?      185




PREFACE


It's been an unusual experience for me to write a series of loosely interconnected essays
on human evolution and related subjects. When one writes a conventional book, one
inevitably follows a predetermined progression, with its own logic and sequence. Essays,
on the other hand, don't impose that kind of discipline; they take you where they will,
and do not necessarily lead on inexorably from one to the next. This has made the process
of writing this book both more interesting and more frustrating than I had expected; and
it has led to what for me was an unexpected discovery-although I realize in hindsight it
shouldn't have come as a surprise. For, just as all roads used to lead to Rome, it seems
that it is impossible to write about anything in human biology without some explicit
reference to the process of evolution itself. The great geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky
knew this decades ago, when he wrote that "nothing in biology makes sense except in
the light of evolution." But nowadays we tend to be mesmerized by the results of
four billion years of evolutionary history on Earth, and to take for granted the process
by which those results came about. I had thought that one essay on the evolutionary
process would be ample to convey the basics of evolution-at least as I see it-to my
readers; but instead I found myself coming back to the subject over and over again,
throughout the book. Whether the topic was how we came to stand upright; or placing human
beings in the context of our closest living relatives; or trying to explain how Homo
sapiens made that last fateful step to becoming human; or examining whether it is indeed
possible to blame our "hunting/gathering" genes for our often bizarre behaviors;
or even evaluating the prospects for the human future- I inevitably found myself drawn
back to the much-misunderstood process that lies behind all of these things. I hope, then,
that readers will forgive me for a small amount of repetition, and for what may look like
a mildly obsessive concern with process at the expense of product. The two really are
related, and neither can be understood in isolation from the other.


Because much of what I say in this book is at odds with the l950s-era beliefs about
evolution that are still widely accepted, I should also reveal right away exactly where it
is that I am coming from. I started my paleoanthropological studies in the early 1960s, a
time when it was taken for granted that human evolution had consisted of little more than
a long, singleminded trudge from primitiveness to perfection. This prevailing view was
supremely linear: Over the eons Australopithecus gave rise to Homo erectus gave rise to
Homo sapiens-all under the beneficent eye of natural selection. Quite apart from the fact
that this story is not only extremely boring but seriously misrepresents what typically
happens in the course of evolution, accepting this schema involved (even then) sweeping
under the rug a huge amount of evidence of diversity in the human fossil record. It was
fortunate, then, that at an early stage of my career I was sidetracked into the study of
Madagascar's lemurs, perhaps the loveliest and most charismatic of all human relatives
(they/we are all primates). There is only one kind of human being on Earth today, and from
our insular standpoint we seem to feel that it is somehow inevitable, or even appropriate,
that we are alone in the world. But among the lemurs it was impossible to ignore diversity.
Madagascar is home to fifty different kinds of lemur, and until quite recently to perhaps
as many as twenty more. Wherever you look in this unfortunately devastated island you are
confronted with evidence for diversity. Nobody studying its attractive denizens could
possibly wish to arrange them in a linear order; instead, the obvious question is: How did
they diversify so remarkably in their isolated outpost? What's more, the question is
essentially the same when you turn from the lemurs to other primate, even mammal, groups.
The living world is diverse, and wherever you look the predominant signal is one of variety
rather than of continuity. Human beings are distinctly unusual in their stately isolation.
Well, there's no denying that this does imply there is something special about Homo sapiens.
Perhaps we are playing the evolutionary game today by a new set of rules. But whether the
same thing applied to the predecessors of our species is another question, and I strongly
suggest that it did not. We will never properly understand our antecedents, and how we
ourselves became as we are, without placing hominids in a normal biological context. By
isolating ourselves on a pedestal, we forfeit the opportunity to do this.


The period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s was a difficult era-politically,
bureaucratically, and economically-in much of the developing world. An adequate account of
my many field misadventures during this time, especially in Madagascar and the Comoro
Islands, would take another book. The upshot of this period of upheaval, though, was that I
was eventually forced to abandon my study of lemurs in the only places where they existed
in the wild. I was greatly distressed by this, for I would have been happy to devote my
entire career to the contemplation of these wonderful animals. But in retrospect I
certainly cannot complain about the outcome, for I was obliged to switch my attention back
to hominid evolution. And I returned to this preoccupation with a changed perspective. The
lemurs had told me a tale of diversity; and looking at the human fossil record, which had
been steadily expanding over this period, taught me the same thing about hominids. There
are a lot of different hominids out there in the record, and they certainly don't all fall
into a single straight line. In fact, the hominid story is just like that of most other
groups of organisms: a tale of continual evolutionary experimentation, with constant
origination of new species, triage among those species by competition, and the extinction
of the unfortunate-very often without any reference at all to traditional notions of
adaptation and natural selection.


If there is one unifying theme in this also rather diverse work, then, it is this: What do
we know about diversity in our family, living and extinct, and-very importantly-how do we
know about it? From the beginning I have been encouraged to pursue this interest by my
editor at Harcourt, Jane Isay, without whose encouragement I would never have presumed to
undertake this book, and without whose insights it would not have been as good as it is. I
would like to thank Beth Harrison for her sensitive copyediting, and Jennifer Aziz for
keeping things on track. Among those many colleagues from whose wisdom and experience I
have particularly benefited over the years, Niles Eldredge, Jeff Schwartz, and Bob Sussman
occupy a special place. Ken Mowhray, as always, contributed valuable practical help, and
my wife, Jeanne Kelly, was endlessly supportive and forbearing. Finally, I would like to
take this opportunity to thank all those members of the reading public who read and enjoyed
my previous books, and who wrote to tell me of their reactions. Science is of little
broader use if it remains the exclusive province of scientists, and it is a great
encouragement to individuals like me to know that there are smart people out there who care
about the research we do.




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