Humanizing Evolution

While anthropologists have hailed Charles Darwin as the founder of paleoanthropology because of his readiness to speculate on human origins, Darwin himself was very reluctant to engage with the human fossil record. Possible reasons are varied: from the wish to avoid (further) argument, through the paucity of available evidence, to the rejection of the Neanderthaler as distinct kind of fossil human by his colleague and friend Thomas Henry Huxley (and the wish to avoid offending his wife). But the upshot was that Darwin never placed on record what he really thought about the Neanderthal and Gibraltar fossils (and he had actually examined the latter). Nevertheless, between them the Descent of Man and the Expression of the Emotions comprehensively foreshadow areas of anthropology, primatology, and human evolutionary biology that have independently flowered since.

Social Anthropology, 2007

2017

What are the principles of current evolutionism? Starting from the very important evolutionary science base since Darwin, this book tries to tell the history of the human being as a species, from its earliest origins, to the closest irony of its biological condition with respect to the environmental environment, passing through anchored explanations In Archeology and Anthropology, as well as by the more materialistic explanations of human beings, Marxism and other social schools. It is true that, although it is true that many of the evolutionary determinants of the human being are only scientifically explicable through evolutionism, the different interpretations of the same, as well as the different theoretical applications to the human being and its nature remain, even today in Day, a reason for discussion (a discussion that, from the point of view of the vast majority of the specialized scientific community, is not useful today). Prologue by José Julio Martínez Valero.

Structure and Dynamics, 2011

Discoveries of modern biology are forcing a re-evaluation of even the central pillars of neo-Darwinian evolution. Anthropologists study the processes and results of biological and biocultural evolution, so they must be aware of the scope and nature of these changes in biology. We introduce these changes, comment briefly on how they relate to anthropology, and suggest numerous readings to introduce anthropologists to the significance and substance of the new evolutionary synthesis.

RENDICONTI LINCEI, 2009

Along with his younger colleague Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Darwin provided the initial theoretical underpinnings of human evolutionary science as it is practiced today. Clearly, nobody seeking to understand human origins, any more than any other student of the history of life, can ignore our debt to these two men. As a result, in this bicentennial year when Darwin's influence in every field of biology is being celebrated, it seems reasonable to look back at his relationship to paleoanthropology, a field that was beginning to take form out of a more generalized antiquarian interest just as Darwin was publishing On the Origin of Species in 1859. Yet there is a problem. Charles Darwin was curiously unforthcoming on the subject of human evolution as viewed through the fossil record, to the point of being virtually silent. He was, of course, most famously reticent on the matter in On The Origin of Species, noting himself in 1871 that his only mention of human origins had been one single throwaway comment, in his concluding section: "light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history" (Darwin 1859, p. 488). This has, of course, to rank among the most epic understatements ever. And of course, it begged the question, "what light?" But in the event, Darwin proved highly resistant to following up on this question. This is true even of his 1871 book The Descent of Man, and

In the year of 2015, the Group of Studies in Human evolution (GEEvH) completed ten years of existence. Since its foundation, GEEvH's has played an important role in the difficult task of communicating science in Portugal in the field of human evolution. In this paper, an overview of the main activities developed by GEEvH in the last decade as well as upcoming goals, will be provided. This approach will be framed by a short theoretical introduction to Charles Darwin's

Choice Reviews Online, 1995

This volume is an informal account of the known paleoanthropological discoveries and associated historical information up to 1995. Aside from the academic facts, the book also includes descriptions of interactions between specialists in physical anthropology and evolutionary biology. The data is well-presented and situated within a general historical perspective comprising some famous debates, controversies, and hoaxes in human evolutionary studies. There are 17 chapters including Before Darwin; Darwin and After;

This paper discusses the role that Konrad Lorenz, already known as the founding father of comparative ethology, played from the 1940s in the birth and development of a new research area, important for its philosophical and scientific fallout: Evolutionary Epistemology (EE). The first and second sections examine the auroral phase of this process: the successful collaboration between the young Lorenz and the philosopher E. Baumgarten; their attempt to rework the Kantian doctrine of knowledge in the light of the Darwinian theory of selection and evolution; the landing of Lorenz to a first formulation of his “phylogenetic apriorism” with the essay Kant’s Doctrine of the A Priori in the Light of Contemporary Biology (Lorenz 1941). In this paper, Lorenz elaborated the theoretical core of an original synthesis between Darwinism and Kantism and ethology and theory of knowledge, which later led him to conceive the anatomical, morphological and behavioral differentiation of the species as a “process of acquisition of knowledge” in Behind the Mirror (Lorenz 1973). The following sections examine the development of EE from the 1970s to the 2000s. In the early 1970s Lorenz’s “Search for a Natural History of Human Knowledge” seemed to converge with the reflections independently developed by the philosopher K. Popper and the psychologist D. Campbell. From the dialogue between the three scholars stemmed the first program of Evolutionary Epistemology (EE): an “integrated theory” that aimed at clarifying both the continuities and differences between biological evolution and human socio-cultural development. The final section shows how, apart from some common general assumptions, a number of fundamental divergences emerged among the EE’s founding fathers, specifically regarding their explanation of the internal organization of living beings and of the human social, cultural and scientific evolution, which, notwithstanding their efforts, turned out to be impossible to reconcile.

1997

2009