“Homo sapiens and other catastrophes” revises and updates a volume written at the frontiers of paleontology by Telmo Pievani, scientist and philosopher of science. A flood of discoveries in recent years has revolutionized and is continuing to change our conception of human evolution, in many aspects essentially attributable to this: there has not been a linear development but a magmatic process, with many trials and errors, second thoughts and setbacks, failures and intersections.
In the minds of most, the pattern of the passage from apes to herectus and sapiens is still valid. It is a little drawing that we have all learned and metabolized from school books: seven or eight anthropomorphic figures lined up in profile, from left to right, until the affirmation of contemporary man. But apart from the fact that drawing man at the top of evolution is arbitrary (why not woman instead?), The whole picture is wrong: from paleontology and genetics it appears that human evolution has been not linear but “bushy”, and even that at certain moments in the remote past anthropomorphic species with larger brains walked on Earth that in more recent times have been supplanted (incongruously) by others with more archaic characters.
There is little logic in all this, but our human logic, with all its pretensions, must surrender to the evidence of the facts when the facts disprove it. The new vision of human evolution reinforces the doubt expressed by paleontologist David M. Raup in the title and subtitle of his most famous book: “Extinction. Bad genes or bad luck? “, Which in turn owes a lot to Stephen J. Gould (see” The Panda’s Thumb “and” The Wonderful Life “): it is not that natural selection always rewards the most suitable, indeed it almost seems a rule that operates blindly, distributing victories and defeats at random, and if in all this an element of merit makes its way over the long term, it does so with extreme difficulty, drawing strength from a minimum statistical advantage.
And what is true for human evolution is all the more true for that of mammals, which had already appeared at the end of the Triassic period, but during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods remained marginal and insignificant: admitted and not granted that mammals were more “suitable” than the dinosaurs, biological evolution did not notice them for tens of millions of years, and they succeeded in affirming themselves only after the fortuitous event of the asteroid had wiped out the dinosaurs.
Telmo Pievani, Homo sapiens and other catastrophes, Meltemi, p. 352, 22 euro