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Hi all,
Sorry, but I can’t let this go. Carleton Coon was a quite famous racist, who worked quietly behind the scenes in the 1950s and 1960s to help those arguing FOR segregation in the U.S. Publicly, he claimed to be “agnostic” on the issue, but in private he was not.
Peg
Peg Yacobucci Assistant Professor Bowling Green State University Department of Geology 190 Overman Hall Bowling Green, OH 43403 (419) 372-7982
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Fair enough. I regard the multiple-origins hypothesis as one of those ideas that can be, and has been, used for racist purposes although the idea is not inherently racist and people who hold it are not necessarily racist. I'm a bit out of my depth here, but I first read about it in this widely read book:
Coon, Carleton S. (1962) . The Origins of Races. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Coon's work was engagingly written and not overtly racist, though he was accused of racism, e.g., by anthropologist Ashley Montagu, and I do not know the truth of that matter. Coon was certainly curious about how humans developed and whether their physical differences represent climatic adaptations. The results, although often interesting, were inconclusive and further research in this area is evidently discouraged.
Setting all thoughts of racism aside, a scientific question can be framed whether isolated populations of a species can all develop simultaneously into another species -- perhaps under the influence of simultaneous climatic change. To me, this hypothesis seems so complex as to make it extremely unlikely. How many identical mutations would have to occur at once on different continents? Or are we supposed to believe that a preexisting genetic switch was turned on, like industrial melanism in several species of moths?
Warning flags are also raised by these considerations: (1) I know of no other species for which such a complex history has been proposed. (2) Coon based his hypothesis on a very small number of specimens.
One can posit nearly isolated populations receiving new genes from a common source as a far more likely scenario, but this compromise is not what Carleton Coon proposed. Coon thought that H. erectus races in Europe, Asia, and Africa developed regionally and independently into H. sapiens races in the same places. But so far, the molecular evidence, such as the "mitochondrial Eve" tree, seems to indicate that this sort of "genetic leavening" of various races of Homo erectus never happened. Instead, a great wave of Homo sapiens erupted out of Africa and replaced the preexisting populations.
I'm at the extreme edge of my knowledge on the topic, so that will be all for me. But if anyone has heard of another totally interfertile species that is supposed to have developed from multiple lines of ancestors, it would be apt to hear about it now.
Your cousin, Andrew K. Rindsberg
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