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The accidental species : misunderstandings of human evolution / Henry Gee.

by Gee, Henry, 1962- author.

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Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Human evolution.

9780226271200 (pbk.) :

022627120X (pbk.)

xiii, 203 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Preface : no more missing links -- An unexpected party -- All about evolution -- Losing it -- The Beowulf effect -- Shadows of the past -- The human error -- The way we walk -- The dog and the atlatl -- A cleverness of crows -- The things we say -- The way we think -- Afterword : the tangled bank.

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.

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