HUMAN EVOLUTION IN AFRICA AND GENETIC VARIATION: A GENETIC HISTORIAN'S INTERPRETATION

A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, humanists, and so on. While, in fact, very few people (scholars) actually/really understand it as it stands, even as it stood when Charles Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now are able to understand it. At a meeting of the Linnean Society of London on July 1, 1858, Darwin proposed a theory of evolution by means of natural selection. His monumental treatise, The Origin of Species, was published a year later. Darwin’s theory revolutionized not only biological thinking but also politics, sociology and moral philosophy. The weakest part of Darwin’s theory was its inability to account for the transfer of biological information from generation to generation. Although it was clear to him that natural selection could be meaningfully defined only in terms of heritable traits, the nature of heredity was poorly understood at that time. All the biological sciences (including genetic history, my own area of specialization) rest on two central principles. One is that all processes have an entire physical and chemical basis. The other is that all organisms and their characteristics are products of evolution. Hence, evolution provides a framework for understanding all the features of living things and illuminates all the biological disciplines, from molecular biology and biochemistry to philosophy, behaviour and ecology. Evolution has important social implications in health science, agriculture, conservation and other human endeavours. Moreover, evolution has profound implications for anthropology, sociology and philosophy – in short, for how we view ourselves. Everyone (scholar) should know something about evolution, and for anyone who envisions a career in the life sciences, an understanding of evolution is indispensable. This paper argues that man is an evolved being, a stark contrast to the Christian view that man was created by God according to the book of Genesis. The paper further argues that Africa is the cradle of humanity taking into consideration the several archaeological hotspots found in the north, East and South Africa