webs of competition and interaction to- 

 ward mutually beneficial states? And 

 again, I was pleased but not at all sur- 

 prised. For I have long felt that images of 

 balance and optimizing competition have 

 been greatly oversold, that major and ef- 

 fectively random forces buffet the history 

 of life, that most groups of organisms 

 make their own way according to their 

 own attributes, and that interactions 

 among most groups are, on the broad scale 

 of time in milUons, more like Longfel- 

 low's "Ships that pass in the night" than 

 the Book of Ruth's "Whither thou goest, I 

 will go." 



3. Where did Homo sapiens originate? 

 My last issue is a carryover from previous 

 years. Nothing decisive happened in 1993 

 to resolve this hot debate of the last decade 

 or so. Rather, I am amazed that the story 

 has such fantastic "legs," and remains 

 both the hottest item on the paleoanthro- 

 pological news wire and a source of di- 

 chotomization that has forced a more com- 

 plex issue into two warring camps (at least 

 in pubhc perception). 



One position has been dubbed the 

 "multiregionahst model," or the "cande- 

 labra" or "menorah" theory (depending on 

 your ethnic preferences) of recent human 

 evolution. Everyone agrees that our im- 

 mediate ancestral species. Homo erectus, 

 moved out of Africa into Europe and Asia 

 more than a million years ago (where they 

 became Java Man and Peking Man of the 

 old textbooks). Multiregionahsts argue 

 that Homo sapiens evolved simultane- 

 ously from Homx) erectus populations on 

 all three continents (with necessary main- 

 tenance of some gene flow among popula- 

 tions, for they could not otherwise have 

 evolved in such a coordinated way). 



The other side has been called the "out 

 of Africa" or "Noah's ark" school of 

 human evolution. They argue that Homo 

 sapiens arose in one place as a small pop- 

 ulation and then spread throughout the 

 world to produce all our modem diversity. 

 If Africa was the single place, then Euro- 

 pean and Asian Homo erectus, and the 

 later European Neanderthals as well, 

 played little or no role in our origin but 

 were replaced by later invaders in a sec- 

 ond and much more recent wave of human 

 migration. 



The most famous version of "Noah's 

 ark" theory, the poorly named "mitochon- 

 drial Eve" hypothesis of modem human 

 origins in Africa, suffered a blow in 1993, 

 when discovery of an important technical 

 fallacy in the computer program used to 

 generate and assess evolutionary trees de- 



bunked the supposed evidence for an 

 African source. But in so disproving the 

 original claim, correction only dictated ag- 

 nosticism, not a contrary conclusion — that 

 is, the new trees are consistent with origin 

 in a single place, but Africa cannot be af- 

 firmed as the clearly preferred spot, al- 

 though Africa remains as plausible as any 

 other place by this criterion. Other inde- 

 pendent sources of evidence — especially 

 the greater genetic diversity measured 

 among African peoples — continue, in my 

 view, to favor an African origin. (A thor- 

 ough and fair review by a partisan of the 

 out-of-Africa school may be found in 



"DNA and Recent Human Evolution," by 

 Mark Stoneking, Evolutionary Anthropol- 

 ogy, wol 2, ]993, pp. 60-13.)' 



As a student of snails, I have no great 

 personal stake in this argument, although I 

 would be willing to wager that this new- 

 fangled Noah's ark will one day find its 

 Ararat (although I won't be shocked if the 

 boat sinks and multiregionalism tri- 

 umphs). But I am intrigued by joumalists' 

 representations of this debate — particu- 

 larly in their attribution of surprise to one 

 side and expectation to the other (thus 

 linking this tale, through the theme of mis- 

 placed surprise, to my previous two sto- 



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