Overview
What do we think about when we think about human evolution? With his characteristic wit and wisdom, anthropologist Jonathan Marks explores our scientific narrative of human origins—the study of evolution—and examines its cultural elements and theoretical foundations. In the process, he situates human evolution within a general anthropological framework and presents it as a special case of kinship and mythology. Tales of the Ex-Apes argues that human evolution has incorporated the emergence of social relations and cultural histories that are unprecedented in the apes and thus cannot be reduced to purely biological properties and processes. Marks shows that human evolution has involved the transformation from biological to biocultural evolution. Over tens of thousands of years, new social roles—notably spouse, father, in-laws, and grandparents—have co-evolved with new technologies and symbolic meanings to produce the human species, in the absence of significant biological evolution. We are biocultural creatures, Marks argues, fully comprehensible by recourse to neither our real ape ancestry nor our imaginary cultureless biology.
Full Product Details
Author: Jonathan Marks
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Dimensions:
Width: 14.00cm
, Height: 1.50cm
, Length: 21.60cm
Weight: 0.272kg
ISBN: 9780520285828
ISBN 10: 0520285824
Pages: 240
Publication Date: 08 September 2015
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Out of stock
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.
Reviews
Marks's book is a wise and witty analysis of how science and culture are inextricably intertwined as we compose and narrate the science of who we are and where we came from, and it permits us to make just a bit more sense of the science. -- Candida Moss The Daily Beast
Marks's book is a wise and witty analysis of how science and culture are inextricably intertwined as we compose and narrate the science of who we are and where we came from, and it permits us to make just a bit more sense of the science. -- Candida Moss The Daily Beast Great book ... very much worth the read. -- Greg Laden Greg Laden's Blog
Marks's book is a wise and witty analysis of how science and culture are inextricably intertwined as we compose and narrate the science of who we are and where we came from, and it permits us to make just a bit more sense of the science. -- Candida Moss The Daily Beast Great book ... very much worth the read. -- Greg Laden Greg Laden's Blog A well-written text ... Recommended. CHOICE connect
Author Information
Jonathan Marks is Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the author of What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee and Why I Am Not a Scientist, both from UC Press.
