Habilus Erectus

I'm back, after a ridiculously long hiatus. Nothing for all of July? Two months gone? Absurd! I promise my estimated 0.06 readers that I will do better.

Lots of ideas have come and gone. Oh, well.

Today's inspiration was a pretty stupid AP story that I saw yesterday in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. It was a science story, and they're always bad. Basic information buried. Phony spin. No context. Oversimplified for idiots in a way that makes the story nearly incomprehensible to anyone with a whit of understanding to begin with.

Here's the deal. There are lots of species (or proposed species, or subspecies) of genus Homo, which includes the species of modern humans, Homo sapiens. For example, H. ergaster, H. neanderthalensis, H. heidelbergensis, H. georgicus, and so on. No one can be completely sure if a piece of skull from here or seven individuals from there is really a distinct species or not, so there could be at least a dozem, or maybe not. The two really old ones that are known, which are common and well established, are Homo erectus and Homo habilis. H. habilis is the oldest known, followed by H. erectus. There's been a longstanding puzzle exactly how the family tree looks for those old days because remains are scarce. Maybe there's more "missing links" to be undug.

The story is that they found a really old erectus -- older than any previously known -- in the same general area as an old habilis of about the same age.

This shows that erectus came about earlier than previously understood, and that it could co-exist with habilis without either species (presumably the newer and better erectus) driving the other out of existence by its superiority in a general competition to survive. This further implies the two species occupied distinct niches, and may have been under evolutionary pressure to dissimilate. The discovery also makes it more plausible that erectus might have existed even earlier than did the newly discovered , and that it could have evolved not from habilis, but from some as-yet undiscovered precursor.

I found that very hard to figure out from the article, which is larded with pseudoscientific garbage about whether human evolution is "linear" or not.

Now, the missing link idea I referenced above is mostly popular mythology. No one who does evolutionary anthropology has thought for a very long time that there was any validity to the idea that humankind evolved up a ladder or across the panel of a newspaper comic, gradually but inexorably growing less hairy and more erect through an orderly progression as though with a target end form in mind. This is so much old-fashioned simplistic magical predestination, nature is good, the world is orderly wishful thinking carried over from a 19th-century religious mindset.

Instead, you have a complicated family tree. Evolution is a natural process with lots of trial and error. Looking back, you can make up a linear progression from primoridial ooze to any modern form of organism you pick by simply ignoring all the side lineages along the way. Such a constructed linear picture, particularly when manipulated to make change appear gradual and homogenous, may be accurate as far as it describes the direct ancestry of an organism, but it carries with it a misleading message to the lay public that evolution is an arrow pointed at a final form.

Yet the news article proceeds from the premise that what is really important about some new Homo bones is that it puts further to rest an image which has long been relegated to the unschooled and those using outdated elementary school textbooks. It is full of stuff about whether erectus and habilis are "sister" species or "mother and daughter," which is itself misleading, since all mother and daughter species are sisters as well -- it's not as though a magic wand could have passed over all the hibiles and turned them into erecti -- the daughter is always a sister for at least some period. Likewise, although the use of the phrase "common ancestor" is scientifically correct, it should be noted that the common ancestor of species A and B might well be one or the other and not necessarily a third: any two species have a comon ancestor if you go far enough back.

I cannot say the article was inaccurate. But it said very little and took a lot of effort to make sense of because it really wanted to tell me things that it thought would have some lay currency, but made me wonder, "scientifically, what is that supposed to mean?" I have the same problem with a lot of legal reporting. If the reporting is not wrong, it's simply confusing. For example, a report will say a judge ruled that Mr. X can stand trial for Y. What does that mean? Was there a motion to declare him incompetent to stand trial? Was there a motion to dismiss? Was there a preliminary hearing? A challenge to jurisdiction? Was Y the only charge? Was there something specific about Y? Even if the report is accurate, I have to question, based on experience, whether it is.

It's frustrating.