Jonathan Marks, Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Learning Objectives
- Discuss differing perspectives about how the human species descended from a primate ancestor.
- Discuss pre-Darwinian perspectives on the nature of the earth and evolution.
- Explain the process of natural selection.
- Describe what is meant by the “biopolitics of heredity”.
- Examine and correct several misconceptions about human evolution.
- Discuss Darwin’s theory and contributions to our understanding of evolution.
About the Author
Jonathan Marks
University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Jmarks@uncc.edu
Jonathan Marks
Jonathan Marks is Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He has published many books and articles on broad aspects of biological anthropology. In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2012 he was awarded the First Citizen’s Bank Scholar’s Medal from UNC Charlotte. In recent years he has been a Visiting Research Fellow at the ESRC Genomics Forum in Edinburgh, at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and a Templeton Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Notre Dame. His work has received the W. W. Howells Book Prize and the General Anthropology Division Prize for Exemplary Cross-Field Scholarship from the American Anthropological Association as well as the J. I. Staley Prize from the School for Advanced Research. Two of his books are called What It Means toBe 98% Chimpanzee and Why I Am Not a Scientist, but actually he is about 98 percent scientist and not a chimpanzee.
For Further Exploration
Ackermann, Rebecca Rogers, Alex Mackay, and Michael L. Arnold. 2016. “The Hybrid Origin of ‘Modern’ Humans.” Evolutionary Biology 43 (1): 1–11.
Bateson, Patrick, and Peter Gluckman. 2011. Plasticity, Robustness, Development and Evolution. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Cosans, Christopher E. 2009. Owen’s Ape and Darwin’s Bulldog: Beyond Darwinism and Creationism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Desmond, Adrian, and James Moore. 2009. Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Dobzhansky, Theodosius, Francisco J. Ayala, G. Ledyard Stebbins, and James W. Valentine. 1977. Evolution. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Company.
Fuentes, Agustín. 2017. The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional. New York: Dutton.
Gould, Stephen J. 2003. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Haraway, Donna J. 1989. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge.
Huxley, Thomas. 1863. Evidenceas to Man’s Place in Nature. London: Williams & Norgate.
Jablonka, Eva, and Marion J. Lamb. 2005. Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Kuklick, Henrika, ed. 2008. A New History of Anthropology. New York: Blackwell.
Laland, Kevin N., Tobias Uller, Marcus W. Feldman, Kim Sterelny, Gerd B. Muller, Armin Moczek, Eva Jablonka, and John Odling-Smee. 2015. “The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis: Its Structure, Assumptions and Predictions.” Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series B, 282 (1813): 20151019.
Lamarck, Jean Baptiste. 1809. Philosophie Zoologique. Paris: Dentu.
Landau, Misia. 1991. Narratives of Human Evolution. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Lee, Sang-Hee. 2017. Close Encounters with Humankind: A Paleoanthropologist Investigates Our Evolving Species. New York: W. W. Norton.
Livingstone, David N. 2008. Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Marks, Jonathan. 2015. Tales of the Ex-Apes: How We Think about Human Evolution. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Pigliucci, Massimo. 2009. “The Year in Evolutionary Biology 2009: An Extended Synthesis for Evolutionary Biology.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1168: 218–228.
Simpson, George Gaylord. 1949. The Meaning of Evolution: A Study of the History of Life and of Its Significance for Man. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Sommer, Marianne. 2016. History Within: The Science, Culture, and Politics of Bones, Organisms, and Molecules. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stoczkowski, Wiktor. 2002. Explaining Human Origins: Myth, Imagination and Conjecture. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Tattersall, Ian, and Rob DeSalle. 2019. The Accidental Homo sapiens: Genetics, Behavior, and Free Will. New York: Pegasus.
References
Darwin, Charles. 1859. On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or, the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. London: J. Murray.
Darwin, Charles. 1869. Correspondence Project. “Letter no. 6684,” accessed on 11 July 2019, http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/DCP-LETT-6684
Eldredge, N., and S. J. Gould. 1972. “Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism.” In Models in Paleobiology, ed.by T. J. Schopf, 82-115. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.
Haeckel, Ernst. 1868. Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte. Berlin: Reimer.
Kellogg, Vernon. 1917. Headquarters Nights. Boston: The Atlantic Monthly Press.
Monypenny, William Flavelle, and George Earle Buckle. 1929. The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Volume II. 1860–1881. London: John Murray.
Punnett, R. C. 1905. Mendelism. Cambridge: Macmillan and Bowes.
Tylor, Edward B. 1871. Primitive Culture. London: John Murray.
Wood, Andrew R. et al. 2014. Defining the role of common variation in the genomic and biological architecture of adult human height. Nature Genetics 46:1173-1186.
Figure Attributions
Figure 2.1 Affe-tyson by Benutzer:Bradypus, originally called “Orang-Outang” (but in fact a chimpanzee) by Edward Tyson, is in the public domain.
Figure 2.2A Ring-tailed lemur portrait 2 by Francis C. Franklin is used under a CC-BY-SA-3.0 License.
Figure 2.2B Lemur (39490547425) by Mathias Appel has been designated to the public domain (CC0).
Figure 2.2C Lemur (26992319228) by Mathias Appel has been designated to the public domain (CC0).
Figure 2.2D Blue-eyed black lemur by Clément Bardot is used under a CC BY-SA 4.0 License.
Figure 2.3 Grotte de Rouff mammut by cave painter is in the public domain.
Figure 2.4 Queensland State Archives 2436 Trilobite fossil at the Queensland Museum Brisbane c 1927 by Agriculture And Stock Department, Publicity Branch is in the public domain.
Figure 2.5A Pet (pet-dog-animals-cute-animal-dogs-3635986/) by Somo_Photography has been designated to the public domain (CC0).
Figure 2.5B English bulldog (2705136) by mk817 has been designated to the public domain (CC0) .
Figure 2.5C ItalianGreyhound by Just chaos is used under a CC BY 2.0 license.
Figure 2.6 Ernst Haeckel – Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, 1868 by Foto H.-P.Haack Das Foto darf gebührenfrei verwendet werden, sofern der Urheber mit “Foto H.-P.Haack” vermerkt wird. is used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 DE license.
Figure 2.7 Blending inheritance in color original to Explorations: An Open Invitation to Biological Anthropology by Mary Nelson is under a CC BY-NC 4.0 License.
Figure 2.8 George Gaylord Simpson (1983) photo courtesy of Jonathan Mark is under a CC BY-NC 4.0 License.
Figure 2.9A Horse (pferd-tier-säugetier-reiten-153500) by openclipart-vectors-30363 has been designated to the public domain (CC0).
Figure 2.9B Donkey by papapishu has been designated to the public domain (CC0).
Figure 2.10 Dentition of Ramapithecus – Fossil – Human Evolution Gallery – Indian Museum – Kolkata 2014-04-04 4499 by Biswarup Ganguly is under a CC BY-NC 4.0 License.
Figure 2.11 Human and ape DNA comparisons original to Explorations: An Open Invitation to Biological Anthropology is under a CC BY-NC 4.0 License.
Figure 2.12 Phyletic gradualism vs. punctuated equilibria original to Explorations: An Open Invitation to Biological Anthropology is under a CC BY-NC 4.0 License.
Figure 2.13 Mouse and elephant skeletons original to Explorations: An Open Invitation to Biological Anthropology is under a CC BY-NC 4.0 License.
Figure 2.14A Healthy human t cell by NIAID is under a CC BY 2.0 License.
Figure 2.14B Star shaped brain cells (astrocytes) by NIH (Pasca Lab, Stanford University) is under a CC BY-NC 2.0 License.
Figure 2.14C Embryonic smooth muscle cell by NIH (National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, National Institutes of Health) is under a CC BY-NC 2.0 License.
Figure 2.14D Human liver cell by NIH (Donna Beer Stolz, University of Pittsburgh) is under a CC BY-NC 2.0 License.
Figure 2.14E Hair cells: the sound-sensing cells in the ear by NIH (Henning Horn, Brian Burke and Colin Stewart, Institute of Medical Biology, Agency for Science, Technology, and Research, Singapore) is under a CC BY-NC 2.0 License.
Figure 2.15 Gallery 14: Eugenics Exhibit at the Kansas State Free Fair, 1920 ID (ID 16328) by Cold Spring Harbor (Courtesy American Philisophical Society) is under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 License.
Figure 2.16 Human and chimpanzee hand original to Explorations: An Open Invitation to Biological Anthropology is under a CC BY-NC 4.0 License.
Figure 2.17 Phrenology; Chart (slide number 5278, photo number: L0000992) by Wellcome Collection, original from The Phrenological Journal (Know Thyself), print from Dr. E. Clark is under a CC BY 4.0 license.
Figure 2.18 Chimpanzee head sketch by Roger Zenner, original by Brehms Tierleben (1887), is in the public domain.
Figure 2.19 Gigantopithecus blacki Jaw Only “Reconstruction” by ©BoneClones is used by permission and available here under a CC BY-NC 4.0 License.
