Professor of Anthropology

Jonathan Marks

These two paragraphs are extracted from Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett. Dennett is discussing human evolution, and particularly the intimate genetic relationships of humans to apes. Links refer to my own annotations.

"[S]ome members of Homo sapiens have been remarkably thin-skinned about our ancestral relationship to the apes. When Jared Diamond published The Third Chimpanzee in 1992, he drew his title from the recently discovered fact that we human beings are actually more closely related to the two species of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes, the familiar chimp, and Pan paniscus, the rare, smaller pygmy chimp or bonobo than those chimpanzees are to other apes. We three species have a common ancestor more recent than the common ancestor of the chimpanzee and the gorilla, for instance, so we are all on one branch of the Tree of Life, with gorillas and orangutans and everything else on other branches.

"We are the third chimpanzee. Diamond cautiously lifted this fascinating fact from the "philological" work on primate DNA by Sibley and Ahlquist (1984 and later papers), and made it clear to his readers that theirs were a somewhat controversial set of studies (Diamond 1992, pp. 20,371-72). He was not cautious enough for one reviewer, however. Jonathan Marks, an anthropologist at Yale, went into orbit in denunciation of Diamond -- and Sibley and Ahlquist, whose work, he declared, "needs to be treated like nuclear waste: bury it safely and forget about it for a million years" (Marks 1993a, p. 61). Since 1988, Marks, whose own earlier investigations of primate chromosomes had placed the chimpanzee marginally closer to the gorilla than to us, has waged a startlingly vituperative campaign condemning Sibley and Ahlquist, but the campaign recently suffered a major setback. The original findings of Sibley and Ahlquist have been roundly confirmed by more sensitive methods of analysis (theirs was a relatively crude technique, path-breaking at the time, but subsequently superseded by more powerful techniques). Why, though, should it make any moral difference whether we or gorillas win the competition to be closest cousin of the chimpanzee? The apes are our closest kin in any case. But it matters mightily to Marks, apparently, whose desire to discredit Sibley and Ahlquist has driven him right out of bounds. His most recent attack on them, a review of some other books in American Scientist (Marks 1993b), drew a chorus of condemnation from his fellow scientists, and a remarkable apology from the editors of that magazine: "Although reviewers' opinions are their own and not the magazine's, the editors do set standards that we deeply regret were not maintained in the review in question" (Sept- Oct., 1993, p. 407). Like Bishop Wilberforce before him, Jonathan Marks got carried away."

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