ABSTRACT
This chapter shows why Dobzhansky, too, judged Coon to be dead wrong about the history of our species, and why Simpson and Mayr, Dobzhansky's closest allies, greeted Coon's hypothesis more positively. It reconstructs Coon's ideas and reactions to them through the lens of the rhetorical concept of kairos or timeliness. There are good reasons to view the years immediately following World War II as an opportune moment for rhetorical action in anthropology. The chapter stresses the role Dobzhansky's population genetics played in changing the rhetorical situation created by Coon's book. The realignment Dobzhansky and Washburn catalyzed had a lasting effect on public as well as professional discourse. The chapter argues that Dobzhansky's alertness to what was at stake in Coon's hypothesis reflected his longer and deeper interaction with American anthropologists. Weidenreich's influence on the topic of the erectus-sapiens transition was felt at the symposium on Human Origins and Evolution Washburn and Dobzhansky mounted at Cold Spring Harbor in 1950.
