The Riddled Chain: Chance, Coincidence and Chaos in Human Evolution

by Jeffrey K. McKee

Did human evolution proceed in an inevitable fashion? Can we attribute our origins solely to natural selection, or were more mischievous forces at work?

These are the questions investigated by anthropologist Jeff McKee. He argues that if we were to wind back the clock to our split from ancestral apes, evolution would proceed differently. Ever since our ancestors first stood up on two feet, natural selection undoubtedly was an important...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 081352783X
• ISBN13: 9780813527833
• Release Date: June 2000
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Length: 294 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

The Riddled Chain: by Jeffrey Kevin McKee

The Riddled Chain, by Jeffrey McKee provides the layman reader with insights into human evolution, fossil hunting, and scientific methods. In addition, the author provides novel explanations of the process involved in human evolution. He argues very eloquently and convincingly that chance, coincidence, and chaos have been the driving forces behind human evolution. These forces feed back on themselves, which McKee calls autocatalysis, driving blindly the whole process forward.This book is written in an excellent prose, with enjoyable anecdotes that seem to express the good-natured personality of the author. Anyone interested in human evolution, or the complexities of evolution theory should read The Riddled Chain. One does not have to be versed in biology, paleoanthropology, or the like to enjoy this book. The Riddled Chain provides an interesting thought provoking perspective into the process that lead to a fascinating and incredibly complex species, ourselves. Unless you have predispositions regarding how humans emerged, or with evolution theory itself, I bet you will not be able to put this book down.

How we got bright enough to wonder how we got bright

By choosing "The Riddled Chain" for his title, Prof. McKee may have meant to invoke both meanings of the R-word. First, the eons-long ascent of living things from isolated cells to hyper-cerebral humans was so riddled with the vagaries of chance, coincidence and chaos that a repeat experiment on a twin planet might stall at some low level, or branch in unimaginably strange ways, or fail completely. Second, the unlikely chain that did unfold on Earth is still to some extent a mystery, a riddle waiting to be solved.Although McKee's informal style and frequent flashes of humor make for pleasant reading, the book also has much to teach. Its central theme reflects the growing realization among scientists that spontaneous development to the level of thinking, planning creatures is a rare event, perhaps much rarer than previously thought. The author puts it succinctly in his opening chapter: "....Human evolution has been the product of many forces that together made us neither inevitable nor probable."Drawing from Chaos Theory, McKee explores the drastic consequences that minute initial-condition changes can cause in long-duration, many-branched processes such as biological evolution. At the end of such a process it may be impossible to distinguish the contributions of truly random events, such as gene mutations and natural disasters, from the deterministic but random-appearing effects of chaotic variation. One way to "separate the variables" is to construct a simulation. Reporting on an example of such evolutionary modeling by computer, McKee describes surprising results that seem to confirm the famous "butterfly effect" often cited in time-travel science fiction.Although he underscores the inevitable roles of chaos and unpredictability, McKee does not ignore the feedback phenomena that stabilized evolution and drove it in the direction of increasing complexity. Natural selection and its companion forces, gene flow and genetic drift, are given a thorough treatment which includes cases where selection fails, such as accidental early deaths unrelated to genetic fitness. An entire chapter is devoted to the concept of autocatalytic (self-driven) evolution and its continuing importance as advanced species like H. sapiens willfully modify their environment and replace natural selection with artificial selection through social policies and medical intervention.One of the book's most engaging chapters underscores the limitations of evolution, such as having to fashion every new model by tinkering nondestructively with an existing one (in contrast to supernatural design, which could start each species with a clean sheet.) McKee amusingly details some of the dubious orthopedic compromises involved in raising mammals from quadruped to biped status, freeing their increasingly articulated front feet to become full-time hands.In "A Tale of Two Sites," the author gives a fascinating account of his fossil-hunting during ten years in South Africa. While th

A comprehensive look at evolution

After reading nearly all the modern books about evolution, starting from Richard Dawkins excellent "Selfish Gene", I have to say that for modern readers this is an extremely readable and very human description of the writer's attempts to work his way through all the modern theories including the "Savanna Hypothesis, Gould's "Punctuated Equilibrium" and Elisabeth Vrba's "Pulse-Turnover"; he punctures the whole lot of them and turns the process of evolution over to the random operation of chance and chaos. I loved it. It is a book for anybody fascinated by evolution, in the context of modern thought. The reader gets the feeling of being addressed as a friend.

Thought Provoking Book

The writing of The Riddled Chain is fluid and easy to read, yet firmly seated in evolutionary theory. Most college biology courses spend an enormous amount of time studying these concepts and their effects. Luckily, you don't have to be in a class to enjoy this book.McKee goes to great detail in explaining the most acccepted evolutionary theories so that anyone can understand them. He then clarifies what he agrees with and what he doesn't and how those theories relate to his own hypothesis of natural selection. For example, I enjoyed the section dealing with how giraffes' circulation systems adapted as their neck length grew and now I can easily explain this to my sons. I found the final chapter extremely thought provoking because it not only dealt with the past, but the future. I highly recommend this book for anyone to read and consider.

Choas Teohry

Finally someone has written a book on human evolution that is different from all the rest. The Riddled Chain takes a new theoretical angle on human evolution. Much to my surprise, all that theory was quite readable and fascinating. Sure, McKee has some of the usual stuff about excavations and the sequence of fossils, but he does it with purpose without getting into a bunch of boring details. He also avoids the childish spats and name-calling that show up in so many human evolution books. What does McKee do? He gently guides you into some pretty heady stuff.The trick is that you don't notice how deep you've gotten. Just when your attention and understanding start to flag a bit, he pull in some amusing anecdote to make it all clear and keep you reading with a smile.His main point is that chance, coincidence, and chaos are important and necessary for evolution. He demolishes the over-simplified theories that climate change leads to human adptations such as bipedalism. Instead he proposes that evolution is self-driven. Chance events such as mutations must coincide with chance conditions, and then leads human evolution in one direction rather than another. He applies chaos theory, which I never understood until now, to show that small events can have big, long-term consequences.The book ends with a look at our future evolution that is both interesting and scary.McKee says in his preface that he thinks science is fun. His book certainly shows that. You'll have fun reading it, and you'll never think about human evolution in quite the same way you did before.