International Journal of Primatology, Fol. 11, No.

3, 1990

Human Uniqueness and Theoretical Content in Paleoanthropology

Matt CartmilU

Received July 6, 1988

One o f the things that distinguishes science from nonscientific discourse is the incorporation o f its hypotheses into theoretical structures. Like parapsychology, the study o f human evolution lacks theoretical content and connections. This lack is due, in part, to the collapse o f the classical primatological synthesis in the 1970s. It is due in larger measure to a persistent anthropological focus on human uniqueness as the phenomenon to be explained. Such supposedly unique human features as large brains, language, conceptual thinking, and upright bipedalism are uniquely human by definition rather than as a matter o f empirical fact. Much scientific effort and ingenuity has gone into redefining such characteristics whenever discoveries about other animals have posed a threat to human uniqueness. But since by definition qualitatively unique phenomena do not conform to overarching laws that apply to similar cases, they must remain theoretically inexplicable. Paleoanthropology shouM aim at increasing its theoretical content by reducing the list o f qualitative human uniquenesses-and eliminating it altogether if possible.
KEY WORDS: demarcation of science; human origins; allometry; Clever Hans; ape language.

If man wants to set up a contest in resembling himself and award himself the prize, no one will quarrel with him.

Mary Midgley (1978,p. 164)

1Department of Biological Anthropology and Anatomy, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27710. 173
0164-0291/90/0600-0173506.00/0 9 1990 Plenum Publishing Corporation

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INTRODUCTION What, if anything, distinguishes science from other sorts of intellectual activity? One of the best-known definitions of the boundary between science and nonscience is Karl Popper's criterion of falsibility, which asserts that "statements or systems o f statements, in order to be ranked as scientific, must be capable of conflicting with possible, or conceivable observations" (Popper, 1968, p. 39). Yet although falsifiability is surely a necessary qualification of scientific statements, it is not sufficient. It does not distinguish scientific statements from other sorts of statements, because not all expectations with testable consequences are scientific hypotheses. If they were, every dog that failed to find water in his water dish would qualify as a scientist. Science, as many philosophers (including Popper) have pointed out, must deal in universal, law-like statements that apply to general classes of events. However, even law-like generalizations with testable implications may lack scientific standing. Consider the following proposition: "After 1820 A.D., all U.S. presidents elected in years ending in zero will die in office." This is a falsifiable hypothesis with a low apriori probability. For 140 years, it was highly corroborated, passing seven stringent tests (Harrison, Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Harding, Roosevelt, Kennedy) with flying colors; but in January, 1989, it was decisively refuted when Ronald Reagan escaped from the Presidency with his life. If falsifiability were all that counts in science, this Law o f Presidential Annihilation should have been of great scientific interest. In fact, the law has no scientific interest whatever. Why not? Some philosophers of science, including Popper (1957), would say that this "law" has no scientific standing because it contains proper nouns: it is not a genuinely universal generalization-what Hull (1983) calls a "process t h e o r y " - b u t is limited to a specific place and time and political system; therefore, it cannot count as a scientific law. Others (Van Valen, 1988) see no difficulty in accepting laws with specific spatiotemporal restrictions. But whether or not its proper nouns count against it, the Law o f Presidential Annihilation has a more fundamental shortcoming- it lacks a theoretical context. It is not embedded in any larger, more inclusive structure of expectations. It has no logical connections with any Iarger Iaws of universal scope. Therefore, its falsification has no wider implications nor any scientific importance. It can be seen only as a historical coincidence. And coincidencesunique constellations of events that conform to no more general p a t t e r n are not scientifically interesting. If assertions that lack a theoretical context are not scientifically interesting, then an atheoretical science must be a contradiction in terms. There are, of course, scientific fields that lack distinctive theoretical entities of their own because they are subdisciplines of a larger scientific domain with which they

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share a common body of theory. Primatology is such a field of study; the biology of primates involves no theoretical concepts or concerns that are not the common property of biological science as a whole. But there are other fields of study that seem to be atheoretical in a more fundamental way and whose scientific status is accordingly open to question. Parapsychology is one example. It is atheoretical by its very nature, because what makes a phenomenon parapsychological is that it has no explanation, not even a hypothetical explanation. A parapsychology that offered testable explanations articulating with other domains of scientific theory would no longer be parapsychology, but something else. (If there were reason to think that, say, telepathy is a real phenomenon produced by a unique sort of radiation from the brain, then students of telepathy would be physicists and neurophysiologists, not parapsychologists.) The phenomena of parapsychology qualify as such precisely because of their mysterious and occult status. Although parapsychologists insist that the constellations of events they study are neither explicable nor merely coincidental, they have not been able to say exactly what else they might be. If parapsychology had elaborated a body of t h e o r y - e v e n an idiosyncratic theory of its own, incommensurate with the rest of s c i e n c e - t o attempt to explain those phenomena, it might qualify as a scientific discipline. Since it has done nothing of the sort, it is hard to see how it can qualify. It remains a collection of ghost stories. As presently constituted, paleoanthropology, the study of human evolution, also lacks a body of distinctive theory. This might be because it has lost an earlier theoretical system and found no replacement, or because it is (like primatology) a subdiscipline of some larger scientific domain and shares in that domain's theory, or because it is a willfully atheoretical cabinet of miracles like parapsychology. All three of these descriptions hold true to some extent. To the extent that the last description holds true, the scientific standing of paleoanthropology deserves to be called into question.

T H E RISE A N D F A L L OF PALEOANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY

At one time, there was a body of paleoanthropological theory. Its history begins with Charles Darwin. The most important item on the early Darwinian agenda was not to elaborate what we would now describe as a theory of human evolution (i.e., a particular historical explanation of human origins), but almost the o p p o s i t e - t o show that human traits required no extraordinary explanation but were predictable and natural results of the general evolutionary process (Cartmill et al., 1986; Bowler, 1986). Critics of the Origin of Species had argued that natural selection could not account for some of

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the peculiarities of Homo: our intellectual capacities were too vast, our moral faculties too disinterested, our natural weapons too puny to have been generated by survival of the fittest variants among ape-like ancestors. Darwin (1871) and his early followers countered these arguments by asserting that most distinctively human traits contribute in one way or another to man's dominion over the lower animals, and are correspondingly selectively advantageous. H u m a n peculiarities are, therefore, largely self-explanatory. The moral and intellectual gap between human beings and the higher mammals is only a matter of degree, and is at least partly closed by the savage races. "The difference between the reason of a Goethe, a Kant, a Lamarck, or a Darwin, and that o f the lowest s a v a g e . . , is much greater than the graduated difference between the latter and that of the most 'rational' mammals," wrote Haeckel (1899). Darwin's psychological follower, Romanes, said much the same thing: I think it may be safelypromised, that when we come to considerthe case of savages, and through them the case of pre-historicman, we shall find that, in the great interVal which lies betweensuch grades of mental evolutionand our own, we are brought far on the way towards bridging the psychologicaldistancewhich separates the gorilla from the gentleman. (Romanes, 1889, p. 439) During the early 20th century, evolutionary morphologists like Smith (1924), Jones (1916), and Clark (1934, 1949) articulated a true theory of human e v o l u t i o n - a body of logically connected generalizations and explanations that portrayed human evolution as law-like, predictable, and confluent with the history of life in general. In this "classical primatological synthesis" (Cartmill, 1982), Homo sapiens was seen as the natural result of primate evolutionary trends, which in turn were seen as the natural outcome of arboreality in mammals (Cartmill, 1972). More particularistic stories about the origin of human peculiarities, accounts that rested more on historical contingencies and less on general laws and vectors of progress, were not put forward in the first half of the 20th century by any o f the leading students of human evolution. A few minor, peripheral authors like Campbell (1913, 1917, 1921) and Read (1914, 1920) elaborated early versions of the hunting model of human origins; but mainstream scientists ignored their writings on the subject, and their ideas were quickly forgotten. However, after World War II, the theoretical unity of paleoanthropology and primatology began to disintegrate. From the late 1940s, it seemed increasingly clear to anthropologists that the human career had begun with an adaptive shift, a historical discontinuity that explained the diagnostic hominid peculiarities of teeth and limbs shared by Homo and Australopithecus. It was generally agreed that the heart of this discontinuity was the appearance of tools and weapons, denoting a breach between the organic and technical domains; between the world of natural law and the world of history; between nature and culture. The old natural-law explanations that had

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depicted the origin of humanity as self-explanatory and inevitable gave way to various formulations of the hunting model and other adaptive-shift explanations, which saw hominid origins as a contingent historical coincidence. Why did this changeover take place? Certainly, it was due in part to our postwar acceptance of the neo-Darwinian evolutionary synthesis. That synthesis stressed the importance of adaptation and ecological niches, and so it encouraged the replacement of natural-law explanations by by narrative historical explanations that accounted for morphological changes as effects of shifts in adaptive mode. But the changeover also reflected a changed scientific perception of the boundary between human beings and animals. The animal-human boundary became more sharply defined for anthropology in the 1950s, when physical anthropology finally purged itself of the belief that some modern human populations help to bridge the gap between gorillas and gentlemen. That racist doctrine had pervaded the literature on human evolution all the way from Darwin (1871) down to prewar Hooton (1940). It was particularly explicit and influential in the works of Haeckel (1902), whose writings are a major source of Nazi racial ideology (Gasman, 1971; Stein, 1986). But assumptions about the hierarchical subordination of human races vanished from scientific discourse after the collapse of Naziism and the revelations of the death camps. It is also probably not a coincidence that those assumptions disappeared from physical anthropology during the same postwar years that saw the dismantling of the European colonial empires. In this new context, in which all anthropological argument began by affirming the unity of the family of man, the line separating humanity from the beasts became sharper and more symbolically important for anthropologists; and human uniqueness was widely stressed as a presupposition of anthropological discourse-for example, in the influential works of Leslie White. In physical anthropology, the increased importance of the animal-human boundary was reflected in the enormous attention lavished on the topic of hominid origins. During the postwar decade, the family Hominidae was expanded to include all stages and collaterals of the human lineage from the time of its separation from the ancestors of the living apes. The supposed evolutionary event that initiated this hominid clade took on new symbolic importance, and was widely equated with the line separating humanity from the beasts (Cartmill et al., 1986). However, because human status is a unique status, the sequence of evolutionary events that produced the earliest creatures with human status is by definition a qualitatively unique historical occurrence, with no significant parallels in other evolutionary lineages. And as Hume pointed out in 1734, a genuinely singular occurrence cannot be explained with reference to the laws of nature. A science centered around the animal-human boundary must, therefore, be a science that lacks theoretical connections.

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To be sure, Jolly (1970) and others have proposed nonhuman analogies for the hypothesized adaptive shift that produced the Hominidae. But such analogies have not been grounded in law-like generalizations; and they have usually been imbedded in two-stage models of hominization, which exclude early hominids from human status and postulate a second, unparalleled adaptive transition that demarcates the animal-human boundary. In one way or another, policing and maintaining that boundary has been a tacit objective of most paleoanthropological model-building since the late 1940s. The theoretical content of paleoanthropology has suffered accordingly.

THE ANIMAL-HUMAN BOUNDARY

Although accepting a qualitative discontinuity between people and animals has diminished the theoretical content of paleoanthropological discourse, it has augmented its moral and cultural significance. The line that our culture draws between people and beasts is a moral as well as a conceptual boundary. More precisely, it is the moral boundary: the borderline dividing persons from property, the line that separates responsible agents with rights and duties from more or less neutral stuff that can be made into soap and lampshades. The moral significance that we attribute to that boundary shows up throughout the scientific literature. It is an especially conspicuous issue in the ape-language controversy. ("If apes can talk," write Seidenberg and Petitto [1981], " . . . will they demand their civil rights? If language is the only capacity that distinguishes humans from other species, and apes possess that capacity, should they not be treated as human?") Moral issues obtrude even into the taxonomic literature, when the taxon in question is Hominidae. In two recent articles on primate classification, Groves (1986) and Schwartz (1986) argue that the principles of cladistic systematics compel us to put at least some of the great apes into the family Hominidae. Groves concludes from this finding that we should try to give up using apes as experimental animals; Schwartz suggests that we should give up cladistic principles instead, in order to avoid "having to refer to experimental animals as hominids." Because the animal-human boundary is the boundary of the moral universe, the stories that we tell about human origins, even if they are true stories, are myths; and the general point of those stories is explaining-and legitimating- human control and domination of nature. This is evident from the list of human differentiae that our textbooks recognize and strive to explain (Cartmill et aL, 1986). That list is a tally of generally admired human characteristics that we like to point to as emblems and causes of human supremacy over the natural order-such characteristics as upright posture,

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Log body weight (g) Fig. 1. Log-logplot of brain weight (mg) on body weight (g) for 139 species of extant eutherian mammals. Black circle, Loxodonta (African elephant); white triangle, Homo; black squares, other anthropoids; white circles, cetaceans; simple dots, other mammals (Insectivora, Scandentia, Rodentia, Perissodactyla, Artiodactyia,Carnivora, Pinnipedia, Hyracoidea, Chiroptera, Edentata). Taxa represented by points above line A (human brain weight) have absolutely larger brains than human beings. Taxa represented by points above line B (isometric line, of 1:1 slope, through human datum) have relatively larger brains than human beings (as a percentage of body weight). Line C is the best-fit line (y = 0.755x + 1.774) calculated by Martin (1981) for a similar data set. Data from Crile and Quiring (1940), Bauchot and Stephan (1966, 1969), and Ridgway and Brownson (1982).

big brains, language, and technology. These human peculiarities were recognized in antiquity and are of course not scientific discoveries. They are in fact not empirical discoveries of any sort; they are traits that are uniquely human by definition. The principal contribution of science has been to redefine those traits whenever it was necessary to protect their axiomatic human uniqueness from the threat of empirical reality. This claim can be expressed less outrageously by saying that diagnostic human traits, like any diagnostic traits, need to be redefined when they prove not to be diagnostic. Many other animals obviously have traits that could be regarded as bipedalism, language, technology, and so on, depending on how those terms are defined. Nowadays, scientists are careful to define those terms in such a way that they exclude nonhuman behaviors. (A medieval bestiarist, who could rely on supernatural criteria o f human uniqueness, would

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have been less careful.) If those terms were defined more generously, so as to encompass behaviors and traits of other species, they would not do the job we expect of them-namely, identifying human capacities that distinguish us from other animals and that account for our superiority.

B R A I N SIZE A N D B R A I N / B O D Y A L L O M E T R Y

The definitional character of human uniqueness is clearly seen in comparisons of human brain size with those of other animals. Human beings are large mammals and have usually large brains. However, several mammals-whales, dolphins, elephants-have brains that are too large to fit inside a human skull (data lying above line A in Fig. 1). Since human beings are uniquely intelligent and the brain is the seat of intelligence, human brain weight (1-2 kg) must be uniquely large. Our science's task is to show that the seemingly larger brains of elephants (5-6 kg) and whales (up to 7 kg) are actually smaller. The first step toward this end is to look at relative brain size-that is, brain weight as a percentage of body weight. That percentage is lower in elephants (0.09%) and cetaceans (0.01-1.16~ than it is in Homo sapiens (1.6-3.0o70), and so our brains are relatively larger than theirs (which accordingly lie below line B in Fig. 1). This is the desired conclusion. Unfortunately, our relative brain size is equalled or exceeded by those of many smaller mammals, including squirrel monkeys (Saimiri: 2.8-4.0o/o), red squirrels (Tamiasciurus: 2.0-2.5%), chipmunks (Tamias: 3:0o7o), and jumping mice (Zapus: 3.4-3.6o/o) (Crile and Quiring, 1940; Bauchot and Stephan, 1969; Ridgway and Brownson, 1972). Allometric analysis must therefore be invoked to rescue the axiom of human cerebral preeminence. The first step in such an analysis is to assume that the interspecific regression of the logarithm of brain weight on that of body weight ought to be a straight line. There is no theoretical justification for this assumption. The shape of the actual bivariate scatter (Fig. 1) is at least as compatible with Count's (1947) contention that such regressions ought to follow a parabolic curve. However, fitting a straight line (line C in Fig. 1) to that curved scatter of points has a welcome consequence: it leaves the datum for Homo lying much further above the best-fit line than do the upper and lower ends of the distribution (which are the parts of the distribution that are problematic for comparisons with human brain size). We can now identify relative brain size with deviation from the regression line, and may conclude accordingly that human beings have uniquely large brains for their body size, when we take allometry into account. However, even after correction for allometry, the difference in relative brain size between Homo and some porpoises remains embarrasingly small. It has recently been found that this persistent difficulty can be dealt with

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by assuming that brain size ought in theory to be proportional to the organism's total metabolic energy (i.e., body weight times basal metabolic rate; Armstrong, 1986). Porpoises have higher BMRs than Homo, and thus devote a smaller percentage of their total metabolic energy to the upkeep of their brains. Therefore, their brains are really much smaller than o u r s - a s a fraction of the total economy of the b o d y - for their body size, when we take allometry into account: Q.E.D. None of this should be taken as impugning the conventional arguments and conclusions concerning brain/body allometry, or the proposition that brain size is in general proportional to BMR. There is nothing wrong with saying that human beings have somewhat larger brains than other animals of their size. But the difference between people and porpoises in relative brain size is slight, and its meaning is unclear. Allometry should not be invoked to make it look decisive. To say that "super-high human brain/body ratios appear to be supported by a higher proportion of the body's energetics being used by the brain than in other mammals," whereas apparently similar brain/body ratios in porpoises really "overlap those of a n t h r o p o i d s . . , after accounting for their high BMR" (Armstrong, 1986), is a maneuver that a lizard might with equal justice use to prove that mammals don't really have bigger brains than reptiles, but only higher metabolic rates. The large brain/body ratios of porpoises are generally regarded throughout the scientific literature on the subject as a puzzling anomaly to be explained away. (The anomaly here may actually be greater than the numbers indicate; because metabolically inactive fats and oils make up a disproportionately large fraction of the cetacean body, body weight may overestimate effective body size in cetaceans, and porpoises may only seem to have subhuman brain/body ratios, for the same reason that obese men and women have.) On the other hand, the aberrantly large brain/body ratio of Homo is regarded as a welcome anomaly, to be preserved and cherished. The deviation of the human datum from supposed laws governing brain size is taken as evidence supporting those laws, because people are not supposed to fit the general mammalian picture when anything involving intelligence is in question. In fact, our concept of intelligence is itself built on the foundation of the animal-human boundary. This fact is nowhere more obvious than in the case of the famous horse named Clever Hans, whose name has been prominently mentioned in recent work on primate communication.

T H R E E M E N ON A HORSE

Hans was a Russian trotting horse resident in Germany at the turn of the century. His owner and trainer, a retired German mathematics teacher

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named von Osten, had spent several years trying to teach Hans to do things seemingly impossible for a horse: to understand written and spoken German, to do simple arithmetic, and to distinguish consonant f r o m dissonant musical chords. Von Osten's labors had apparently been crowned with astonishing success. Clever Hans, as the horse became known in the newspapers, would answer questions on all these subjects by nodding his head, tapping one hoof, pointing with his nose, or picking up a designated object in his teeth. His answers were generally correct, so long as the questioner was a person familiar to him; it was not necessary that yon Osten be present. A self-appointed commission of 13 experts undertook an investigation of the Clever Hans phenomenon during the summer of 1904. The commission included experts of all the relevant sorts, f r o m the circus manager Paul Busch to Prof. Carl Stumpf, founder and Director of the Psychological Institute at the University of Berlin. Despite their impressive credentials and manifold expertise, the commission members were unable to detect any cues or signals that Hans might be receiving f r o m von Osten or his other interrogators. Five days after the Hans-Commission made its report, Prof. Stumpf went back to Berlin, leaving the investigation in the hands of his student Oskar Pfungst. Pfungst then undertook the classic experimental study that has immortalized his name (or at any rate Hans's). By varying one condition of the testing situation after another, Pfungst was able to establish that Hans's trainer and questioners were indeed giving Hans visual cues that guided his responses, but that these cues were so subtle that only Hans had noticed them. The horse was reading surprisingly minute changes in h u m a n muscle tension and body posture: tiny things, like flaring of the nostrils (Pfungst, 1911, p. 63) and head movements as small as 0.2 m m (p. 125), that had been unconscious on yon Osten's part and had wholly escaped the attention of the previous expert observers. All this was widely regarded as a triumph of scientific observation. Yet oddly enough, it was regarded as a triumph for Pfungst and not for Hans. Pfungst did recognize that "Hans still remains a phenomenon 9 . . in excelling all his critics in the power of observation" (Pfungst, 1911, p. 175). But he took considerable pains to deny that any mental activity had been involved in Hans's observations o f Homo sapiens. Hans, said Pfungst, was "rather like a machine that must be started and kept going by a certain amount of fuel (in the f o r m of bread and carrots)" (p. 202). Hans's superhuman feats of observation, Pfungst concluded (p. 240), 9 . . are founded first upon a one-sided development of the power of perceivingthe slightest movementsof the questioner, secondlyupon the intense and continued, but equally one-sided, power of attention, and lastly upon a rather limited memory, by means of which the animal is able to associate perceptions of movement with a small number of movementsof its own which have becomethoroughly habitual. The horse's ability to perceive movements greatly exceeds that of the average man. This superi-

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ority is probably due to a different constitution of the retina, and perhaps also of the brain... All conclusionswith regard to the presenceof emotionalreactions, such as stubbornness, etc., have been shown to be without warrant. With regard to the emotional life we are justified in concluding from the behavior of the horse that the desire for food is the only effective spring to action. In the context of those last sentences, it is gratifying to learn that Hans managed to bite Pfungst good and hard at least twice during the course of the study (Stumpf, 1911). No doubt Hans mistook him for food. Pfungst was, as Hediger (1981) put it, "obsessed by the w i s h . . . t o prove that a horse or any other animal could not think in a human way." Pfungst's bias reflected the feelings of his supervisor, Prof. Stumpf, about Darwinism and the boundaries between humanity and the lower orders. Stumpf was 56 years old in 1904. His university training at Wurzburg, where he had been a student and disciple of the brilliant young priest Franz Brentano, had made a devout Catholic and fervent Aristotelian of him (Boring, 1957). He had begun his own academic career as a philosopher, specializing in the mind-body problem (cf. Stumpf, 1896), but had moved over into scientific psychology as it gradually disentangled itself from philosophical psychology and physiology during the latter half of the 19th century. Stumpf appears to have been a stiff, gloomy, aristocratic man, a living caricature o f a 19th-century German intellectual. Wolfgang K6hler (1937) remembered him as being more preoccupied with those characteristic pre-war German virtues, Besonnenheit (rational self-control) and Mass (a sense of what is fitting and proper), than any other human being K6hler had ever met. Stumpf contributed a preface and appendices to Pfungst's book. (In these addenda, Stumpf explicitly claimed the investigation as his own work, crediting Pfungst only with determining exactly which visual cues Hans had been responding to.) Stumpf thought that the most important finding of the Clever Hans study was the conclusively demonstrated absence of "the slightest trace of conceptual thinking" in the lower orders of the Scala Naturae, "up to and including the ungulates" (Stumpf, 1904). The dubious hypothesis of "the essential similarity of the human and animal mind, which doctrine has been coming more and more into favor since the time of Darwin" (Stumpf, 1911), had accordingly received a sharp rebuke, just as Stumpf had expected. Stumpf happily assured "disappointed Darwinists" that "for lovers of truth, it must always remain a matter of inconsequence whether anyone is pleased or displeased with the truth, and whether it is enunciated by Aristotle or Haeckel" (Stumpf, 1911). We are left in little doubt as to which of the two Stumpf sided with. The anti-Darwinian biases of the man who directed the Clever Hans study have since been forgotten, and subsequent generations of psychologists have remembered only two conclusions generally drawn from Pfungst's

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book. The first is that animals cannot understand what we say and do not have anything much like human intelligence. The second is that experimenters should always hide behind a screen so that the experimental animals cannot tell what they are thinking. Those two conclusions are ill-consorted bedmates. A third possible c o n c l u s i o n - t h a t some horses are keener observers of human behavior than most psychologists - has not gotten into many psychology textbooks. Why not? After all, that conclusion is a fair enough statement of the facts of the case. It is what Pfungst himself says, after we discount his mistaken conjectures about horse retinas and his deprecation of Hans's "one-sided" abilities (whatever that word means). But the conclusion that horses are in some respects more intelligent than psychologists is not really one that we have the option of adopting. The perceptual and social sensitivity that enabled Clever Hans to uncover his interrogators' deliberately concealed desires does not count as genuine cleverness, precisely because horses appear to have more of it than we do; and horses cannot be more intelligent than p e o p l e by definition. If horses outperform people on a supposed test of intelligence, that invalidates the test. What we mean by the word "intelligence" is whatever distinguishes the human mind from those of beasts.

ANIMALS AND L A N G U A G E Similarly, what we mean by "language" is whatever substantiates the judgment that nonhuman animals are unable to talk. Seventy years ago, it was clear to Saussure (1915) that the crucial distinguishing feature of the "linguistic sign" was the arbitrary relation of a signal pattern to a concept. During the 1940s and 1950s, Leslie White grounded an influential view of human distinctiveness in the proposition that only human beings can create such arbitrary relations, although other animals can be trained to recognize them:
The difference between the behavior o f m a n a n d other animals, then, is that the lower animals m a y receive new values, m a y acquire new meanings, but they cannot create and bestow them. Only m a n can do t h i s . . . A n d this difference is one of kind, not of degree: a creature can either "arbitrarily impose signification," can either create a n d bestow values, or he cannot. There are no intermediate s t a g e s . . . Because h u m a n behavior is symbol behavior and since the behavior of i n f r a - h u m a n species is non-symbolic, it follows that we can learn nothing about h u m a n behavior from observations u p o n or experiments with the lower animals. (White, 1949, pp. 29-35)

However, more recently, mastery of syntactical relationships has been identified as the crucial marker of human status. Syntax, it seems, is "precisely what distinguishes our species from others" (Bickerton, 1987), and true language ought properly to be understood as "the ability to create and understand sentences," which "characteristically e x p r e s s . . , a complete semantic

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proposition through a set of words and phrases, each bearing particular grammatical relations to each other" (Terrace et al., 1979). This difference between earlier and later definitions of language is at least partly due to our increased knowledge of the linguistic capacities and limitations of other animals. Chimpanzees have so far not demonstrated an ability to employ syntax productively (although they, like bottlenosed dolphins, can understand syntactic differences between strings of signals: Premack, 1976; Herman, 1986). However, they can learn to relate a sequence of signals to a concept, and have manifested at least an occasional ability to assign new meanings to arbitrary signs (Savage-Rumbaugh, 1986, p. 276). In the face of this new evidence, language has been preserved as a marker of human status by redefining it in terms of syntax rather than semantics. The Gardners (Gardner and Gardner, 1974), of course, believed that the chimpanzee Washoe was creating a new meaning syntactically when she saw her first swan and signed water bird. Terrace, who has argued forcefully that most of the ape-language experiments represent Clever Hans phenomena, offers a different interpretation:
The simplest nongrammatical interpretation of such utterances is that they contain signs that are related solely by context. U p o n being asked what she sees when looking in the direction of a swan it is appropriate for Washoe to sign water and bird. In this view, if Washoe knew the sign for sky, she might just as readily have signed such less interesting combinations as sky water, bird sky, sky bird water, and so on. (Terrace, 1983, p. 21)

That is to say, Washoe was not really talking; she was just describing the landscape to someone who had asked her what she saw. Fifty years ago such a performance would have been a reason for claiming that the chimpanzee was talking; now it actually counts as evidence against that claim.

LANGUAGE AND THINKING Because language is (by definition) unique to human beings, it has been widely equated with thought; as Wittgenstein (1958, p. 6) put it, "Thinking is essentially the activity of operating with signs." Although few modern students of comparative psychology have subscribed to the Cartesian view of animals as insensate machines made of meat, until recently the prevailing view has been that animals have sensation and emotions but lack "all the higher intellectual, aesthetic, and moral feelings, as well as volition guided by motives" (Pfungst, 1911, p. 16). "The intellectual life of a cat or dog," wrote Thorndike (1911, p. 123),
9 . . is most like what we feel when consciousness contains little thought about anything, when we feel the sense-impressions in their first intention, so to speak, when

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Cartmill we feel our own body, and the impulses we give to it. Sometimes one gets this animal consciousness while in swimming, for example. One feels the water, the sky, the birds above, but with no thoughts about them or memories o f how they looked at other t i m e s . . . Self-consciousness dies away. Social consciousness dies away. The meanings, and values, a n d connections of things die away. One feels sense-impressions, has impulses, feels the m o v e m e n t s he makes; that is all.

This dreamy unawareness of "the meanings, and values, and connections of things," like many of the other intellectual deficiencies of nonhuman animals, is supposedly entailed by their inability to form concepts. Although many philosophers and psychologists agree that conceptual thinking is the crucial distinction of the human mind, there is less agreement about what it is. Adler (1967) defines a concept as an acquired disposition to understand what kind of thing an object is and what that kind of thing is l i k e or, to use the scholastic language that Adler is carefully avoiding here, a disposition to comprehend the essence of a species. Exactly what this entails is unclear; however, it seems safe to say that it must be closely associated with language, and that horses are probably not very good at it. Pfungst (1911, p. 16) offers a less rarefied definition of a concept as
9 . . a mental construct which has its source in ideas, or memory-images, in that their essential characteristics are abstracted. For this reason the concept has not a definite image-content. (Thus the thought of "horse" in general is a concept. Not so the thought of a certain individual h o r s e - t h a t is an idea, with a definite image-content.)

It seems that animals, which are in Pfungst's view incapable of conceptual thinking, must either lack ideas altogether or else think (if that is the word) wholly in terms of particular individuals, like someone condemned to speak a language consisting entirely of proper nouns. Such a view of animal mentation is surprisingly widespread. It leads even so sympathetic and perceptive a psychologist as Hediger, for example, to reject Patterson's (1978) claim that the gorilla Koko is able to identify herself as a nonhuman animal and her trainers as human beings:
Koko has studied neither zoology nor anthropology. She cannot distinguish between m a n and animals as two different categories of the zoological system. As with each animal she lacks the notion of species. Therefore she could not know that she belongs to the species Gorilla gorilla and the h u m a n beings surrounding her to Homo s a p i e n s . . . We have to a s s u m e that Koko, based on her assimilation tendency, sees in her mistress (for the time being) a superior specimen of her own species, that is another gorilla. (Hediger, 1981)

What Hediger asserts here has been sufficiently refuted by SavageRumbaugh's (1981, 1986) laboratory studies of category recognition in chimpanzees; however, in retrospect, it seems remarkable that it was asserted at all. Did anyone ever doubt that human beings, no matter how ignorant of zoology and systematics, are able to distinguish between human beings and gorillas? Is it only language that makes that discrimination possible? Does the preverbal toddler perceive a difference in kind between its pet cat and

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its father? If not, how does it learn to use the words "cat" and "man" correctly? Although many of the concepts that we use to organize the world have verbal labels and have been imposed on our thinking by the traditions of our speech community, many of our c o n c e p t s - p e r h a p s most of t h e m lack verbal equivalents. We all recognize categories of natural and artificial objects for which we have no names. I do not know the name of the small yellow flowers that proliferate in my pasture, but I nevertheless recognize them as a natural kind with certain universal c h a r a c t e r i s t i c s - f o r example, their unpalatability to horses. It seems parsimonious to assume that my horse is capable of a similar degree of abstraction and does not have to treat each of several thousand nasty-tasting little yellow flowers as a unique individual. To quote Midgley (1985, p. 56): If language were reallythe only source of conceptual order, all animals except man would live in a totally disordered world. They could not be said to vary in intelligence, since they could not have the use of anything that could reasonably be called intelligence at a l l . . . The truth seems to be that- even for humans- a great deal of the order of the world is pre-verbally determined, being the gift of faculties which we share with other animals. (Babies would be a lot worse off were this not so.) Of course the addition of language builds a magnificent superstructure on this foundation. But it does not replace it. The proposition that "animals do not think as we do, when we think in words, and that in so far as we are only conscious when we think in words, they lack conscious awareness" (Walker, 1983, p. 387) may seem plausible and attractive to academics and others who work with words for a living, but its implications are unacceptable. If thinking is essentially the activity of operating with words or mental images, then neither the musician improvising at the keyboard, nor the potter throwing a vase on the wheel, nor the choreographer blocking out a sequence of dance steps, nor the fencer executing a deceptive feint, nor the soccer player planning an assault on an undefended goal, are thinking. If we insist on denying that such complex nonverbal skills involve "thinking," some other word is needed to distinguish them from mere passive sentience or reflex action; and the same holds true for the less formalized but otherwise comparable mental abilities of many n o n h u m a n animals. Thorndike's (1911, p. 284) claim, that the skills of athletes, artists, and aesthetes are grounded merely in "the selection of impulses" and are therefore of a low and bestial sort, compared to those of more analytic thinkers like himself, is a notion that only a college professor or other professional wordsmith could ever have taken seriously.

CONCLUSIONS Whether chimpanzees, dolphins, and other animals can think or talk is a matter of definition. But it seems obvious that they can do more along

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those lines than we have until recently been willing to admit, and that what they can do is a necessary prerequisite to what only we can do. Whether Washoe's "water bird" was one signed noun or two, her ability to make such a signal in response to a trainer's q u e s t i o n - t o perceive that question as a question, and to reply to it with semantically appropriate a n s w e r s - i s part of a substratum o f animal cognitive and communicative capacities without which language and thinking of a distinctively human kind would be impossible. As Bickerton (1987) put it, "One of the remarkable things about apes is that they seem to have not the slightest difficulty in distinguishing between proper and c o m m o n nouns." This is the sort of protolinguistic fact about primate cognition that needs to be investigated and studied if we hope to learn anything about the origin of language. But such questions do not get asked as long as we remain fixated on human uniqueness. Neither do many similar questions about other supposedly unique human capacities. It is noteworthy, for instance, that not one of all the physical anthropologists who has studied and theorized about the mystery of human bipedalism and its origins has ever undertaken a systematic comparison of human beings with large flightless birds. A comparative study of ostriches or emperor penguins might shed a great deal of light on our own locomotor h a b i t s - a n d it would at least discourage solemn pronouncements about what extraordinary coordination and timing humans must have to walk around on two legs without falling over (Campbell, 1985, pp. 45-46). But such studies are not undertaken; we have absorbed too well our textbook lesson that hominids are unique among vertebrates in being truly erect bipeds, and that birds and bipedal dinosaurs are not comparable because their vertebral columns are not held upright. To understand the origin of anything, we must have an overarching body of theory that governs both the thing itself and its precursors. Without such a body of theory, we have no way of linking the precursor to its successors, and we are left with an ineffable mystery, like the one that Chomsky (1964, 1975) and Lenneberg (1964, 1967) have always insisted must lie at the origin of syntax. We are also left with a body of knowledge that cannot be understood as an implication of larger and more fundamental generalizations about the world, but is fated to remain logically isolated in a theoretical vacuum like that surrounding parapsychology. There are, of course, people who are happy with that. Some of the critics of sociobiology (e.g., Bock, 1980, p. 149 ff.), deny that any phenomena in human history can be explained in terms applicable to animals. Eldredge and Tattersall (1982, p. 24 ff.) deny the possibility of any general theory applying to more than one evolutionary lineage, and they reject sociobiology on that account. This puts evolutionary events outside the purview of scientific

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explanation and reduces us to drawing up cladograms and other statements of historical coincidence. The core of truth in what Eldredge and Tattersall are asserting is that differences between two species cannot be explained by taking one of them as a model for their last c o m m o n ancestor. As T o o b y and DeVote (1987) put it, "Even if one were to learn everything about the hominid-pongid c o m m o n ancestor, m a n y of the most crucial questions about distinctively hominid evolution would remain unanswered: why are we humans and not chimpanzees, bonobos, or gorillas?" No doubt, people are different f r o m the apes; but it is our job as scientists to explain those differences. Explanation, as opposed to mere storytelling, has to invoke law-like regularities connecting causes and effects. As Karl Popper put it: A singular event is the cause of another singular event- which is its effect- only relative to some universal l a w s . . . In so far as we are concerned with the historical explanation of typical eventsthey must necessarilybe treated as typical, as belongingto kinds or classes of events, For only then is the deductive method of causal explanation applicable. (Popper, 1957, pp. 146-147) It follows that if there are qualitative h u m a n uniquenesses that find no analogies of any sort a m o n g other species, they are not explicable. Our aim as scientists must be to explain as much as possible: to find animal analogs for h u m a n traits and to seek, as students of primate behavior have long sought, common patterns of adaptation underlying those analogies. We hope to find that the origin of our large brains and language and so on are explained by overarching theoretical regularities that apply to, say, all social animals, or all fo0d-sharing p r e d a t o r s , or to whatever categories turn out to have explanatory value and theoretical importance. To accept this h o p e - to seek to show that all things h u m a n are prefigured or paralleled in the lives and adaptations of our fellow a n i m a l s - i s at b o t t o m to doubt the reality of the moral b o u n d a r y that separates people f r o m the beasts. Whether we fear or welcome the dissolution of that b o u n d a r y is the real issue behind much of the recent debate over primate communication, sociobiology, and h u m a n evolution.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank Drs. Irven DeVore and Karen Strier for inviting me to participate in the symposium at which this article was presented. I a m ' g r a t e f u l to Drs. Kaye Brown, John Buettner-Janusch, and Russell Tuttle for the helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript, and to Drs. W. C. Hall and W. L. Hylander for pointing out several useful references.

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