Colloquium paper: in the light of evolution IV: the human condition.

T he year 2009 marked the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of his most influential publication. Darwin transformed the biological sciences in much the same way that Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton, centuries earlier, transformed the physical sciences—by demonstrating that the universe operates according to natural laws that fall within the purview of rational scientific inquiry. In 1543, Copernicus published De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium (“On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres”) that challenged conventional wisdom that the Earth was the center of creation and instead promoted the idea that natural laws govern the motion of physical objects in the universe. In 1859, in On the Origin of Species (4), Darwin developed the equally revolutionary concept that a natural but nonrandom process—natural selection— yields biological adaptations that otherwise can give the superficial impression of direct intelligent craftsmanship. Actually, Darwin barely mentioned Homo sapiens in On the Origin of Species, cautiously stating only that “much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” More than a decade later, however, Darwin addressed human evolution at considerable length in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (5) wherein can be found many thoughtful passages, such as, “Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future.” Of course, much has been learned about humanity’s evolutionary origins and biological conditions since Darwin’s time, not least from the evidence of paleontology, comparative vertebrate biology, and genomics. An emerging field known as “anthropogeny” (6) seeks to understand the evolutionary origins of humans and their biological and cultural traits. In the articles of this Colloquium, leading evolutionary biologists, anthropologists, and philosophers of science reflect upon and commemorate the Darwinian Revolution as it relates to the human condition at levels ranging from the molecular to the phenotypic to the social and philosophical. The articles in these Proceedings are organized into three parts: (I) Human Phylogenetic History and the Paleontological Record; (II) Structure and Function of the Human Genome; and (III) Cultural Evolution and the Uniqueness of Being Human. The diverse topics addressed in these articles give some indication of the vast breadth and depth ofmodern scientific research into the Darwinian evolution of the human state.