Book Reviews

Journal of Human Evolution (1988) 17, 267-275

Bones of Contention: Controversies in the Search for Human Origins

By Roger Lewin ( 1987). New York: Simon and Schuster. 348 pp. ISBN O-67 l-52688-X. $19.95.

My primary qualification for reviewing this book is that I am not a palaeoanthropologist. I have never met Richard Leakey, and I once shook hands with Donald Johanson, although I am certain he wouldn’t remember it. I have never been to the field, I have no intention of ever going to the field, and I get the shakes if I know I am more than 10 minutes away from a convenience store. Consequently, JHE has solicited this review in the expectation of some degree of dispassion and distance from the subject matter.

Bones of Contention is a major semi-popular work in a vein similar to Lucy by Johanson and Edey ( 198 1)) and to which comparison is inevitable. Bones of Contention is a very enjoyable and enlightening read, filling in some lacunae in Lucy, having a generally wider focus, and giving an occasional different slant on things. Having been a co-author with Richard Leakey on earlier books, Lewin might have been expected to come off as an apologist for the family, but I was not left with that impression. In fact, Mary Leakey comes off rather poorly in Lewin’s exposition.

One area in which fault may be found in Bones of Contention is in the illustrations. We are not given, say, Richard Leakey’s phylogenetic tree pictorially; in fact, no current researcher’s view on phylogeny is given graphically. Though the KBS tuff is discussed at length, no geological illustration of its place in the Koobi Fora section is given. By contrast, I counted at least eight snapshots of Richard Leakey, four of Johanson, live of Louis Leakey; and two each of David Pilbeam, Ian Tattersall, and Sherwood Washburn. There are several photos of Tim White, some actually published in Lucy earlier; perhaps the Tim White archives are depleted.

The structure of Bones of Contention is in dialectical pairs of chapters on five topics: Taung, Ramapithecus, the Leakeys, the KBS tuff, and Lucy. These are sandwiched between discourses on the nature of the discipline which attempt to contextualize the controversies and their resolutions. It is with this framework that my discomfiture arises.

Lewin’s interpretation of the history of palaeoanthropology is extremely whiggish, all characters being judged according to how like our own their views turn out to have been in retrospect. Thus Dart was smart, and Boule a fool. The latter was prejudiced against Neanderthals on our tree, and the former was unencumbered by the prejudices of his English enemies. I don’t find this approach terrifically enlightening. Lewin lightly

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dismisses the objections to Taung as the products of minds befogged by Piltdown. Perhaps they were, but the facts remain that there was no provenience or date; it was an isolated specimen; juvenile apes look more like humans than adult apes; and Dart compared the skull only to humans, not to apes. These strike me as valid criticisms, to which one may also add that Piltdown had satisfied the scientific acid test of replicability, while Austrulopithecus had not. As soon as it did, in the late 1930s Gregory and Hellman were quick to accept it in public and in print. But until then, Eoanthropus was the best data, and therefore had to be confronted, as Lewin reports that Earnest Hooton told Washburn. Frankly, I agree with Hooton.

The book begins and ends with the idea of palaeoanthropology as storytelling, from Misia Landau at the beginning and from Matt Cartmill at the end: this clearly is the major theme of the work. Lewin wants his readers to believe that the field is special, personalities are stranger, egos are stronger. But this conclusion requires a comparative control for validation, and none is present. A likely alternative is that physical anthropology is in general just like any other science, only more interesting.

Do we really need to be asked again why the Piltdown fraud worked? Paleoanthropology is certainly not the only science ever led astray by deceit. After all, had things happened only a little bit differently, it could easily have been Arthur Keith blowing his brains out and Paul Kammerer lauded for his work on Lamarckian inheritance in the midwife toad. Anthropology may have suffered in lacking a practitioner with the pugnacity of a William Bateson (Kammerer’s bite-noire), but that is hardly anyone’s fault. The fact is that, as they said about Richard Nixon, the system worked, and that is to the discipline’s credit. An analysis of the seamy side of science has recently been made by two other writers for Science (Broad & Wade, 1982).

And why must we beat our breasts because Australopithecus languished unappreciated until the late 193Os? The molecular biologists Avery, MacLeod, and McCarty demonstrated elegantly that DNA, not protein, was the genetic material in 1944-but that view did not take hold until 1952. This was due largely to the forceful antagonism of Alfred Mirsky (McCarty, 1985), who can easily be seen as the Arthur Keith of his discipline. There was a four-decade lag between Wegener’s proposal of continental drift and its acceptance by the geological community as well. But so what? It is our job as scientists to be sceptical: how can we in good conscience chide Keith and colleagues for being uncritical about Piltdown, and at the same time for being too critical about the Dartians? The burden of proof must lie with the scientist making the bold claim, and it is not at all clear that Dart’s 1925 paper met that burden. The fact that Dart emerges in hindsight to have been correct is irrelevant.

As for storytelling being an autapomorphic trait of palaeoanthropology, a quote from Peter Medawar (1984, p. 40) speaks pretty much for itself:

[Alccording to the interpretation of the scientific process which I myself think the most plausible, a scientist, so far from being a man who never knowingly departs from the truth, is always telling stories in a sense not so very far removed from that of the nursery euphemism-stories which might be about real life but which must be tested very scrupulously to find out if indeed they are so I notice that laboratory jargon follows this usage, e.g. “Let’s get So-and-so to tell his story about” something or other, an invitation which So-and-so may decline on the grounds that his work “doesn’t make a story yet” or accept because he “thinks he’s got a story”. There is a slightly deprecatory flavour about this use of”story” because fancy has to be used to fill in the gaps and some people tend to overdo it (p. 40, emphasis in original).

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So where is that great yawning chasm which allopatrically divides physical anthropology, and more specifically palaeoanthropology, from its sister disciplines? Storytelling simply will not do. Ifthere is a significant difference to be found, it is probably in the fact that in addition to there being a dimension of competent and incompetent physical anthropology, there is also morally a good and bad dimension by which work can be judged. A morally offensive invertebrate palaeontology, for example, is inconceivable. While there may be racist entomologists, there is no racist entomology. Consequently, though Carleton Coon is spared mention by Lewin, his words on being (quite properly) harangued about his views on racial origins for the umpteenth time bear repeating: “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” (1968, p. 275). And just for the record, one need only refer to Simpson’s (1963) and Mayr’s (1962) reviews of The Origin ofRaces to learn that Coon’s story about race was received warmly by two of the three leading evolutionary biologists of the time.

Indeed, to return to the topic at hand, it apparently needs to be reiterated that the entire class of literature to which Lewin’s book belongs-namely, the scientists can be jerks too, just like your brother-in-law, only better educated, genre-dates to the 1968 publication of The Double Helix by molecular biologist James Watson. Again, physical anthropology does not stand alone, but rubs shoulders with the great and with the ignominious alike.

Lewin attributes to Adrienne Zihlman the recognition of commonalities between Piltdown and Ramapitkecus, which I find contrived and spurious. One was deliberate chicanery, while the other was simply the overzealous exploitation of too little data. There is no need to associate, for example, Cyril Burt’s twin studies with Darwin’s theory of pangenesis, though both concerned heredity and were the products of Englishmen.

A secondary theme in Lewin’s book is mind-changing. One encounters three classes of scientists in Bones of Contention: those who have changed their minds, those who are too closed-minded ever to change, and those who were right all along. Needless to say, there is some extent to which historiography obscures history here. Vincent Sarich, for example, recollects to Lewin having always argued for a 5 MY divergence of humans and chimps, but one doesn’t have to look hard to find him having suggested 3.5 MY. Thus, Sarich hasn’t always been right, no matter what it looks like. Morris Goodman is among those presented as closed-minded in the context of the molecular clock, but the recent literature on DNA sequence is running strongly in favour of a slow-down in the hominid lineage. And after 20 years, we still don’t knowjust exactly what the immunological albumin clock was actually clocking, aside from being some correlate of amino-acid substitutions. It bears noting that in Lewin’s presentation it was the fossils which closed the door on Ramapitkecus, and the biomolecules which nailed it shut, which is probably as it should be.

Lucy presented Ernst Mayr as putting his imprimatur on the name Australopitkecus afarensis; in Bones of Contention we learn he thinks it should be suppressed. But if Mayr can change his mind, then what’s wrong with Johanson and the number of species at Hadar or Pilbeam and Ramapitkecus?

The book is largely free of typos, but there are several disconcerting minor errors present, worthy of mention only in light of the book’s “inside” look at palaeoanthroplogy. Like the individual contributions of Roger and Francis Bacon, those of Robert and Randall Sus(s)man are occasionally difficult to distinguish. In Bones of Contention, the surname of the one who works on anthropoids is given as the one who works on prosimians. Or is it the other way around? Le Gros Clark’s name is given throughout as Wilfred, not Wilfrid; A. C.

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Haddon is given as Haddan; Eoanthropus dawsoni is given as dawsonii; Richard Swann Lull is

given as an anthropologist, not a geologist; HrdliEka’s name is missing the little

diddley-doo [haEek] over the “c”, and he founded the American Association of Physical

Anthropologists, not the American Society of Physical Anthropology, on December 29,

1928, not in 1930, etc. Lewin writes that John T. Scopes’s chief prosecutor was William

Jennings Bryan, but Bryan was merely the chief persecutor; circuit attorney general A. T.

Stewart prosecuted the case. None of these is particularly significant in and of itself, but

these are all matters of public record, and may suggest discretion in accepting naively the

things which are not public record, such as who muttered what to whom in 1976 about the

age of the KBS tuff.

In all, however. Bones oJ Contention is a positive reading experience. one from which

students and professionals alike will benefit. There is much for us to think about in Lewin‘s

book, which is more than can be said for all too many science books. The cognoscenti may

find fault with aspects of it? but then they always do. On the whole, it stacks up favorably,

against Lucy for scope and viewpoint, but unfavorably for clarity and presentation. I had

actually bought a copy before being asked to review Bones qf‘C’ontention, and still regard it as

$19.95 well spent.

References

Broad, W. & Wade. N. (1982). &+wrr c!f the Truth. Ncu l’urk: Simon and Schustrr. Coon. C. S. (1968). Comment on “Boqus Science”. J. Heredz(v. 59, 275. Johanson. D. & Edrv, M. 11981) LUQJ: The Beginnings q/Humnnkrnd. NW York: Simon and Schustrr-. Mayr. E. (1962) O&n of the human races. Srwnce 138, 120422. McCarty, M. (1985) The Transjming Prznciple. NW York: \V. \I’. .Uortvn. Medawar, P. (1984). Pluto’r Republic. New York: Oxford Univcrsiry Press. Simpson. G. G. (1963) Review of The Ori,@ of Races hy <L~rleron S. (:uon. Pmpectiz,r~ Hid .Itd. 6, 268-272. Watson. ,J. D. (1968) T/v Double He/it. New York: Atheneum.

.JOK MARKS

Department of‘rlnthropolog,

Inlr I,‘niuer.riQ.

h$le Haven, CT 06520. c’.S.=1,

Bones of Contention: Controversies in the Search for Human Origins

By Roger Lewin (1987). New York: Simon & Schuster. 348 pp. US$19.95. ISBN

O-671-52688-X.

“A historical tour of. major controversies in which shifting interpretations ofthc nature

of evolution and of early man have battled for scientific credibility”. This is how the

publisher’s blurb describes Roger Lcwin’s new book. Informally, I am told, it has hecomr

known as “The Gossip Book”: is that in fact what it is’? Ifso, is it important to have such a

book? And, if it is important, does Roger Lewin’s book fill the need?

In 1981 Don Johanson and Richard Leakcy wcrc brought together for a television debate

by the revered veteran of American networks, M:altcr Gronkitc. The book opens with an

account of the debate, set in the context of Sir Wilfrid Lc Gros Clark’s prediction that all

discoveries about human evolution will arouse controversy: “And so it goes”, says Lewin.

The story of the ‘LAncestors” exhibition at the American Museum ofNatural History, with