Darwin's Unfinished Symphony
How Culture Made the Human Mind
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- 20,99 €
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- 20,99 €
Publisher Description
Humans possess an extraordinary capacity for culture, from the arts and language to science and technology. But how did the human mind—and the uniquely human ability to devise and transmit culture—evolve from its roots in animal behavior? Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony presents a captivating new theory of human cognitive evolution. This compelling and accessible book reveals how culture is not just the magnificent end product of an evolutionary process that produced a species unlike all others—it is also the key driving force behind that process. Kevin N. Lala tells the story of the painstaking fieldwork, the key experiments, the false leads, and the stunning scientific breakthroughs that led to this new understanding of how culture transformed human evolution. It is the story of how Darwin’s intellectual descendants picked up where he left off and took up the challenge of providing a scientific account of the evolution of the human mind.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Laland, professor of behavioral and evolutionary biology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, covers basic principles of evolutionary biology as he describes a decade s worth of his and others research, culminating in a comprehensive and fascinating solution to the vexing problem of the human mind. He advocates for the position that human culture is not a product of the human mind; instead, he believes that early cultural tendencies shaped the evolution of our brains. Employing a combination of experimental and theoretical data, Laland hypothesizes that early humans copied successful behaviors from relatives and thus increased their fitness. Passive imitation led to active teaching with large benefits accruing to those who were able to pass on complex behaviors most accurately. Teaching, in turn, led to the need for language. It sounds paradoxical that teaching should both explain the advent of human cultural complexity and be the product of it, he writes, but that is exactly what we should expect if a feedback mechanism... is operating. All of these interactions helped shaped the brains of early humans, making them far more complex than those of our closest relatives. Throughout, Laland successfully draws readers into the scientific process that led to his conclusions while presenting data from a very wide array of disciplines.
