On Human Evolution

摘要

As a paleontologist working on human evolution, one of those inevitable questions that always comes up with my colleagues is, “what’s so special about us?” Any fair-minded biologist on the planet will tell you that all living things are special in their own way, each species unique in its possession of beautifully particular characters and adaptations. Humans are just another animal they would say, and in most cases they’d be right. Yet there is still this nagging feeling thatwe are different. Even as a scientist, it is extremely seductive to play up our distinctiveness from the rest of the natural world. Newly discovered fossils of our ancestors often make headline news or get onto the cover of prestigious journals like Nature and Science, giving their discoverers a lot of fame and attention in the process. If you add that no other living species has language, complex symbolic expression, or such a rich material culture, you have a heady mix of factors that very much drives our view of ourselves as being set apart. In many ways, this is what lies at the heart of the problematic "debate" that currently rages over scientific versus religious explanations for our origins. To some people, we are simply so different that we can’t possibly have evolved from other animals.