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paleoanthropology, genetics and evolution

Ernst Haeckel

  • Quote: Haeckel on our ape "heirlooms"

    Sat, 2013-01-05 22:14 -- John Hawks

    Ernst Haeckel, in the History of Creation, English translation in the Project Gutenberg version:

    Thus, from a careful examination of the comparative anatomy of the Anthropoides, we obtain a similar result to that obtained by Weisbach, from a statistical classification and a thoughtful comparison of the very numerous and careful measurements which Scherzer and Schwarz made of the different races of Men during their voyage in the Austrian frigate Novara round the earth. Weisbach comprises the final result of his investigations in the following words: “The ape-like characteristics of Man are by no means concentrated in one or another race, but are distributed in particular parts of the body, among the different races, in such a manner that each is endowed with some heirloom of this relationship—one race more so, another less, and even we Europeans cannot claim to be entirely free from evidences of this relationship.”

    Tags: 
    Ernst Haeckel
    history of biology
    apes

  • Blumenbach, Haeckel, Dobzhansky

    Wed, 2013-01-02 23:16 -- John Hawks

    Here's an illustration of the history of biology:

    Google ngram comparison of Blumenbach, Haeckel, and Dobzhansky

    This is an ngram comparison, which counts the occurrences of the terms (in this case, Blumenbach, Haeckel, and Dobzhansky) in books published across all these years, and compares those to the total number of words published in those years.

    There's only so far one can go with "one-name" figures in biology, and as we get closer to the present it is harder to find "one-name" figures whose last names aren't shared with other moderately famous personages. If we expand to some other names, Linnaeus outscales Blumenbach by a lot, and Darwin dwarfs all these in references. Even before Charles Darwin's lifetime, "Darwin" as a one-name term does very well, on the strength of earlier family members including Erasmus Darwin. Literary figures do much better than biologists.

    Tags: 
    history of biology
    Johann Blumenbach
    Theodosius Dobzhansky
    Ernst Haeckel
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Neandertals

For years, I've worked on their bones. Now I'm working on their genes. Read more about the science studying these ancient people.

Denisova

From a finger bone of an ancient human came the record of a completely unexpected population. My lab is working on the science of the Denisova genome.

Acceleration

The advent of agriculture caused natural selection to speed up greatly in humans. We're uncovering some of the ways that populations have rapidly changed during the last 10,000 years.

Malapa

Just outside Johannesburg, the Malapa site is producing some of the most exciting finds in human evolution. This site is the headquarters of the Malapa Soft Tissue Project.