🚀 go-pugleaf

w.p.coyne@newcastle.ac.uk writes:

>  Had you publicised the theory before 1990 in articles, talks or the 
>media?   Or was yours an expansion of an existing well publicised
>theory of the effects of climate on human evolution..  
> 
>   I ask because "Children of the Ice" by John and Mary Gribbin
>was also published in 1990.  I think sometime in the late 80's John
>Gribbin did a radio series for the BBC of 10 minute episodes where
>he explained this theory of the importance of climatic interaction with
>humans.  
>   
>    HIs discussion of the settlement of Greenland by the Vikings
>during a warm period 
>lasting a few centuries, and then its destruction caused by the colder
>weather of the 15th century was memorable.   The phrase "adapt or die"
>was very appropriate because the settlers could have survived if they
>had discarded their European lifestyle and agriculture and adopted the
>eskimo way of life (maybe some of them did).

 
The idea (of climate change affecting human evolution) is neither original to
Gribbin or me, it goes back at least to Darwin, who in the ORIGIN OF SPECIES
said, "The action of climate seems at first sight to be quite independent
of the struggle for existence; but in so far as climate chiefly acts in
reducing food, it brings on the most severe struggle between individuals,
whether of the same or of distinct species, which subsist on the same kind
of food.  Even when climate, for instance extreme cold, acts directly, it
will be the least vigorous, or those which have got the least food through
the advancing winter, which will suffer the most."
        THE ASCENT OF MIND is not particularly concerned with what has
happened since the end of the last ice age about 12,000 years ago; my one 
brief mention of the Iceland-Greenland Norse saga at page 107 came from 
John and Mary Gribbin's excellent article in NEW SCIENTIST of 
20 January 1990, and was inserted into the galley proof for ASCENT, 
which came out later that year.  ASCENT proceeds from the observation
that three things happened starting about 2-2.5 Mya:  brain
enlargement, prolific stone toolmaking, and the ice ages; it asks
what might the relations between them.
        ASCENT is particularly about the process whereby ice margin 
fluctuations serve to select for certain traits; I'm a neurophysiologist 
interested in the hominid brain enlargement/reorganization problem.  
Any originality of ASCENT lies in those areas, not in calling attention 
to the role of climate change in speeding evolution which has been 
widespread in paleoanthropological circles for some time.
 
    William H. Calvin   WCalvin@U.Washington.edu