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OverviewFull Product DetailsAuthor: Jeffrey Kevin McKeePublisher: Rutgers University Press Imprint: Rutgers University Press Dimensions: Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.50cm , Length: 22.90cm Weight: 0.624kg ISBN: 9780813527833ISBN 10: 081352783 Pages: 294 Publication Date: 01 June 2000 Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate , Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: Out of stock  The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available. Table of Contents"Preface 1. Chance, Coincidence, and Chaos 2. Between a Rock and a Hard Place 3. A Tale of Two Sites 4. Speeding Up the Pace of Evolution 5. Rebels Without a Cause 6. The Mother of Invention 7. ""You Can't Always Get What You Want..."" 8. Autocatalysis 9. The Beginning and the End of Evolution Notes Literature Cited Index"ReviewsAdd culture to the alliterative subtitle and clever to describe the approach of the author, for this is indeed an intelligent and provocative account of human evolution. McKee (Anthropology/Ohio State) is a theorist as well as a field paleoanthropologist. He has worked on digs at the storied sites in South Africa (Magapansgat and Taung) where Raymond Dart discovered a famous fossil of a child hominid, not an ape, estimated to be about 2.5 million years old. The structure of the skull provided McKee with a starting-point for his thesis: there is chaos in the world, he claims, because a change in some initial circumstance in our evolutionary historyone that occurred by chance (gene mutation)has had epoch-making and unpredictable repercussions. The Taung child was a small-brained, large-faced biped. In the process of adapting to standing and walking, McKee speculates, the spinal cord attached to the brain moved centrally so that the head would eventually sit squarely over the spinal column and face forward. These genetic and morphological events, along with evidence from other fossil finds and computer simulations, led McKee to conclude that evolution is self-catalytic (i.e., self-driven). It is the product of change, coincidence, and chaos, climaxing in human evolution with culture, that has increased our adaptability. McKee discredits the popular theory that a climatic cooling led to a loss of forest and the growth of savannahs, thereby driving our ancestors to bipedalism. He also includes a wonderful chapter cataloguing the compromises in anatomy and physiology our species lives with, and he speculates that we are preserving maladaptive traits because of our medical ingenuity. McKees wonderfully rich and thought-provoking text, told with style and winning flashes of humor, is a refreshing entry into the always contentious and endlessly fascinating story of human origins. (Kirkus Reviews) Author InformationJEFFREY K. MCKEE teaches in the Department of Anthropology and Evolution, Ecology, & Organismal Biology at The Ohio State University. He is the co-author of Understanding Human Evolution. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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