Biology Newsfeed

Phillip V. Tobias, 1925 - 2012

Scientific American - Posted: June 19th, 2012, 8:31pm EDT

pIn early 1925, the most important fossil pertaining to human evolution to date was reported from South Africa; the skull of an infant Australopithecine from a locality called Taung demonstrated that our ancestors walked upright, had human-like teeth, and a small, ape-like brain which may or may not have had some human-like features. This fossil#8217;s discovery co-occurred with a significant uptick in creationist activity in South Africa and the United States; for example, the Scopes trial in Tennessee started weeks later, in April 1925. Still later in the same year, on October 14th, Phillip Valentine Tobias was born./ppThe connections among these events is complicated. Scopes was not a direct response to the Taung fossil, but the Taung fossil and later South African finds influenced the creationist debate everywhere. South African creationism gained notable vigor as a direct response to this find. At some point the South African Apartheid government, which did have an official religion, prohibited further exploration for fossil hominins, while allowing continued research on material already in museums. The infant Tobias, after the mandatory childhood, teenage years, and all that, would become a social and political tour de force in South Africa, to the extent of being an embarrassment to the state. He worked for a public university and held a position of global recognition, and he spoke out against Apartheid, against Creationism, and in favor of Science and Evolution. It was partly because of him that the government could not entirely shut down all research on evolution. (Tobias was to become one of the scientists who contributed to the debunking of Piltdown.)/p a href=http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=phillip-v-tobias-1925-2012[More]/a

Read more

Return to the Newsfeed