Tattersall Ian
Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History, 200 Central Park West, New York NY 10024, USA,
J Anthropol Sci. 2022 Dec 30;100:19-43. doi: 10.4436/JASS.10007.
Paleoanthropology's relationship with evolutionary theory has not been entirely happy. The anatomists who dominated paleoanthropology for its first century had little interest in biological diversity and its causes, or in hominins' place in that diversity, or in the rules and principles of zoological nomenclature - which they basically ignored entirely. When, as the twentieth century passed its midpoint, Ernst Mayr introduced theory to paleoanthropology in the form of the gradualist Modern Evolutionary Synthesis (in its most hardened form), he shocked students of human evolution not only into a strictly linear evolutionary mindset, but into a taxonomic minimalism that would for years obscure the signal of phylogenetic diversity and vigorous evolutionary experimentation among hominins that was starting to emerge from a rapidly enlarging hominin fossil record. Subsequently, the notion of episodic as opposed to gradualist evolution re-established phylogenies as typically branching, and species as bounded entities with births, histories, and deaths; but the implications of this revised perspective were widely neglected by paleoanthropologists, who continued to reflexively cram diverse new morphologies into existing taxonomic pigeonholes. For Pleistocene hominins, the effective systematic algorithm became, "if it isn't Australopithecus, it must be Homo" (or vice versa), thereby turning both taxa into wastebaskets. The recent development of the "Extended Evolutionary Synthesis" has only exacerbated the resulting caricature of phylogenetic structure within Homininae, by offering developmental/phenotypic plasticity as an excuse for associating wildly differing morphologies within the same taxon. Homo erectus has been a favorite victim of this foible. Biological species are indeed morphologically variable. But they are only variable within limits; and until we stop brushing diverse morphologies under the rug of developmental plasticity, paleoanthropology will remain at a major impasse.
古人类学与进化理论的关系并非一直融洽。在古人类学发展的第一个世纪里占据主导地位的解剖学家们，对生物多样性及其成因、人类在这种多样性中的位置，以及动物命名法的规则和原则几乎毫无兴趣——他们基本上完全忽视了这些。当20世纪过半，恩斯特·迈尔以渐进主义的现代综合进化论（最僵化的形式）将理论引入古人类学时，他不仅让人类进化的研究者们陷入了一种严格的线性进化思维模式，还陷入了一种分类极简主义，这种极简主义在多年里掩盖了人类进化谱系多样性的信号，以及在不断扩大的人类化石记录中开始显现的人类之间活跃的进化实验。随后，与渐进主义进化相对的间断性进化概念重新确立了进化谱系通常是分支状的，以及物种是有诞生、历史和消亡的有界实体；但古人类学家们广泛忽视了这一修正观点的影响，他们继续下意识地将各种新形态塞进现有的分类框架中。对于更新世的人类来说，有效的分类算法变成了“如果不是南方古猿，那肯定是智人”（反之亦然），从而使这两个分类单元都变成了垃圾桶。“扩展进化综合论”的最新发展，通过将发育/表型可塑性作为在同一分类单元内关联差异极大的形态的借口，只是加剧了由此产生的人亚科进化谱系结构的滑稽描绘。直立人一直是这种弱点的受害者。生物物种在形态上确实是可变的。但它们只是在一定范围内可变；而且在我们不再将各种形态掩盖在发育可塑性的地毯之下之前，古人类学将一直处于重大僵局。
