The recent publication of a fossil primate has once again raised the dread spectre of the ‘missing link’. Now, I can’t really discuss the fossil itself or its publication, in any detail, given that I am not a wholly disinterested party. After all, I am the editor at Nature who handles manuscripts in this area. However, I can say something specific, I think, on two aspects of the media circus (there is no other word for it) attendant on the publication of the material.
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iEditor by Henry Gee
This is the Nature Network foothold for Nature Senior Editor Henry Gee. Expect discussion about editorial issues and experiences, papers I've handled, books I'm writing, and pictures of my pets. I also blog at http://cromercrox.blogspot.com/
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Missing Links
- Date:
- Thursday, 21 May 2009 - 11:40 UTC
The first is a curious phenomenon in which otherwise sane and rational news reporters lose all sense of reason or proportion when confronted with anything to do with human evolution, no matter how trivial or (ultimately) inconsequential it might be. Not every paper on (say) the release of calcium from intracellular stores is deserving of press coverage, let alone in the kind of breathlessly tumescent tones reserved for human evolution. But it seems that any paper on human evolution is fair game for the kind of treatment reserved for voice-overs on advertisements for Marks and Spencer’s food. If all papers are treated the same way, then no discrimination can be made between them, and the effect is a kind of dull infantilization.
The second is the whole business of the ‘missing link’. Now, I am not one to advocate violence, but should you find yourself gripped by an uncontrollable urge to deck the next person you meet who utters this phrase, then I certainly wouldn’t stand in your way.
I think that some people, particularly at the more gushing end of that pseudo-profession known as public relations, need a lesson in evolution and how it works. They might be directed to an essay I wrote on this subject but for those of the hard-of-linking I shall paraphrase the argument here.
Evolution is a word we use to describe changes in organisms due to the interaction of hereditary variation, superabundance, environmental change, and time. Evolution has neither memory nor foresight. It has no scheme, design or plan. Now, it might be the case that trends are apparent in evolution, but these are, by necessity, seen after the fact, and are not built into the process beforehand. The patterns we see in life are the results of evolution, and are contingent. In and of itself, and leaving aside concepts such as developmental canalization and exaptation, evolution carries no implication of progression or improvement.
The term ‘missing link’, however, speaks to an idea in which evolving organisms are following predestined tracks, like trains chugging along a route in an entirely predictable way. It implies that we can discern the pattern of evolution as something entirely in tune with our expectations, such that a newly found fossil fills a gap that we knew was there from the outset. Quite apart from the impossibility of knowing whether any particular fossil we might find is our ancestor or anyone else’s — a theme I explored a few years ago in a book — this is a model of evolution that is at once entirely erroneous, and also rather sad.
In my time as fossil-watcher at Nature_, the most interest has been sparked by fossils that challenge our expectations, rather than those that confirm them; jolting us out of well-worn mindsets and forcing us to look at the world in an entirely new way. Fossils such as Sinosauropteryx, the first of many dinosaur species announced that had feathers, or feather-like integumentary structures, forcing us to re-assess the evolution of birds and flight; fossils such as Acanthostega and Tiktaalik, forcing us to reassess our ideas about how early tetrapods left the water; fossils such as "_Homo floresiensis":http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v431/n7012/full/nature02999.html, that forced us to confront the likely richness of human diversity in the recent past, and showing us that there is more than one way to be counted as human.
Time will tell whether we will view Darwinius in the same light. But whatever its position in evolution, Darwinius was a living organism worthy of study and respect as a creature in its own right; it did not exist by virtue of being a staging post in the predictable evolution of anything else. For that reason, hailing something – anything – as a missing link does that creature a profound disservice, cheapening that which we wish to exalt.
Last updated: Thursday, 21 May 2009 - 11:40 UTC
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Comments
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Aha, I understand now, I think. There is no missing link because there was never a chain. I am imagining instead a piece of frayed cloth, which is the fabric of all of us, and at the end of one loose thread there happens to be Homo sapiens, and at the end of another, Darwinius.
I promise to never twitter those two words together again, Henry – except when talking about jewellry.
Bravo, Henry. Of all the hyperbole and misconceptions flitting about Ida’s skeleton like a cloud of mosquitoes, you have pinned down a big one and deftly slain it.
Hear hear!
Isn’t this the missing link?
Bob O’Hara: I just want you to know that I clicked, dammit.
I should add that whereas the conventional news and broadcast media fell for the entirely cynical ploys of the Darwinius organ-grinders, the blogosphere was distinguished by the elegant detachment and maturity with which it dealt with the story. So, step up, Brian Switek, Ed Yong, Greg Laden and Carl Zimmer, and collect your well deserved Orders of the Unicycling Girrafe (OOFTUGs).
Why the difference? Because science writers at the conventional news outlets dance to the drum of news editors, who have no interest in the actual science, but every interest in the bottom line, and sell to the lowest common denominator; whereas bloggers are generally independent; are well-informed; and know how to write.
Hence, from now onwards, I shall have nothing more to do with the conventional science media. I won’t give interviews, even backgrounders, to anyone likely to use terms such as ‘ancestor’ or ‘missing link’. Indeed, I shall put it on record, here and now, that if anyone interviewing me uses the term ‘missing link’ I shall simply walk out.
But because bloggers understand that their audience is made of grown-ups, I’m always happy to paradfe my erudition, such as it is, in the blogosphere.
And another thing – it’s interesting, is it not, that not more than a day after it was announced with much
funfairfanfare, Darwinius has dropped out of the news agenda? When we published Homo floresiensis it was in the news agenda for weeks. I wonder why?Henry, I mostly follow your argument, but doesn’t your assertion about trains chugging along tracks confuse backward links and forward links? I can’t project my family tree forward, but I can look backwards – and as I don’t know the name of my great grandfathers, could I not say that they are missing links in the backward chain to my great great grandparents? There was no plan, no chugging forward along set tracks, but I can still find links looking backwards.
I’m not saying you can do the same thing with fossils, but merely wondering if the absence of a set plan for looking forwards necessarily denies the existence of links (missing or otherwise) looking backwards.
The latest news is that things have become so bad with the hype that Ida has got the sax.
I thank you.
I couldn’t agree more. For a review of the history of this antiquated concept see this post.
Darwinius was a living organism worthy of study and respect as a creature in its own right
I love that bit.
And I understand your frustration. I got quite excited (not in a good way) when media hype along similar lines happened with the beasties I know a little bit about.
@ Brian
Henry, I mostly follow your argument, but doesn’t your assertion about trains chugging along tracks confuse backward links and forward links? I can’t project my family tree forward, but I can look backwards – and as I don’t know the name of my great grandfathers, could I not say that they are missing links in the backward chain to my great great grandparents? There was no plan, no chugging forward along set tracks, but I can still find links looking backwards. I’m not saying you can do the same thing with fossils, but merely wondering if the absence of a set plan for looking forwards necessarily denies the existence of links (missing or otherwise) looking backwards.
The first thing to say is that everyone has an ancestor – of course they do – that’s a given. The problem is that one can never know if a fossil you might dig up definitely is your ancestor, or not, or the ancestor of anything you can name. The most you can assert is some degree of cousinhood. (This idea, that one cannot assert ancestor-descendant relationships a priori, is often wilfully misconstrued by creationists that evolution can’t be true, whereas in fact evolution is axiomatic.) For this reason, evolutionary relationships expressed cladistically show all the taxa, living or extinct, on what seems to be the same temporal plane, with no implication of specific ancestor-descendant relationships. Again, it’s important to stress that this strategy does not deny the existence of ancestry and descent, only that specific instances can never be known, and that any such statement of ancestry and descent cannot be falsified in the classic Popperian sense.
Looking at one’s own genealogy is confussing because we can support, to an extent, anny such speculations with additional documentary evidence. Yes, you had grandparents, and great-grandparents, but any such specific genealogical links between you and any specific ancestor that can be proven are done by external means – not available in the case of fossils.
Of course, you can never know who your descendants will be, and that, again, is one of the reasons why in cladistics all taxa summarized in a tree are written at the same plane, to avoid making any specific assertion of descent. This is all in my book Deep Time of course.
@ Bob – I think she’s playing Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
@ EMJ – thanks for that link, and for letting me know of your post. Ah, Alexander Pope. Matchless.
@ Steffi – that’s just it. I don’t know annything about the critters mentioned in that despatch, so I wouldn’t know the degree to which it had been hyped. That’s why I no longer trust science journalists and won’t have anything more to do with them.
The most illogical thing of all is that the whole “missing link” concept was supposed to describe some intermediate form between apes and us humans (I believe that that was back in the days where saying that we are all in the same family was still not entirely kosher). But from what I’ve gathered (and the picture certainly confirms it) Ida is supposed to be some kind of prosimian! So following the same logic, ANY new fossil that we may uncover in the future can ba called a “missing link”!
@ Christian – that’s right. The ‘missing link’ idea was much bandied around in the 1920s following the discovery of Australopithecus africanus, the ‘Man-Ape’ from Africa.
Hot news – ‘Ida (IdaTheLink)’ is now following me on Twitter. Good grief.
I know you’ve seen this already, Henry, but I’m going to put it here just so you can enjoy the full effect in the comfort of your own blog.
P.S. For the {font-size:200%}BIG event tomorrow, you might try using this. I’m sure we’ll all appreciate the chance to offer our advice.
As I believe I have said elsewhere, 25 March is not the Biggest Day in Creation – it’s 23 March – i.e. tomorrow, when I shall be liveblogging an erection in my garden, pursuant to some hot girl-on-girl action.
NFN: Cromer is 2 months behind the rest of the world.
Damn, they’re catching up.
The concept of a “missing link” may be antiquated and a dreadful use of catchy words to sell airtime. But look at it from a different perspective. If it brings the public to the table to even contemplate evolution of human beings, can it be altogether a bad thing? I am an educator and having taught Biology in High School and College in the Bible belt of the USA for the last 10 years, I celebrate anything that can present evolution as a biological fact, even if it does use words like “missing link”. I think that the authors are implying that this might be an intermediate form between two extant groups, forms that Creationists reject absolutely and claim have never been seen in the fossil record. So while correctly deploring the exploitative gushiness of the media, let’s acknowledge that from another viewpoint it might be acceptable, even if it only serves to bring the horse to the water.
Hey Henry, I guess you may know this already, but your post was extensively quoted (with attribution) on this week’s Guardian Science Podcast.
@Vidya – I see your point, but I am vehemently against the view that one should adulterate one’s science as a way of fighting off the creationists. As I remarked to Eugenie Scott once, creationists are like herpes – they’ll always be with us. Her response – “that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t practice safe sex” – is something with which I disagree. Metaphorically, I mean.
@Stephen – I didn’t know this – thank you!