#530 Jeremy DeSilva - A Most Interesting Problem; Darwin’s Descent of Man (150th anniversary)

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RECORDED ON JUNE 16th 2021.
Dr. Jeremy DeSilva is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth College. He is a paleoanthropologist, specializing in the locomotion of the first apes (hominoids) and early human ancestors (hominins). His particular anatomical expertise-- the human foot and ankle-- has contributed to our understanding of the origins and evolution of upright walking in the human lineage.  He has studied wild chimpanzees in Western Uganda and early human fossils in Museums throughout Eastern and South Africa. From 1998-2003, Dr. DeSilva worked as an educator at the Boston Museum of Science and continues to be passionate about science education. He is the author of A Most Interesting Problem: What Darwin’s Descent of Man Got Right and Wrong about Human Evolution.

This interview is part of the series on the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s Descent of Man.

In this episode, we focus on A Most Interesting Problem, and Darwin’s Descend of Man. We first discuss the Descent of Man in its historical context, and compare it to the Origin of Species, and try to trace back the origins of some of its most prominent ideas. We talk about part 1 of the book, and the evolutionary origins of our mental faculties, and what Darwin had to say about race and sex differences. We get into Darwin’s insights on our African origins, and some of the most important ideas in the field of paleoanthropology. We explain why “race” is not a useful scientific concept, and why “cline” is a much better one to understand human biodiversity. We also talk about how revolutionary the idea of sexual selection was. Finally, we discuss why some of Darwin’s ideas were/are problematic, with a focus on a recent controversy involving Agustín Fuentes’ essay on Science, and we sum things up with what Darwin got right and wrong about human evolution.

Time Links:
00:00  Intro
00:45  The importance of the Descent of Man
09:27  Part 1 – our mental faculties
14:11  Human evolution, and paleoanthropology
45:18  Race, and clines
54:40  Part 2 – sexual selection
1:04:16  Were Darwin’s ideas on race and gender problematic?
1:15:37  What Darwin got right and wrong about human evolution
1:18:55  Follow Dr. DeSilva’s work!
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A Most Interesting Problem: https://amzn.to/3rlLELU
Twitter handle: @desilva_jerry
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