The Man Who Found the Missing Link: Eugine Dubois and His Lifelong Quest to Prove Darwin Right
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.71 (632 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 068485581X |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 515 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-06-03 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Irascible, competitive, and more than a little paranoid, Dubois managed to alienate even would-be allies, and thus to distance himself from the scientific community. And such fossils had indeed been turning up throughout the Dutch East Indies, to which Dubois traveled in 1887. Like many scientists of his generation, Eugene Dubois (1858-1940) was devoted to the ideas of Charles Darwin. --Gregory McNamee. There, he conducted a rigorous campaign of excavations, which yielded fruit four years later with the discovery of fragmentary remains of a creature that he called Pithecanthropus erectus, the "upright-standing apeman" who constituted a missing link between modern humans and their distant ancestors. Effectively self-ostracized, Dubois was deprived of the honors and appointments he had striven for. He was also profoundly ambitious, seeking
Quick and Entertaining Shipman's account of Dubois life is written more in the style of Microbe Hunters Microbe Hunters than The Great Devonian Controversy The Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge among Gentlemanly Specialists (Science and Its Conceptual Foundations series). She takes a few liberties presenting dialog that she could not possibly know, but the facts she does have do not make the interpretations unreasonable.On the. A great story, beautifully told, but with odd balance. J. P. Rushton The sentences in this book have been so elegantly crafted that they flowed like a smooth running brook. Since my wife and I like to alternate reading chapters from anthropology adventure stories out loud to each other, we were captivated by the editorial polishing that allowed us to pick up speed with nary a fumble (except for the occasional technical, Dutch or Indonesian words). While we had expected rough and tumble science, we wer. Rob Hardy said Spotlight on an Obscure, Important Scientist. Everyone knows that there is still religious (not scientific) opposition to the Theory of Evolution, but when it was unveiled, there was strong scientific opposition as well, which only decreased as more (and younger) scientists grew to accept the powerful explicatory capacities of the theory. The most unacceptable part of the theory was that humans themselves had evolved from some previous ape-like form. Scientific opposition to thi
The Dubois family motto, "Recte et fortiter," means straight and strong, and Dubois lived it to the letter. In her revisionist view, Dubois is the unrecognized father of modern paleoanthropology (the science of human origins and evolution), one of the greatest discoverers of human origins. On December 16, 1940, he died, alone, bitter, and misunderstood. It was some eighteen months after the first Neanderthal skeleton was found in Germany and a little more than a year before Charles Darwin published "The Origin of Species" in England. Barely surviving a harrowing sea journey during which the precious fossils were nearly lost, Dubois arrived in Europe triumphant in having accomplished the impossible. After five years, two weeks, and three days of life-threatening work, Dubois' excavations yielded the missing link. It takes a brilliant writer to elucidate a brilliant mind, and Pat Shipman -- long hailed as a stellar narrator of the drama of scientific understanding -- here shines as never before. He was much more than just a fossil-finder; he was a scientist of genius. His finds were too surprising, his techniques and analysis too new, his conclusions too sweeping to be easily accepted. His solitary crusade cost him dearly -- the love of his wife, the trust of his best friend, the support of his closest professional associates, the legacy of respect he risked everything to achieve. Believing that a powe