Word: homo
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After quickly tracing the development of life from the first crude cells (which cry "Free! *&#! We're free!" as they "colonize the open ocean") to the first primates, Gonick moves on to early pre-history in volume two, "Sticks and Stones. Homo Erectus, Neanderthal and the more advanced Cro-Magnon human of the Stone Age give way to the Homo Sapiens of the first post-ice age settlements of 12,000 years ago. Volume two ends with the founding of cities in Sumer, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq. Four billion years in 100 pages...
Like moths around candles, a number of gifted writers have been dazzled by that subspecies of Homo americanus, the murdering sociopath. Witness Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Joe McGinniss's Fatal Vision. Or this well-crafted account of the fatal swath cut by an Indiana-born dentist named Kenneth Z. Taylor...
Snobbery, the sport of twits, is nearly dead, shoved rudely aside by ethnic and racial hatreds, homo- and heterophobia, religious and nationalistic furies, yuppie loathing, resentment of California and contempt of Congress. So much truly muscular antipathy whirls about these days that it is hard to care as deeply as you are supposed to -- hard even to remember -- that they won't let your son, the grocery bag boy, into their daughter's debutante ball. Which is why it is hard to care about Geoffrey Wolff's new novel...
Sociobiology may not come close to clearing away all the mysteries of human behavior, but the discipline is a view from Darwin's shoulders, offering invaluable insights into the genetic roots of behavior. Unfortunately, many of these insights may never be gained. As Homo sapiens multiplies and forages like army ants, Wilson has grown alarmed about the millions of plant and animal species that are disappearing in civilization's path. Thirty years ago, he witnessed the beginnings of mass deforestation in the Amazon. Ten years ago, he became an active conservationist, with a touch of the ecological poet. Destroying rain...
...reason I call humans even more of an afterthought than others is that our lineage is so young and so small. The splitting point between human ancestors and those that gave rise to chimps and gorillas is 6 million to 8 million years ago, and the human species, Homo sapiens, is probably only about a quarter of a million years old. So humans in current form have been here only a quarter of a million years, which may sound long, but is a geological second...