The origin of man is biography

The circle of the universe is like a ring, a diamond in that ring, without a doubt - we ”Omar Hayyam. In his work "The origin of the species." Darwin only casually touched the question of the origin of man, limiting himself to the words "the light will be poured into the origin of man and his history." But this phrase alone caused a storm from the churchmen and idealists of all stripes.

The philosopher T. Carlyle was indignant; He immediately called Darwin’s book the Gospel of Dirt, and emphasized “I knew three generations of the Darwin family - all atheists! It's hard to say why. Perhaps he believed that the data for convincing presentation is still not enough, and maybe he believed that it was better to give a wide range of scientists to get used to the idea of ​​natural selection.

Be that as it may, many had the impression that in the year Darwin was not yet sure that his theory was applicable and to man. This, of course, does not correspond to the truth. The analysis of the manuscripts and notebooks of Darwin testifies with all the irresponsibility that Darwin put forward the idea of ​​the origin of a person from a monkey to the ancestor - more than 20 years before the publication of the “origin of the species” even after the theory of natural selection was won by the scientific world, Darwin was in no hurry.

He allowed his young friend and comrade -in -arms Huxley to get ahead of himself and only eight years after him published the book “The Origin of Man and Sexual Selection” for a year. It was a capital summary of all knowledge at that time about the position of man in nature, the true meaning of which we begin to understand only now. What opinions about this exist now? Most researchers up to the middle of our century “rejuvenated” a person, as a species, relate his formation to the playstones and golochent of the quarter period.

For this, there were, as if every reason. The remains of the most primitive of the then famous humanoid creatures - Pithecanthropus found by Evgeny Dubois in Java, were given at first about one million years a more accurate modern assessment - not more than thousands of years. For the period from the 60th millennium to 38 millennia, Neanderthals are widespread, which, obviously, arose earlier, having changed the first monkeys - archanthropes, this name unites Pithecanthropes and Sinanthropes.

Neanderthals - otherwise paleoanthropes - were replaced by a modern person less than 40 thousand years ago. Thus, overly compressed, implausively small, unprecedented terms were allocated to the evolution of man. The process of the formation of a person in popular articles and books sometimes draw like a parade in which a reasonable person walks in front of the nape in the back of the head, and the fossil monkey, a likely common ancestor of chimpanzees and a person, walk in front of a person.

Human predecessors are divided into three stages of Australopithecus or creatures similar to them, archangropes and paleoanthropes. For more than thousands of years, one stage has passed to another, and the pace of development has increasingly accelerated. This concept was called a stadium theory. In general, this is not very similar to the Darwin evolution; Rather, it resembles an orthogenesis - a focused desire to create a crown of creation - homo sapiens.

No wonder the largest anthropologist F, Vaidenraich was a convinced orthogenetist, and his colleague for work on the remains of Sinanthropus Teyar de Chardin, a supporter of the teleological interpretation of evolution. The impressive finds of Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus in Asia caused most anthropologists a doubt about the validity of the thesis of Darwin that the birthplace of mankind is Africa.

Well -developed theories about the Central Asian origin of man arose - P. Sushkin defended this theory, and abroad - a very famous paleontologist G. doubted the forest lifestyle of our alleged ancestors. Dry cold plateau of Central Asia seemed more suitable for the development of straightforwardness than topical forests. True, Australopithecus also lived in Africa in the dry steppes and savannahs, but they were considered not the direct ancestors of a person, but a deviated, lateral branch.

But again and again, many were very embarrassed by the unprecedented speed of the evolution of the human brain and its high level of development in the most backward human tribes. In this paragraph, Alfred Wallace did not agree with Darwin on Wallace, the human soul should have divine origin. The course of Wallace's reasoning was the native hunters with whom he dealt on the islands of the Indo -Malaid Archipelago, were not inferior to the development of the brain by civilized Europeans as he wrote to members of scientific societies, and why the “savage” is such a perfect tool?

The selection does not create unnecessary things. So, did not the selection create the human brain, but another, higher power? Both the logic and ethics of Wallace cannot be recognized as impeccable. On the one hand, a clear sympathy for the “natives”, rare in Victorian Britain, on the other hand, arrogant patting on the shoulder, a contemptuous attitude to the primitive activity of “savages”.

Why is the savage the same brain as a member of a scientific society? In fact - why?And then, what to come up with and once made a stone ax was apparently not easier than inventing a laser today. The average life expectancy of white hunters for elephants was not so long ago no more than two years, and they were armed with large -caliber rifles, and a primitive man armed only with a spear, killed mammoths in thousands, built real houses from their cranches with fangs, and we still cannot solve some of his secrets.

Here is one of them in the burials of man of the ancient Eallete Paleolithic under the Sungire of the vicinity of the city of Vladimir found long, absolutely straight spears from the mammoth bone. But mammoth tusks are known to be curved. So, the person of the Paleolithic could soften the elephant bone for a while and unbend it. We no longer know how to do this.

Wallace was mistaken to kill a saber -toothed tiger with you made by a spear is perhaps more difficult than solving a differential equation today. However, what was still caused by such a quick evolution of man? How did the races of a modern person arise? Is there a person’s evolution in our time and will we evolve in the future? If we, then in, which direction? These matters will be discussed in the following sections.

What is the position of a person in the zoological system? The associate of Darwin Huxley proposed to identify a person into an independent kingdom of psychozoa - along with the kingdoms of animals and plants. Although this is a huge leap in comparison with the views that considered man a fallen angel, few people will agree with Huxley's opinion. According to the current biological classification, a reasonable person is the only type of people living now, otherwise - hominids.

This family, along with the family of anthrapery of chimpanzees, gorilla, orangutan and gibbons, come in the subordinate of the human -like detachment of primates. So, a person is allocated into a separate family. What was the basis for this and which of the living humanoids that are now the closest to us? The well -known anthropologist A. The bottom of the name is sometimes written by Kate that a person and gorillas of general morphological signs, in humans and chimpanzees, have, in Orangutan, gibbons and other monkeys have signs common with a person, but such calculations should be treated carefully, because they only create the appearance of quantitative analysis.

Recall that most morphological features are determined by several genes and usually we do not know how the number of genes is connected by one or another sign. Ignorance of the genetic weight of the sign can distort the picture of kinship. Imagine a bank that performs currency exchange operations not at the rate, but by the number of signs - changes 1 ruble per 1 yen, 1 dollar per 1 pound.

The collapse of such a bank is only a matter of a near future. So in this case we do not know the genetic course of our currencies that is, signs. We will try to determine our closest relatives by the signs that we knowingly know that they are due to one genome. These are, for example, blood groups A, B, and oh, it turned out that all humanoids have blood groups A and B, the zero group is found only in chimpanzees.

The well-known Rh fact is available, and in monkeys. Proteins of the blood of anthropoid monkeys and a person are so close that the blood of chimpanzees and gorillas can be transplanted to a person, of course, the corresponding group. It is already that this begins to doubt the powers of the special family of people between the family blood transfusion usually ends with the collapse of other people's red blood cells.

A group of researchers from the University of California studied the kinship of blood serum proteins - albumin - in humans and monkeys in a certain immunological reaction. If you take the albumin human index per unit, then the higher the index, the more distant from the person is the test species. For the gorilla, this value is 1.09, for chimpanzee 1.14, the difference close to the error of the definition, but for Gibone - 1.28, Paviana - 2.44, Monkey - 2, Capucin - representative of American wide -skinned monkeys, separated from the total trunk of primates about 40 million years ago, has index 5, and the primitive primacy of Lemur - but here we are here, and here we are here.

Again we risk falling into a mistake. The system, built on a few signs, almost always turns out to be artificial. The variety of forms of human hemoglobins is so great, and the differences between human hemoglobins and gorillas are so insignificant that you can fight about the lay that people with the hemoglobin of the gorilla can be found on earth. But from this they do not cease to be people.

Is there a way to directly compare the genotypes of the studied organisms, determine the percentage of similar genes? This method would be an objective and absolute criterion of kinship. It turns out that there is such a method. It was developed 10 years ago by American biochemists Hoyer, Bolton and McCarthy and is called the molecular hybridization method.

Its principle is simple. How do you remember, DNA is normal dual -packed. This is a double spiral, the halves of which are fastened with hydrogen bonds.With a decrease in temperature, the reverse process begins - renutation. Hydrogen bonds again become stable and complementary halves of DNA, encountering in the solution with chaotic thermal movement, they form double spirals again.

And now the most interesting. So that DNA does not restore its structure, denatured DNA can be immobilized easiest to do this by passing the solution with DNA through a nitrocellulose filter - DNA will settle on the filter, and then pass a solution of a denaturated DNA of another species through the same filter, laid by radioactive isotope with carbon, tritium or phosphorus.

Then, on the filter, hybrid DNA molecules are formed, one half of which belongs to one species and the other to the other. It is clear that the larger the compared types of similar genes, the higher the percentage of the label connection. We put the filter B liquid scintillator and calculate on the counter the number of flashes per unit of time - the ego will be an indicator of genetic kinship.

At the Moscow University there is a laboratory of bioorganic chemistry, in which academician Andrei Nikolayevich Belozersky founded the department of evolutionary biochemistry after the untimely death of Andrei Nikolayevich, the department is headed by his student A. In this department, the method of molecular hybridization, along with others, is widely used to clarify related relationships between different groups of organisms - from strains Lilia and lilies of the valley, sharks and sturgeons, bears and sperm whales.

The first attempts to apply the method of molecular hybridization as an objective criterion of kinship in some cases led to paradoxical results - data were obtained sharply different from generally accepted in systematics. For example, sturgeon fish were not a subclass of bone fish, but a completely independent class, equivalent to cartilage and bone fish.