Anthropology 152

Lecture 6 -October 3, 2022

Chapter 2 of text : Biology, Genetics and Evolution

“Evolution and Creation Stories”

Later in the class I will discuss how Biblical Genesis’ parables on human creation can be interpreted as in harmony with anthropological theories of human origin.

Historical background leading to Darwin’s discovery of his specific theory of evolution:Page 31 of the text: “The Classification of Living Things”

LaMarck’s “how the giraffe got a long neck” hypothesis generally referred to as _inheritance of acquired characteristics_( which has been proven erroneous) is an evolutionary hypothesis AND IT IS A NATURAL SELECTION hypothesis; and it was not yet proven false in Darwin’s time.

I only refer to an hypothesis proven false because with language and culture , humans have a LaMarckian-LIKE ( NOT LITERALLY THE SAME AS LAMARCK’S THEORY) ; in that with language and culture , cultural characteristics invented by imagination and adopted as customs , can be inherited , not through genes, but by children learning their customs and language from their parents. And importantly, like the story of the giraffe stretching its neck in response to an environmental adaptive problem ( food only high up), cultural adaptations are caused by the adaptive problem that they solve. A hypothetical example might be Homo Erectus inventing control of fire in response to moving into colder regions North of Africa. And LaMarck’s story concerns both cause of variety and inheritance in a population, concerning which Darwin did not have a theory, which you may recall from the last lecture where I said, Darwin lacked : 1) a theory of Inheritance ; and a theory of how variety of genotypes arises within a species (page 35 of the text)

Page 33 of text Human Nature Chart (passed out in a previous class)

Page 33 of text: “The Discovery of Evolution”

Page 44 of text: “Evolutionary Forces and Populations”

Page 37 of text: “Genes and Alleles” explained

A critical shortcoming of the text book and all other presentations that I’ve read on Darwin’s Natural Selection theory is failure to say specifically and to emphasize that the main and ultimate test of a species’ fitness is _population growth or loss_. This is implied by the idea that extinction is absolutely “unfit” ; it is zero population. A main way to avoid zero population is to grow the population; another is to adapt to a variety of environments. Humans excelled at both of these , as evidence by our population spread across the whole globe during the Stone Age, whereas other vertebrate, mammal and primate species did not equal the population size increase of Genus Homo or adaption to a wide variety of environments and ecological niches.