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Title: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution (Cambridge Reference Book) by Stephen Jones, Robert D. Martin, David R. Pilbeam ISBN: 0-521-46786-1 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 30 June, 1994 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $50.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.8 (5 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Some interesting ideas, much padding
Comment: Anyone who is interested in understanding human origins is likely to be attracted to this book. It actually consists of a very comprehensive collection of articles by specialists - specialists on everything from "The structure of DNA" to "Tribal peoples in the modern world." Hidden away among all this specialised knowledge are some interesting conclusions, but they take a lot of searching for. There is one on page 358 - a three-quarter page box headed "Throwing". Barbara Isaac suggests that our ancestors, lacking sharp canine teeth or claws, made up for it, once their hand were freed from walking duties, by becoming good at throwing stones. There is another exciting idea on page 88. In another three-quarter page box, M H Day suggests that bipedalism involved a smaller pelvic girdle, which made it more difficult to give birth to a big-brained baby.
There are some more exciting ideas, but the great bulk of the text, whilst good background material for the specialised anthropologist, doesn't tell us anything very interesting. Some of it is downright irrelevant, merely filling up space. Why did we need an article on the New World Monkeys? They are nothing to do with our ancestry. And why must the book start off by trotting out the old chestnut about life starting off 3000 million years ago as "short stretches of nucleic acid floating in a chemical sea". Those who still believe that, do so on faith alone - it's science fiction. The truth is that no one knows how life began, if indeed it ever did begin.
What the book lacks, above all, is an intelligent overview, someone who can draw the strands together and tell us what it all means. Perhaps we should not expect this. Certainly we don't get it.
Rating: 3
Summary: Be careful about buying this book
Comment: This is NOT a book which will give you the story of human
evolution. It is a series of articles covering the issues,
problems, and methods of analysis within the domain of
human evolutionary studies. That is, and be careful about
this: the book is about HOW TO DO the study of human
evolution. It does not (except accidentally) present
the actual history of human evolution. And the latter is
what I was looking for when I mistakenly bought this book.
Since this book is about "issues," it also contains such
"hard science" as Georgina Mace's claim, on page 56,
that "cultural influences are so strong in human
societies that they will nearly always diguise any
broad patterns of human sexual dimorphism."
Right. I can't even begin to imagine where that idea
came from...until I remember that it is feminist
dogma that all differences between the sexes are
caused by society. Okay.
You might want to skip this book.
Rating: 4
Summary: The need for a new paradigm: intelligent design
Comment: The pieces of the puzzle simply don't fit. One doesn't have to go through the subjects of the prebiotic soup, the origins of life, the cambrian explosion, irreducible complexity of molecular machines, the fossil record, micro and macroevolution, the fine-tunning of the universe for life, to make that clear. It is already abundantly clear. That is one of the reasons there should be a place for intelligent design in science. The other, of course, lies in the fact that intelligent design has already presented itself as a viable research paradigm. It is not enough to say, as evolutionary theorists like to say, that, as Dr. David L. Haury puts it, "science has no statement to make beyond the natural world". The problem, though, is that science may be working with a flawed conception of natural world in the first place, by conflating nature with matter. The fact is that information may be a structural and internal part of nature, as it is a structural part of computer "hardware" and "software". It is impossible to deal with computers from a purely naturalistic or materialistic perspective that excludes intelligent design in advance. The same may be true about the "natural world", and science has certainly something to say about that. Naturalist "scientists" may want laugh and scorn of intelligent design. But theirs is a partial, interested and biased laughter, as is the laughter of a Republican towards a campaign finance reform bill proposed by a Democrat. This kind of laughter must not be taken seriously.
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Title: Extinct Humans by Ian Tattersall, Jeffrey H. Schwartz ISBN: 0813339189 Publisher: Westview Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 2001 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: Human Origins : The Fossil Record by Clark Spencer Larsen, Robert M. Matter, Daniel L. Gebo ISBN: 1577660021 Publisher: Waveland Press Pub. Date: 01 April, 1998 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: From Lucy To Language by Donald Johanson, Blake Edgar ISBN: 0684810239 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 27 November, 1996 List Price(USD): $60.00 |
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Title: Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness by Ian Tattersall ISBN: 0156006537 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 01 July, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Dawn of Human Culture by Richard G. Klein ISBN: 0471252522 Publisher: Wiley Pub. Date: 29 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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