I am actually starting to feel optimistic about meeting my self-imposed mini-deadline. It took me a few days, but I was able to go through what I had previously written for the human evolution chapter once. It let me regain my bearings and straighten things up a bit, even if I ended up adding as much as I deleted. (It now stands at 25 pages, which will have to be severely condensed.)
As far as the historical narrative, I have now reached the part when Piltdown was unveiled as a fraud and W.E. le Gros Clark convinced his colleagues that Australopithecus was relevant to human evolution after all. There's still quite a few events to cover after that, but it is easier to start explaining what we know now as I get to more recent discoveries. There is simply too much information to do it all justice, but I am doing my best to tell a coherent story.
Reading Narratives of Human Evolution has helped me come to grips with the project. I am aiming to tell a story that intertwines scientific history with natural history, as I might relay it to a friend with enough patience to listen. As Landau points out in her book, even when we make a big deal about being objective and moving away from mythology, we still tell stories. Rather than fight it, I've tried to recognize it and turn it to my advantage.
I still have a lot of work to do (and a book review to write for a journal, believe it or not), but I think I will be able to get the rest of the chapter in order in the next two weeks. Here's the latest Wordle for the human evolution chapter ("Through the Looking Glass");
style="padding:4px;border:1px solid #ddd">
For previous posts dealing with this project, see the "Books" and "Great Book Project" archives.
- Log in to post comments
boneyard?
If you need to leave out material, how about dropping the subject of Piltdown man altogether (or very nearly so)? Yes, in a historical context, the Piltdown 'discovery' has some significance, and perhaps it is necessary to at least mention it. And it is admittedly a great story.
Problem is, it's a story that has been told many, many times before. Unless you can add some entirely original material to the Piltdown story (such as proving, once and for all and beyond any doubt, the identity of the forgerer), I would recommend that you keep references to Piltdown at a bare minimum. If you only have one brief chapter at your disposal to discuss human evolution, it seems unreasonable to me to devote a significant part of it to what ultimately is pretty much a dead-end story.
Of course, this is just my opinion, and the decision is yours. But however much or little you eventually decide to write about Piltdown, for the love of Darwin's beard, *please* avoid using the word/phrase 'Whodunit?'!
Will; The host site is still down, and I haven't gotten any word about it. I'll post about what is going on as soon as I know.
Dartian; I guess it all depends on the way you're telling it. I don't have any shocking new information, and it is a familiar story, but I'm trying to explore the idea that the focus on Piltdown might have stunted proper appreciation for other fossil discoveries during the first half of the 20th century, particularly Australopithecus africanus.
Even if this isn't the case (I have some more work to do), at the time of discovery it was a significant find. If I left it out because we know today that it was a fraud then I'd be writing the story of onward-and-upward science, which isn't my intention. It's a messy process, and even though it might sting a bit, the whole Piltdown controversy offers a window into how anthropology was done and how ideas about human evolution could sometimes override the evidence.
Brian; Fair enough. It's just my impression that too many books on human evolution end up spending too much space on the detective story aspect of Piltdown ("Who did it?", "What was the motive?", "Was it a conspiracy?", etc.). And that, while certainly interesting, isn't really germane to the larger issue, i.e. hominid evolution.
Dartian; Yeah, I'm not really interested in the "detective story" as Piltdown as an object of scientific controversy. It didn't seem to fit, and I actually wanted to put more emphasis on what the bones meant for our understanding of human evolution rather than on who was fiddling around with stains and files.