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Books > Science & Mathematics > Biology, life sciences > Life sciences: general issues > Evolution
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The Accidental Species (Hardcover, New)
Loot Price: R463
Discovery Miles 4 630
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The Accidental Species (Hardcover, New)
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List price R562
Loot Price R463
Discovery Miles 4 630
You Save R99 (18%)
Supplier out of stock. If you add this item to your wish list we will let you know when it becomes available.
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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
world--they are not, indeed, unique to our species.
"The Accidental Species "combines Gee's 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 evolution--the key is not what's missing,
but how we're linked.
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