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Scientific American Library Series #47
Modern İnsanın Kökeni
"Modern İnsanın Kökeni"nde insanın evrimiyle ilgili son yıllarda ileri sürülen ve birbiriyle çatışan iki kuram ele alınarak, bu kuramların güçlü ve zayıf yanları bilimsel bir tarafsızlık içinde işleniyor. Uzun yıllar New Scientist dergisinde editörlük yapmış olan yazar Roger Lewin modern paleoantropolojinin gelişimine ışık tutarken, modern insanın kökeni üzerine güncel tartışmaları şekillendiren kanıtların farklı yorumlanabileceğini de anlatıyor.
244 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
6 people are currently reading
166 people want to read
About the author
Roger Lewin
59 books17 followersRoger Lewin (born 1944) is a British prize-winning science writer and author of 20 books.
Lewin was a staff member of New Scientist in London for nine years. He went to Washington, D.C. to write for Science for ten years as News Editor. An example article was "Evolutionary Theory Under Fire", 21, November 1980, vol. 210, pp 883–887. Lewin wrote three books with Richard Leakey. He became a full-time freelance writer in 1989 and concentrated on writing books. In 1989 Roger Lewin won the Royal Society Prizes for Science Books for Bones of Contention.
In 2000, Lewin formed Harvest Associates with wife Birute Regine for business consulting. Together they wrote, The Soul at Work: Unleashing the Power of Complexity Science for Business Success, Orion Business Books (1999), republished as Weaving Complexity & Business: Engaging the Soul at Work, Texere (2000). He is a member of the Complexity Research Group at the London School of Economics.
Lewin was a staff member of New Scientist in London for nine years. He went to Washington, D.C. to write for Science for ten years as News Editor. An example article was "Evolutionary Theory Under Fire", 21, November 1980, vol. 210, pp 883–887. Lewin wrote three books with Richard Leakey. He became a full-time freelance writer in 1989 and concentrated on writing books. In 1989 Roger Lewin won the Royal Society Prizes for Science Books for Bones of Contention.
In 2000, Lewin formed Harvest Associates with wife Birute Regine for business consulting. Together they wrote, The Soul at Work: Unleashing the Power of Complexity Science for Business Success, Orion Business Books (1999), republished as Weaving Complexity & Business: Engaging the Soul at Work, Texere (2000). He is a member of the Complexity Research Group at the London School of Economics.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 9, 2021
If you have young children who, with their natural inquisitiveness, begin to ask you how human beings came to be and you, like what your parents did to you, would entertain them with the story of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis, know that you’ll be telling them a lie and perhaps would be initiating them to grow up in ignorance.
Coming from heat, planet earth was once just a lifeless rock floating in space. After billions of years it cooled off. Billions of years more it began to have simple life forms, starting from its waters. A certain kind of fish was our evolutionary ancestor. After another unimaginably long period of time the fish learned to crawl on the ground. But it wasn’t the only one evolving. There were other creatures and they had evolved into so many kinds of things and ours were primates, apelike. And we had cousins. There were the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, etc. Probably other kinds of these “hominid” will be discovered in the future from the fossils they left behind. There had even been one in the Philippines, named the Homo Luzonensis, for its fossil was found in a cave in the Philippine island of Luzon.
It is something like this: imagine dogs which had evolved from their wolf-like ancestors of long ago. There were many such kinds of dogs. Imagine all these dogs going extinct except one, say, the poodle. So when one says “dog” only the poodle comes to mind. But there were actually a lot more other kinds of dogs like the rottweillers, German Shepherds , etc. only that they had entirely disappeared.
We, the Homo Sapiens, are just half a chromosome away from the chimpanzees. It is estimated that at one time we were only about 2,000 heads in the entire planet and could also have easily gone the way of extinction. In any event, we would probably go extinct too like 99.8% of all species which had ever lived. Indeed, extinction is the norm, and survival the rarest of exception. We would be as helpless as the dinosaurs (which ruled the world for millions of years—yes, MILLIONS) if a huge asteroid hits our planet. A more lethal virus than Covid 19 could also do the trick. We are really nothing special.
Whether there is God or not (and WHAT he/she/it is), we really do not know. That is the only honest answer possible. Those who say they KNOW and, worse, those who say God communicates with them are plainly either con artists (religion is big business) or honest but delusional. God is not something which can be proven or disproven. But if you allow yourself to be freed from your childhood/cultural indoctrinations, you could easily see that all religions are manmade, fictitious myths. It is precisely because they are manmade that there are so many of them, each with their own stories, dogmas and devout followers. Each one proclaiming that theirs is the repository of the Ultimate Truth.
Look at yourself. Do you go to churnch every sunday, do biblical studies and wear a crucifix in your neck? Or do you pray everyday facing the direction of Mecca? Then realize that it is not because Jesus is THE true god, or that Allah it is, and Mohammad is his only prophet. It is only like that to you because you were born and raised as a Christian or a Muslim. It is but the accident of your birth: the place you were born, the parents you had, the culture you grew up in. This is why before the first round of the match, Manny Pacquiao kneels on a corner and pray; while Prince Naseem Hamed would shout “Allahu Akbar!”
We are still evolving. Millions of years from now, if we don’t become extinct, we would probably look very, very different. Some ignoramuses by that time, shown photos of us as we appear now, would most likely not believe that they had descended from us, the same way some of us now mocks the idea that we had descended from creatures that looked like apes. But, to repeat, this will take many millions of years from now. And how long, really, is a million (just ONE million) years? Unimaginably long. Ferdinand Magellan coming to the Philippines was only about 500 years ago. Jesus Christ was only a little more than two thousand years.
In a recent news item it was announced that scientists had found that the human brain had gone smaller, just a tiny bit smaller, since the time of the Cro-Magnon man. That’s evolution in action. But how far back were the Cro-Magnons? About fifty thousand years. Incidentally, the male penis is getting smaller too, and the male sperm is getting weaker according to studies.
There are a lot of other things in this world than are dreamt of in your biblical studies, Pacquiao. Like those found in this book where, at least, you’ll learned how the Neanderthals got their name:
“Joachim Neander, poet and composer, died in 1680. Toward the end of his short life he frequently visited a quiet valley near his home to seek his idyllic muse. As a mark of respect for this young man, the local burghers named the valley after him: Neander Thal. An accident of history ensured that this name would gain more than topographical fame. In August 1856, with the Prussian construction industry hungry for raw material, quarry workers in the Neander Valley unearthed human bones in a cave, Feldhofer Grotto, above the Dussel River, flowing toward its confluence with the Rhine at Dusseldorf. Probably an entire skeleton had been entombed in the limestone sediments of that cave; all that survived the quarrymen’s zeal, however, was the top of a cranium, some leg and arm bones, and other damaged parts.”
That was how the first Neanderthal fossils were discovered.
Coming from heat, planet earth was once just a lifeless rock floating in space. After billions of years it cooled off. Billions of years more it began to have simple life forms, starting from its waters. A certain kind of fish was our evolutionary ancestor. After another unimaginably long period of time the fish learned to crawl on the ground. But it wasn’t the only one evolving. There were other creatures and they had evolved into so many kinds of things and ours were primates, apelike. And we had cousins. There were the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, etc. Probably other kinds of these “hominid” will be discovered in the future from the fossils they left behind. There had even been one in the Philippines, named the Homo Luzonensis, for its fossil was found in a cave in the Philippine island of Luzon.
It is something like this: imagine dogs which had evolved from their wolf-like ancestors of long ago. There were many such kinds of dogs. Imagine all these dogs going extinct except one, say, the poodle. So when one says “dog” only the poodle comes to mind. But there were actually a lot more other kinds of dogs like the rottweillers, German Shepherds , etc. only that they had entirely disappeared.
We, the Homo Sapiens, are just half a chromosome away from the chimpanzees. It is estimated that at one time we were only about 2,000 heads in the entire planet and could also have easily gone the way of extinction. In any event, we would probably go extinct too like 99.8% of all species which had ever lived. Indeed, extinction is the norm, and survival the rarest of exception. We would be as helpless as the dinosaurs (which ruled the world for millions of years—yes, MILLIONS) if a huge asteroid hits our planet. A more lethal virus than Covid 19 could also do the trick. We are really nothing special.
Whether there is God or not (and WHAT he/she/it is), we really do not know. That is the only honest answer possible. Those who say they KNOW and, worse, those who say God communicates with them are plainly either con artists (religion is big business) or honest but delusional. God is not something which can be proven or disproven. But if you allow yourself to be freed from your childhood/cultural indoctrinations, you could easily see that all religions are manmade, fictitious myths. It is precisely because they are manmade that there are so many of them, each with their own stories, dogmas and devout followers. Each one proclaiming that theirs is the repository of the Ultimate Truth.
Look at yourself. Do you go to churnch every sunday, do biblical studies and wear a crucifix in your neck? Or do you pray everyday facing the direction of Mecca? Then realize that it is not because Jesus is THE true god, or that Allah it is, and Mohammad is his only prophet. It is only like that to you because you were born and raised as a Christian or a Muslim. It is but the accident of your birth: the place you were born, the parents you had, the culture you grew up in. This is why before the first round of the match, Manny Pacquiao kneels on a corner and pray; while Prince Naseem Hamed would shout “Allahu Akbar!”
We are still evolving. Millions of years from now, if we don’t become extinct, we would probably look very, very different. Some ignoramuses by that time, shown photos of us as we appear now, would most likely not believe that they had descended from us, the same way some of us now mocks the idea that we had descended from creatures that looked like apes. But, to repeat, this will take many millions of years from now. And how long, really, is a million (just ONE million) years? Unimaginably long. Ferdinand Magellan coming to the Philippines was only about 500 years ago. Jesus Christ was only a little more than two thousand years.
In a recent news item it was announced that scientists had found that the human brain had gone smaller, just a tiny bit smaller, since the time of the Cro-Magnon man. That’s evolution in action. But how far back were the Cro-Magnons? About fifty thousand years. Incidentally, the male penis is getting smaller too, and the male sperm is getting weaker according to studies.
There are a lot of other things in this world than are dreamt of in your biblical studies, Pacquiao. Like those found in this book where, at least, you’ll learned how the Neanderthals got their name:
“Joachim Neander, poet and composer, died in 1680. Toward the end of his short life he frequently visited a quiet valley near his home to seek his idyllic muse. As a mark of respect for this young man, the local burghers named the valley after him: Neander Thal. An accident of history ensured that this name would gain more than topographical fame. In August 1856, with the Prussian construction industry hungry for raw material, quarry workers in the Neander Valley unearthed human bones in a cave, Feldhofer Grotto, above the Dussel River, flowing toward its confluence with the Rhine at Dusseldorf. Probably an entire skeleton had been entombed in the limestone sediments of that cave; all that survived the quarrymen’s zeal, however, was the top of a cranium, some leg and arm bones, and other damaged parts.”
That was how the first Neanderthal fossils were discovered.
November 11, 2023
Okullarda ders olarak okutulan bir kitaptı, yanılmıyorsam lemurlara farklı bir bakış açısı kazanıyordunuz baş parmak kullanımı ve benzeri bir ağaç canlısının ilk atalarımız olması ihtimaliyle beraber. Kaliteli basım, eski, güzel günler. Elbette antropoloji her geçen gün üstüne yeni bir bilgi konan bir alan, bu yüzden tarihten bir kesit olarak, kati değil ek bilgi edinmek niyetiyle okunmalı.
February 11, 2017
özellikle son iki bölüm harikulade.
Read
April 18, 2017bu kitap insan evrimini öyküsel anlatımın uçuzlugundan kurtararak anlatıyor. meraklısına tavsiye ederim.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews