Look up any definition of evolution, and it will not say it's about hominids. Evolution is about all organisms, and it's about the changes in frequency of genes, not an increase in the number of different species in one clade that are recognised. And, yes, the identification of hominids, from partial remains, both needs expertise and is still not universally agreed by the scientists in the area.
"the author's and your claim that science as a process is questionable"
Oh, look, yet another strawman from you. Did you actually read all of the OP excerpt, let alone the full article? The last paragrahp of the excerpt:
The defense of science against this claim turns out to be complicated, for the simple reason that, as a social activity, science is vulnerable to all the comedy inherent in any social activity: group thinking, self-pleasing, and running down the competition in order to get the customer’s (or, in this case, the government’s) cash. Books about the history of science should therefore be about both science and scientists, about the things they found and the way they found them. A good science writer has to show us the fallible men and women who made the theory, and then show us why, after the human foibles are boiled off, the theory remains reliable.
Got it? He said, in something you really ought have read, that science can be defended from being called "a socially agreed-on fiction", and that writers can show that theories remain reliable. There's more like that in the article - from the conclusion:
"But it is a special kind of social activity, one where lots of different human traits—obstinacy, curiosity, resentment of authority, sheer cussedness, and a grudging readiness to submit pet notions to popular scrutiny—end by producing reliable knowledge. ... One way or another, science really happens."
I hope you are loving this. You should be learning something about comprehension.
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