Marks prefers the use of hominids and I understand his argument to have five parts:
- The hominins systems is all about privileging genetic ancestry.
- "Evolution is the production of difference", i.e. it is all about divergence. Specifically, Darwinian evolution is "fundamentally" about adaptive divergences.
- It follows that we should highly value the divergences that evolution produces in classifying life.
- Not doing so is inconsistent with the existence of the field of anthropology (it is "predicated on the special interest accorded to humans in the panoply of nature").
- This system is easier to work with when it comes to dealing with human relatives (I'm not up to that bit, but I have scanned a bit further in than where I am "up to" and I have dim recollections which suggest the point is that you start running out of names... basically you have to have everyone be a species within a genus which means you now don't reflect genetic ancestry at all).
Due to the aforementioned scanning this has been in the back of my mind for a while but it wasn't until today when I read this bit properly that I managed to articulate why this hasn't really been sitting right with. Aren't the differences all the more striking, and hence important, if we recognise the proximity of ancestry? By analogy, no-one is at all surprised that one species of shark looks much the same as another species (or another genera) but when you chuck in a dolphin everyone goes "wow" at how similar they look. Now, maybe you don't actually go "wow" and there are some important dissimilarities (such as the means of locomotion) but there is a reason why one always finds ichthyosaurs being compared to dolphins and sharks... and you can understand that reason as "wow" (symbolic power). We have no right to be wowed if we're all about "anatomical, ecological and behavioural divergence" and while I don't know if Marks is wowed or not, I do think this is an entirely logical means of reconciling his point (that divergence is special***) and genetics.
Now, I don't know about you, but if there are limits to the number of groups that we have available to us, should we really be surprised? The problem is not that we're having to differentiate everything only at the level of genera (or whatever****) but that people prior to better understanding of genetics developed a system that works with traditional methods of distinguishing species (which I will here term comparative anatomy****). The solution is not use something which eliminates the "wow" but rather to come up with some new names... e.g. super-tribe, super-family... although maybe these are already being used but the diagram on page 137 goes subfamily to tribe (I suggest that Hominini becomes a super-tribe).
So, NSG, I thought maybe this was an interesting topic for a thread, and maybe you'll prove me wrong and won't reply, but what say ye, anyway? What makes more sense as a means of classifying humans (or, I suppose, anything else)? Ancestry or divergence? Does Marks' logic make more sense or am I right that it's self-defeating?
In any case, I am sure the sound of the word Marx will draw NSG like ants to a raw steak.
*Gorillas and chimpanzees get to the be the other to tribes within this group. Orangutans live in their own subfamily within a shared family.
**The other great apes all live in the family Pongidae.
***Because I am suggesting that divergence is all the more special when we'd expect it to be similar.
****Most of my understanding of this stuff comes from reading dinosaur books when I was younger, I stopped taking science as a subject when I was 16. I have never looked back. Nor indeed, have I ever studied anthropology (whether we're talking about now or in the past) which I mention because Marks doesn't believe even biological anthropology to be a science. In fact, I can prove this... either you believe that every time I've ever mentioned I go to the University of Auckland is a lie prepared to lay the groundwork for this thread, or the absence of an anthropology course with the above as a textbook is utterly convincing, because I know this thread reads a bit like "homework help".