It's All In Your Mind
New book traces human mental development
Fossils tell us where and when we stood on our hind legs and when we lost our body hair. But when and where did we start to think? That's a harder question. William H. Calvin, in his recently released A Brief History of the Mind: From Apes to Intellect and Beyond (Oxford University Press, 219 pp., $26), takes it on. Drawing on all the sciences that aim to reconstruct the past, Calvin maps the environmental influences (such as changing climates and the need to throw a spear accurately) that shaped the evolution of our mental hardware. About 50,000 years ago, he says, long after Homo sapiens had that hardware available, a new mental operating system appeared. This software upgrade featured syntax, which allowed language to express complex nested concepts, a mental "big bang" that enormously facilitated our ancestors' ability to structure their lives, to anticipate and plan.
Calvin, a neurobiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, is a master both of how minds work in a cultural context, and how brains work on a neuron level. He's also a master at helping ordinary readers understand neurobiology. A Brief History of the Mind offers an expanded table of contents outlining the main arguments, text divided into digestible-sized chunks, and pictures. The writing is conversational and colorful, uncluttered by intimidating footnote references (although there are extensive notes in the back). While the book is as accessible as possible, this is cerebral science; it pulls together evidence in the rocks, bones, and artifacts, using natural variation and selection to construct rigorous nets of probable causes and effects. Creationism, thankfully, isn't worth a passing nod.
Calvin's most compelling insight is that our minds are not ideal for the world we have made. Evolution has adapted us for different conditions and works too slowly to bail us out now: "Clearly, human cultural innovation is now in charge of getting the bugs out, not biological evolution. And we haven't made much progress yet." Calvin suggests educational innovations that could produce adults capable of the new kinds of thinking that will be necessary. Whether our current adults have the foresight or will to implement them remains to be seen.
—Ralph Bowden
