Michael Ruse remarked that ?unfortunately there is simply nothing in the literature by philosophers on human origins'. Explore how the data on human emergence can become an interesting way to approach a philosophical anthropology.
Since the time of Darwin it has been recognised that biological species are essential to the process of evolution. A species consists of a population rather than unconnected individuals. The population of any species is reproductively isolated from that of others because of the fertility criterion. This means that despite the cohabitation of similar species in a specific territory no interbreeding will occur. Mayr states that ?Each species is a delicately integrated genetic system that has been selected through many generations to fit into a definite niche in its environment.' Palaeontology, according to Darwin, accounted for the formation of any new species through a gradual transformation of the ancestral population with large numbers of individuals in the inhabited territory. Eldredge and Gould later named this process phyletic gradualism. This phyletic gradualism, however, continued the tradition of extrapolation from local populations and also used the accepted model for adaptive geographical variation, namely the gradual substitution of genes directed by natural selection, as a paradigm for the origin of species . This theory, as Mayr argues, does not take into account the advantage of the isolate. Mayr recognised that speciation occurred more rapidly and more effectively in small, isolated populations. That is populations that have migrated from the larger ancestral population and therefore are isolated from the homogenizing effect of the gene flow. In this way successful speciation occurred due to the cumulative effects of sm ...