Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
with language and culture, attributes that do not require a fixed human
essence but do seem to argue for an identifiable human condition—that
is, for a set of limits within which human life has historically functioned.
But his concern is not to define humanness so much as to observe the
disputes that have altered the dating of the attribution of humanness.
This dating has recently gone through three crises, in archaeology, pale-
ontology, and molecular anthropology, and the core of Proctor's chapter
is a review of each.
In archaeology, the crisis has been over the interpretation of the oldest
tools, those found in the Oldowan Gorge in Kenya and, of particular
interest to Proctor, in St. Acheul, northwest of Paris. These tools tend to
be uniform in style and manufacture for vast stretches of time, and their
use seems to cross different hominid species during that time. This sug-
gests that these tools are not necessarily the indicators of human culture
they have been taken for since their endurance does not seem to depend
on the transmission of knowledge of their use by symbolic language. The
second crisis is in paleontology, where it has been discovered “that more
than one species of hominid must have coexisted at many points in the
course of hominid evolution.” The recognition of this diversity has impli-
cations for our understanding of the politics of doing science since this
question of diversity was submerged in our concern to deny the category
of race, as in, for example, the 1952 United Nations Educational,
Scientific, and Culture Organization (UNESCO) “Statement on Race.”
Finally, there is the crisis in molecular anthropology, arising from the dis-
covery that all living humans share a common ancestor from Africa
approximately 135,000 years ago. This not only points to human
recency, but it also emphasizes the unity of the surviving species.
Proctor suggests that “if evolution has taught us anything, it is that
there is no essence of humanity, no fixed form.” But he is also concerned
to point out that political goodwill can stifle science, which points to the
larger issue of whether the ethics and politics of genetic engineering can
be considered in isolation from the question of what constitutes our
humanness. The UNESCO “Statement on Race” denounced racial theory
and racial prejudice, but it accomplished this political good on the
basis of a conception of the unity of hominid development—the only
significant diversity was the hominid split from apes, perhaps eleven or
twelve million years ago—that slowed the recognition both of hominid
