Oceania Publications, University of Sydney

The Ownership of Culture: Reconciling Our Common and Separate HeritagesAuthor(s): Jonathan StoneReviewed work(s):Source: Archaeology in Oceania, Vol. 27, No. 3, Evolution, Form and Geography: A Symposiumon Human Biology (Oct., 1992), pp. 161-167Published by: Oceania Publications, University of SydneyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40386955 .Accessed: 13/06/2012 14:25

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Persp. Hum. Biol. 2/Archaeol. Oceania 27 (1992) 89-90

The ownership of culture:

reconciling our common and separate heritages

JONATHANSTONE

Abstract

Physical anthropology is a young branch of science, but of enormous interest and achievement. With other aspects of anthropology, however, it has become the focus of criticism voiced by those whose history and traditions are the objects of its study. A resolution of this tension requires an understanding both of the scientific tradition criticised, and the social traditions which are the source of criticism. Ideas are canvassed which suggest that this conflict is a contemporary instance of a long tension between science - unpredictable, uncaring yet powerful - and the hopes which give rise to our great social visions and traditions. In particular it is argued that the criticism of anthropology is an extension of the contemporary advocacy of human rights. It is suggested that the resolution of the conflict may also emerge from the concept of human rights, in particular from the idea of a common human family, inherent in that concept.

Astronomy of our species

Someone must have said before this occasion that palaeontology is the astronomy of our species. Close events in either discipline can be studied closely, but the greatest events in both astronomy and physical anthro- pology are long past and now can be seen only in glimpses, because their traces have been degraded by time. Whatever thought or technology might be brought to bear, those events cannot be prodded and poked, in the modern reductionist way, until they are known in a detail which overwhelms all but the specialist. Astronomers and palaeontologists alike must be content to infer great events from faint traces.

There are of course many differences between these two disciplines, of which I would dwell on just one, the comparative youth of anthropology. Astronomy is perhaps the most ancient of sciences. Its beginnings are found in ancient China, Mesopotamia and Greece, and the modern discipline dates from Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543), thus early in the Renaissance. Physical anthropology, by contrast, has few ancient roots. The discipline is usually traced back to the late 18th century, to the work of Johann Blumenbach. For his doctoral dissertation, published in 1777, Blumenbach chose the topic De generis humani varietate nativa (On the varieties of native humans). This topic was to be his lifelong interest, pursued at the University of Göttingen,

where he assembled a celebrated collection of human crania, organised to illustrate his division of humans into five groups, the Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American and Malayan.

But Blumenbach's work concerned modern humans. The extension of anthropology to the prehistory of Homo was delayed for another 100 years, until the late 19th Century, fully two hundred years after Harvey (1628), Galileo (1632) and Newton (1687, 1704) had laid the foundations of modern astronomy, medicine, mathematics and physics. The study of the evolution of Homo sapiens was not delayed by any dryness of its subject or complexity of its practice; there are few sciences as intrinsically interesting or technically straightforward. The palaeontology of hominids was delayed until it could be imagined.

Comparative anatomists had of course been aware of the similarities between modern apes and humans, at least since the end of the 17th Century1, but those similarities were explained in the intellectual framework of their times, as the product of separate creation. It required a series of intellectual revolutions - to set aside the authority of scripture and church, to accept that issues such as the age of the earth, and the origin of species are properly to be understood by observation not revelation, and then, hardest of all, to accept the often disconcerting outcome of observation - before the palaeontology of hominids could become part of the scientific enterprise.

Accordingly, it was only in the latter part of the 19th Century that anthropologists began to realize that the human fossils they were studying might belong to species distinct from modern man, and that among those hominids they might be able to trace the evolution of Homo sapiens. The discipline has been vigorous and of enormous public interest ever since but, until the revolu- tion in biology which we call evolution, any attempt to trace those origins would have been damned, as was evolution itself, as morally wrong.

Now, barely a century after the intellectual ground was cleared for the study of human evolution, the discipline is under attack, declared morally wrong, an arrogant imposition of the values of oppressors on the oppressed. For many anthropologists, who took pride in the knowledge they had gathered of the history and cultural variety of indigenous communities, the attack came as a shock; it seemed an unwelcome step back to times thankfully forgotten, when the cardinals of Rome preferred not to look through Galileo's telescope lest their Department of Anatomy, University of Sydney, NSW 2006

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world-view be threatened (see Gingerich 1982 for a recent account), but instead turned on science, and showed Galileo the rack.

Because the conflict has arisen in our day, the task of resolving it falls on us, and it falls not simply on anthro- pologists or on the people of the affected minorities, but also on those between. To identify a resolution to the conflict we need first to understand it; and in search of that understanding, I would today ask three questions of it: What is actually happening in this conflict? Why is it happening now? and For what resolution might we hope?

Hope and experience

To understand the conflict itself, we must somehow understand both the urge to investigate and record which compels anthropologists, and the hopes and fear and anger which compel their critics.

The power and amorality of science

For those of us for whom science is a familiar intellec- tual framework, it is easy to forget how impersonal, uncaring and threatening science can seem. The threat arises from two features of science: its enormous success and its amorality. Science has produced the technology which continues to transform our lives but, even more impressively, science has changed our understanding of ourselves and our world. Science has made a flat earth round, it has sent the earth spinning around the sun, it has banished diseases before which magic and prayer were helpless, it has traced the history of stars into times more ancient than any mystic imagined, and it has, from scattered fossil fragments, reconstructed the evolution of our species, confirming our continuity with other animals, marginalising the scriptural view of special creation. Science has proved to be an awesomely powerful intellectual venture.

Despite its intellectual power, however, science lacks moral power. Aldous Huxley's comment on sport 'Like every other instrument man has invented, sport can be used of good or evil purposes' is correct in making no exception for science. Power structures, by definition, use any resource available, including scientific knowledge and technology, for purposes as often evil as good. Although the distinction between an instrument and a source of evil seems clear, critics of science commonly conflate the two, and damn science as the source of evil because it is the instrument. And, if one is committed to make the point, there is ammunition enough: the role of scientific knowledge in the technology of weapons, of genocide and of state surveillance. This criticism may be made in two forms.

In one, science is viewed as part of evil elites. This claim, I argue, is unsustainable, for science has served many good purposes, to reduce suffering in the face of illness, to generate food in the face of famine, to replace ignorance with understanding, to fight environmental damage. Moreover, science has, on memorable occasions,

opposed powerful elites, for example, the Church of Rome over astronomy, the Church of England over evolution, Stalin's USSR over genetics. In any case, most science cannot be sensibly understood as either part of power structures or as part of their opposition. Many of the great ideas of this century - relativity, quantum theory, the theory of tectonic plates, the molecular basis of heredity in DNA, the ionic basis of brain function, the 'big bang' theory of the origin of the universe - were at their discovery quite irrelevant to the great social conflicts of their time (though the applications of some were harnessed quickly enough). Scientists may become committed for good and evil, but science, the intellectual venture, is the source of neither.

The second criticism of science is the lesser in gravity, but the harder to refute. It is charged that science is the sum of the work of individual scientists, who may from time to time do good or evil, and that science can therefore be considered good or evil in various times and places. Yet, no scientist's work flows without modifica- tion into the stream of ideas which is called science2. Despite Newton's stature as a scientist, his extensive work on alchemy and biblical texts, described for example by his biographer More (1934:159) have found no place in science. The astronomer measurements of Tycho Brahe, the great 16th Century Danish astronomer, were unrival- led in their scope and precision and led him to propose the Tychonic' system of planetary movements (described by Thoren 1990:Ch. 16). Yet it was on Brahe's measurements that Kepler relied to demonstrate the elliptical orbits of the planets, giving great impetus to Copernicus' helio- centric concept of planetary movements, which surpassed Brahe's view. Cuvier (1812) was the pre-eminent compara- tive anatomist of his day, and his descriptions of the structures common to the mammals remain milestones of evolutionary biology. Yet Cuvier interpreted those similarities in terms of special creation. Evidently 'science' is both less and more than the sum of the works of scientists. It is less because most of the work of individual scientists does not survive long in the main- stream of scientific knowledge; it is more because the process of science makes that knowledge independent of the views of its discoverers.

There is reason to stress the reality of this process by which knowledge and concepts are incorporated into and rejected from the mainstream of science. Most scientists, and many philosophers of science, would agree that the process is one of testing ideas against continuing obser- vation; and they would agree also that no-one can predict, still less control, the course of that testing, and thereby the course of scientific knowledge.3 Without such predicta- bility, no scientist can be a dependable authority, and no branch of science can dependably support a non- scientific (social) agenda. Individual scientist can and do use their discipline to pursue social causes, but the values which impel them to those causes do not come from science. It follows that science has nothing to offer to those of us who yearn, as we all do, for values, for the realisation of a vision of justice, for a purpose in life. If

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you ask a biologist what the future holds, you will learn of ecological crisis fuelled by human overpopulation; if you ask a physical scientist, you will learn that all life on the planet seem certain to be extinguished as the sun, running out of fuel, expands around its planets (as described for example in Dicus et ai (1983). Science seems threatening because it is powerful, intractable and uncaring. The product of our intellect, it gives no comfort to the hopes, fears and visions which arises so reliably from the mystical side of the human mind.

Springing eternal: hope and reason

Large areas of non-scientific culture are, of course, never in conflict with science; I am thinking particularly of art, music and much of literature. But the cosmologi- cal aspects of religion; deist or spiritualist theories of disease and disaster; the belief that human fortunes are determined by the planets; religious teachings of creation and dreamtime, of the age of the earth, of the relationship between humans and other animals, of the place of humanity in nature, all are constantly bumping into science, and from time to time clashing with it. The clash over the study of human prehistory is just one of many such conflicts.

To give an example of such a clash, Ellen Bielawski (1989) traces the effect of counting years on Western and Inuit perceptions of the Arctic past. Archeologists see surviving traces of the Palaeoeskimo occupation of the Arctic (between 1,000 and 4,000 years ago) and they frame questions about the relationship between ancient and modern Inuit. The modern Inuit see the same traces, but interpret them as part of an unchanging, world; the archaeologists' questions, without intending to do so, challenge the Inuit's understanding of their own past. Mulvaney (1991) discusses the reactions of Australian Aboriginal writers to the same challenge, and Zimmer- man (1989) traces several similar contrasts between time as viewed by archeologists and time as viewed by indigenous peoples.

It is fruitful to place these contrasts in a broader context. In all sciences, from embryology to astronomy, and in everyday life, the view of time gained when it is measured is a powerful tool. But the conventional measurement of time assumes its linear progress, and raises difficult questions of the beginning of time and of its end. Those problems were evident to ancient philosophers, both secular and religious, of both East and West, who answered with a rich range of views: that time is cyclical (a corollary of the cycle being reincarnation), or illusory (because past and future are embedded in the present), or divisible into manageable epochs by moments of truth-bearing apocalypse. The tension over the nature of time which has arisen between indigenous communi- ties and anthropologists is thus part of a much wider and older debate, to whose tensions every human who takes an interest becomes subject. In a slightly broader sense, the tension between indigenous traditions and the findings and assumptions of anthropology is part of a

debate as old as science. When scientific concepts trouble existing cultures, as did Copernican astronomy and Darwinian evolution, it is because those concepts contradict long-held beliefs in the nature of the universe and of the human place therein. To take a modern example, the scientific reality of human overpopulation of planet Earth is resisted, I have argued elsewhere (Stone, 1990, 1992), because it challenges long-held traditions of charity, privacy and individual rights.

The feature common to non-scientific traditions challenged by science is that they provide what science cannot - a concept of the purposefulness of human existence, a sense of harmony of past, present and future. They are hopeful views of the world, and their clash with science is at its core a clash between hope and experience. These clashes occur as much within western culture as between western and indigenous cultures. Indeed the clash occurs within each individual; in 1616, for example, at the inception of modern science, Galileo foresaw 'a terrible detriment for the soul if people found themselves convinced by proof of something it was made then a sin to believe'. Each of us tries to construct a meaningful view of this difficult world both in terms of religious purpose, drawing on the hope that arises so reliably from the human breast; and each of us also tries, to construct a meaningful view of the same world in terms of experi- ence, drawing on the curiosity that arises so reliably from the human intellect.

Why now? The history of hope

The clash between anthropology and indigenous cultures is, I have argued above, a contemporary instance of a wider and older clash of views, and it is of interest to ask why it is occuring now, not 50 years ago or 50 years hence. The answer requires, of course, an understanding of the dynamics of indigenous cultures. Those who have written of these dynamics (e,g, in the volumes edited by McBryde, 1985, Layton, 1989), note the increasing self-confidence of these cultures, and their desire to control their history, their artefacts and their future. Others, for example Trigger (1985) and Willmot (1985), have stressed the constructive adaptation of indigenous communities to the challenges to their past and destiny posed by the majorities which surround them, the need for majority communities to acknowledge that adapta- bility, and the need for archeologists and other scholars to recognise it in the debate over 'who owns the past?' I explore here the symmetrical point: that, however secure majority communities may seem, they too are facing challenges to old assumptions of their past and destiny, and that their adaptations to those challenges must also be understood, if we are to understand the clash which is my subject.

Western societies now have rich written histories, too complex to be dealt with sensibly in an essay. I would trace just one strand of that history, which I choose because I suspect that it is fundamental to the understanding I seek; that strand is the role of hope in shaping the great social

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visions of the West, and in reforming them to successive and (hopefully) better visions of human society. Hope has been at conception and birth of all great social visions, and has led us to visions of salvation, of eternal life, of harmony with nature, of justice among nations, of peace on earth, of peace in the sight of God. But hope pursued has proved not just elusive, but a source of enormous human misery. Again and again in the history of the West, we have seen movements of passionate hope create fears and taboos which have led us to inflict the most awful suffering on our fellow humans.

For many centuries, religious faith was the vehicle of western hopes for justice, but we have learnt not to rely on faith as the foundation of government. Our present caution was reached only after centuries of bloodshed in the name of faith, in the Crusades, in the 30 Years' War, in the long struggle between the Churches of Rome and England, in the harsh discipline of the Congregation of the Inquisition. The hope that grew in the 18th Century, that the principles of egalitarianism and brotherhood would provide a securer foundation for justice than had faith, foundered in the bloodshed of the French Revolu- tion and of the Napoleonic wars which followed. The powerful imperialist dreams of the European powers in the 19th Century inspired their great explorations, but also drew them into continental conflicts, and finally world war.

From the ashes of World War I grew yet another version of hope. The idea of class equality sown in the French Revolution was reformulated by Marx and Engels (1886, 1888) into the doctrine that all social injustice has its origin in class oppression. The Marxist- Leninist vision of righting social injustice by the revolu- tionary overthrow of capitalism led half the world into a nightmare of repression-in-the-name-of-hope from which it is still awakening. And the fascist dream that the human spirit can flower in the expression of populist will, unsullied by the interminable arguments of democracy or the internationalist vision communism, precipitated and was destroyed by the horror of World War II.

The period since the end of the Second World War - our time - has been an extraordinary time in the history of the West; Hobsbawm (1992:6) for example described this period as 'the forty most revolutionary years in the history of human society'. It began with a burst of hope in the availability of peace, now that fascism was dis- credited, along with religious absolutism, egalitarianism, imperialism and patriotism, as an acceptable vehicle for hope. The transnational concept of the League of Nations, established in the aftermath of World War I, was revived by the victors of the Second World War in the United Nations, committed by its Charter to the main- tenance of international peace and security, the establish- ment of friendly relations between nations, and the peaceful settlement of disputes. It might have been expected, given human history, that the vision of a union of nations would be thwarted by the fear that arose among the victors, between the one visionary movement

left among them - communism - and the democracies of the West, and that that fear would lead to another war.

What could not have been predicted was the nature of the war which broke out among the victors of WWII, the long frightening yet peaceful Cold War. Its effects on the protagonists have been extraordinary. The communist states enjoyed enormous successes during the early decades if the Cold War, seeing the spread of their revolutionary vision through Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, Laos and Cambodia and forcing the humiliation of the democracies in Vietnam. Domestically and peacefully, they made startling advances in industrialisation, space exploration, and sport. Yet beneath that success, their fabric was relentlessly corroded by their lack of popular assent. By the late 1980's, their success was a facade around an exhausted core and, late in that decade, the communist regimes of the Soviet Union and eastern Europe crumbled, as the democracies watched in amazement. In the case of the Soviet Union the crumbling was of historical dimensions; it was perhaps the first time that a great state had peacefully accepted the failure of its hopes and vision.

In the democracies, by contrast, the brutality of the fascist states during WWII, and the brutality with which the Communist states repressed dissent throughout the Cold War, reinforced our bitter memories of our own periods of political and religious absolutism. Our confidence in democracy grew, not as a course to political perfection, but as a course without extremes. Our major political parties sense now that they can be elected to power only if they claim the middle ground; political parties which keep alive old visions of religious and political zeal persist, but are marginalised by a stubborn popular distrust. That distrust has made us politically stable, and that stability has given us economic prosperity, and that prosperity has given us the time and security and energy to attend to a whole basket of social inequalities neglected through the long decades in which we struggled to survive great waves of war, economic depression and ideological fervour.

In the US, a powerful civil rights movement grew in the 1950's, to confront the states of the old Confederacy, whose persistent resentment of their defeat in the Civil War had kept American blacks disenfranchised and persecuted for a century after their formal emancipation. The untenability of imperialism was recognised, and the colonial European powers withdrew from Africa and Asia, for the most part peaceably. Regimes which had institutionalised racial division, particularly the white regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa, became the object of western concern and sanctions, and great efforts were made to end those regimes. In Australia, the cruelty and failure of imagination of our treatment of the Aboriginal peoples began to be recognised and tackled with the enfranchisement of the Aboriginal people, the establish- ment of land councils and many other measures taken at both state and federal levels (as outlined for example in Sullivan, 1985). Throughout the West, the legal status of women was addressed and gradually made equal to that

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of men. And the concept of multiculturalism was formulated to combat the petty persecutions and humiliations suffered by ethnic minorities in most western societies.

These many reforms are often discussed as forming a broad movement of concern for 'human rights'. In the shadow of nuclear war, we found the stability, prosperity, security and energy to give long-neglected social injustices of gender, race, poverty and ethnicity some of the reforming attention they had long deserved. European societies had of course seen earlier periods of great reform; perhaps the unique feature of the Cold War reforms was the momentum they gathered in so many western countries without serious rumbles of revolution. It is in this climate of stable reform that majority societies have begun to hear and respond to the claims of indig- enous peoples for recognition of their rights. In a way we might now recognise as characteristic of our species, however, we have over-invested hope in human rights, allowing ourselves to dream that a world free of want and misery can be achieved through zeal in their cause. Campaigns to end the racism of white minorities in Africa have confused whiteness with racism and imperialism, until in the 1970's even South African journalists were excluded from the Olympic games, yet Idi Amin was accepted as Chairman of the Organisation of African Unity. We have so equated blackness with suffering and powerlessness that we still refer to the black rights movement in the US as a civil rights movement, despite the bitter and violent anti-whitism and anti-Semitism now intermingled with its genuine grievances. The campaign for the removal of discrimination against women has been pursued past the boundaries of prejudice, until speech codes are imposed even in those traditional havens of dissent, our universities, and debates over academic freedom (Wortman 1991) and museum holdings (Wilson, 1985) are constrained by a threat of attack. As we once protected religion with the taboos of heresy and blas- phemy, we now protect the cherished ideals of human rights with the taboos called imperialism, colonialism, chauvinism and racism, so now someone who expresses concern at the environmental impact of immigration is likely to be damned as a crypto-racist (for example in Macleod, 1991:333). And we have set up tribunals to deal with breaches of these taboos. To today's advocates of human rights, anti-discrimination boards are important instruments of social re-education about and liberation from the evils of racism, sexism and homophobia. To those who remember the history of the West, these boards carry an echo - happily still faint - of the tribunals set up by the French and Russian revolutions, of the Congre- gation of the Inquisition, and of the House Committee for Un-American Activities, all of which were seen by advocates of other causes as important instruments for social re-education about and liberation from the perceived evils of their times - monarchism or revolu- tion, radicalism or counter-revolution, communism or fascism, or religious heresy of this form or that. The fact that at the core of these tribunals there has always been an

attempt to confront real evils only makes their descent into intolerance more likely and more dangerous.

It is in this climate of advocacy for human rights that a deep gulf has opened between the outlook of anthropolo- gists, who take pride in the understanding they have gained of the history and culture of the communities they have studied, and that of indigenous peoples world-wide who, in varying ways and to varying degrees, criticise and even condemn the discipline, for example in Langford (1983), Richardson, (1989), and Turner (1989). As always in such conflicts, there is much to be said on both sides. Certainly, the injustices left unattended by decades of war, depression and ideological fervour are aching sores in our social structure, whose healing is of great importance. Certainly, some of the actions of some scientists over that time have been part of those injustices, and have fully warranted criticism. The problem has been that the criticism has been extended from particular actions of scientists, to the venture of science as a whole.

Resolution

How will the current tension between the science of anthropology and the social claims of minorities be resolved? The histories of earlier conflicts between hope and experience suggest two outcomes. First, such conflicts are resolved with time, and so far in ways which allow the continuation of scientific enquiry; in all their previous clashes, hope has yielded to experience. Second, the time required may be considerable; past such conflicts have rarely been resolved by a decisive consensus, but have faded away over decades as the passions which precipi- tated them, and the protagonists of the passions, grew old. Galileo's confrontation with the Congregation of the Inquisition dragged on for 25 years, and ended only with his death, still under house arrest 8 years after his trial (Gingerich, 1982), and by that time Cardinal Bellarmino and the several of his colleagues who had summoned Galileo to examination by the Congregation had also passed on. Darwin published his Origins in 1859 and the debate over evolution persisted for several decades , and indeed persists to this day.

I am optimistic however that this conflict will be resolved more quickly and constructively, for several reasons. First, it is already understood by the community at large that the concerns of minorities for the just recognition of their cultural values and for a proper role in decisions which affect their cultural values, are concerns we must all share. Anthropologists have given concrete expression of their commitment to those community values in the Vermillion Accord adopted by the Executive Committee of the First Inter-Congress of the World Archaeological Congress, meeting in the city of Vermillion (South Dakota) in August 1989 and the First Code of Ethics adopted by the Council of the Second World Archaeological Congress, meeting in Venezuela in 1990. Both are voluntary codes adopted by scientists by their own initiative; both recognise the duty of anthropol- ogists to respect the rights and sensitivities of those whose

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culture becomes the object of scientific study. Second, the case against anthropology will in time be eroded by its assumption that the discipline is undertaken by scientists for their personal aggrandisement; Langford, for example (1983) refers to anthropology as '. . . your profession which made its international reputation by digging up, analysing and proclaiming upon the Aboriginal dead.' Some scientists do gain distinction from their achieve- ments; but then some leaders of minority groups gain distinction from the leadership they provide to their people. Neither science nor minority movements are discredited thereby. The urge to discover through observa- tion and reason is intrinsic to us all, and will I believe come to be shared by cultures which now, angered by the oppression they have suffered, mistakenly condemn science as the source of the agenda of the majority which surrounds them.

Finally, it seems to me that the fundamental commit- ments of the human rights movement will contribute to the resolution of that conflict. In some ways this hope may seem forlorn, for the concept of that all humans should enjoy equal rights encourages the assertion of minority claims, perpetuating cultural and language differences within nations or continents. Hobsbawm (1992) for example argues that the resurgence in the recent history of Europe of local nationalisms, seen most dramatically in the breakup the USSR and Yugoslavia, results from a fraying and fragmentation of old social values, and he concludes with a paradox, that: What holds humanity together today is the denial of what the human race has in common.

I would add that the concept of human rights seems to require both points of the Hobsbawm's paradox, both recognition of minority claims and the 'you-us' fragmen- tation which they produce, and recognition of the interdependence of all humans, best expressed by the lines of John Donne (1571 - 1631) from his Devotions:

No man is an Island, entire of itself . . . Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

The resolution of that paradox will take time, for it involves defining the limits of particular and universal claims, as well as the mastering of anger created by injustices old and new. I am perhaps more optimistic than Hobsbawm in sensing that such a resolution can be reached. Part of the resolution will be an acceptance that the claim of common humanity, which places a duty on majorities to respect and care for oppressed minorities, also places some level of duty on every human group, whether major or minor, not to exclude the rest of humanity from their culture. When we have learnt to resolve the tension between the fragmentation and universalism which the human rights movement equally encourages, perhaps we will then accept that the culture of each human group is the culture of us all. Perhaps then, ways will be found to enable each group to share its past (Pardoe, 1990), even as it seeks to protect and preserve it.

For the moment it remains uncertain how long it will take, and how many of the faint traces of the great events of human evolution will be destroyed, before that resolution is reached.

Notes

1. The Encycloaedia Britannica (vol 14:928) identifies the 1699 work of Edward Tyson, an English physician, in which he compared the anatomy of humans and chimpanzees, as a landmark of comparative anatomy in 1699.

2. Popper, in his 1972 essay Kant's Critique and Cosmology credits Kant with the insight that science cannot be purely inductive, that the experimenter 'must cross-examine nature in the same light of his doubts . . . theories . . . ideas . . . Here, I believe, is a wonderful philosophical find. It makes it possible to look upon science ... as a human creation, and to look upon its history as part of the history of ideas . . .'.

3. I do not mean hereby to dismiss the notion of social responsibility in science. I have argued elsewhere (Stone 1990) that there are clear, limit situations in which scientists can and should choose to desist from certain work, or to put their energies into particular problems.

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