Tales of the Ex-Apes: How We Think about Human Evolution / Edition 1

by Jonathan Marks

Overview

What do we think about when we think about human evolution? With his characteristic wit and wisdom, anthropologist Jonathan Marks explores our scientific narrative of human origins—the study of evolution—and examines its cultural elements and theoretical foundations. In the process, he situates human evolution within a general anthropological framework and presents it as a special case of kinship and mythology.
 
Tales of the Ex-Apes argues that human evolution has incorporated the emergence of social relations and cultural histories that are unprecedented in the apes and thus cannot be reduced to purely biological properties and processes. Marks shows that human evolution has involved the transformation from biological to biocultural evolution. Over tens of thousands of years, new social roles—notably spouse, father, in-laws, and grandparents—have co-evolved with new technologies and symbolic meanings to produce the human species, in the absence of significant biological evolution. We are biocultural creatures, Marks argues, fully comprehensible by recourse to neither our real ape ancestry nor our imaginary cultureless biology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520285828
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	09/08/2015
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Jonathan Marks is Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the author of What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee and Why I Am Not a Scientist, both from UC Press.


 

Table of Contents

Preface

1. Science
2. History and Morality
3. Evolutionary Concepts
4. How to Think about Evolution Non-reductively
5. How Our Ancestors Transgressed the Boundaries of Apehood
6. Human Evolution as Bio-cultural Evolution
7. Human Nature/Culture

Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

"This was the kind of subject that excited greats like Paul Ricoeur, Martin Buber, and Hans Jonas. But unlike the occasionally tortured prose of these admittedly brilliant thinkers, Marks’ books are to the point, funny even. . . The reading is easy; even the most difficult subjects in molecular biology and philosophy are handled with wit and the minimum of jargon."

Science & Education

"A well-written text . . . Recommended."

CHOICE connect

"Great book . . . very much worth the read."

Greg Laden's Blog - Greg Laden

"Marks’s book is a wise and witty analysis of how science and culture are inextricably intertwined as we compose and narrate the science of who we are and where we came from, and it permits us to make just a bit more sense of the science."

The Daily Beast - Candida Moss