Theories of Human Evolution A Century of Debate, 1844-1944

• Main Author: Bowler, Peter J. (Author)
• Format: Book
• Language: English
• Published: United Kingdom Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1986
• Subjects: Human evolution
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 Some years ago I began to prepare the survey of the history of evolu tionism that subsequently appeared as Evolution: The History of an Idea. It was intended partly as a textbook for university courses in the history of science, and one of its chief aims was to serve as a guide to the vast literature now available in the field. When preparing the sections on human evolution, I found to my surprise that in this particular area comparatively little work seemed to have been done. There were many studies that dealt with the reaction to the idea of human evolution in the original Darwinian debate, but only Loren Eiseley's Darwin's Century traced the issue into the late nineteenth century. There was certainly no general survey of early twentieth-century theories of human evolution available, and I was forced to cite books dealing with the discovery of fossil hominids and the Piltdown fraud. Although satisfactory for their own purposes, these books treated theories of human evolution merely as background to the fossil discoveries. I thus felt the need for a survey that would concentrate on the theoretical debates and dovetail more closely with the existing literature on the Darwinian revolution.