Darwin suggested that humans were not the only toolmakers and tool users on earth and that non-human cognition was significant. “As a paleoanthropologist of African origin, it gives me pride and honor to actually find ancient fossil remains of our ancestors in the continent that Darwin predicted they would be found,” the paleoanthropologist Yohannes Halie-Selassie notes. In The Descent of Man, Darwin argued that humans evolved in Africa and, indeed, the fossil record shows a long history of hominins in Africa. Without a record of fossil hominins and DNA evidence to draw from-lines of evidence that have crucial importance for contemporary research-what did Darwin get right about human evolution in 1871? What did he get wrong? In a word, plenty. Each essay reminds readers that science-good science, that is-is “a collective enterprise that unfolds over generations as we test and retest old ideas and develop new ones to make sense of our world,” as DeSilva notes in the book’s preface.
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What did Darwin get right about human evolution in 1871? What did he get wrong? In a word, plenty.īut rather than just offer a chapter-by-chapter critique of Descent, the essays in A Most Interesting Problem also explain how the study of human origins has unfolded in the subsequent 150 years, emerging as a vibrant scientific field full of exciting discoveries and new research questions. In “The Fetus, the Fish Heart, and the Fruit Fly,” Alice Roberts points out that while there are links between embryological development and evolutionary history, the specific “recapitulation” idea proposed by Darwin no longer holds up. In short, Darwin argued that stages of an embryo’s development mimicked, “recapitulated,” an organism’s evolutionary history. The result, A Most Interesting Problem: What Darwin Got Right and Wrong About Human Evolution is a fascinating, comprehensive, and accessible collection of essays.Įach chapter in A Most Interesting Problem tackles a chapter from Descent by situating Darwin’s work in his proper, historical context and then describing “what science knows now.” For example, in Chapter 1 of The Descent of Man, Darwin drew on evidence from comparative anatomy and embryology to show that similarities in the structure and embryonic development of living animals could provide clues about how human evolution unfolded. To celebrate The Descent of Man’s sesquicentennial, the paleoanthropologist Jeremy DeSilva gathered a team of anthropologists (along with a historian and science writer) to update, interpret, and correct Darwin’s science.
Ever since its publication, Descent has prompted vigorous debate in scientific circles, to say nothing of the fervor it’s ignited within religious, political, and social groups.
It wasn’t until The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, published twelve years later, that Darwin picked up the question of human evolution specifically, calling the question of our species’ origin “the highest and most interesting problem for the naturalist.” The Descent of Man outlines the theory and evidence for human evolution that Darwin had amassed, as well as his arguments about the origins of civilizations, human races, and sex differences-such as the evidence for each was in 1871. Origin explained the diversity and existence of new plant and animal species, but Darwin tiptoed around the question of what exactly this process would mean for humans and our own biological beginnings. Darwin reasoned that populations of organisms evolve over generations through a process that he termed “natural selection.” His work offered evidence that the diversity of life on Earth arose by common descent through a brachiating pattern of evolution. When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, it outlined a new scientific theory.
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