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

by Gee, Henry, 1962-

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University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Human evolution.

Evolution (Biology)

Fossil hominids.

9780226284880 (hc.)

0226284883 (hc.)

203 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

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 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. Henry Gee, paleontology editor at Nature, argues that this reflects a profound misunderstanding of how evolution works and supports mistaken ideas about our own place in the universe. Gee presents a challenge to our tendency to see ourselves as the acme of creation. 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, 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"--Provided by publisher.

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