Again, "when you need the job done right,"

"bring in a woman."

 

Continuance of a prior riff. 

 

 OK, a new Science Magazine review, and this one jumped the VIP rope line queque.

 

 

Well, crap, now I gotta go back and re-assess the aggregate cred of my many prior Tomasello cites.

 

UPDATE 

 

More Christine Webb:

… There is no single, linear narrative of evolutionary progress. Instead, evolution is a process of continuous branching and diversification—more like a tree or web than a ladder of life. Stephen Jay Gould, who taught right across the street in Harvard’s Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, vehemently cautioned against equating evolutionary change with directionality and progress. Yet the process is often interpreted or presented as progressive (or “orthogenetic”), culminating in us. Classic depictions of major evolutionary transitions will show microbes, plants, and invertebrates leading up to smaller vertebrates like fish and birds and, finally, large mammals like humans at the top. Such renderings reinforce the widely held but erroneous view that evolution proceeds from “primitive” to more “advanced” organisms. And it’s also worth noting that we’re talking about how this human-centric idea spreads in schools that even teach evolution in the first place! 

Darwin himself maintained that “it is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another,” yet talk of “higher” and “lower” organisms is still common today. We tend to assume that our species is the end point of evolution, that there is an inexorable trend toward “human-ness.” One iconic image shows the silhouettes of humans’ ancestors gradually transitioning from hunched-over ape-like forms to upright cavemen-looking figures that eventuate in Homo sapiens (a wittier version depicts modern humans at the last stage crouched over again at their computers). People often misinterpret this image as evidence of a linear process by which modern humans descended from chimpanzees. Humans did not “evolve from” apes or monkeys. We share a common ancestor with both chimpanzees and bonobos that lived around five to seven million years ago. Chimpanzees and bonobos (and all other species with whom we share ancestry and who have not yet gone extinct) have continued to evolve in parallel as the evolutionary tree continues to branch outward. Yet linear representations tend to erase those other-than-human histories. They elide the diversification of species from common ancestral populations into one human-centric story. 

To make this point clear, consider the following question: Are frogs more closely related to fish or to humans? Many people assume a closer relatedness between frogs and fish than between frogs and humans. But because frogs and humans share a more recent common ancestor (one that is not shared with fish)—frogs are more closely related to humans. 

Perhaps even more surprisingly, some fish are more closely related to us than they are to other fish. For instance, lungfish are more closely related to mammals like humans than they are to other aquatic species like salmon. Evolutionarily speaking, “fish” is an invalid functional category that does not reflect real evolutionary relationships. The word aggregates tens of thousands of different species—more in number and diversity than all terrestrial vertebrates combined. As my friend the aquatic animal welfare scientist Becca Franks notes, “The vast majority of modern fish species evolved hundreds of millions of years after humans shared a common ancestor with them—which means that modern fish are not primitive forerunners to our lineage any more than humans are primitive forerunners to theirs.” 

There is a great fallacy in making humans the reference point for the rest of the biological world. Not only because it is scientifically invalid, but because it deprives us of a richer, fuller perspective and way of life. Evolutionary biologist Robert O’Hara said it best: “When we come to realize that even among the vertebrates there are 50,000 different ‘vertebrate stories,’ each one with a different ending and each one with a different narrative landscape; when we truly think in terms of the diverging tree, instead of the line; when we understand that it is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another; only then will we see the full grandeur of the historical view of life.” …

Webb, Christine. The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters (pp. 31-33). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

Stephen Jay Gould! Yes! Serious Gouldian "Drunkard's Walk" fanboy here (link to my "Eve" post).

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ERRATUM

You recognize her? 

 

ANOTHER OF MY FAVORITE WOMEN

 

Tectonic Geologist Dr. Marcia Brornerud

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BTW, I'm already eyeball-deep in this glorious (male author) "story" book.

 

 

A Scientific American find.

 

This (male author) book is equally worthy: 

 

 

Ton of dots to connect... 

 

Topic to be continued via a subsequent post. But, yet another relevant book has surfaced outa the blue.