Review by Choice Review
For anyone interested in human evolution, this book is an absolute must read. If you formed your opinions on human evolution by reading any of the thousands of books out there, you need to throw out those opinions and start again. If you believe that humans stopped evolving 40,000 years ago, think again. If you have bought into the arguments of popular science writers that culture somehow trumped biology all those millennia ago, get rid of them. Cochran and Harpending (both, Univ. of Utah) have taken up the mantle of what some scholars have been preaching for decades: not only has human evolution not slowed down or stopped, it has actually accelerated over the past 10,000 years. The long-standing assumption that humans somehow quit evolving grew out of the late-19th-century notion that nothing an organism did during its lifetime had any bearing on the genetic makeup of its offspring. Organisms--none more so than humans--are active niche constructors, and what they do during their lifetimes has tremendous bearing on what genes do and do not do in future generations. Cochran and Harpending say this beautifully. The only downside to this highly recommended book is that this reviewer did not write it! Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries. M. J. O'Brien University of Missouri--Columbia
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Cochran and Harpending dispute the late Stephen Jay Gould's assertion that civilization was built with the same body and brain Homo sapiens has had for 40,000 years. Humanity has been evolving very dramatically for the last 10,000 years, they say, spurred by the very civilizational forces launched by that evolution. They initially retreat, however, to Gould's 40,000-year benchmark to consider how H. sapiens replaced H. neanderthalensis and to argue for genetic mixing such that modern humans got from Neanderthals the innovative capacity for civilization. Later, agricultural life created problems necessitating adaptations, most importantly to disease and diet, that persist to this day among inheritors of the populations that made them. Lighter skin and eye color arose from other genetic reactions to environmental challenges, and less immediately obvious changes further discriminated discrete populations, as recently as late-eighteenth-century Ashkenazi Jews, among whom intelligence burgeoned in, Cochran and Harpending contend, adaptive response to social pressure. A most intriguing deposition, without a trace of ethnic or racial advocacy, though directed against the proposition that we're all the same. --Olson, Ray Copyright 2009 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Arguing that human genetic evolution is still ongoing, physicist-turned-evolutionary biologist Cochran and anthropologist Harpending marshal evidence for dramatic genetic change in the (geologically) recent past, particularly since the invention of agriculture. Unfortunately, much of their argument-including the origin of modern humans, agriculture, and Indo-Europeans-tends to neglect archaeological and geological evidence; readers should keep in mind that assumed time frames, like the age of the human species, are minimums at best and serious underestimates at worst. That said, there is much here to recommend, including the authors' unique approach to the question of modern human-Neanderthal interbreeding, and their discussion of the genetic pressures on Ashkenazi Jews over the past 1,000 years, both based solidly in fact. They also provide clear explanations for tricky concepts like gene flow and haplotypes, and their arguments are intriguing throughout. Though lapses in their case won't be obvious to the untrained eye, it's clear that this lively, informative text is not meant to deceive (abundant references and a glossary also help) but to provoke thought, debate and possibly wonder. (Feb.) Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Physicist Cochran and anthropologist Harpending team up to recount changes in population genetics that they say mark an explosion in human evolution. But do they? The postIce Age rise of civilization, particularly the invention of agriculture and domestication of animals, led to a population explosion, changes in diet, new diseases and challenging environments as people spread across the globe. But we are still one species, still stuck with evolutionary compromises like back problems and painful childbirth to accommodate walking upright. The authors mostly report on adaptations during the past 10,000 years of local groups, such as barrel-chested Bolivians living at high altitudes or sickle-cell trait carriers protected against malaria. Give Cochran and Harpending (Anthropology/Univ. of Utah) credit for explaining that these are the result of rare beneficial mutations that propagate in groups because of the survival advantages they confer, and also for explaining how world genetic maps are enabling the tracing of adaptations. The authors provide sundry examples, noting that as populations increased, so would the number of mutations, which could spread via trade routes, conquest, colonization and intermarriage, activities that reflect cultural evolution. They breeze through the millennia, glibly opining that modern Homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthals or attributing the Spanish success in the New World to the Amerindians' lack of immunity to disease (no mention of the conquerors' use of horses, for example). Their speculation reaches its apogee in a declaration that Ashkenazi Jews have developed high intelligence because they were largely an inbred group restricted to cognitively demanding jobs as financiers or merchants, and that recessive neurological diseases common to Ashkenazis, such as Tay-Sachs, are associated with expanding neural connections in the brain. Readers' exasperation will only grow as these conjectures are interspersed with such statements as, "It has been shown that poets are unusually likely to be manic-depressive." An overreaching travesty that could have been a useful compilation of genetic modifications over time. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
