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Book Progress #7

By laelaps on April 23, 2008.

Yesterday I managed to tack a few paragraphs on to the end of the human evolution chapter, bringing the page count so far up to 10, although some of this will ultimately be cut. I wanted to write more last night, but by the time I walked home from class and ate dinner it was 9:30 and I was feeling a little sleepy-eyed. Adrian Desmond's book The Ape's Reflexion has given me a lot of food for thought, however, especially the absurdity of the question "What makes us human?" as if it were a plea to find something (anything) that would divide us from the rest of nature. (New concepts are in bold)

Introduction

Huxley's rejoinder to Wilberforce at Oxford - Darrow puts Bryan in the hot seat - Behe's astrological mishap - One long argument - Flickering candles in the dark - Monstrous myths - Evolutionary archetypes -

Whales

Koch's Missourium - The king of the seas flees to Europe - Maybe Basilosaurus, maybe not - Huxley's overlooked insight - Fast & furious fossil finds -

Birds and Dinosaurs

Noah's ravens vacation in New England - Hitchcock's Jurassic birds - A little fossil birdie told me about evolution - A misplaced feather - From London to Berlin - The source of Huxley's inspiration - Megalosaurus = an ossified, fossilized, underdeveloped chick - The unimportance of Archaeopteryx - Hypsilophodon as a good transition - Problems with the Pachypoda - How did we get such beautiful fossils? - Ornithosuchus or theropods? - The case of the missing clavicles - 75 years of pseudoscuhian narrative - Barnum Brown's forgotten Daptosaurus - Ostrom's "terrible claw" - "Tetrapteryx" and Microraptor

Human Evolution

Tyson's dissection of a "pigmie" - A chimp's place in the Chain - Where are the "missing links?" - White's 1799 attempt to save the Chain - The Neanderthal that was mistaken for an Irishman - The Neanderthal fossils get named - Dubois goes to Indonesia - "Java Man" - The discovery of "Peking Man" - Dart's Australopithecus - - What makes us human? - Ask a stupid question... - Ape-like humans, not human-like apes - Caught in the Chain

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