This Year's (2024) Textbook-free Human Origins and Evolution

I’m still teaching APG 201 Human Origins and Evolution to an auditorium of 120 students every Fall semester. Unlike what students do at other universities, there is no weekly small-group lab for a fourth credit because we do not have graduate students to teach those.  

And, I’m still teaching the course without a textbook, but there are readings galore (one from a textbook!) and they can always use this free textbook as a resource if they’d like: https://explorations.americananthro.org/index.php/pdf-chapters/. 

In case it helps anyone, I'm sharing a bit about the course and all but the very last prompt (aka assignments) they have to address in their Book of Origins (moleskine) in preparation for each class. There are 37. If you’d like to try something like this, let me know and I’ll share my detailed instructions for students regarding the Book of Origins. I’ve seen it all go sideways every which way possible, so the instructions are now bullet-proof.  The one thing I'll make clear here is that students have to fill at least one page to complete each assignment and they may do so by writing or drawing, but if they draw they must write an explanation for their drawing (as in, they must write enough to make it clear why the drawing is there on the page.)

APG 201 Human Origins and Evolution

Description

This is a course about how you evolved. This is your natural history. To write it, we will learn from biological and evolutionary anthropologists who study human and nonhuman primate biology, behavior, diversity, adaptation, and evolution to better understand the human species and explain how we arrived at our current condition: Incessantly chattering, tailless, furless, culturally dependent, big-brained, bipedal creatures who are diverse in appearance and culture and inhabit nearly all types of habitats on Earth. Along our journey we will ask ourselves how we know what we know. We will also address, head-on why so much of this material is culturally controversial. The science of human evolution and its dissemination into the popular imagination has a long history of racism and sexism. In this course we will address that history by identifying outdated and mistaken evolutionary thinking. A long tradition of making Homo sapiens the hero of human origins and evolution is one major cause of this problem, which is why we take a biographical approach to our natural history, running through the human lifespan, instead of marching progressively up through the sandstones of time towards a destined triumph (as the story often, unscientifically, goes). Here, we take back our evolutionary history, scrubbing the story from the facts and evidence, making it fit for all humankind. And, who knows? Maybe we’ll find that the truth is lovelier than fiction.

Required Materials

1. Moleskine* Classic Collection, hardcover book, any color, 5 x 8 1/4 inch (these page dimensions are required) and must have at least 96 pages (though the ones with 240 pages seem easiest to purchase), ruled/dotted/unruled/ etc is your choice. You will be writing and drawing in this book so lined or dotted pages are recommended over completely blank ones. *You may purchase a different brand other than Moleskine, but the page size is required and so is a book-ish spine (not a spiral wire).

2.   A Most Interesting Problem: What Darwin’s Descent of Man Got Right and Wrong about Human Evolution by (editor) Jeremy DeSilva. Buy/rent/borrow this anywhere you wish. Feel free to read the digital, Kindle, or audio versions. I put a copy of this book on reserve at the library.

ASSESSMENT

Exam 1                                              15%

Exam 2                                              15%

Book of Origins                               50% (due on the last day of class and graded once, then)

Final Exam                                       20%

Total                                                  100%

Exams take place in the classroom and will consist of true-false, multiple choice, and questions that ask for short written answers, maybe fill-in-the blank, maybe a paragraph or two. Practice questions will emerge in class throughout the semester. The first exam is on the material since the start of the course. The second exam is based on the material since the first exam. The final exam is cumulative, so based on the entire course, but you will be able to use your Book of Origins for reference during the Final Exam.

 Book of Origins

Prompt 1. Consider these questions and (without fear) write your responses in your notebook or directly into your Book of Origins. Address all 10 questions. Who’s your audience? You right now and your future self.  

 1.      What is evolution? (i.e. What do you know about evolution as of today?)

 2.      What do you know about human evolution as of today?

 3.      What are you interested in learning about human evolution?

4.      Is human evolution, in general, something positive, negative, or neutral to you? 

 5.      If someone asked you to tell them the story of human evolution, what story would you tell them?

 6.      Do you consider human evolution to literally be a “story”? Why or why not?

 7.      Past students in this course have said that “evolution is racist” and that “evolution is sexist.” What do you think they were talking about? How do we fix this?

 8.      Make a note to your future self that explains that whatever future-you is about to read in this book could be riddled with misunderstandings and errors or that it may contain perspectives and opinions that have changed since you wrote them. Explain to your future self why it may contain those things.

 9.      Draw yourself, a part of yourself, or a symbol or symbols that represent yourself.

10.   And, finally, on the next page jot down something separate from all of the above (but it can be related/redundant, that’s fine): What’s one thing you’re taking away from class today that matters to you? And see if you can explain (as brief as you’d like) why it matters to you.

 

Prompt 2. The Scientific Process!  To do this assignment, you must choose one of the well-known and established observations listed below (A, B, or C):

A) In most humans, the right humerus (upper arm bone) is larger than the left one.

B) Chimpanzees living in zoos tend to weigh more than their relatives living in the wild.

C) Among infant chimps, females ride on their mothers for longer than males, who start walking independently more frequently at a younger age than females.

Next, without using anything but your own mind…

1.      If you had to choose one of those observations to study (try to explain) in real life, which would it be and why? 

2.      Represent that observation with an illustration or a graphic (i.e. what’s called a “figure” in a scientific paper) as if you had data (which you do not, so numbers are unnecessary, or you may make some up).

3.      How would you verify the observation? Offer up a way to verify it. That is, describe the steps you would take to establish that it is a correct observation (and lend credence to its factuality). In other words, how would you go about making this observation for yourself, seeing it for yourself? While scientists and scholars look to the scientific literature (articles and books) or to published datasets, those are not options for your answer today. What would you do "in the field" (either with human skeletons or with live chimpanzees) to see for yourself (a.k.a. verify) either a, b or c?

4.      Now, go ahead and accept your observation (a,b,or c) as fact (because it is) and explain that one observation. Come up with at least two hypotheses/explanations for that observation. This is brainstorming, and is part of the scientific process.  Again, like with #1, do not google around; use nothing but your own mind if at all possible. Have no fear. This is a playground!

a.      Need a refresher or a foundation on the scientific process and what “hypotheses” are? Go to here: https://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/howscienceworks_01 (pages 1-21 are awesome).

5.      Briefly describe how you would test at least one of these hypotheses/explanations for a, b, or c.  Include discussion of the methods and variables/types of data, and the kinds of evidence that you would need to find to both refute and to support each hypothesis.

6.      What might be some limitations and obstacles to explaining the observation?

7.      What is the value in studying this?

 

Prompt 3. Read the Preface (by Jeremy DeSilva) and Introduction (by Janet Browne) in A Most Interesting Problem, then write and/or draw what you found to be meaningful, significant, or noteworthy in the readings. If struggling to identify that information, then pull out what you have questions about, what you’d like to learn more about, what you’re uncertain about, what surprised you, what relates to other material we have already covered in the course, or what may relate to what you anticipate we will cover down the road. (Remember to title the page or do something to make this page make sense to future you.)

Prompt 4. Know Your Apes:  For all seven of these critters--gibbons, siamangs, orangutans, gorillas, bonobos, chimpanzees, and humans--use at least one page per ape to answer the following questions. Complete sentences are not necessary, as long as the info is there. Get your information from  these excellent websites listed below (and more information will come in class, soon). The only snafu you may encounter is researching humans and if that's the case, just do your best with what you know about humans, as a human.

·        Explorations (open access textbook):  http://explorations.americananthro.org/index.php/chapters/

·        Animal Diversity Web: https://animaldiversity.org/ 

·        Primate Factsheets: http://pin.primate.wisc.edu/factsheets/

·        Hominoid fact sheets: https://ielc.libguides.com/srch.php?q=ape&t=0

·        Encyclopedia of Life: https://eol.org/

·        Time Tree: http://timetree.org/

·        What is a bonobo? https://evolutionaryanthropology.duke.edu/research/3chimps/chimps-bonobos

1. [printout/paste, draw, or trace (your choice) a picture of the ape]

2. What is the species? (for some apes, there are multiple species, so choose only one)
3. Where does it live on Earth?
4. Describe its habitat.
5. Is your primate nocturnal, diurnal, or crepuscular?
6. What does it eat?
7. How does it move about?
8. How does it socialize? (i.e. solitary? groups?...)
9. How does it raise offspring? (i.e. solitary? groups?...)
10. Body size? (report pounds or lbs; to convert from kg type “convert x kg to lbs” into google)
11. Are male and female different in body size?
12. What does it look like? Color? Fur?
13. What are its threats to survival?
14. At what point in the past ("MYA" = millions of years ago) did it share a most recent (aka “last”) common ancestor with humans? (go to http://timetree.org/  to find out; type the ape and human into the two different fields and then allow timetree.org to provide the estimate for how many millions of years ago our lineage parted ways with this ape’s)

Prompt 5. Based on lecture/discussion/handout, answer the following questions. (Remember to either include the question or answer in a way that the reader understands without knowing the question.):

·        What's the relevance of Linnaeus to our course?

·        What's an example of a homologous trait among vertebrates, link it to your body.

·        Why are you a primate?

·        Which nonhuman ape is the best ape? (Make a case for one ape being the best ape.) Suggest a possible reason why your professor asked you this question.

Prompt 6. Read Chapter 1 by Alice Roberts in A Most Interesting Problem, then write and/or draw what you found to be meaningful, significant, or noteworthy in the readings. If struggling to identify that information, then pull out what you have questions about, what you’d like to learn more about, what you’re uncertain about, what surprised you, what relates to other material we have already covered in the course, or what may relate to what you anticipate we will cover down the road. (Remember to title the page or do something to make this page make sense to future you.)

Prompt 7. Read Chapter 6 by John Hawks in A Most Interesting Problem, then write and/or draw what you found to be meaningful, significant, or noteworthy in the readings. If struggling to identify that information, then pull out what you have questions about, what you’d like to learn more about, what you’re uncertain about, what surprised you, what relates to other material we have already covered in the course, or what may relate to what you anticipate we will cover down the road. (Remember to title the page or do something to make this page make sense to future you.)

Prompt 8. Observe like an evolutionary biologist

·        Go to http://www.eskeletons.org/ 

·        Based on what you see at that resourceful website, draw the os coxa (half of the pelvis) of a chimpanzee and a human, in at least one page. (Do not worry about your artistic skill, but try your best. Drawing is an effective technique, used by scientists, for understanding anatomy.)

o   Describe the similarities and differences in anatomy between chimp and human pelves/pelvises. (Do not worry about applying technical jargon.)

o   Question: What kinds of behavioral differences might correlate with the anatomical differences in the pelvis and why?

·        Next, draw the skull (including teeth) of a chimpanzee and a human, in at least one page.

o   Describe the similarities and differences in anatomy between chimp and human skulls and teeth. 

o   Question: What kinds of behavioral differences might correlate with the anatomical differences in skulls and teeth and why?

 

Prompt 9. Hominin Hall of Fame. Make 7 separate informational, fact-filled baseball-like, Pokémon-like, etc cards or hall of fame plaques. Put each one on a separate page of your book.

·         “Ardi"

·        “Lucy” (A.L. 288-1)

·        (choose one) The “Taung Child” or the “Dikika child” (a.k.a. Selam)

·        The “Nariokotome Boy” aka the “Turkana Boy” (KNM-WT 15000)

·        Shanidar 1

·        Liang Bua 1 (LB 1) nicknamed “The Hobbit”

·        one for any individual (dead or alive) you wish for “Homo sapiens” 

In addition to course materials, especially Hailie-Selassie’s chapter in A Most Interesting Problem, you may want to look to the Smithsonian’s Human Origins page: https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils. Google is fine too, but beware! That Google brings the Smithsonian up for me, first (or nearly first), for all those hominins up there warms my heart. Wikipedia is fine too. But be sure to check your book and the Smithsonian first.

This response is complete as long as there are seven pages, but you do not literally need to fill the page with facts. You can fill each page with an image and include very few meaningful facts, if you wish.

The more facts the merrier, though! And as you make your pages, ask yourself... Why do these individuals and species matter? What is interesting? What do we know? What don’t we know? How do they relate to you? How do you relate to them? 

[Aside from the very last prompt, all the responses from now on are only 1 page. Whew!]

Prompt 10. Watch Lice and Human Evolution (PBS NOVA, 10 min) https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/lice-and-human-evolution/ .  Write and/or draw what you found to be meaningful, significant, or noteworthy in the readings. If struggling to identify that information, then pull out what you have questions about, what you’d like to learn more about, what you’re uncertain about, what surprised you, what relates to other material we have already covered in the course, or what may relate to what you anticipate we will cover down the road. 

Prompt 11. Monkeys all the way down? This is a two-part prompt.

a.      Read “Monkeys all the way down” by Dunsworth (https://www.sapiens.org/column/origins/monkeys-all-the-way-down/ ) then answer this question: Did we evolve from monkeys and apes? Explain.

b.      Calmly and kindly respond to a hypothetical, but agitated friend or family member who says, “If we evolved from apes, then why are there still apes?” Write and/or draw your response to them in one page, minimum. And don’t forget to title it so that future you knows what’s happening on this page.

Prompt 12. Are we apes? Provide both a yes and no answer with reasoning to back each.  While doing so, reveal whether you side with yes, no, or neither, and explain why that is. Here are some entertaining resources that may help you form either or both of your answers. If we have time, we will discuss this question in class.

·        The side of no, we aren't:

o   You Are Not an Ape! Jon Marks at TEDxEast (17 mins): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLfdKk9JEp8

·        The side of yes, we are apes:

o   Wrongheaded anthropologist claims that humans aren’t apes: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2015/11/02/wrongheaded-anthropologist-claims-that-humans-arent-apes/

 

Prompt 13.  Scenario-building or storytelling?

Without looking anything up (except to find and observe pictures of the primates or to look up terminology, like in that open access/free textbook I posted on Brightspace, or in the online Merriam Webster dictionary, etc etc), write an answer for each of the questions below. It is crucial that you DO NOT GOOGLE THESE QUESTIONS or type them into AI chat thingies or anything at all. I forbid you from asking anyone or any algorithm the questions, below, because thinking them through is the point of the exercise. Exercise your freedom to think and imagine based on where you are now. To complete this response you need to provide 5 answers, one for each question below. It's totally possible to do all five answers in total within that one page minimum. If you're not feeling brief, then, as always, feel free to go over the one page minimum. Your answer to each question, below, is a hypothesis (a good guess) to explain the evolution of each of the five phenomena. These are evolutionary scenarios that you are writing. This is brainstorming only, so have no fear of being wrong, but be clear.

1. How did the mandrill (monkey) get that colorful face? What about the rear (which looks like the face)?
2. How did the black and white colobus monkey (a leaf-eater or folivore) get a long, specialized gut?
3. How did gorillas become the largest primate?
4. How did silverback gorillas become twice as big as females?
5. How did humans become “naked”? (i.e. how did we come to be less furry than the other primates)?

 

Prompt 14.  Go here and read this article by evolutionary biologist John H. Macdonald: https://udel.edu/~mcdonald/mythintro.html

When you get to the part that says “Summary for worried parents” read through those points and choose at least one to dig into more deeply by clicking on the trait and learning more.  Write up and/or draw what you learned, what it means to you, and what you’re left wondering.

For each of those human traits (in that list of bullet-points in the article), there is a myth that one form is recessive. (It’s based in the larger myth that all genes have a dominant and a recessive allele.) If that were true, then two parents with the recessive trait could not have a child with the dominant trait. And, if that were the case, then it would be possible to look at these traits in a person and know something about their biological paternity. We cannot.

 

Prompt 15. Read “Things Genes Can’t Do” by Weiss and Buchanan (Aeon)
https://aeon.co/essays/dna-is-the-ruling-metaphor-of-our-age 

Then, just like with the readings you’ve already done, write and/or draw what you found to be meaningful, significant, or noteworthy in the readings. If struggling to identify that information, then pull out what you have questions about, what you’d like to learn more about, what you’re uncertain about, what surprised you, what relates to other material we have already covered in the course, or what may relate to what you anticipate we will cover down the road. (Remember to title the page or do something to make this page make sense to future you.) But, also, be sure to highlight (by writing about it) what you believe is the most important point that Weiss and Buchanan make and explain it. 

 

For any readings below that lack specific questions for you to answer, this is the prompt: Write and/or draw what you found to be meaningful, significant, or noteworthy in the readings. If struggling to identify that information, then pull out what you have questions about, what you’d like to learn more about, what you’re uncertain about, what surprised you, what relates to other material we have already covered in the course, or what may relate to what you anticipate we will cover down the road. (Remember to title the page or do something to make this page make sense to future you.)

Prompt 16. Read “Where did they all go? How Homo sapiens became the last human species left” in The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/nov/18/where-did-other-human-species-go-vanished-ancestors-homo-sapiens-neanderthals-denisovans

Prompt 17. What are some important things you have learned so far in the course (whether in the classroom or in responding to prompts)? Be sure to explain why they are important, in the world or to you, personally.

Prompt 18. Read “Social and Biopolitical Dimensions of Evolutionary Thinking” by Jonathan Marks and Adam Johnson

https://pressbooks.calstate.edu/explorationsbioanth2/chapter/17/

 

Prompt 19. Read “The Coronavirus is Mutating” (Washington Post) (posted on Brightspace).

·        Note/quote the parts of the text that refer to genetic drift (even though it is a term which is never uttered in the article).

·        Note/quote the parts of the text that refer to natural selection (whether it says the term or not).

·        Next, there is a preference (or something like it), in this article, for natural selection-based explanations? If so, then why do you think so? If not, then why do you think that Prof. Dunsworth asked about it?

 

Prompt 20. The future loss of wisdom teeth in our species? For this assignment, read this long preamble, and then the short news article pasted there, and then answer questions A, B, and C.

Remember…

• Most of us were taught incorrectly or led, wrongly, to believe that 'evolution' = 'natural selection' which implies that all evolution occurs through natural selection. This leads us to see every evolutionary scenario, all the way from fairy tale ones to the most scientifically legitimate ones, as natural selection. This is, of course, not a correct understanding of evolution.

• Natural selection can result in new adaptations or in the elimination of bad traits. The former is "positive" selection, the latter is "negative" and is always occurring no matter what. Positive selection does happen but is not easy to test, since natural selection occurs via differential reproductive success, but "survival of the lucky" alleles via genetic drift can look exactly the same by increasing and decreasing allele frequencies just by chance. The difference between the two (natural selection and genetic drift) is that, in a selection scenario, the trait that's evolving is causing the differential reproduction (whether enhancing or inhibiting, even if ever so slightly affecting it slowly over time), but in a drift scenario the trait is "drifting" (like on the surface of the ocean) to lower or higher frequencies over the generations merely due to chance (unlinked to the trait in question) effects on differential reproduction and due to chance passing of one allele or the other to offspring. Like selection, drift can completely fix or completely eliminate traits! Genetic drift is always occurring, and so is negative selection to some degree (the disappearance of mutations that prevent survival and reproduction, which is to say their own existence) and positive selection to some degree (the rise in prevalence of mutations, new or old, that enhance survival and reproduction, which is to say that they contribute to their own existence).

Read this short news story:

Wisdom teeth might be lost as people continue to evolve: Why the modern diet may make wisdom teeth unnecessary About 25 to 35 per cent of people will never get their wisdom teeth by Astrid Lange Toronto Star Library, Jun 25 2013

Wisdom teeth are the third and final set of molars that most people get in their late teens or early 20s. But not everyone does — the American Dental Association estimates that about 25 to 35 per cent of people will never get their wisdom teeth. Another 30 per cent will only get 1 to 3 of them. Anthropologists believe wisdom teeth evolved due to our ancestors' diet of coarse, rough food — leaves, roots, nuts and meat — which required more chewing power and resulted in excessive wear of the teeth. Since people are no longer ripping apart meat with their teeth and the modern diet is made of softer foods, wisdom teeth have become less useful. In fact, some experts believe we are on an evolutionary track to losing them altogether.

Now, respond to A, B, and C. 

A.     Briefly explain the evolutionary mechanism behind the evolutionary scenario for future wisdom tooth loss that the author of the news article above alludes to. In other words, think about what the writer is really hypothesizing for future human evolution and rephrase their explanation, but scientifically, in terms of all or just some of the four main mechanisms of evolution that we discussed in class which are mutation, gene flow, genetic drift, and selection. Important! Banned words for your scenario include: Need(s/ed/ing), want(s/ed/ing), try(s/ed/ing), best, most and fittest.

 

B.     Write out an alternative scenario where selection is responsible for the loss of wisdom teeth in our future selves. If it's not obvious, this will be a significantly different scenario from what the writer has imagined in the news article and from what you wrote in response to 'a.' Important! Banned words for your scenario include: Need(s/ed/ing), want(s/ed/ing), try(s/ed/ing), best, most, and fittest.

 

C. Having 0-3 (instead of all 4) wisdom teeth develop is a fairly common phenotype out there just like the previous article said, and it probably includes people in APG 201.There's a story out there in science and in pop culture that, because we evolved to have smaller jaws in the last six million years of hominin evolution, natural selection is currently favoring people who don't form wisdom teeth at all. That is, people think that there are people who don't develop all four wisdom teeth because it's adaptive not to, because our jaws are so small and it's a health risk to fit all those teeth in a small jaw. They explain this pattern of human variation with natural selection (the way we legitimately do with skin pigmentation variation) and it helps justify third molar extraction. Now, knowing (1) that there's all kinds of dental variation in humans, deviating from what's typical, in terms of which teeth they do or do not develop and that's also true for apes who have large, roomy jaws, and live in the wild, and (2) a bit (from skimming) the mind-blowing information in this brief article "The Prophylactic Extraction of Third Molars: A Public Health Hazard" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1963310/ .... WHAT'S YOUR TAKE on that just-so story about humans who naturally don't develop wisdom teeth because it is adaptive no to? As far as evolutionary scenarios go, is that story good, bad, neutral, or otherwise? And, does that evolutionary thinking justify us getting our wisdom teeth routinely, prophylactically removed?

Prompt 21. Deciphering and polishing your evolutionary scenarios. Look back at the answers to the following that you wrote in an earlier prompt several days ago….
1. How did the mandrill get that colorful face? What about the rear (which looks like the face)?
2. How did the colobus monkey (a leaf-eater or folivore) get a long, specialized gut?
3. How did gorillas become the largest primate?
4. How did silverback gorillas become twice as big as females?
5. How did humans become “naked”? (i.e. how did we come to be less furry than the other primates)?

For each of those evolutionary scenarios that you wrote in an earlier response/chapter in your book, label (consider using a different color ink than what you used to write, originally) which evolutionary mechanisms (mutation, drift, selection, gene flow)) that you hypothesized were at work in each of your scenarios. Back then, you probably didn’t use all the terms and ideas we covered in class more recently, but you may have been getting at some of them in other words.

Next, on this page for this response, rewrite a scientifically improved version of each of the four explanations you wrote earlier.  Make them more scientifically accurate by using the four main mechanisms of evolution and using their terms as you write: mutation, gene flow, genetic drift, and natural selection. You may need to just change a few words or you may need to completely revise the entire answer, it depends on what you originally wrote. Brief can be excellent!  Important! Banned words include: Need(s/ed/ing), want(s/ed/ing), try(s/ed/ing), best, most, and fittest.

 

Prompt 22. Read Chapter 2 by Suzana Herculano-Houzel in A Most Interesting Problem

Prompt 23. Read “When Did Sex Become Fun?” by Dunsworth (Sapiens) 

https://www.sapiens.org/column/origins/sexual-evolution-pleasure/

Prompt 24. Read Chapter 8 by Mike Ryan in A Most Interesting Problem

Prompt 25. Choose one and read it: “Do Animals Know that Sex Makes Babies?” by Dunsworth (posted on Brightspace) or “Sex Makes Babies” by Dunsworth and Buchanan: https://aeon.co/essays/i-think-i-know-where-babies-come-from-therefore-i-am-human

Prompt 26.  Read (or thoughtfully skim!) the article "There is no 'obstetrical dilemma: Towards a braver medicine with fewer childbirth interventions" by Dunsworth. (posted on Brightspace) And then answer the following questions as you write and/or draw your one-page response:

·        What is the obstetrical dilemma hypothesis?

·        Is it familiar to you at all, even if you never heard what it's called?

·        What is at least one criticisms of, or problem with, the obstetrical dilemma hypothesis? 

 

Not required: For those who are especially interested in this topic, check out (and feel free to incorporate as a resource) "Childbirth, Explained" which is on Netflix as an episode of Sex Explained (2020): https://youtu.be/2BmN8C8IzRw?t=1 

Prompt 27 – Cro-Magnon  You. This is a two-part assignment, but you need only fill one page. (1) Describe an ancient a-ha moment, or circumstance of any kind, big or small, between 7 million and 10,000 years ago (basically any time in hominin prehistory) that you would have loved to have experienced or witnessed. It could be straight out of your imagination or it could be inspired by a scene from a movie, book, or game. (2) Draw what you would etch, draw, scrawl, or paint on your cave wall today, or anytime in earth's history.

Prompt 28 – Read “The mystery of early milk consumption in Europe” in Nature (News) https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02041-y?utm_source=naturepod&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=shownotes

Prompt 29 - Taking into account the information you've learned from the course materials, revisit the drawings of the hips of a chimp and a human that you did for an earlier prompt several days ago. Now, explain the similarities and differences in the skeletal anatomy of the chimp and human hips (aka pelves). Feel free to resketch these bones, or not, to accompany your explanations for why they are similar and why they are different. 

Prompt 30. Read Chapter 9 by Dunsworth in A Most Interesting Problem

Prompt 31. Choose one of these articles in Scientific American, and read it: “To follow the real human diet, eat everything” or “Does Humanity Have to Eat Meat?” (both are posted on Brightspace)

Prompt 32. Read Chapter 3 by Hare in A Most Interesting Problem

Prompt 33. What are some important things you have learned so far in the course (whether in the classroom or in responding to prompts)? Be sure to explain why they are important, in the world or to you, personally.

Prompt 34. The True Story of Ota Benga. Read and/or listen to the following: From the Belgian Congo to the Bronx Zoo (NPR): http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5787947, then react meaningfully and make sure to address the following: What is a link between racism and evolutionary theory and what do you think about it?

Not required: These are two highly recommended literary contributions to what we're grappling with, which is why I posted pdfs of each on Brightspace.

1.      [Note! This is a fictional account based on the real history.] A True and Faithful Account of Mr. Ota Benga the Pygmy, Written by M. Berman, Zookeeper – Mansbach http://adammansbach.com/other/otabenga.html

2.      [Note! This is very dark sarcasm and not to be taken literally.] How to Write About Africa – Wainaina (Granta): https://granta.com/how-to-write-about-africa/

 Prompt 35. Ancestry is not race is not human biological variation is not race is not ancestry. Distinguish all three of those phenomena in humans (ancestry, race, and human biological variation) from one another. For "race" you must stick to humans. Whatever people call a "race" in other organisms is not race in humans. Be sure to consider why is it important, or why it matters that we make these distinctions between these three concepts. You must find a quote to use in your answer from Ch. 7 by Fuentes in A Most Interesting Problem) and you must quote or cite at least 1 other resource from the list below in your answer. If any link leads you to a paywall, don’t pay a dime; there’s a good chance you can get past the paywall through the URI library. (If you need assistance using the library to find any of these, I’m available to help! Or choose another article that’s not subscription based!)

·        Human Races are not like dog breeds - Norton et al. (EEO) SEE GLOSSARY OF TERMS AT THE VERY BOTTOM
https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-019-0109-y

·        Chapter 15: Ten Facts about human variation – Marks (Human Evolutionary Biology)

https://webpages.uncc.edu/~jmarks/pubs/tenfacts.pdf (copy and paste that URL into your browser because just clicking on it may not work)

·        The NFL's Racist 'Race Norming' Is an Afterlife of Slavery https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-nfls-racist-race-norming-is-an-afterlife-of-slavery/

·        Surprise! Africans are not all the same (or why we need diversity in science) – Lasisi  https://anthrograd.com/2017/10/18/surprise-africans-are-not-all-the-same-or-why-we-need-diversity-in-science/

·        America's Hidden History: The Eugenics Movement: https://www.nature.com/scitable/forums/genetics-generation/america-s-hidden-history-the-eugenics-movement-123919444/

·        'National Geographic' Reckons With Its Past: 'For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist'

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/12/592982327/national-geographic-reckons-with-its-past-for-decades-our-coverage-was-racist

·        There's no such thing as a 'pure' European—or anyone else – Gibbons (Science)

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/theres-no-such-thing-pure-european-or-anyone-else

·        Frederick Douglass's fight against scientific racism – Herschthal (NYT)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/22/opinion/frederick-douglasss-scientific-racism.html

·        The unwelcome revival of race science—Evans  (The Guardian)

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/02/the-unwelcome-revival-of-race-science

·        Why America's Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis - Villarosa (The New York Times) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/magazine/black-mothers-babies-death-maternal-mortality.html

·        Being black in America can be hazardous to your health – Khazan (The Atlantic)  https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/being-black-in-america-can-be-hazardous-to-your-health/561740/

 

Prompt 36. Sex, Gender, and Human Evolution. Taking into account anything from this course, and your life, answer these two prompts citing at least one source for each (still, one page is all you need): (1) Sex is not gender and gender is not sex: what does that mean? (2) Contemplate how and/or why old/bad science encouraged people to deem women "inferior.”

·        https://www.nature.com/news/sex-redefined-1.16943?fbclid=IwAR2QNl_esA0ooF5dfaq0x7_FN7kB6rpi0V0KFfqnq8rdxnMn37xYi6Vm8QU

·        https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/aug/11/women-equal-to-men-science-fact-book-angela-saini

·        https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/woman-hunter-ancient-andean-remains-challenge-old-ideas-who-speared-big-game

 

[Prompt 37 is not yet written for this year. It will be a lot like previous years. It will include a letter-to-day-one-self as well as a self-grade, but there are always a few more specific questions about evolution here as well (but no reading, etc).]

 

 

Plants are People, Too

What Can Plants Do?

I haven't written a blog post since 2017. I've missed it, but, well, life has intervened. But, I've just read The Light Eaters, by Zöe Schlanger, a book describing a tidal wave of new thinking about plant behavior, and it has moved me to write.  It's a New York Times bestseller.  It's exciting stuff.  

Schlanger writes of research on plants that seem to make decisions, that plan ahead, plants that anticipate where light will be when, altruistic plants, plants that treat close kin better than distant kin or unrelated plants, vines that can mimic the plants they are parasitizing, plants that seem to have some way to "see," though it's not at all clear what the mechanism would be, she describes eusocial plants, in which, like bees, some contribute to the survival of others without reproducing themselves, plants that emit the exact chemical to attract parasites of insects that have attacked them, roots that seem to forage.  Ultimately, she wonders whether plants might have the equivalent of a brain, a centralized organizing something.  Many others ponder the same question.  Schlanger eventually asks if the entire plant is equivalent to a brain but, again, the mechanism is a puzzle.  

And there's so much more.  

The author is very measured in her discussion of what all these new findings might mean.  She cautions about the importance of the traditional scientific method and of questioning results. She reminds us that The Secret Life of Plants, by Tomkins and Bird, published in 1973, was an "irresponsible, best-selling book that nearly snuffed out the field for good." That book told us that plants have emotions, they prefer Beethoven to rock-and-roll, they can read our minds, and so on.  It was quickly debunked.  

Serious botanists who are thinking about plant behavior these days want to be very careful not to be taken for similar fantasists.  The young field of plant neurobiology applies generally accepted methods to ask how plants process the information they glean from their environment, and it's these kinds of results that Schlanger reports in her book.

Schlanger is a journalist.  She's not producing new findings herself, she's writing about them, as are many others.  A June 11 essay by Rachael Petersen in Aeon asks "Do Plants Have Minds?"  She writes about Gustav Theodor Fechner, a 19th century intellectual from Saxony who contemplated this question.  

He reminds me that the best way to apprehend the unseen in plants is to take off the blindfold and look. He reminds me that what we stand to gain by looking at nature with new eyes is nothing short of the world, and nothing short of each other.

Looking at nature with new eyes seems to be just what's happening in much of Botany.   

But, there are cautions.  E.g., an April 23 piece by Daniel Immerwahr, in The Guardian, warns that a lot of the data are being over-interpreted (the importance of the underground fungal network between trees, in particular) but that there are many interesting discoveries being made. And, he writes respectfully of Schlanger's book.  

So, the question of what to make of all these new observations of plant behavior is in the air but we are far from a deep understanding.  I like this Wikipedia discussion of the Chilean Boquila trifoliolata plant, a vine that mimics other plants, even plants it didn't evolve anywhere near, which Schlanger discusses at length, and even visits in Chile. 

The exact mechanism by which mimicry occurs is not well understood but may involve chemical, odor, genetic, metagenomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, metabolomic, epigenetic, and/or microbial cues to identify and mimic the species it is attached to.

It would seem that the inexact mechanism by which mimicry occurs is not well understood, either.  

Anthropomorphizing

People who study non-human life have long been careful about anthropomorphizing their study subjects.  But, this seems to be changing.  There's an interesting June 6 piece in The Atlantic by Katherine J. Wu about this. She suggests that, by denying human characteristics to other living beings, we may be missing important truths about their behavior.  

Schlanger notes repeatedly that botany has a history of discouraging the anthropomorphizing of plants. And yet, it is possible that there's no better, or even no other language in which to describe the new discoveries.  There seems to be a new openness to applying what we know about humans to plants.  If we strip all life down to organisms that strive to survive and reproduce, maybe that's as it should be.  We are all trying to solve the same problems; knowing where we are in space, finding food, spotting danger and figuring out ways to avoid it, finding mates, or otherwise reproducing.  Let's throw in protecting kin, sensing our environment, and solving problems.  We all do at least some of that, even single-celled organisms.   

So, let's assume that the results reported in this book are verifiable, and even revolutionary. Plants really can do all these things, and more, and it is meaningful to describe them in human terms. Let's keep looking, and cataloguing and generalizing.  

But, will anthropomorphizing plants get us anywhere?  We still don't really understand human, or, generally, primate behavior. We're still squabbling over whether it's genes or environment, so once we describe plants in our terms, have we actually understood them any better? And, how would we know?

You Are Not "You"

 As I’m revising my upcoming book, I’m reflecting on its past, present, and future. 

 

You Are Not “You”

 Believe, at least for the time being, that you are anyone and everyone, including me.

That’s how you wanted to open your book on human evolution, whose earlier incarnations regularly employed the second person perspective: You got into paleoanthropology for reasons. You used to think one way. Now you think another. Trying on the author’s perspective helps us see how blind we’ve been to the personalities that have crafted the facts of life and have perpetuated the make-believe narratives we’ve accepted as science. With that newfound sense, we can tell new stories, better stories, or no stories at all about where we came from and who we are, about human nature.

But before you could pitch that prophylactic opening, sure to ward off reader discomfort bound to bubble up down the line when they first read “you”;

before you could defend the second person as a necessary tool for shifting the reader’s evolutionary thinking away from distinct, competing individuals to an always interconnected, collaborative whole, something more powerful than “we”;

before you could defend this point-of-you as showing, rather than telling, how personal perspective shapes science and the fictions we tell with facts, they told you to “ditch the second person.” Something about a feted New York novelist getting away with it long ago, but it not serving your book. “There are places where it’s like watching you talk to yourself.”

You is confusing. Early on, your manuscript included, You’re always reading your way through the books around the house, which made your partner look up from the page and blurt, “No I’m not!”  After the uproar, the literary significance of what immediately followed [something about Metamorphosis being about the sister’s transformation, which is a section you later struck] was lost.  

 Oh boy. Did you just say “literary”? That’s probably where you took a wrong turn.

See, you have no idea how to write. You have no business having literary ambition. This is merely a science book you’re writing and even it demands a level of writerly competence that you’re struggling to realize.

So far, much of the feedback you’ve received from the pros is comprised entirely of words you know well, but in new combinations that you do not. So sometimes you nod along with what they’re saying, uh-huh, just like when you’re tired of asking someone to repeat what they’ve already said three times too softly and quickly for your ears and brain to comprehend.

Ignorance, ineptitude, lack of skill and talent, and an aging auditory apparatus. All that must be the root of the problem here, not necessarily the second person itself. Someone else with lettered or unlettered skill and talent would be able to write the book you’re trying to write. Not you.

Sure, with the second person you had success on your blog. Your you…you… you … posts resonated more than others—maybe engaging readers the way that you’d become N.K. Jemison’s protagonist in the Broken Earth Trilogy. But when you applied the second person to your book’s pages, it did no such thing.

Immersion into another person and away from one-man-army individualism, you believed, and still do, is the key to transforming human evolutionary thinking. But you fumbled the script. You dropped it down the shithole. And nothing, not even throwing your phone and wallet down after, could make you save it now. Say no more. You heard them loud and clear.

They read “you” but they couldn’t be you. You is annoying, jarring, disorienting. And, so, you are. It’s not just a better writer who could write the book you are trying to write, it’s a better person. A more relatable person. And an admirable one who earns the reader’s committed effort to walk in their shoes. Not only did you fail to bring people on board, but you turned them off: no one wants to be a crazy person who talks to themselves [sic]. The Second Person, whoever they are, is only who you wish you were: someone people could stand to pretend to be for a little while.

You are clearly a First Person. Real, typical, and yet somehow also not easy for real, typical readers to transform into. Readers can only metamorphose into exceptional people—people who can make the bedrock quake, people who can behead a troll, people who are fiction, made-up. Those people, Novel People, imaginary people invite readers into their skins. Fiction People can be Second Person, can be you. Non-Fiction People, like you, cannot.

Reading your First Person p.o.v., I… I… I… means they can empathize with you or not. It’s their choice. If you’re too different from who they are, in their minds, then they’re probably not very deep into you and they’re able to keep their distance, if that makes them more comfortable. But why must everyone be so comfortable? (Oh, must be the money.)

In reality, in Nonfiction Land, we don’t choose to be who we are and we can’t choose to be distinct from anyone. There is no First Person in 3.7 billion years of connected life on Earth. Reality is, I am you, as you are me, so we are we, and we are all together. The Walrus wasn’t wrong.

Atomized organisms comprised of atomized traits built by atomized genes is a fiction and it’s why mainstream evolutionary thinking doesn’t make any sense to you. It’s not merely philosophy, it’s the storytelling game, and it’s the practical and logistical limitations of speech and language. Explaining why mainstream evolutionary thinking doesn’t make any sense to you, and isn’t good enough science, takes more than explanation, more than talking the talk. It takes walking the walk. One way to walk the walk is to put the reader in your shoes.

Are we really supposed to assume that readers of non-fiction are so different from fiction readers? Are they that terrible at transforming themselves? At imagining? At trying something on? If so, then why even bother to change their minds about human evolution at all?  The evidence, they’re thinking; it’s the evidence that will change their minds. But they’re thinking wrong. If the facts were enough, then we’d be free already.

While you makes everyone you, and while, together, you are a more fitting adversary for old make-believe stories than I is, you is weird. You’ve got to find a way forward as I. They win. But you can make I work so you win too:

I contains multitudes and those multitudes are you.

Not yet mainstream, non-traditional, logical and reasonable evolutionary explanation for the average greater strength of human males

Common question I hear (including common "truth" about the evolution of men's strength): 

From an evolutionary standpoint, it doesn't really make sense that men are stronger than women. Of course I know men evolved that way to fight off other males to get mating opportunities, but shouldn't women also evolve strength to protect their kids? Wouldn't it make more sense for women to evolve a greater muscle mass to protect their kids from danger?

Answer: 

You’ve hit on one of the most important questions about human evolution, so I hope you’ll forgive me if this goes a little long. I’ve learned that it’s better to say too much than too little when you’re asking people to question (and maybe reject entirely) some of Charles Darwin’s ideas. One hundred and fifty years ago, he couldn’t have possibly gotten everything right. In 2024, science is still just a baby.

Though, it’s only taken humanity 150 years to know that evolution (=change over deep time throughout all lineages which are all related to, and interconnected with, one another) is true.

But there are the facts of evolution and then there are the stories we tell about those facts.

It’s a fact that males are on average stronger than females, and it’s a fact that humans (and every organism) evolved from earlier forms/ancestors, but the story we tell about why male humans evolved to be on average stronger than females is very far from fact.  

Unfortunately, that story is taken for granted as such a fact-of-life in our culture right now that questioning its truth can earn you some serious eyerolls or can make people leap to the conclusion that you’re doubting the truth of evolution itself. But enough about my personal problems. Let’s answer your wonderful question.

We can start by considering the fact that female humans are actually, already, totally evolved to be totally capable of protecting their children—wits-wise, strength-wise, throwing-projectiles-wise, fire-wise, booby-trap-wise, and otherwise, and probably have been for millions of years (considering we’re primates and knowing what female primates are capable of: surviving and helping others to too). And remember, few of our ancestors were ever isolated and alone. Group-living with complex culture and highly social coalitional behavior is rampant among primates and the human primate takes sociality, cumulative culture, and cooperation to the extreme. So, from the perspective where female humans are perfectly strong enough to care for themselves, their kids, and their loved ones (just as any female primate is), then it remains a mystery why males evolved to be even stronger. But because we started from a different assumption about the evolution of females compared to tradition/pop culture, then our scientific imagination can be open to non-traditional explanations for the evolution of male-female differences in strength.

Ever since Darwin, it’s become common sense to explain male-female differences in human strength to be about males fighting other males, the winners getting to mate more, and therefore putting their winning/strong genes into more sons than the other guys. Eventually that common sense story included males fighting other males to protect their wives and babies from imaginary Stone Age marauders. In our cultural tradition, male-female differences in strength have become evidence for a belief about human nature that has us loving only our close family, all others we battle to the death. But (combined with our initial understanding that females are perfectly physically strong enough to survive and to help others’ do the same) the fact that daughters would clearly benefit from evolving the same level of strength as sons, as you point out, is exactly why we should question that common sense story.

There is obviously a male-female difference in average strength, with males being stronger and having more total muscle mass, on average—though it is less pronounced in people who have been active since childhood and throughout their lives. And there is obviously a male-female difference in physical violence, with males fighting more than females. However, fighting (and the winners of the fights passing down more winning genes, ratcheting up strength in only sons in the future) need not be the reason physical differences exist between the sexes.

After all, fighting is not the reason for another major difference in male and female biology. Fighting’s not the reason that gonads and genitals are different between the sexes. And, while all bodies count on both testosterone and estrogen to develop and to function (and while estrogen in all bodies is synthesized from androgens), testes in male bodies produce more testosterone than is found in female bodies, while ovaries in female bodies produce more estrogen than is found in male bodies.  (And both of those hormones are also produced elsewhere all bodies, like the brain.) A delicate balance of both of those hormones (and many others), not too little and not too much, is required of all bodies to reproduce (to produce gametes and to facilitate in their meeting gametes of the other sex). And so, evolutionarily changing the levels of those hormones risks preventing that change from existing into the future. That is, evolving to have more or less testosterone or estrogen is a risky evolutionary process, given it could prevent evolution/life from continuing. Greater testosterone is the best explanation we have for greater male strength, by its promotion of the development of muscle mass. But males’ greater testosterone is fundamentally linked to their reproductive biology in the first place. Messing with testosterone levels, up or down, in males risks lowering male reproductive success. That’s true for females, too.

Bear with me because there is not a whole lot of well-understood biological science here, but it’s not likely that a female with male levels of circulating testosterone, which could make her stronger, would actually be able to reproduce. Remember, we all need a certain level of estrogen and testosterone to do so and producing so much testosterone would probably affect female reproductive ability (it may also cause a reduction in estrogen which would add to the problems, but that’s just an educated guess).

The point is, given what we know about how estrogen and testosterone contribute to reproductive biology (and if we also assume that female bodies are good and strong enough to do what humans need to do to survive and to help others to too), then it’s easy to imagine why daughters of strong men are not as strong as strong men’s sons. 

We could say that males' higher testosterone and the resulting increased muscle mass is just a consequence of being not-female. When bodies are so intricately linked through hormones to the complexities of sexual reproduction, it’s probably wise to appreciate those hormones' crucial roles in reproduction. When we do, we can see how sex differences in bodies, like muscle mass and height, could be by-products of the evolution of the reproductive system.

That is, since the reproductive system differs between males and females, then why would we expect everything else that’s developmentally linked to the reproductive system to be identical? The old common-sense story about males being stronger because of selection for fighting ability assumes that all humans would be the same if not for male-specific selection for strength. But we’re not the same in ovaries and testes. We’re not the same in hormone levels. All that difference in our gonads is doing the fundamental work with eggs and sperm to sustain our lineage.

One by-product of those hormone levels caused by our gonads is our height difference. Because males don’t have the higher levels of estrogen that ovaries produce for the ovulatory/menstrual cycle, male bodies keep growing for longer than females’. That’s because, in all bodies, estrogen drives long bone growth and an even higher level of it is needed for growth plates to fuse and for height to stop increasing. Females stop gaining height early in puberty because of the high levels of estrogen. Males keep growing for up to a few more years because there is nothing stopping them so soon like there is in females. Male-female differences in height are therefore not because of selection for big, tall males (despite that being common sense story since Darwin); they are because of reproductive biology’s side-effects on bone growth duration resulting in patterned variation where on average females are shorter than males.

I suspect that the same side effects are happening with muscle mass and strength. There’s no reason to expect us all to be the same and then, from there, to require a male-specific adaptive tale for the difference. Selection is already building ovaries and testes and from there viable/successful human variation forms (height, strength) and we’re clearly doing fine with all this variation because our ovaries and testes keep putting all this variation into the future. (There is probably something about the increased fat mass in female bodies compared to males, because it is linked to estrogen and to successful reproduction. And so, there may be something about building fat in bodies with more estrogen and, in the absence of lots of estrogen, building more muscle instead.)

That leaves us wondering why human males fight so much more than females (and so much more than other primates) if they have not necessarily evolved to do so. It may have lots more to do with culture than old evolutionary stories have led us to believe. It may even have a little bit to do with telling boys and men that they have evolved to be fighters.

As you point out implicitly in your question, what I’ve written here isn’t mainstream (yet), but, like I said, science is still a baby. Keeping an open mind about human biological variation and remaining skeptical of the stories we tell to explain human variation is, I think, the strongest way to face human evolution with science.