Test Your Knowledge
- How is the study of your ancestors biopolitical, not just biological? Does that make it less scientific or differently scientific?
- What was gained by reducing organisms to genotypes and species to gene pools? What is gained by reintroducing bodies and species into evolutionary studies?
- How do genetic or molecular studies complement anatomical studies of evolution?
- How are you reducible to your ancestry? If you could meet your ancestors from the year 1700 (and you would have well over a thousand of them!), would their lives be meaningfully similar to yours? Would you even be able to communicate with them?
- The molecular biologist François Jacob argued that evolution is more like a tinkerer than like an engineer. In what ways do we seem like precisely engineered machinery, and in what ways do we seem like jerry-rigged or improvised contraptions?
GLOSSARY
Adaptation: Any alteration in the structure or functioning of an organism (or group of organisms) that improves its ability to survive and reproduce in its environment.
Adaptationism: The idea that everything is the product of natural selection.
Allele: A genetic variant. A non-identical DNA sequence found in the same gene location on a homologous chromosome, or gene copy, that codes for the same trait but produces a different phenotype.
Biogeography: The geographical distribution of living things.
Blending inheritance: An obsolete theory where the offspring of two parents will have characteristics that are intermediate between the two parents.
Canalization: The tendency of an organism to stay the same even when exposed to new environmental circumstances.
Culture: That complex whole that includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.
Descent with Modification: Darwin’s term for what we now call “evolution,” in which animals and plants look different from their ancestors.
Epigenetics: The study of how genetically identical cells and organisms (with the same DNA base sequence) can nevertheless differ in stably inherited ways.
Epistemes: Fundamental cultural ideas, which organize the world and help to render it meaningful. Similar to paradigm.
Eugenics: The practice or advocacy of improving the human species by altering the gene pool through selective breeding.
Evo-devo: The study of the origin of form; a contraction of “evolutionary developmental biology.”
Exaptation: An additional beneficial use for a biological feature.
Extinction: The loss of a species from the face of the earth.
Founder Effect: The reduced genetic diversity that results when a population is descended from a small number of ancestors. A type of genetic drift that occurs when members of a population leave the main or “parent” group and form a new population that no longer interbreeds with the other members of the original group.
Gene: Segment of DNA that contains protein-coding information and various regulatory (e.g., promoter) and noncoding (e.g., introns) regions.
Gene Flow: Geographical movement of genes due to the transfer of alleles from one population to another through the contact of different populations.
Gene Pool: The entire collection of genetic material in a breeding community that can be passed on from one generation to the next.
Genetic Drift: Random changes in allele frequencies within a population from one generation to the next with nonadaptive effects.
Genotype: The entire set of genes of an individual organism;the combination of two alleles that code for or are associated with the same gene.
Hereditarianism: The idea that genes or ancestry is the most crucial or salient element in a human life. Generally associated with an argument for natural inequality on pseudo-genetic grounds.
Homology: Correspondence of parts between species due to the mutual inheritance of a primordial form from a common ancestor.
Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics: The idea that you pass on the features that developed during your lifetime, not just your genes; also known as Lamarckian inheritance.
Monogenism: The theory that all humans are descended from the same ancestors.
Mutation: An alteration to the base sequence in the DNA of an organism.
Natural selection: The process whereby organisms that are better adapted to their environment tend to survive longer and transmit more of their genetic characteristics to succeeding generations than do those that are less well adapted.
Niche construction: The active engagement by which species transform their surroundings in favorable ways, rather than passively inhabiting them.
Phenotype: Observable physical or biochemical traits of an organism that are produced through the interaction of genotype and environment.
Phenotypic plasticity: An organism develops new traits as a reaction to new environmental circumstances.
Phrenology: The 19th century anatomical study of bumps on the head as an indication of personality and mental abilities.
Phyletic gradualism: The theory that evolution occurs slowly and uniformly over long periods of time; speciation is a gradual process.
Polygenism: The discredited theory that humans of different races are descended from different ancestors
Punctuated Equilibria: The theory that suggests that evolution occurs rapidly over brief periods of change and speciation, followed by long periods of status or equilibrium.
Sexual Selection: Natural selection arising through preference by one sex for certain characteristics in individuals of the other sex.
Synonymous mutation: A change in the DNA sequence that codes for amino acids in a protein sequence, but does not change the encoded amino acid.
Synthetic Theory of Evolution: Explanation of the evolution of life in terms of genetic changes occurring in the population that leads to the formation of new species.
Species selection: A postulated evolutionary process which suggests that selection acts on an entire species population, rather than individuals.
Teleological: The explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve rather than of the cause by which they arise.
Transmutation hypothesis: The nineteenth century idea that life forms were spontaneously generated and not descended from a common ancestor.
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.
