8 - The Uniqueness of Humans

Summary

Applying the Darwinian perspective to human origins required palaeoanthropologists to abandon the assumption that the human race is the goal of the evolutionary process. Darwin himself suggested that our acquisition of higher mental powers was a by-product of an adaptive shift to walking upright. Although rejected for decades, this approach became widely accepted in the 1930s as fossil discoveries confirmed that bipedalism preceded the expansion of the brain and the plausibility of natural selection was boosted by the synthesis with genetics. Most of the biologists who pioneered the synthesis accepted that the human species could no longer be regarded as an inevitable outcome of evolution. Science-fiction authors began to explore the idea that there might be non-human aliens, recognizing that evolution could produce intelligent beings in many different ways.