Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Society & Social Sciences

THE ACCIDENTAL SPECIES

Henry Gee

Misunderstandings of Human Evolution

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.”

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.
The book 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.

Henry Gee is a scientist and a senior editor at the science journal, Nature. His many books include IN SEARCH OF DEEP TIME (Free Press 1999), JACOB'S LADDER (Norton 2004), and A FIELD GUIDE TO DINOSAURS (Chartwell Press 2012), among others. He lives in England with his family.

Available products
Book Published 2013-10-21 by University of Chicago Press
Book Published 2013-10-21 by University of Chicago Press

Comments

With a delightfully irascible sense of humor, Henry Gee reflects on our origin and all the misunderstanding that we impose on it. The Accidental Species is an excellent primer on how—and how not—to think about human evolution.

The Accidental Species is at once an eminently readable and important book. For almost three decades Henry Gee, senior editor at Nature, has helped bring some of the most important discoveries in paleontology to the scientific community and the public at large. Employing years of experience, sharp wit, and great erudition, Gee reveals how most of our popular conceptions of evolution are wrong. Gee delights in shedding us of our assumptions to reveal how science has the power to inform, enlighten, and ultimately surprise.

Gee sets out vehemently to dispute our common tendency to see ourselves as the pinnacle of creation, the bold, brilliant branch that is the final growth of the evolutionary tree of life. A thought-provoking and challenging book.

Quite simply, the best book ever written about the fossil record and humankind’s place in evolution.

If you only read one book on human evolution, or indeed one book on evolution, make it this one.

Henry 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. . . . 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.

An editor at Nature, Henry Gee possesses a prose style that hews to that magazine’s rigorous standards of scientific journalism while at the same time exhibiting a colloquial vivacity....fascinating survey...