8: Primate Diversity

Why and How we Name Nature

Imagine waking up one day unable to tell the difference between a carrot and a cat. Which one do you eat? Which one do you pet? What about a turkey versus a tiger? Which do you roast for dinner, and which do you run from? If we suddenly lost our ability to distinguish between living things, we could find ourselves in dangerous, even deadly, situations. Our survival depends on recognizing and categorizing the natural world around us (Kaesuk Yoon, 2009).

Our Brains Are Wired to Categorize

Brain research shows we actually have specialized neural regions dedicated to helping us recognize and locate ourselves among other living beings. Young children are naturals at this and it makes evolutionary sense: for hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors survived as gatherers and hunters. Knowing which plants were edible, which animals were dangerous, and which resources were valuable meant the difference between life and death. Being able to name and organize the living world was crucial for survival.

A Universal Human Pattern

Cultural anthropologists have discovered that humans everywhere organize the living world in surprisingly similar ways. They call this process “taxonomizing”—creating ordered systems of classification. Whether studying people in the Amazon rainforest, the Australian outback, or the African Congo, researchers find that humans reliably categorize nature in regular, predictable patterns. There might be minor differences in the number of categories people create or exactly how they group things, but fundamentally, we’re all working from the same mental playbook. (Kaesuk Yoon, 2009).

The Power of Naming

Taxonomy is the formal term for “naming nature,” or classifying living things, and it has some pretty powerful and practical effects on how we interact with the world. Consider the humble dandelion. To a suburban homeowner, it’s a pesky weed to be eliminated from the perfect lawn. To a forager or herbalist, that same plant is nutritious food and valuable medicine. The name we give something, the category we place it in, fundamentally shapes our relationship with it.

A Modern Shift

Today of course, most of us spend far less time in nature than our ancestors did or than we might like to. Most people can instantly recognize and distinguish between brand logos—Nike, Adidas, Vans—but struggle to identify common birds, trees, or wildflowers in their own neighborhoods. We’ve shifted from navigating the natural landscape that sustains us to navigating a social and commercial landscape filled with cultural symbols. As highly social and cultural beings, it’s probably not surprising that cultural literacy has overtaken ecological literacy for a majority of human populations around the globe.

But this shift has consequences. For instance, most people don’t know the difference between a monkey and an ape, even though these are fundamentally different types of primates. They might not realize that some groups of primates are far more similar to humans than others in terms of behavior, anatomy, and evolutionary history. Without a basic understanding of primate taxonomy, we miss out on understanding where we fit in the natural world and who our closest living relatives actually are.