The human family tree, it turns out, is complicated
nautil.us
nautil.us
Ian Tattersal has been a leader of the splitters for many years now, and the basic arguments of his books are looking fairly good right now:
https://www.amazon.com/Extinct-Humans-Ian-Tattersall/dp/0813...
Mind you, so many discoveries have been made recently that each of these books tends to go obsolete quickly in so far as they try to tell a specific story based on the fossils known in a particular year. However, the overall argument for the splitters, that the "homo" genus has many branches, just like any other successful genus, is a strong argument that is reinforced by these recent finds. I link to one of Ian Tattersal's books where he clearly made the argument for the splitters, and did a good job of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_...
As such the lumpers have real support based on current generic information. Anatomically distinct branches aren’t enough to declare something a different species.
Discovery however favors splitters as prestige follows from discovery of new branches of humanity.
Seriously though, the more I learn about speciation, the more I realize how imperfect our system is at categorizing life. Obviously lots of cases are pretty clear-cut, but there's so many examples where you almost have to treat every population as its own distinct entity.
My definition of species honestly changes depending on the context. For conservation efforts, if you don't look at the separation and genetic distinctness between populations which would happily interbreed if it weren't for geographical restraints, you're liable to lose both genetic diversity and location-specific genetic adaptations that may be present in one population. For human evolution, I don't know what it really matters whether we call it one species or twelve. It's a very artificial system that will never be 100% agreed upon by experts. Being hominid fossils, they'll be studied intently down to the tiniest sliver of bone no matter where they're placed taxonomically. We all like nice, neat categories, but life is much messier than our naming system wants it to be and I'm not sure I really care where we draw these lines. If I'm missing a good reason for it, please educate me.
In respect to species the least ambitious definition is groups of related organisms that exchange genetic information. Ring species for example can exchange beneficial mutations from the edges of each branch through intermediaries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species
In that context hominids may have had many distinct populations based on survival skills for their local environment and geographic barriers which is enough for adaption to local conditions to take place, but exchanges between groups would still genetically link distant populations across thousands of generations. A<>B<>C<> … Y<>Z
For example it’s extremely unlikely that nobody crossed the Bering Strait even just from 1,000 BC to 1BC. Let alone 10,000 BC to 1492.
> The true diversity and complexity of human evolution over the last few hundred millennia surpasses even the most unhinged imaginings we might have hazarded just a short generation ago. But greater clarity has left us with a messier and less elegant narrative. Our species’ status, it turns out, is “complicated.”
What was the elegant but overly simple narrative? What's an example of an "unhinged imagining" that we'd now accept as boringly true? How long is a short generation?
This is outlandishly untrue! Think about the politics (not "Politics") within your own family. Now extend that out a bit and you have a "tribe" ... and of course that is going to have "political" and "Political" ramifications. And on it goes ...
As soon as you get more than one person in a group politics of some sort will emerge. And "natural" groupings have historically been biological.
No one said anything about race, but I guess you could consider it implicit historically. However, I could easily see a tribe of people with multiple races, but biologically connected by their genetic relationships. In fact, without looking it up, I would think around the Mediterranean that was common at some time in the past.
>The idea that "natural" groupings are based on race is absurd.
One, no one specified race. But two, before the rise of empires (and mega-empires) I would defy you to name a single example contrary to that. Before easy transportation, every one local in a society was related one way or another and likely separated from other groups enough for race to count. I don't know how, historically, you can get a more "natural" grouping than that!
>Even in the historical context, there are a peletora of examples where personal interest trumps biological alliances and diverse alliances are formed.
I would be curious if you can name even one historical example that did not start off with some sort of biological context. All large empires that you can name started off as tribes and eventually grew to incorporate others. Small ones would likely be even more biologically concentrated. Granting that some society can grow and start to incorporate other groupings as you suggest.
Sure but you weren't saying that. You were saying that these groupings were self-reinforcing.
The natural grouping you're describing is based on location, not biology. The biology is a consequence of isolation. And in fact, as the article points out, the biology isn't so clear-cut because even at the subspecies level we have genetic evidence for interbreeding (most famously between "modern" humans and Neanderthals).
This is what's called a motte-and-bailey. You're arguing tribalism is natural and based on biology, but when challenged you retreat to the undisputed claim that tribes existed and that tribes are biologically somewhat homogeneous, rather than defending your initial claim that tribes arise from biology.
You'd have to demonstrate that tribes were historically mostly xenophobic, which just isn't the case. If that were true, we'd expect the exact opposite of what the article describes: clear, distinct branches with minimal interbreeding.
> All large empires that you can name started off as tribes and eventually grew to incorporate others.
Again, that's undisputed. For something to grow it needs to start off small by definition. One could argue about the definition of "tribe" (e.g. pre-empire Rome is generally referred to as a "city state" but the initial settlers were likely part of the Latin "tribe") but that's overly pedantic.
You're trying to argue that politics is based on biological kinship and you're simply not supporting that claim in anything you say. You could have argued about the psychological differences in how we worry about people close to us versus people we don't know in far away places, but even that would only demonstrate tribalism at a social level, not that this tribalism is inherently tied to biological kinship.
> You're trying to argue that politics is based on biological kinship and you're simply not supporting that claim in anything you say.
No. What I am arguing is that in ANY group of people, politics emerges naturally. And as a second argument, "close kinship" is the most natural way that people have grouped historically and up to this very day. And throughout history there is no closer kinship than biological relationships to one another.
That is it. I am not arguing that race is important for politics to emerge or that people can't group in any way they feel like (Brown fans, eg), or that biology begets politics or anything like that.
Except you're not even right about biological relationships being all that special. You think you don't have to provide evidence for this because it is "common knowledge" but it's based on ideas like the nuclear family, which are fairly recent inventions. Families used to span multiple generations and include unrelated household members (think maids, farm hands, etc) and prior to that tribes encompassed what we might as well refer to as villages, where biological relation is more incidental than the basis for social bonds.
Even as a naturalistic argument appealing to other animals it fails: in many species packs will allow stragglers to join the group and treat them no different than blood relatives.
There's some truth to parent-child bonds being special but you're attempting to extrapolate from that to entire social groups and to argue for some kind of historical progression based on it which is nothing more than a just-so narrative.
If close kinship means immediate and extended family, then I would agree.
Connections between biology and politics:
- Municipal water systems have to provide water instead of inert gasses or iron ingots.
- Limited human lifespans are directly related to the successor problem of monarchies or dictatorships and are a major reason why democracies are more stable.
- Whether or not the public believes what propagandists are saying is determined by what goes on in their brains, which are inscrutable, but undeniably biological.
- Minor phenotypical differences are used by troublemakers to start fights, in behaviors ranging from playground mocking, to racism and beyond.
Given how long some monarchies have been around and how quickly some democracies fall to extremism that would actually be interesting to compare.
Don't discount survivorship bias. The Japanese monarchy lasted (as a political entity) for 2600 years, but in that time consider how many thousands of other autocracies rose and fell throughout human civilization. It's a bit like pointing at some old, well-preserved houses and saying "they sure made houses to last back in the day", when in fact all the houses from back-in-the-day which were not built to last have long since rotted away, and whose presence cannot attest as a counterexample.
Representative democracies are fairly recent. Even popular examples like Rome had very strict ideas about who was eligible to vote and even in the US women and Black people hadn't been allowed to vote for the longest time of its existence.
I'm not sure what examples of "falling to extremism" you're thinking of, but to pre-empt the two most obvious ones: Weimar Germany was an extremely young republic and its fall to extremism was initiated by conservatives trying to prevent the rise of communists to avoid losing their wealth after the republic had already weakened their political power; and the Soviet Union pretty much directly followed a violent revolution to overthrow a monarchy and jumped right into military dictatorship while having to fight an enemy hellbent on depopulating most of its territory. Most of the others I can think of are successor states to Soviet republics that either were autocratic already or rapidly turned into kleptocracies after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and only adopted the dressings of democracy prior to falling apart.
Also most stable monarchies aren't dictatorial. Chinese dynasties were famously bureaucratic and European monarchies had fairly intricate aristocracies that frequently got involved when it came to less clear-cut lines of succession. It's probably best to think of these as oligarchies, which as a category is probably also a good fit for many so-called democracies.
The 2000 story said race is just a social construct, because we were all from the same origin.
Here the science now seems to say there are real, scientific ancestry differences. If not visual, they are easily determined. So, again, we return to a place where we can't say we all have the same origin.
It will take some effort to avoid returning to the older paradigm, and I'm not sure we've got the tools to do it.
Not only are modern humans all the same species, but race lacks any biological coherence unless you draw the lines exclusively between Black African populations and lump everybody else in with one of them -- which probably isn't what most "race realists" had in mind.
Of course, accepting such a thing requires valuing science over theology.
2. What matters is whether or not we can reproduce with chimpanzees. We can’t, so we’re not chimpanzees.
In terms of reproduction, my understanding is that modern populations suggest that our recent ancestors could mate with Neanderthals. And did.
Of course reproducing is a messy criterion beyond that. Children and old women and just some regular folk can’t reproduce but are people nevertheless. And in vitro and surrogacy are another can of worms.
Confidence based on what math?
Species isn't based on raw percentage of matching DNA. Nor is that how p values work.
> In the extreme it is 23andme emphasis on “18% Welsh but I thought I was English” as scientific. Every report ought come back as 98.8% Chimpanzee if it was science.
That calculation is comparing only the genes that differ between the references, and weighting them across 100% to give an easy to understand result.
If you added a chimp into the reference pool, they'd show up as less than 1% every time.
If you added a chimp into the reference pool, and removed all the human samples except welsh, then the test would say "on a scale from chimp to welsh, you are >99% welsh". But that's a matter of lacking the data to be more precise, not because the method is fatally flawed.
The place where flaws might come in is when the source data is mis-labeled, not because the math is wrong.
> Sure there’s a little science. But mostly it is theology. A belief that humans are especially special masquerading as science.
No it's not. It would do the same thing with chimps. Put a bunch of them in the 23andme database and then a sample chimp will come back as 25% this area chimp, 40% this area chimp, 34% this area chimp, 1% match to humans.
Maybe "welsh" is too fine of a distinction to determine. But you can easily tell the difference between that general area vs. native american vs. subsaharan african ancestry.
Even if they were born in Belize, South Africa, or Trivandrum.
But uh my main point was to explain how the issues have nothing to do with distinguishing chimp from human, and there is no reasonable metric that would say they're the same species, and I wish you wouldn't ignore my main point to talk instead about the definition of welsh.
Do you really think this or are you trolling statisticians?
In the extreme it is 23andme emphasis on “18% Welsh but I thought I was English” as scientific. Every report ought come back as 98.8% Chimpanzee if it was science.
Sure there’s a little science. But mostly it is theology. A belief that humans are especially special masquerading as science.
1. Having far less facial and bodily hair than all primates to the extent that we are forced to utilize clothing to survive all the seasons in most of the biomes we occupy.
2. Substantially reduced general strength - a chimpanzee boasts the equavilent of 3 of us.
3. The lack of opposible thumbs on our feet which prevent us from using all four limbs with the required dexterity to climb or exercise fine motor control.
4. Being able to constantly stand and travel upright and boasting an incredibly efficient running gait.
5. The most powerful throw in the animal kingdom.
6. The ability to sweat which combined with the previous two differences would make humans an incredibly dangerous pack animal even without the next difference.
7. Substantially higher intelligence to the point where there is a qualitative as well as quantitative difference in general intellect between even the dumbest of us and a chimpanzee, even if they might be able to outperform the dumbest of us in certain domains.
8. Bit of a silly but interesting factoid - boasting the largest penis of the primates by a large margin.
Even having a few of these would probably be grounds for speciation, never mind all 8.
Marriage customs are a common means of enforcing discriminatory societal practices (miscegenation, same sex, other religion, etc.). The logical structure of the objection is consistent with all of those…they are plug and play for chimpanzees.