Word: homo
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...minor details wrong. Our species, Homo sapiens, is never spelled with a lower-case h. Irven DeVore's name is not spelled "DeVore." The overflow crowd in Science Center C was watching on a live video system, not "watching on video tape." And the ovation DeVore received was not a "standing" one, to the best of my recollection and that of a friend, both of us seated in the very last row of Science Center...
...Science Center lecture on human evolution, J. Wyatt Emmerich raises the spectre of Victorian Social Darwinism at Harvard, headquartered in the anthropology department. He accuses DeVore of being "out of his league." He wonders at the paradox of a talk on human evolution focusing on the behavior of Homo sapiens' predecessors; where is the paradox? He sagely asserts that DeVore "fails to understand that human beings are qualitatively unique organisms"; all animal species are "qualitatively unique." He links DeVore's studies to those of "sociobiology" in an apparent attempt to discredit DeVore through the controversial nature of that new field...
...PARADOX: At a lecture last week billed as the "Evolution of Human Behavior," Irven Devore said little about homo sapiens until the last minutes of his talk. A newcomer to "sociobiology" would have been befuddled by pictures of elephants, apes and impalas appearing on the screen above Devore's head, an advertised lecture on human behavior sounded more like an interesting but insignificant discourse on zoology...
That does not mean the evolution of intelligence has ended on the earth. Judging by the record of the past, we can expect that a new species will arise out of man, surpassing his achievements as he has surpassed those of his predecessor, Homo erectus. Only a carbon-chemistry chauvinist would assume that the new species must be man's flesh-and-blood descendants, with brains housed in fragile shells of bone. The new kind of intelligent life is more likely to be made of silicon...
...cover photograph was striking, but the lens and/or perspective distorted the head of Homo habilis. I should not wish readers to think in terms of huge-headed ancestors. Indeed, the cranial size was smaller than today's average human...