DeSalle, Rob, and Ian Tattersall. Human Origins: What Bones and Genomes Tell Us about Ourselves.

• Author: Blaser, Kent
• Position: Book review

DeSalle, Rob, and Ian Tattersall. Human Origins: What Bones and Genomes Tell Us about Ourselves. College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press, 2008. 216 pages. Cloth, $29.95.

A few years ago the American Museum of Natural History in New York received funding to replace and update its popular exhibit on human evolution. The co-curators of the new Spitzer Hall of Human Origins, Rob DeSalle and Ian Tattersall, wrote this book partly as a companion piece to enhance and deepen the experience of those viewing the exhibit. But it fortunately works equally well apart from the museum experience, as an excellent stand-alone introduction to an unusually complex and controversial topic.

A primary strength of DeSalle and Tattersall's approach is its balanced attention to two rapidly changing and converging fields of study, both of which have seen revolutionary new developments over the last fifty years or so. The first, the "bones" part of the subtitle, is human paleontology or paleoanthropology, the traditional study of early human fossil records, which experienced remarkable breakthroughs in the wake of the Leakeys' pioneering work in East Africa in the 1960s. The second involved the even more explosive growth of completely new sciences set off by the discovery of the basic mechanics of DNA in the 1950s and accelerated by the development of high-speed computers that enabled rapid analysis of the enormous quantities of data--about three billion individual units for Homo sapiens--needed to read or decipher and compare genetic codes, or "genomes." Applied to the study of human origins, genetic studies, molecular biology, or "genomics" as the authors most often refer to this work, has had amazingly fruitful results, primarily in the last decade (It's almost stunning to be reminded that the first full genome to be unraveled--that of an influenza virus--was completed as recently as 1996).

Admirably rejecting the temptation to "dumb down" complicated scientific material and to talk down to non-scientists, the authors instead take on the hard work of preparing readers for at least a rudimentary grasp of serious scientific material. More than half of the book is devoted to background, explanatory material to help readers understand the basic science involved, beginning with an exploration of the nature of science and scientific knowledge and an explanation of why creationism and intelligent design theory fail to qualify as scientific enterprises. DeSalle...