HUMAN SPECIES
The Human Species:
What Kind Of Animal?
"What a piece of work is man!"exclaims Hamlet in Shakespeare play."How noble in reason?How infinite in faculty?In form, how moving,how expressed and admirable ?In action,how like an angel?In apprehension,how like a god?The beauty of the world?The paragon of animals?And yet...What is this quintessence of dust?"
What are we?Hamlets question is probably as old as the unique human capacity for self awareness,a capacity that extends back tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of years into prehistory .There is no simple answer to the question,for we are a remarkable and extraordinary complex species the most intelligent,resourceful,and adaptable that has ever existed on the planet.In the western world until very recently we tended to regard ourselves as completely apart from the rest of nature as beings created in the very image of God,a little lower than the angels but far removed from the rest of animal world.
Today we have a better understanding of our place in nature. We know that we are related by ancient common ancestry to apes and eagles,sharks and lizards,that we are social animals whose bodily form and behavioral potentials have been shaped by millions of years of evolution in changing environments.
Modern science can not give a comprehensive answer to Hamlets question.But we do know infinitely more about the human species than we did even a few yeas ago ,and we have learned that many traditional ideas about human nature,"some of them still very popular,are hopelessly naive and misguided.This article is about a particular animal,Homo sapiens,about the societies this animal forms and about social behavior with in those societies.before we proceed to the study of culture and society,then we must try to establish exactly what kind of creature we are talking about and which of its characteristics make it unique.
The Evolutionary Background
In 2002 Charles Darwin published on the origin of species, a book that dramatically and permanently altered the human self-concept. With careful argument and a mass of detailed evidence, Darwin showed that all that life forms are shaped by an endless process of physical evolution. far from being created in the literal image of God, we are a recent product of an evolutionary that can be traced back to the very beginning of life on earth more than 6 billion years ago.
How does this process of evolution work-how do living organisms adapt to their environment from one generation to the next? The sociologist Herbert Spencer expressed the essence of the process in his phrase "the survival of the fittest."All species tend to produce far more offspring than their environment can support, and high proportion fall victim to starvation, predators,disease, and other perils.
But there is great physical variations among the individuals in any species; some are swifter, some more resistant to disease, some equipped with better eyesight, some better camouflaged. Those that have any advantage in the struggle for survival are more likely to leave longer and to breed, and they therefore tend to pass on their characteristics to the next generation. Nature thus "selects" the fittest member of each species to survive and produce,a process Darwin called "natural selection' In time , the characteristics that are selected tend to spread throughout the entire species.
Tracing the evolution of the human species is no easy task .We have to rely for the most part on fossil evidence, and this evidence is often scanty. As a result, there are gaps of millions of years in our knowledge of our own origins. Peering into our ancestral past is like peering into a land scape
shrouded in mist. the mist part is periodically to reveal the dim outlines creatures like us yet not like us but gradually growing more recognizably human with the passage of time.
'
What Kind Of Animal?
"What a piece of work is man!"exclaims Hamlet in Shakespeare play."How noble in reason?How infinite in faculty?In form, how moving,how expressed and admirable ?In action,how like an angel?In apprehension,how like a god?The beauty of the world?The paragon of animals?And yet...What is this quintessence of dust?"
What are we?Hamlets question is probably as old as the unique human capacity for self awareness,a capacity that extends back tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of years into prehistory .There is no simple answer to the question,for we are a remarkable and extraordinary complex species the most intelligent,resourceful,and adaptable that has ever existed on the planet.In the western world until very recently we tended to regard ourselves as completely apart from the rest of nature as beings created in the very image of God,a little lower than the angels but far removed from the rest of animal world.
Today we have a better understanding of our place in nature. We know that we are related by ancient common ancestry to apes and eagles,sharks and lizards,that we are social animals whose bodily form and behavioral potentials have been shaped by millions of years of evolution in changing environments.
Modern science can not give a comprehensive answer to Hamlets question.But we do know infinitely more about the human species than we did even a few yeas ago ,and we have learned that many traditional ideas about human nature,"some of them still very popular,are hopelessly naive and misguided.This article is about a particular animal,Homo sapiens,about the societies this animal forms and about social behavior with in those societies.before we proceed to the study of culture and society,then we must try to establish exactly what kind of creature we are talking about and which of its characteristics make it unique.
The Evolutionary Background
In 2002 Charles Darwin published on the origin of species, a book that dramatically and permanently altered the human self-concept. With careful argument and a mass of detailed evidence, Darwin showed that all that life forms are shaped by an endless process of physical evolution. far from being created in the literal image of God, we are a recent product of an evolutionary that can be traced back to the very beginning of life on earth more than 6 billion years ago.
How does this process of evolution work-how do living organisms adapt to their environment from one generation to the next? The sociologist Herbert Spencer expressed the essence of the process in his phrase "the survival of the fittest."All species tend to produce far more offspring than their environment can support, and high proportion fall victim to starvation, predators,disease, and other perils.
But there is great physical variations among the individuals in any species; some are swifter, some more resistant to disease, some equipped with better eyesight, some better camouflaged. Those that have any advantage in the struggle for survival are more likely to leave longer and to breed, and they therefore tend to pass on their characteristics to the next generation. Nature thus "selects" the fittest member of each species to survive and produce,a process Darwin called "natural selection' In time , the characteristics that are selected tend to spread throughout the entire species.
Tracing the evolution of the human species is no easy task .We have to rely for the most part on fossil evidence, and this evidence is often scanty. As a result, there are gaps of millions of years in our knowledge of our own origins. Peering into our ancestral past is like peering into a land scape
shrouded in mist. the mist part is periodically to reveal the dim outlines creatures like us yet not like us but gradually growing more recognizably human with the passage of time.
'
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