UBC: Le Gros Clark, Man-Apes or Ape Men?

Man-Apes or Ape-Men?: The Story of Discoveries in Africa by W.E. Le Gros Clark

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



This book is about taxonomy, which is like genre theory for living things. I love it.

I imprinted on Lucy: the Beginnings of Humankind at an early age, which is how I recognized Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark's name. Aside from being fascinating, this book is an interesting historical artifact. It was published in 1967, just before the discovery of Australopithecus afarensis, and it provides a snapshot of what was going on in palaeoanthropology in the middle of the controversy over Australopithecus africanus, Australopithecus robustus, Homo habilis, Zinjanthropus, Telanthropus, Paranthropus, Pleisanthropus, Meganthropus and all the other specimens given names of their own. It was a nontrivial problem; one of the things going on in this book is a examination of the way in which we can't talk accurately about things we don't have accurate names for: "Probably nothing has done more to introduce confusion into the story of human evolution than the reckless propensity for inventing new (and sometimes unnecessarily complicated) names for fragmentary fossil relics that turn out eventually to belong to genera or species previously known" (9), and the purpose of this monograph is to realign and correct the unnecessary overproliferation of names in discussions of pre-human evolution.

Le Gros Clark was an anatomist, and dude knows his shit. I won't pretend that I could follow the ins and outs of his exhaustive discussion of australopithecine skull (or even worse, australopithecine pelvises), but he explains himself carefully, and I certainly did come out with a clear understanding of exactly why australopithecines are not apes and are not human beings. He writes very clearly and carefully, and what I love most about him is the way he lays out and explains all the steps in how taxonomy works. Why do you name one fossil Australopithecus and one fossil Homo? How do you decide whether two specimens found in different places with very different provenances (which I know is totally not an appropriate word in palaeontology, but every fossil has a different story of discovery, and that story can make a huge difference in how the fossil is interpreted) are members of the same species? Le Gros Clark uses statistics like John Henry's hammer, showing the range of variation in well documented species like Homo sapiens and then showing that the differences between specimens called Australopithecus africanus and specimens given new and glorious names of their own fall well within statistical variations for a single species.

He is extremely stern about the way palaeoanthropologists overemphasize the uniqueness of every find but he also emphasizes over and over again that what he and his colleagues are engaged in is a process of discovery and that part of that process is making mistakes. He analyses his own mistakes, and other people's mistakes, and he ends with a really lovely defense of making mistakes:

Probably no scientist, however distinguished, has been invariably correct in the interpretations and theoretical hypotheses that he has advanced to explain his observational or experimental data. Hypotheses are of vital importance for progress in all branches of scientific knowledge, for only by formulating hypotheses is it possible to put them to the test by further observation and experiment, or by the application of new and more refined techniques. It is perhaps the fate of many hypotheses to be superseded sooner or later. If they are genuine scientific hypotheses, that is to say, if they are hypotheses that accord reasonably well with the facts available to their authors at the time and are susceptible to the test of observation and experiment, they will have played their part in promoting and accelerating the advance of scientific thought and research even if eventually they are discarded. A well-known Scottish author, Samuel Smiles, once remarked, over a hundred years ago, "Probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery." There is a great deal of truth in this aphorism, and certainly those who have made so many and such important discoveries by their energetic field work readily may be excused if one or other of their hypotheses should eventually prove to be unsubstantiated or untenable.
(Le Gros Clark 134)

He means specifically Robert Broom and Raymond Dart, who discovered and championed Australopithecus africanus in the face of tremendous opposition (of which Le Gros Clark is also sternly disapproving), and who were fundamentally right, even if some of their conclusions were overenthusiastic. And like the rest of this book, Le Gros Clark is saying, This is how you do science. It's a process of mistake and correction, making a hypothesis, testing it, reformulating it--or rejecting it for a new hypothesis. The fact that that is what the book is about means that it doesn't matter that it's out of date and some of its conclusions are obsolete. (Le Gros Clark did not like Homo habilis, considering the Olduvai fossils to be well within the range of variation for Australopithecus africanus, but he lost that battle. And of course Lucy is waiting just over the horizon from where he's standing.) And I personally love the fact that Le Gros Clark's science is taxonomy, the science of names.

The naming of cats is a difficult matter . . .



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