The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings Of Human Evolution - Plot & Excerpts
Human beings became bipeds, yelled the prof, to free the hands so that mothers could cuddle infants close to their chests. How could I have had the temerity, screamed the empurpled sage, to have rejected a paper that made so much sense? One of the problems with human evolution, as opposed to, say, rocket science, is that everybody feels that their opinion has value irrespective of their prior knowledge (the outraged academic in the encounter above was a scientist, but not a biologist, still less an evolutionary biologist). It’s obvious to see why—we are all human beings, and we are all bipeds, so we think we know all about it, intuitively. What we think about bipedality “stands to reason.” Now, I’d be the last to disparage anyone who wanted to express an opinion, however cockeyed, but it is sometimes the case that the most perplexing problems are those that seem the simplest at first sight. It is always a wonder to me that there is still much to be discovered about something so screamingly obvious as the way we humans walk.
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