2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
genetics, embryology, cytogenetics, botany, ecology, paleontology,
sedimentology, and other fields. Although it did not claim the mantle, it was
in many ways more in the spirit of Darwin than the neo-darwinians were.
Schindewolf’s student, Adolf Seilacher, was driven to the study of evolution
in part by experiencing radical contingency first-hand as a German soldier in
WWII. The grand narrative constituting his theory of history was shattered. In
a move reminiscent of the annales school, Seilacher investigated the quotidian
existence of worms, slugs, and other critters in the economy of nature via the
fossilized evidence of their tracks, trails, burrows, and death scenes to produce
a narrative of contingency, physical and developmental constraint, and
spectacular adaptation to local environments. In the 60’s and 70’s, young
American paleontologists (Raup, Eldredge, Gould, Stanley, inter alia) drew
on this German synthesis when they challenged the explanatory adequacy of
the “hardened” Modern Synthesis and the hegemony of population genetics,
to reassert macroevolution as a source of theory.
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Robert␣ N. Proctor Pennsylvania State University
When did Humans become Human? The Impact of Racial Liberalism on the
Recognition (and Denial) of Fossil Hominid Diversity 1944-2000
New fossil finds have revolutionized the understanding of fossil hominid
phyletic diversity in recent decades. Today, there is fairly wide acceptance of
the “bushiness” of the human ancestral tree—circa 10-20 different hominid
species in 3 separate genera over the past million years—though that
“consensus” was not established without a struggle. Recognition of fossil
hominid diversity was hampered by post-WWII conceptions of racial diversity,
especially the New Synthesis celebration of (intra-species) genetic variability,
but also the related liberal anti-racialist consensus that culminated in the
UNESCO Statement on Race. I will explore the impact of post-Auschwitz
racialist ideologies on conceptions of hominid diversity, focussing especially
on the so-called “single hominid hypothesis”—the idea put forward by
Dobzhansky, Mayr, Simpson, Brace, and others that only one hominid species
could ever exist at any given time in paleontologic history. The idea was partly
that genetic diversity was sufficient to embrace any and all hominids as
“human,” there was also the idea that the human cultural “niche” was too tight
to allow more than one occupying species. Morphologists contributed to the
myopia, with the idea that there simply wasn’t enough “morphologic space”
between A. africanus and H. erectus to shoehorn in another species. I plan to
trace the rise and fall of the single hominid hypothesis from the period 1920-
1950, when taxonomic diversity implied racial differentiation, to the period
1950-1970, when hominid diversity was shunned in the wake of the UNESCO
Statement, to the period 1970-1990, when diversity again came back into
fashion, albeit now without the racialist overtones that had colored much of
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