The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution

Gee, paleontology editor at Nature, confronts two commonly held views of evolution and effectively demolishes both, persuasively arguing that evolution doesn’t work the way most people believe it does and that the entire concept of “human exceptionalism” (the idea that humans are fundamentally superior to other animals due to “language, technology, or consciousness”) is erroneous. By providing a cogent description of natural selection, he explains how evolutionary progress does not necessarily lead to increasingly complex organisms, and why it makes no sense to consider adaptation yielding an ideal fit between an organism and its environment. Building on this concept, Gee demonstrates that there is nothing about humans, from our bipedalism to our tool-making abilities, and from language to cognition, that definitively sets us apart from other species of animals. He buttresses these points with an impressive and accessible overview of the pattern of human evolution, showing just how little we actually know and arguing that different evolutionary stories could likely fit the extant data. Throughout, he explores how science simultaneously explains the unknown while raising new questions. Gee is also adamant that the process of evolution is the best explanation we have for the diversity of life, and he provides a scathing attack on creationists who have taken his words out of context and used them to support their own pseudoscientific claims. (Oct.)