Category: anthropology

RIP Philip Tobias

July 10, 2012 • 10:01 am

If you haven’t heard of Philip Tobias—and you should if you know a bit about human evolution—you will have heard of the Sterkfontein Caves, a World Heritage Site excavated by Tobias, a paleoanthropologist who spent most of his career at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Tobias died Saturday June 7 at age 86.   (I was off by a month, and hadn’t heard the news, but the man still deserves an RIP.)

Tobias was a student of Raymond Dart, who discovered the first austraolpithecine fossils in 1924, also in South Africa (I describe Dart’s dramatic find at the beginning of my chapter on human evolution in WEIT). Tobias was also mentored by the Leakeys, and worked at Olduvai on the famous hominin fossil nicknamed “Nutcracker Man” or “Dear Boy”.  As the New York Times obituary notes:

Dr. Tobias wrote a treatise that described Dear Boy in minute, almost microscopic detail.

“That monograph continues to be the benchmark on how we should chronicle these important discoveries,” said the paleoanthropologist Donald C. Johanson, co-discoverer of the famous hominin fossil Lucy and founding director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University. “It’s on every paleoanthropologist’s shelf.”

“Nutcracker Man” became the holotype specimenof Paranthropus boisei (formerly Zinjanthropus), a robust hominin (ergo the name, derived from its massive teeth) that was a sterile offshoot of the hominin tree.

The NYT adds this:

In the 1960s, Dr. Tobias became involved in excavations at South Africa’s Sterkfontein caves, which yielded a trove of hominin fossils and tools, including a specimen called Little Foot, an unusually complete hominin skeleton whose age has been estimated at 2.3 million to 4 million years. Dr. Tobias campaigned successfully to have the caves declared a World Heritage site.

“Little Foot” is an australopithecine whose affinities are still uncertain.

And an obit at tributes notes that Sterkfontein is where over a third of all known early hominin fossils have been found, including specimens of Paranthropus, Australopithecus, and Homo.

Finally, Tobias was a fierce opponent of apartheid during the years it was the law in South Africa (Witwatersrand, or “Wits,” was a center for both black and white opposition to apartheid.) The Times describes a lecture he gave in Stony Brook in 2006:

In his Stony Brook lecture, Dr. Tobias said he wanted to correct accounts in several books that said Louis Leakey had browbeaten him into agreeing that Homo habilis was a distinct species. Dr. Tobias said that he had come around gradually to agreeing with him, but that his agreement was based strictly on the evidence.

“My personality was not such as to be easily browbeaten into a certain standpoint,” Dr. Tobias said. “My individualism had stood behind me in my 40-years-long fight against apartheid and the inroads against academic freedom by the apartheid government of South Africa.”

Tobias in 2006 in Johannesburg, where he taught. Photo for the NYT by Alexander Joe/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A book to anticipate—with a bit of trepidation

May 15, 2012 • 8:26 am

Reader Phil called my attention to a new book by primatologist Frans de Waal that will be published next year, The Bonobo and the Atheist  (March 2013, W. W. Norton, though Amazon says Feb. 25).

The Norton description sounds intriguing:

Drawing on his landmark research, esteemed primatologist Frans de Waal traces the biological roots of human morality.

In this thoroughly engaging book, leading primatologist and thinker Frans de Waal offers a heartening, illuminating new perspective on human nature. Bringing together his pioneering research on primate behavior, the latest findings in evolutionary biology, and insights from moral philosophy, de Waal explains that we don’t need the specters of God or the law in order to act morally. Instead, our moral nature stems from our biology—specifically, our primate social emotions, which include empathy, reciprocity, and fairness. We can glimpse this in the behavior of our closest relatives in the animal kingdom: chimpanzees soothe distressed neighbors, and bonobos will voluntarily open a door to offer a companion access to their own food. Building on a wealth of evidence, de Waal reveals that morality is not dictated to us by religion or social strictures. Rather, it is the inevitable product of our biological nature.

The fact that the roots of morality can be seen in some of our closest relatives is a common theme of de Waal’s work.  And the rejection of God-given morality implied by the description is heartening—a good palliative for the “Moral Law” argument of Francis Collins.

What worries me a bit, though, is what Frans posted 24 hours ago on his public Facebook page:

The book is almost done! It is a reflection on religion and the origins of morality. It questions whether we get any closer to the truth by bashing religion, the way neo-atheists have been doing, even though I also believe that morality antedates modern religion. The book is of course heavy on primate behavior, but also covers philosophy, discusses medieval art, and seeks a way of bridging the gap (loved by philosophers) between facts and values. All in one book!

De Waal has gone after New Atheists before, most notably in a New York Times piece I highlighted in October of 2010. There he said this:

Over the past few years, we have gotten used to a strident atheism arguing that God is not great (Christopher Hitchens) or a delusion (Richard Dawkins). The new atheists call themselves “brights,” thus hinting that believers are not so bright. They urge trust in science, and want to root ethics in a naturalistic worldview.

While I do consider religious institutions and their representatives — popes, bishops, mega-preachers, ayatollahs, and rabbis — fair game for criticism, what good could come from insulting individuals who find value in religion? And more pertinently, what alternative does science have to offer? Science is not in the business of spelling out the meaning of life and even less in telling us how to live our lives. We, scientists, are good at finding out why things are the way they are, or how things work, and I do believe that biology can help us understand what kind of animals we are and why our morality looks the way it does. But to go from there to offering moral guidance seems a stretch.

Even the staunchest atheist growing up in Western society cannot avoid having absorbed the basic tenets of Christian morality. Our societies are steeped in it: everything we have accomplished over the centuries, even science, developed either hand in hand with or in opposition to religion, but never separately. It is impossible to know what morality would look like without religion. It would require a visit to a human culture that is not now and never was religious. That such cultures do not exist should give us pause.

I welcome de Waal’s demonstrations and arguments for the origin of morality as at least a partial inheritance from our primate ancestors.  But the atheist-dissing seems gratuitious, something that doesn’t belong in a book of this type unless de Waal is trying to occupy some nonexistent “middle ground” (“halfway to crazy town,” as P.Z. calls it).  The goal of New Atheism, as I see it, is not mainly to insult religious individuals, but to question the tenets of belief, point out the invidious consequences of unsupported belief, and question the unwarranted privilege that religion has arrogated to itself. Surely that’s something that a scientist like de Waal would approve of.

And what would morality look like without religion? Have a gander at Scandinavia.  That doesn’t look too bad to me; in fact, the region looks more moral than the U.S.   Please, Frans, lay off the gratuitious and incorrect characterizations of New Atheism.

But I will of course read Frans’s book, as I’ve greatly enjoyed his other books on primate behavior. You can order it here.