The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The idea of a missing link between humanity and our animal ancestors predates evolution and popular science and actually has religious roots in the deist concept of the Great Chain of Being. Yet, the metaphor has lodged itself in the contemporary imagination, and new fossil discoveries are often hailed in headlines as revealing the elusive transitional step, the moment when we stopped being "animal" and started being "human." In The Accidental Species , Henry Gee, longtime paleontology editor at Nature , takes aim at this misleading notion, arguing that it reflects a profound misunderstanding of how evolution works and, when applied to the evolution of our own species, supports mistaken ideas about our own place in the universe. Gee presents a robust and stark challenge to our tendency to see ourselves as the acme of creation. Far from being a quirk of religious fundamentalism, human exceptionalism, Gee argues, is an error that also infects scientific thought. Touring the many features of human beings that have recurrently been used to distinguish us from the rest of the animal world, Gee shows that our evolutionary outcome is one possibility among many, one that owes more to chance than to an organized progression to supremacy. He starts with bipedality, which he shows could have arisen entirely by accident, as a by-product of sexual selection, moves on to technology, large brain size, intelligence, language, and, finally, sentience. He reveals each of these attributes to be alive and well throughout the animal world--they are not, indeed, unique to our species.

The Accidental Species combines Gee's firsthand experience on the editorial side of many incredible paleontological findings with healthy skepticism and humor to create a book that aims to overturn popular thinking on human evolution--the key is not what's missing, but how we're linked.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Preface: No More Missing Links (p. ix)
• 1 An Unexpected Party (p. 1)
• 2 All About Evolution (p. 20)
• 3 Losing it (p. 42)
• 4 The Beowulf Effect (p. 57)
• 5 Shadows of the Past (p. 73)
• 6 The Human Error (p. 97)
• 7 The Way We Walk (p. 112)
• 8 The Dog and the Atlatl (p. 124)
• 9 A Cleverness of Crows (p. 135)
• 10 The Things We Say (p. 146)
• 11 The Way We Think (p. 157)
• Afterword: The Tangled Bank (p. 169)
• Notes (p. 173)
• Index (p. 197)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Gee (paleontology editor, Nature; A Field Guide to Dinosaurs) sets out vehemently to dispute our common tendency to see ourselves as the pinnacle of creation, the bold, brilliant branch that is the final growth of the evolutionary tree of life. He articulately reinforces that the fossil record is sparse and that interpretations of this record frequently mislead us to think of evolution as an onward push of progress and improvement. The author then reviews features of human beings that some think, mistakenly, differentiate us from the rest of the animal kingdom. He begins with bipedalism, discussing it as a likely by-product of sexual selection, and then moves on to technology, large brain size, intelligence, language, writing, and, lastly, sentience. Gee defines each of these characteristics, giving several examples of them in other organisms throughout the animal world that fit within the boundaries of his definitions. In addition, he provides personal anecdotes and humor as he makes his points. VERDICT Gee succeeds in his arguments against media-influenced methods for analyzing and presenting the story of human evolution. Readers who already have a background in the study of human evolution are likely to appreciate this thought-provoking and challenging book.-Neil Dazet, Brooklyn Coll. Lib. (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Gee, paleontology editor at Nature, confronts two commonly held views of evolution and effectively demolishes both, persuasively arguing that evolution doesn't work the way most people believe it does and that the entire concept of "human exceptionalism" (the idea that humans are fundamentally superior to other animals due to "language, technology, or consciousness") is erroneous. By providing a cogent description of natural selection, he explains how evolutionary progress does not necessarily lead to increasingly complex organisms, and why it makes no sense to consider adaptation yielding an ideal fit between an organism and its environment. Building on this concept, Gee demonstrates that there is nothing about humans, from our bipedalism to our tool-making abilities, and from language to cognition, that definitively sets us apart from other species of animals. He buttresses these points with an impressive and accessible overview of the pattern of human evolution, showing just how little we actually know and arguing that different evolutionary stories could likely fit the extant data. Throughout, he explores how science simultaneously explains the unknown while raising new questions. Gee is also adamant that the process of evolution is the best explanation we have for the diversity of life, and he provides a scathing attack on creationists who have taken his words out of context and used them to support their own pseudoscientific claims. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

CHOICE Review

The idea that modern humans are the pinnacle of natural selection is deeply ingrained into popular culture and some scientific thought. Gee (senior editor, Nature; In Search of Deep Time, CH, Jul'00, 37-6287) wants readers to understand that this progressive, linear understanding of human evolution is a misconception. Not only is the fossil record of human ancestors spotty, but it is often improperly interpreted by researchers biased toward a view of evolutionary history as an inevitable march toward domination of the planet by Homo sapiens. The author uses the first half of his book to convincingly demolish the notion that human evolution is exceptional. Unfortunately, in the second half, he uses anecdotes and faulty logical jumps to argue that nothing about our species is unique. For instance, according to Gee, because much of human interaction is homologous to the social nattering of animals, it is proper to write off all human communication as commonplace. Anatomy, technology, intelligence, and language are all dismissed as unimportant as far as distinguishing humanity from our ancestors or other animals. The book's style is clear and often witty, but Gee's refusal to acknowledge that ordinary evolutionary mechanisms can have extraordinary results is disappointing. Summing Up: Recommended. With reservations. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates; general readers. J. L. Hunt University of Arkansas--Monticello