EVENTS

STOQ 2009 – THE STOQ INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON
«BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION. Facts and Theories»

Abstracts of the Lectures:

Giorgio Manzi, University of Rome "La Sapienza", Italy

History of the Research 

"Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history": this was the well known line that Charles Darwin devoted to human evolution at page 488 of the "Origin", 150 years ago. Although this was only a short sentence, apparently incidental and innocuous, it actually represented a risky prediction. In other words, Darwin’s claim was: whether natural selection is the basic mechanism of the origin of species, there is no reason to exclude our own species from analogous circumstances. As a matter of fact, when the 1250 copies of the "Origin" went out of print in one day, an intense debate started immediately not about chaffinches or turtles, but focused on the argument, crucial in fact, included in that controversial single line of page 488 – i.e., the phylogenetic relationship of Homo sapiens with monkeys and apes. Other predictions about human evolution were put forward by Darwin elsewhere, as for instance in his 1871 book, where he decided to directly face the most challenging "mystery of mysteries" (as he had written in 1859). It was risky, for instance, to state that Africa was our more probable homeland, in a period when the only discoveries of fossil humans where from Europe – well before the discovery of Australopithecus africanus in 1924, Homo habilis in 1964 or the earliest representatives of Homo sapiens in the last decades – or when other scientists were suggesting to look toward the easternmost Asian regions, where effectively Eugène Dubois found his Pithecanthropus erectus in 1891. It was also risky to state that the fossil record and the science of paleontology as a whole couldn’t shed light on the process of evolution, in general, and on our origins, in particular.

The circa twenty species of extinct hominids that we know at present – although some of them appear, and effectively are, controversial – clearly demonstrates that he was (fortunately) wrong in assuming such a pessimistic perspective about the fossil record. To tell the truth, the science of human origin, or paleoanthropology, seems now able to shed light not only on our evolution, but on the mechanisms underlining the evolutionary theory as a whole. Hence, Darwin’s predictions like these may be discussed in the light of our present knowledge on the evolution of ourselves, with the provocative intention to evaluate where he was or wasn’t wrong.