200
evolution [ 212 ]. Gould notes that such ideas are so compelling, and so prevalent in
modern evolutionary thinking (numerous textbooks illustrate the idea of evolution
with the clichéd fi sh–amphibian–reptile–land mammal–human sequence) that even
experienced academics come to take such ideas for granted, without considering
vital issues such as evidence and causality. In the second chapter of his book (p. 28),
Gould offers a quote from The Diversity of Life by E. O. Wilson, for whom he has a
great deal of admiration. Wilson also appears to confl ate evolution with progress,
and defends his view with a fi nal line that Gould says he “ almost found chilling ”:
During the past billion years, animals as a whole evolved upward in body size, feeding and
defensive techniques, brain and behavioral complexity , social organization, and precision of
environmental control... Progress, then, is a property of the evolution of life as a whole by
almost any conceivable intuitive standard... let us not pretend to deny in our philosophy
what we know in our hearts to be true.
Gould goes on to suggest a mechanism by which a trend of increasing complexity
can appear out of processes that are directionally random. Simply put, bacteria are
the simplest forms of life possible, and further simplifi cation is prevented by an
evolutionary ‘wall’. The result is that even random evolutionary events will neces-
sarily produce more complex organisms over time, thereby giving the illusion that
the process of evolution is an inherently complexity-increasing one. Gould also
liberally cites the work of McShea—in particular, his point that it is important to
distinguish ‘passive trends’ (overall results arising as incidental consequences, with
no favoured direction for individual species) from ‘driven trends’ (each species of a
lineage tends to change in a particular manner, because evolution supposedly
favours more complex creatures).
Applying these ideas to ethnoclassifi cation systems, it is tempting to arrive at the
same conclusion as Berlin —that hunter-gatherer languages that lack folk specifi c s
(and are instead perhaps dominated by folk generics with little explicit, higher order
grouping) represent the ‘simplest’ possible ethnoclassifi cation systems, and that the
advent of agriculture resulted in increased ‘ complexity ’ simply because there was
no other way to go. However, one crucial difference between the biological and the
linguistic data is the time-depth of the available information. While biologists can
rely on an imperfect, but temporally extensive fossil record (as well as extant micro-
organisms that are commonly believed to be good exemplars of the earliest forms of
life to have evolved), ethnobiologists usually only have access to synchronic
linguistic (and cultural) data that provide little evidence of how current systems
may have come into being. Of course, there exist landmark studies that have made
use of empirical, diachronic data from complementary fi elds such as linguistics,
archaeology and genetics in order to describe the evolution of cultural phenomena
such as subsections, migration and exogamy [ 213 – 215 ]. Unfortunately, comparable
studies do not appear to exist in ethnobiology, with the result that strong claims
about the evolutionary direction of ethnoclassifi cations are made solely on the basis
of synchronic data.
Similar objections have been raised in relation to the idea of Cultural Evolution ,
that appeared in the anthropological discourse of the nineteenth and mid-twentieth