199given the types of observations that they might have the opportunity to make during
their interactions with these insects. Admittedly, neither Brown nor Berlin has
explicitly made any mention of differences in the depth or—if I might use a pro-
vocative term—quality of the traditional biological knowledge of the speakers of
different languages. However, as the passage quoted above suggests, certain vague,
and in my opinion, unjustifi ed, assumptions regarding the pre-eminence of the
agriculturalist way of life underpin Berlin’s ideas on the “ evolution of ethnobiologi-
cal categories”, where the emergence of subgeneric taxa is taken to be a sign of
increasing complexity in an ethnoclassifi cation system.
Plants and animals evolve over time. The systems of ethnobiological classifi cation that
human beings come to develop to mirror evolution ’s work also change through time...
(p. 272)
Berlin never clarifi es the exact relationship between biological evolution and his
own conception of evolving ethnoclassifi cation systems, but it is clear that the
analogy alluded to in the above quote cannot be taken literally, due to the vast dif-
ferences in the temporal scales over which the two might operate. Moreover, his
idea of an evolutionary sequence that involves an increase in ‘ complexity ’ high-
lights some worrying assumptions implicit in the enterprise of comparing classifi ca-
tion systems across languages. Such assumptions have long plagued western
thought concerning the natural world, and, in the most famous instance, have taken
the form of the now outdated and highly anthropocentric Scala Naturae ‘the ladder
of nature’, where Man was placed at the top of all earthly creations, superseded only
by God and His angels. While this dogma is no longer a part of western scientifi c
thought in a literal sense, there are indications that such ideologies still permeate
much of modern evolutionary biology. Many biologists unconsciously use the word
‘complexity’ to describe the random directionality evident in many evolutionary
events, without considering the broader implications.
McShea [ 211 ] has argued that even though modern-day multicellular organisms
are indeed more complex than the bacteria-like organisms that comprised the earli-
est life form s on the planet, there is no hard empirical evidence to suggest that
increasing complexity is a guaranteed, or even frequent, outcome of long-term evo-
lutionary processes. Advocating an “emphatic agnosticism” on the question of
increasing complexity, McShea wonders “ whether the word “complexity” (as it is
commonly used) is just a modern substitute [for the Scala Naturae ] , a kind of code
word for perfection, progress, and proximity to us .” His main objections to the exer-
cise of comparing species separated by long stretches of evolutionary time are not
only that ‘complexity’ is a vague and ill-defi ned term, but also that there can be
several (often confl icting) metrics of complexity—number of genes, size of the
genome, body size, number of limbs, relative brain size, specialization of body
segments, degree of brain folding, just to name a few—and that the ad hoc choice
of any one of them might provide an appealing, but inaccurate, answer.
An even stronger argument was made by the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay
Gould, who devoted an entire monograph to the question of anthropocentrism
embedded in the “poorly formulated and improbable” ideas of progress in long- term