The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution Read Online Free PDF

nothing much to do with Darwin. The bastardized view of evolution that’s become so much a part of the general consciousness—so much so that it’s so much low-hanging fruit for admen—owes much to Ernst Haeckel, Darwin’s number one fan in Germany.
    Haeckel took Darwinian natural selection and bolted on to it older ideas of progress popular among nineteenth-century German thinkers. Take a series of forms, each one more advanced than the last—according to whatever criterion you desire, be it larger brains, longer necks, more prominent plumage, whatever—and simply draw arrows between them, representing some innate striving toward cosmic perfection.
    And that’s evolution—or, at least, evolution as most people think of it—a kind of cartoon, infused more by our prejudices, desires, and innate self-regard than any actual evidence. Figure 2 is my version—my parade of likely characters, linked by arrows, pointing in the direction of progress.

    Figure 2
    The arrows represent natural selection, or evolution, as essentially and inherently an agency of inevitable progression, with—perhaps—the aim of producing, in its final form, the perfection that is Man (with a capital
M
).
    Yes, to be sure, I’m having a lot of fun at everyone’s expense, but how can this cartoon be in any way wrong as a picture of human ancestry, at least in a general sense?
    No sensible, informed person would doubt that we all had ancestors, and the further back you look in time, the more apelike they’d have looked, right?
    This cartoon picture of human evolution doesn’t really represent our actual ancestors, but metaphors, right?
    Well, yes, up to a point. That we all had ancestors is true—emphatically so. That our ancestors would have been more apelike the further back in time we look is also highly likely, given that our closest living relative in the animal kingdom is the chimpanzee, and it remains reasonable to suggest that the chimpanzee has evolved less far from our common ancestral state than we have. 25
    But if the figures in this parade are metaphors, what do these metaphors represent? The figures, surely, represent idealized evolutionary stages, between ancient ape and modern human, rather than specific individuals or even species. That’s fair enough.
    But my argument is less with the figures themselves than the arrows between them, arrows that seem to represent inevitability and progress, of evolution leading, inexorably, through one lineage and one lineage alone, to its culmination, the latest model human (or washing machine or car), more refined, more sophisticated, and crucially, more perfect than the one before.
    Another problem pointed out by Darwin in the
Origin
was what he called the “imperfection” of the fossil record. The record of life preserved as fossils is immediate evidence for evolution having happened. It is, however, rarely good enough for us to be able to trace the evolution of one particular species from another with any confidence. It is important to remember that fossils, on their own, are remnants of creatures toiling on some tangled bank of the past. They do not, of themselves, represent coherent statements about evolutionary history—still less, evolutionary progress. If a fossil is a statement, it is not a sentence, such as

    because fossils are not buried with their pedigrees, nor prognostications on the future of their progeny, if any. No, fossils are not statements. Nor are they phrases, or words, but exclamations, from which we, the finders, are invited to make what we can.
    Piecing together the tale of evolution from fragmentary fossils is a hard business. Because fossils are so rare, and because an unknowably large proportion of the history of any lineage will have been erased, what fossil hunters can never do with confidence is look at a fossil and assert that it is the actual ancestor of any creature now living (or of anyother fossil). To be sure, the fossil might be such an