Human Evolution: We're Not Finished Yet

"Oh what a piece of work is man," wrote Shakespeare, long before Darwin suggested just how little work went into us. Somehow, that same process that gave us reason, language and art also left us with hernias, male nipples, impacted wisdom teeth, flatulence and hiccups. One argument scientists often make against so-called intelligent design - the idea that evolution cannot by itself explain life - is that on closer inspection, we look like we've been put together by someone who didn't read the manual, or at least did a somewhat sloppy job of things. Viewed as products of evolution, however, our anatomical quirks start to make sense, says University of Chicago fossil hunter and anatomy professor Neil Shubin, author of the recent book Your Inner Fish (Pantheon Books). And by focusing on our less lofty traits, evolutionary biology can help dispel one of the most egregious and even tragic fallacies surrounding Darwinian evolution - that it moves toward perfection, with man at the apex of some towering ladder. To read more: http://snipurl.com/2571m

Source: Sigma Xi's Science in the News. URL: http://sitn.sigmaxi.org/. Last accessed: April 22, 2008.

NOTE: Randall Library has just ordered a copy of Shubin's book, Your Inner Fish.