Digging Deep for the Human Factor

BONES OF CONTENTION Controversies in the Search for Human Origins. Roger Lewin. Simon and Schuster, New York, 1987:348 pp. $19.95. Human beings can err. Not only can they err, they can be driven to error by their prejudices, their preconceptions, their personal rivalries, even their religious beliefs, all of whieh may color their assessmentof the data. That’s the theme of Bones of Contention, Roger Lewin’s look into the controversies that have bedeviled paleoanthropology throughout its history as a science. In one of several scientific quarrels that Lewin examines in satisfying depth, the dispute surrounds volcanic crystals of feldspar. Were they at least 2.4 million years old, thus proving that fossils from a precursor of man discovered by Richard Leakey in Ethiopia dated from the same period or earlier? Or only 1.9 million years old, as other evidence and lines of argument suggested? Who cares? If the answer. changes how we view our relationship to the rest of the animal kingdom and to nature itself, we’re all apt to care, if in some cases tepidly. Caring passionately, though, were the scientists embroiled in the dispute. For them, egos and reputations were on the line. And caring so much could not help but influence their reading of the data. Scientists are above all that? Hardly, says Lewin, especially in paleoanthropology, where the fossil data are thin and scattered, and the theory needed to interpret them is most vulnerable to shading. The book is interesting and welltold, if a little quote-heavy. If it was Lewin’s intent to make and defend a thesis—that our views of human origins are colored by the preconceptions of scientists and the cultural milieu they inhabit—he has succeeded admirably. Yet he has succeeded almost too well. In Lewin’s hands, paleoanthropology is reduced to unrelieved, sometimes petty squabbling driven almost solely by culture-bound preconceptions. To explore “controversies in the search for human origins,” was, of course, his intent. Yet by keeping so resolutely to task, he loses all chance of fashioning the kind of rounded, balanced portrait of scientific work that might have made this book, good as it is, a better one. Needed, perhaps, is a backdrop against which the controversies might stand in bold relief. Why not, in a book about paleoanthropology, a few pages devoted to what actually happens at the site of a find, the process by which it’s unearthed, the steps taken to record it, the orderly and accepted methods by which it is studied for clues to its origins? True, we pick up a little here and there—and in Lewin’s fascinating look at fossils dating methods quite a lot. But it’s not enough. We need to know better the paleoanthropological establishment’s version of how its science works before we can appreciate how the social factors of such concern to Lewin color it. Lewin’s is among a spate of recent popular science books that seek to overturn the myth that scientists are simply great minds unburdened by the ordinary human conceits and fueled only by jewellike Reason. By now the regular reader of such books must be dull indeed not to have gotten the point. May it now be time for a revisionist view? One acknowledging that scientists are influenced by personal, social and cultural factors without denying that their methods, their techniques, their body of amassed knowledge are not without some small role to play? Kanigel is the author of Apprentice to Genius: The Making of a Scientific Dynasty (Macmillan 1986). His address is 2643 North Calvert St., Baltimore, MD 212

Digging Deep for the Human Factor

BONES OF CONTENTION

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