Tasting Our Tongues

The fifth chapter in Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads provides an interesting, removed look at evolution. The fact that so many people don't understand it or merely won't accept it as fact is fascinating given how far we've come from the time when science accepted it in the first place. But even for those people, such as ourselves, who feel like they understand and accept Darwin's theory of evolution, we are too surrounded by it that we don't see it. Especially in the museum display sense, he says, that "stepping back and examining one's own paradigm is, after all, almost as hard as tasting ones own tongue." Yet no matter how obvious, too obvious, each of Darwin's findings seem to us now together they create revolutionary explanations for everything from fossils to skin color. 

As for the New York Times article "Lost in a Million-Year Gap, Solid Clues to Human Origins," I didn't even know that the study of human origins was called paleoanthropology, let alone that we have no trace of humanoids for a period of a million years. But reading the article, I couldn't imagine why it mattered so much whether Homo habilis had a direct lineage to Homo erectus. Surely it was silly for people to be claiming findings as fact when there is always new ground, figurative and literal ground, to be uncovered in this area of expertise. I'm glad the author mentioned, despite it being at the very end of the article, that the importance of the habilis-erectus ties lie in the dietary and environmental factors of species change. Otherwise I would have found this article slightly arbitrary.