Species Concepts, Populations and Evolutionary Models in Paleoanthropology
Author(s)
Caspari, Rachel
Abstract
This paper explores the influence of populational thinking on paleoanthropology. It is shown that, in fact, populational thinking never prevailed in the history of field. While there was a tendency to view variation as intraspecific in the post-synthesis years, populational models were not generally applied or accepted. Intraspecific variation was conceived of and modeled by many of the most prominent scholars in terms of trees, heuristic devices that effectively treat all variation as specific. The essentialism at the core of our pre-Darwinian understandings of human variation was transferred into evolutionary thinking through branching models, and paleontology, the other influence on the field, never adopted populational thinking as critical to the discipline. Partially due to a focus on systematics that relies on type, small sample sizes, and the general lack of resolution necessary to deal with intraspecific processes, paleontology remains one of the most typological sciences within evolutionary biology. It is argued that the recent focus on species level processes represents very little in terms of new thinking; rather it provides a rational context for the essentialist thought that has always dominated the field.
