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| Preface | |
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| Correlation Guide | |
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| Topic Guide | |
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| Internet References | |
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| Evolutionary Perspectives | |
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| Unit Overview | |
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| Charles Darwin Was Born into a World That Today's Scientists Wouldn't Recognize, Tom Siegfried, Science News, January 31, 2009 | |
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| Every great scientist is a product of his or her time | |
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| Darwin, more than any other, shaped his and his influence was so much greater than he could ever have imagined | |
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| Was Darwin Wrong?, David Quammen, Online Extra, National Geographic Magazine, November, 2004 | |
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| Evolutionary theory is not just an ephemeral guess, but is a well-established set of concepts that has come to be critically important to human welfare, medical science, and understanding the world around us | |
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| The Facts of Evolution, Michael Shermer, from Why Darwin Matters, Henry Hold & Co., 2006 | |
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| Evolutionary theory is rooted in a rich array of data from the past. While the specifics of evolution are still being studied and unraveled, the general theory is the most tested in science, tests spanning the past century and a half | |
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| Evolution in Action, Jonathan Weiner, Natural History, November 2005 | |
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| More than 250 scientists around the world are documenting evolution in action. Some of the most dramatic cases are those that result from the ecological pressures which human beings are imposing on the planet | |
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| How the Dog Got Its Curly Tail, David Sloan Wilson, from Evolution for Everyone, Delacorte Press, 2007 | |
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| The fact that domestic animals have become tame by retaining their juvenile traits has revealed an important corollary to the concept that heritable variation is shaped by natural selection: not all traits are so purely and simply adaptive | |
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| The Latest Face of Creationism, Glenn Branch and Eugenie C. Scott, Scientific American, January 2009 | |
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| Creationists have long battled against the teaching of evolution in the classroom. Because of a series of legal setbacks, their strategies have had to evolve from promoting their own perspective to undermining science literacy | |
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| Why Should Students Learn Evolution?, Brian J. Alters and Sandra M. Alters, Defending Evolution in the Classroom, Jones & Bartlett Publishers, Inc., 2001 | |
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| In explaining how organisms of today got to be the way they are, the evolutionary perspective helps us to make sense of the history of life and explains relationships among species | |
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| It is an essential framework within which scientists organize and interpret observations, and make predictions about the living world | |
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| Primates | |
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| Unit Overview | |
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| The 2% Difference, Robert Sapolsky, Discover, April 2006 | |
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| Now that scientists have decoded the chimpanzee genome, we know that we share 98% of our DNA with chimps | |
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| So how can we be so different? The answer lies in the fact that a very few mutations make for some very big differences | |
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| The Mind of the Chimpanzee, Jane Goodall, Through a Window, Houghton Mifflin, 1990 | |
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| It has long been recognized that the differences in anatomy and physiology between apes and humans is only a matter of degree | |
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| Because of the work of Jane Goodall, we have come to realize that there is continuity in the mental and emotional developments as well | |
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| Got Culture?, Craig Stanford, from Significant Others, Basic Books, 2001 | |
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| The study of the rudimentary cultural abilities of the chimpanzee not only sharpens our understanding of our uniqueness as humans, but it also suggests an ancient ancestry of the mental abilities that we and the chimpanzees have in common | |
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| Dim Forest, Bright Chimps, Christophe Boesch and Hedwige Boesch-Achermann, Natural History, September 1991 | |
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| Contrary to expectations, forest-dwelling chimpanzees seem to be more committed to cooperative hunting and tool use than are savanna chimpanzees | |
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| Such findings may have implications for the understanding of the course of human evolution | |
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| Thinking Like a Monkey, Jerry Adler, Smithsonian, January 2008 | |
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| Sometimes, rather than simply observing primates, researchers try to decipher their thoughts and intentions by subjecting them to experimental trials. In this case, the issue has to do with whether rhesus monkeys have a theory of mind | |
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| Why Are Some Animals So Smart?, Carel Van Schaik, Scientific American, April 2006 | |
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| Observations of orangutans in the wild show that the more individuals have an opportunity to learn from one another, the more innovative and intelligent they become | |
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| How Animals Do Business, Frans B. M. de Waal, Scientific American, April 2005 | |
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| In contrast to classical economic theory, which views people as profit maximizers driven by pure selfishness, recent studies show that both people and animals occasionally help one another, even when there is no obvious benefit involved | |
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| A Telling Difference, Stephen R. Anderson, Natural History, November 2004 | |
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| Some animals, such as the bonobo named Kanzi, have amazing communication skills, but evidence that they are capable of abstractions and grammatical structuring like humans is lacking | |
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| Sex and Gender | |
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| Unit Overview | |
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| What Are Friends For?, Barbara Smuts, Natural History, February 1987 | |
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| An understanding of friendship bonds that exist among baboons is not only destroying our stereotypes about monkeys in the wild, but is also calling into question the traditional views concerning the relationships between the sexes in early hominid evolution | |
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| Face-Offs of the Female Kind, Marina Cords, Natural History, September 2008 | |
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| Among the blue monkeys of Western Kenya, territorial battles reveal some rather peculiar group dynamics. For one thing, females fight far more often than males and for another, the higher the rank the more they seem to depend on those at the bottom when the group splits into two | |
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| What's Love Got to Do with It?: Sex among Our Closest Relatives Is a Rather Open Affair, Meredith F. Small, Discover, June 1992 | |
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| The bonobos' use of sex to reduce tension and to form alliances is raising some interesting questions regarding human evolution. Does this behavior help to explain the origin of our sexuality? Or should we see it as just another primate aberration that occurred after the split from the human lineage? | |
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| Mothers and Others, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Natural History, May 2001 | |
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| In many species, including our own, mothers are assisted in rearing their offspring by others. The more we adhere to this evolutionary heritage of "cooperative breeding,'' the more likely we are to raise emotionally healthy children | |
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| The Fossil Evidence | |
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| Unit Overview | |
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| The Salamander's Tale, Richard Dawkins, from The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004 | |
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| To identify two different species with distinct names implies a discontinuity between them. Yet, if they were part of an evolutionary sequence, one begetting the other, the continuous reality contradicts the discontinuity implied by the names | |
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| It is no wonder, therefore that Dawkins claims that "names are a menace to evolutionary history.'' | |
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| The Woman Who Shook up Man's Family Tree, Donald C. Johanson and Kate Wong, from Lucy's Legacy, Harmony Books, 2009 | |
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| Don Johanson and Kate Wong show that the search for fossil hominids is a daunting task | |
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| It requires sufficient financial support, access to promising research sites in remote areas, collaboration among a variety of specialists, physical endurance and that most elusive quality of all-sheer luck | |
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| Hunting the First Hominid, Pat Shipman, American Scientist, January/February 2002 | |
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| In the search for the first hominid to branch off from the apes, taking note of the key features that distinguish apes from people helps to an extent | |
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| However, such a list can be misleading, because not all of these features arose simultaneously, and we do not even know which came first | |
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| Made in Savannahstan, Marek Kohn, New Scientist, July 1/July 7, 2006 | |
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| The prevailing view in Paleoanthropology has been that our ancestors evolved human-like traits in Africa before entering Europe and Asia. Recent evidence points to another possibility-that early hominins expanded out of Africa at an earlier stage and then returned to the ancestral continent as Homo erectus | |
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| Scavenger Hunt, Pat Shipman, Natural History, April 1984 | |
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| Microscopic analyses of tooth wear and cut marks on bones, combined with an increased understanding of the advantages of bipedalism, point in the direction of a "Man the Scavenger'' model rather than "Man the Hunter.'' | |
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| The Scavenging of "Peking Man'', Noel T. Boaz and Russell L. Ciochon, Natural History, March 2001 | |
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| Dragon Bone Hill in China is the site of the cave that yielded the first, and the still largest, cache of fossils of Homo erectus pekinensis. In the process of applying new methods of analysis to the evidence, the authors try to determine whether these relatives of ours used fire, and whether they were cannibals, hunters, or the hunted | |
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| Late Hominid Evolution | |
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| Unit Overview | |
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| Hard Times among the Neanderthals, Erik Trinkaus, Natural History, December 1978 | |
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| In spite of the coarseness of their lifestyle and the apparent violence between individuals, Neanderthal skeletal remains reveal a prehistoric record of affection and respect, and they should be accorded the status of human beings | |
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| Rethinking Neanderthals, Joe Alper, Smithsonian, June 2003 | |
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| Contrary to the widely held view that Neanderthals were evolutionary failures, the fact is that they persisted through some of the harshest climates imaginable. Over a period of 200,000 years, they had made some rather sophisticated tools and have had a social life that involved taking care of the wounded and burying the dead | |
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| Last of the Neanderthals: A Hunter Retreats, Stephen S. Hall, National Geographic, October 2008 | |
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| With their large brains and enormous strength, Neanderthals were well suited to the rigors of hunting ice age mammals. But as the climate changed and a new kind of human appeared on the landscape, their numbers dwindled and they could no longer compete | |
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| The Great Human Migration, Guy Gugliotta, Smithsonian, July 2008 | |
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| Although modern humans made forays out of Africa much earlier, they did not actually penetrate Western Europe until about 40,000 years ago, as the last pockets of Neanderthals dwindled to extinction | |
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| The Littlest Human, Kate Wong, Scientific American, February 2005 | |
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| An astonishing find in Indonesia suggests that a diminutive hominid, perhaps downsized from Homo erectus, co-existed with our kind in the not so distant past | |
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| The Gift of Gab, Matt Cartmill, Discover, November 1998 | |
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| While the origin of human language is rooted in the aspects of psychology and biology that we share with our close animal relatives, our kind of communication seems to be associated with making tools and throwing weapons | |
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| The Birth of Childhood, Ann Gibbons, Science, November 14, 2008 | |
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| Unlike our closest relatives, the apes, humans depend on their parents for a long period after weaning. New investigative technology has allowed researchers to determine when and why our long childhood evolved | |
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| The Brain, Carl Zimmer, Discover, November 2008 | |
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| Facial expression is not simply a form of communication that can be traced back through our primate ancestry. Nor are the facial muscles themselves simply rooted in our fish ancestry. One of the most startling findings gained from recent research is that making faces helps us understand what other people are feeling | |
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| Human Diversity | |
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| Unit Overview | |
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| Skin Deep, Nina G. Jablonski and George Chaplin, Scientific American, October 2002 | |
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| Although recent migrations and cultural adaptation tend to complicate the picture, human skin color has evolved to be dark enough to prevent sunlight from destroying the nutrient folate, but light enough to foster the production of vitamin D. | |
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| Born Gay?, Michael Abrams, Discover, June 2007 | |
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| The search for the causes of homosexuality may have therapeutic implications or even political ones, but most researchers are concentrating on the scientific issues: How might sexuality-related genes build brains? How are people attracted to each other? How and why might homosexuality have evolved? | |
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| How Real Is Race?: Using Anthropology to Make Sense of Human Diversity, Carol Mukhopadhyay and Rosemary C. Henze, Phi Delta Kappan, Volume 84, Issue 9, 2003 | |
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| The authors claim that race is not a scientifically valid biological category. Instead, looking at it as a historically specific way of thinking about categorizing and treating human beings, race can be seen as a cultural invention | |
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| The Tall and the Short of It, Barry Bogin, Discover, February 1998 | |
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| Rather than being able to adapt to a single environment, we can-thanks to our genetically endowed plasticity, change our bodies to cope with a wide variety of environments. In this light, research suggests that we can use the average height of any group of people as a barometer of the health of that particular society | |
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| Living with the Past | |
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| Unit Overview | |
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| The Viral Superhighway, George J. Armelagos, The Sciences, January/February 1998 | |
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| The modern world is becoming a viral superhighway | |
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| Environmental disruptions and international travel have brought on a new era of human illness, one marked by new diabolical diseases | |
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| The Perfect Plague, Jared Diamond and Nathan Wolfe, Discover, November 2008 | |
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| Globalization, changing climate, and the threat of drug resistance have conspired to set the stage for that perfect microbial storm: a situation in which an emerging pathogen-another HIV or smallpox perhaps-might burst on the scene and kill millions of people before we can respond | |
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| The Inuit Paradox, Patricia Gadsby, Discover, October 2004 | |
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| The traditional diet of the Far North, with its high-protein, high-fat content, shows that there are no essential foods-only essential nutrients | |
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| Dr. Darwin, Lori Oliwenstein, Discover, October 1995 | |
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| The application of Darwin's theory of evolution to the understanding of human diseases will not only help us better treat the symptoms of diseases, but also helps us understand how microbes and humans have evolved in relation to one another | |
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| Curse and Blessing of the Ghetto, Jared Diamond, Discover, March 1991 | |
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| Tay-Sachs disease is a choosy killer, one that targeted Eastern European Jews above all others for centuries. By decoding its lethal logic, we can learn a great deal about how genetic diseases evolve-and how they can be conquered | |
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| Ironing It Out, Sharon Moalem, Survival of the Sickest, HarperCollins, 2007 | |
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| Hemochromatosis is a hereditary disease that disrupts the human body's ability to metabolize iron. To understand why such a deadly disease would be bred into our genetic code, we need to take a closer look at European history, the bubonic plague, and medical practices that were discredited | |
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