num_pages: 224
description: 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 worldthey are not indeed unique to our species. The Accidental Species combines Gees 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 evolutionthe key is not whats missing but how were linked.
language: English
title: The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution
publisher: University of Chicago Press