Department of Anthropology, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA.
Graduate Program in Ecology, Evolution, Environment, and Society, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA.
Evol Anthropol. 2021 Nov;30(6):375-384. doi: 10.1002/evan.21927. Epub 2021 Oct 15.
Grit is implicated in several biological phenomena-it wears teeth, it fractures teeth, it drives tooth evolution, it elicits complex manual manipulations-any one of which could be described as a central topic in evolutionary anthropology. But what is grit? We hardly know because we tend to privilege the consequences of grit (it is abrasive) over its formal features, all but ignoring crucial variables such as mineral composition, material properties, and particle geometry (size, angularity), not to mention natural variation in the habitats of primates and their food surfaces. Few topics have animated so much debate and invited such cool indifference at the same time. Our goal here is to shine a light on grit, to put a philosophical lens on the nature of our discourse, and to call attention to large empirical voids that should be filled and folded into our understanding of primate natural history and evolution.
沙砾与若干生物学现象有关联——它磨损牙齿，导致牙齿破裂，推动牙齿进化，引发复杂的手动操作——其中任何一项都可以被描述为进化人类学的核心话题。但是，沙砾是什么呢？我们几乎一无所知，因为我们往往更看重沙砾的后果（它具有研磨性）而不是其形式特征，几乎忽略了关键变量，如矿物成分、材料特性和颗粒几何形状（大小、棱角），更不用说灵长类动物栖息地和它们食物表面的自然变化了。很少有话题能像这样引发如此多的争论，同时又让人如此冷漠。我们的目标是关注沙砾，用哲学的视角来审视我们的论述本质，并提请注意那些应该填补并纳入我们对灵长类动物自然历史和进化理解的巨大经验空白。
