Vincent Sarich

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Vincent M. Sarich (born 1934) is an American anthropology professor.

Born in Chicago, he received a bachelor of science in chemistry from Illinois Institute of Technology and his masters and doctorate in anthropology from University of California, Berkeley. He was a member of the Department of Anthropology at Stanford fromm 1967 to 1981, and taught at UC Berkeley from 1966 through 1994.

Sarich's use of molecular evidence in anthropology was groundbreaking. He used it to measure the biochemical similarity in relative degree between human beings and other kinds of animals, which led to important concepts in human evolution: the "molecular clock" and the "African Eve" theory (also called "Mitochondrial Eve or the "Out of Africa Model"). He and coauthor Allan Wilson thought at the time that the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans was about 4 to 5 million years ago, in apposition to the estimate by fossil experts of 13 million years.

They compared the structure of certain blood proteins of humans and those of African apes. By comparing differences, they estimated the age of divergence of two species, because mutations take place at a constant rate.

Because he was politically conservative, Sarich was out of the mainstream of his peers in anthropology. His later work on race strengthened his reputation as a controversial figure. He applied his earlier work to racial differentiation, which he sees as the beginnings of speciation, arguing that the smaller the amount of time required to create a given number of morphological difference, the more selectively significant the differences become.

In 1995, Sarich was a signatory of a collective statement titled "Mainstream Science on Intelligence", written by Linda Gottfredson and published in the Wall Street Journal. Sarich also wrote a favorable review of The Bell Curve.

He currently lectures in anthropology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

[edit] Publications

Sarich VM, Wilson AC. Immunological time scale for hominid evolution. Science 158, 1967, p. 1200-1203.

Sarich VM, Miele F. Race: The Reality of Human Differences. Westview Press (2004). ISBN 0-8133-4086-1

Sarich VM. The Final Taboo. Skeptic (Altadena, CA) January 1, 2000. Volume: 8 Issue: 1 Page: 38

Sarich VM, Dolhinow P. Background for man; readings in physical anthropology ASIN: B00005VHM2

Zihlman, Adrienne L. , John E. Cronin, Douglas L. Cramer, and Vincent M. Sarich. (1978). Pygmy chimpanzee as a possible prototype for the common ancestor of humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas. Nature 275: 744-746.

Zihlman, L., John E. Cronin, D.L. Cramer, and Vincent M. Sarich, Pygmy Chimpanzee as a Possible Prototype for Common Ancestor of Humans, Chimpanzees and Gorillas. Nature.

Marks, Jon, Carl W. Schmid, and Vincent M. Sarich, (1988). DNA hybridization as a guide to phylogeny: Relations of the Hominoidea. Journal of Human Evolution, 17: 769-786.