Continuing my series on the top 10 reasons to enroll in Anthropology 207x (Introduction to Human Evolution), which officially begins on May 6th….
Previous entries:
#10 Origin stories are captivating. Scientific origin stories can be unifying.
#9 It’s open and free!
Reason 8 – Our evolutionary past informs how we understand human difference today
It is hard to look at the news each day–today mine features the double blow of the ongoing reaction to police violence in Baltimore and the combination of heroism and tragedy that is inherent to Nepal’s ongoing earthquake response–and not be aware of the tremendous diversity of life experiences encompassed by humanity. Not only are our lives different, but how we see and interact with the world is different. And we are different.
The pattern of human differences is, in part, a product of our evolutionary past. This is true in two critical ways. First, the pattern of inherited differences that forms the substrate of human biological variation is very directly a product of our evolutionary past. The expansions, dispersals, connections, and response to specific regimes of natural selection that human populations have undergone over the many millennia of our past shape the broad outlines of that complex reality. Hiding in plain sight in this pattern is the overwhelming shared similarity that represents all of humanity. We share much of the evolutionarily significant events as part of our common human story. The differences that do exist often defy simple categorizations of human variation that we tend to employ and have employed throughout history, such as social categories of race. Knowing how evolution works and how evolution has worked are important components to understanding why we are different (and similar!) today.
More subtlety, how we cognitively and linguistically interact with each other, how we recognize and identify similarities and differences between ourselves and others, is itself a product of our evolutionary past. In other words, our brain has evolved specific mechanisms and we have evolved specific developmentally plastic pathways to shape how we identify people apart from us. The interplay between culture and biology through evolved cognitive structures is hugely important. And hugely consequential for how we understand the often tragic and horrific path of human history when it comes to responses to systems of human categorization.
Check out the AAA’s “Understanding Race” project for more information.
From the AAA “Understanding Race” project
Understanding how we are different (and how little), and how and why evolution has shaped human variation in the ways that it has, provides an important vantage point on human diversity in the present.
I will have additional updates each day between now and May 6, when the course goes live.
