ABSTRACT
T He Interest in human classification and evolution has been so great that it has produced a bewildering quantity and variety of terms and theories. Yet, in spite of the diversity, the major groups of primates recognized today were familiar to the scholars of the 19th century. The groups which seemed “natural” to the pre-evolutionary zoologist remain central in the thinking of the modern student of human evolution, and the purpose of this paper is to suggest reasons why this is the case. My thesis will be that the principal groups of the living primates are adaptive and that the characters by which they have been recognized are structures which are closely related to the behavior of the groups. With the addition of the evolutionary point of view, the contemporary groups are seen as the ends of adaptive radiations but the groups are the same. If this is the case, the referents of the names should be the adaptive groups. The most useful taxonomic characters will be those closely correlated with the basic adaptation. And “splitters” will be scientists who divide “natural,” that is adaptive, groups. 1 Some illustrations of these points will be given before proceeding to a discussion of the Hominidae.
