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2004 Recipient
Dr. Vincent M. Sarich
Professor Emeritus of Anthropology
University of California, Berkeley
 Dr.
Vincent M. Sarich, Professor Emeritus of anthropology at the University
of California, Berkeley, was awarded the 2004 Kistler Prize in recognition
of his scientific research regarding human evolution. Analysis of immunological
evidence by Dr. Sarich and biochemist Allan Wilson, now deceased, led
to their conclusion that humans and African apes shared a common ancestor
no more than five million years ago, not 15 to 25 million years ago,
as paleontologists contended. The “molecular clock” hypothesis
established Sarich’s place in human evolution studies.
Born in
1934, Sarich was educated at the Illinois Institute of Technology (B.S.,
chemistry) and the University of California, Berkeley (M.S., Ph.D.,
anthropology). He was a faculty member of the Department of Anthropology
at UC Berkeley from 1966 through 1994, when he took emeritus status.
It
was for his doctoral dissertation that Sarich worked out the details
of human origins that were to bring him into sharp contention with
fossil experts. In addition to the usual anatomy of living forms and
the fossil record, his research relied on proteins, the differences
among which provided a new framework of relationships among the species
involved. This work showed that the human line went through brachiating
and knuckle-walking stages on the way to the bipedalism of the australopithecines.
Sarich’s view gradually gained acceptance, becoming the acknowledged
scientific doctrine in the mid-1980s.
His later research sought to
expand the logic of evolutionary biology to inquiries of human nature
and social policy. Sarich stated in his Kistler Prize acceptance speech: “I
became more and more concerned with the details of human evolution
at the behavioral level.” As
a case in point, he discussed the deleterious effects of the fact that “over
the last few decades, the belief in free will has decreased markedly.
This is evidenced in the Harris Poll … there are fewer and fewer
people indicating that they feel in control of the situation.” Sarich
believes that this is the environmental factor that is interacting
with genes to result in marked increases in mental illnesses in the
population.
Dr. Sarich has written widely on the bell curve, the reality
of human differences, and the relationships between brain size and
cognitive ability. Most recently his interests lay particularly in
the areas of language origins and evolution, as well as the origin
of our species and the evolution of variation within it.
“Reading through the material, it occurred to me that it evidenced the existence of a clock and that we ought to be able to find out something about human relationships using molecular comparisons. We weren’t the first to do this, but we were the first to document that there was a clock and then use it to solve a specific evolutionary problem. … [T]he idea was that the human line in its separation from the African apes was no more than five million years old. Since the australopithecines were already three million years old, this very markedly narrowed the range of time, which was not evidenced either among living forms or in the fossil record.”
—From Dr. Sarich’s acceptance speech at the 2004 Kistler Prize Banquet
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