Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity [Hardcover]

Raymond Tallis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 30, 2011 | ISBN-10: 1844652726 | ISBN-13: 978-1844652723

Biologism -- the belief that human beings are essentially animals and can be understood in biological terms -- is gaining increasing acceptance in contemporary thought. This trend is seemingly legitimised by genuine, often spectacular, advances in biological science: in human genetics, evolutionary theory and neuroscience. Our propensities, we are told, can be accounted for by "a gene for" this or that; everyday behaviour can be explained in Darwinian terms; and human consciousness is identified with the activity of the evolved brain. Ultimately, so the story goes, all that we do, think and feel is subordinated to the imperative of ensuring that we behave in such a way as to, individually or collectively, maximise the chances of replicating our genetic material. In Aping Mankind, Raymond Tallis argues that the rise of this way of thinking is a matter of profound concern. He demonstrates that by denying human uniqueness, and minimising the differences between humans and their nearest animal kin, biologism misrepresents what we are, offering a grotesquely simplified and even degrading account of humanity, which has dire consequences: by seeing ourselves as animals we may find reasons for treating each other like them. In a devastating critique Tallis exposes the exaggerated claims made for the ability of neuroscience and evolutionary theory to explain human consciousness, behaviour, culture and society and shows that human beings are infinitely more interesting and complex than they appear in the mirror of biologism.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A major and erudite statement of a position that is intellectually, morally, and spiritually of the first importance to those of us living now." Roger Scruton, of numerous books including A Political Philosophy: Arguments For Conservatism

"A splendid book. Tallis is right to say that current attempts to explain major elements of human life by brain-talk are fearfully misguided. Tallis is exceptional in having both the philosophical grasp to understand what is wrong here and the scientific knowledge to expose it fully. He documents the gravity of this menace in a clear, vigorous style, with real fire, venom, and humour." Mary Midgley, author of The Owl of Minerva: A Memoir and The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene

"A wonderful book and an important book, one that all neuroscientists should read. Tallis's fearless criticism of the work of some distinguished contemporary academics and scientists and the rather ludicrous experimental paradigms of MRI work needs to be made." Simon Shorvon, UCL Institute of Neurology

About the Author

Raymond Tallis trained as a doctor before going on to become Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester. He was elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences for his research in clinical neuroscience. He retired from medicine in 2006 to become a full-time writer. He has published fiction, poetry and over a dozen books of cultural criticism and philosophical anthropology including, most recently, the acclaimed The Kingdom of Infinite Space (2008).

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Acumen Publishing (July 30, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1844652726
• ISBN-13: 978-1844652723
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1.5 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #458,948 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

95 of 102 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Revolution in understanding humanity September 27, 2011

By John Gillis

Format:Hardcover

This is a rare and remarkable work of synthesis of scientific fact and philosophy from a medical professional immersed in the neurological and biological sciences. Although Tallis is one of the most literate and clear writers in science and philosophy, it is important to acknowledge that portions of the book are "heavy" and require serious concentration due to the density and uniqueness of the ideas he is presenting. But, by contrast, there are many places where one can't help but laugh out loud sometimes at his inventive phrases and words to help describe and drive home his essential viewpoints.

The book strikes me as having two basic goals:

1) A withering critique of reductionists who believe
---a) that our great conceptual abilities as humans can be reduced to (is equivalent to) the neural firings in our brain. These he call neuromaniacs.
---b) and those intellectuals who seek to minimize human differences from other animals by either anthropomorphizing animals or animalizing humans, in wrong ways. This phenomenon he calls Darwinitis. [However he is a committed Darwinian in the original meaning of the term.]
2) A fascinating theory of human origins that involves explaining the origin of free will in humans, the origins of self-consciousness, the origin of conceptual development and language development, resulting from the *nature* of our entire body and its unique set of features.

The first five chapters are devoted to item (1) above, and is largely a sustained and intense attack on many commonly promulgated and accepted scientific/philosophical myths, misconceptions and mistakes of the 20th and 21st centuries (and some earlier).

In chapter 6 he starts into his positive theory phase, and it is worth waiting for.... It is quite a revelation of factual, biologically driven ideas that very plausibly explain proto-human and human development over the past four million years.

I still need to absorb some aspects of his thesis, so I'm not sure I agree with all of it yet. For example his conclusion that there is a "collective space" made up of a "community of minds" that inhabit a kind of conceptual world that is beyond biology -- is using terms in a way that are not clear to me. Despite this talk of collective this and community that, he still seems to be basing his theory on individuals, so perhaps he's really talking about "society" or "civilization", sort of. In any case, this is a seminal work in the understanding of our unique human consciousness.

I do have a few quibbles with his positions, such as his unquestioning acceptance of the classical philosophical primary vs. secondary qualities distinction, that tends to cloud his usual clarity in one portion of one chapter.

Some of his other books from recent years, apparently are components or precursors to this opus. That is, he frequently refers to some of these other titles, so it looks to me that the earlier works were pieces of the "puzzle" that he was working on, item by item -- with this book being the culmination of them all. So, now I'll have to go check out some of these previous works, since they sound fascinating, as detailed workings-out of aspects of the overall theory that he presents in "Aping Mankind." Read more ›

46 of 51 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Not pop-pseudoscience November 14, 2011

By Real Name

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Negative scientific studies, studies that demonstrate negative findings (like showing that a drug does not lower blood pressure any more than a sugar-pill), aren't as sexy as positive studies. Very few professors have gotten tenure by only showing what is not true. No one has won a Nobel prize for solely criticizing other people's research. That said, negative research can be as practical and useful as positive research. Look at recent research on vitamins--there is now good evidence that several vitamins and anti-oxidants decrease your life-expectancy rather than make you more healthy. It is important to know that vitamins can be bad for your health, even though it is a negative finding.

Aping Mankind is negative research. While most popular-science writers attempt to weave compelling stories from the latest neuroscience experiments to explain 'why we are the way we are', Tallis attempts to show why these stories simply cannot be true. If you are skeptical of media--and scientific journal--headlines such as "Researchers discover the location of love in the brain", then you may enjoy Aping Mankind. In this work Tallis exposes the odd proclivity of scholars, from biologists to literary critics, to anthropomorphize pieces of matter while simultaneously dehumanizing human beings. In effect we are systematically transferring our humanity to matter, and this may not be good for our health--just like vitamins.

32 of 37 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars An Honest and Fair Atheistic Humanist February 16, 2012

By Edward A. Schroder

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

In this book Tallis attacks scientism: the mistaken belief that the natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology and their derivatives) can or will give a complete description of everything, including human life. We are not just our bodies. Humans are more than just animals. Scientists are deluded if they have the notion that our consciousness, the self to which the successive moments of consciousness are attributed, our personality, our character, personhood itself, are identical with activity in our brains. He calls this belief Neuromania.
Contrary to what evolutionary psychologists have argued, our behavior is not just determined by our biology. "The reduction of human life to a chain of programmed responses of modules to stimuli overlooks the complexity of everyday experience and the singularity of the situations we find ourselves in, to say nothing of the role of conscious deliberation." The human brain alone does not account for all our actions, our most private thoughts and our beliefs.
Religious belief is not the result of certain parts of the brain, so-called "God-spots". We are not just "hard-wired" for religious belief.
Darwinism cannot give a satisfactory answer to the questions: how did consciousness emerge, and what is consciousness for, anyway? When Darwinists teach that natural selection is random, and that we have evolved without any intelligent design or purpose, they still have to account for the emergence of humans who have consciousness, and seek for meaning and purpose in their lives. The logic of human development presupposes purpose. Atheists cannot explain the fact that we are purpose-seeking beings. We have the need to ask "Why?" We seek reasons. We are rational beings. Random natural selection does not explain this feature of life....
Tallis protests too much when he opines, "As an atheist humanist I reject the idea that evolution has a goal. More particularly, I do not for a moment think it had us in mind as its destination and crowning glory....it is a mindless, pointless process...Darwin had argued that there was an alternative to a conscious, super-intelligent designer: the operation of unconscious, although non-random, natural selection over hundreds of millions of years." He is going against his fellow atheists, like Dawkins, who see no purpose in the blind forces of physics. He claims that Darwinism leaves something unaccounted for.
"Isn't there a problem in explaining how the blind forces of physics brought about (cognitively) sighted humans who are able to see, and identify, and comment on, the `blind' forces of physics, even to notice that they are blind, and deliberately utilize them to engage with nature as if from the outside, and on much more favorable terms than those that govern the lives of other animals? On the Origin of the Species leaves us with the task of explaining the origin of the one species that is indeed a designer. How did humans get to be so different?...Something rather important about us is left unexplained by evolutionary theory. We are not mindless and yet seem to do things according to purposes that we entertain in a universe that brought us into being by mindless processes that are entirely without purpose. To deny this is not to subscribe to Darwinism but to embrace Darwinitis."
Tallis addresses the issue of God rigging the outcome of evolution, but concedes that that notion would not be compatible with evolutionary theory. He thinks that evolution is a shockingly cruel and inefficient process that has nothing to do with love, mercy or even common decency. It is no place for a God of love. He has a problem with the relationship between God and nature, and opts for eliminating God from the equation. He thinks that belief in a Creator is a man-made notion to explain why the world makes sense. However he is disgusted with those who would reject religion on the basis of a devastating reductionism. "In defending the humanities, the arts, the law, ethics, economics, politics and even religious belief against neuro-evolutionary reductionism, atheist humanists and theist have a common cause, and, in reductive naturalism, a common adversary: scientism."
This book will keep the new atheists like Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens and Wilson up late at night. If ever Tallis has a religious experience he will be hard put to maintain his atheism since he has rejected scientific reductionism. Read more ›

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Well-Written, Logical Approach to Consciousness May 22, 2012

By R. Schultz VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Ray Tallis comes out fighting in this masterful, well-written examination of the basis of consciousness. Tallis shows how weak most of the modern pronouncements on the subject are. He is especially irritated every time he sees another medical news squib announcing that some complex human emotion such as love or a sense of justice has been tracked via MRI scans to a particular locus in the brain. He also takes to task other noted authors who claim to have located the seat of human consciousness in the activity of certain neurons, or in the passage of memes through our various memory channels.

Tallis picks apart these claims, examining them logically, and in the process, exposing most of them as being either tautologies or else such vague, fluctuating approximations that they are useless in shedding any light on how humans' unique self-awareness arose. He brilliantly pinpoints the contradictions inherent in most of them.

For example, many authors, such as Searle, start out their explanations of consciousness by positing that A, some neural firing, produces B, our experience of the color yellow. But Tallis points out that A and B can't, on the one hand, be the same thing - and on the other hand, be cause and effect. If A causes B, that presupposes that A & B are different entities or events. Nor, Tallis maintains, can the author wiggle out of this contradiction by maintaining that A & B are two facets of the same things. As Tallis points out, one facet of something can't cause another facet of the same thing, any more than the inside of a house can cause the outside of the house. Furthermore, any such chain of causation requires an observer to make the correlation. If some neuronal firing causes a human to have the experience of yellow, who is making that causative connection?... You have to presume some precedent consciousness making that observation. That puts you back where you started. Where did that consciousness come from?

This gives you an idea of the sort of rigorous critical analysis Tallis applies to many of the loose statements that have been flung about in recent years purporting to "explain consciousness." Tallis goes on to show much of the fallacy and confusion involved in equating a brain's functioning with the workings of a computer - or even with the more general, poetic propagations of a series of pebbles thrown into a pond. He also points out how far many authors are reaching in their attempts to maintain that human consciousness is on a close continuum with the consciousness of other animals.

In the process of rejecting strict materialism as an explanation for consciousness, Tallis doesn't seek to drag us back into the old dualism of mind vs. brain. He doesn't conjure any ghostly spiritual infusions to explain our unique awareness. He admits he doesn't really have definite alternative answers to how consciousness arose. He has some suggestions about what elements might have spurred the development.

Some of his suggestions are intriguing; but some make the second half of this book somewhat more muddled than the precise first half. In later chapters, Tallis gets involved in a rather abstract Hume vs. Kant comparison. He maintains that consciousness can't be reduced to the firings of networks of neurons inside an individual brain, but must be the result of some more diffuse phenomena that arise from the "I-soil" of an individual growing as part of a community. This gets a little too airy, insubstantial, and unsubstantiated.

However overall, this book still rates a definite five stars. It offers a more grounded point of departure than do the writings of Dennett or Penrose. Not only does it lead the reader to try to think more clearly in response to all the latest "discoveries" about the seat of consciousness, but it also comprises a good overall lesson in how to logically question and challenge all sorts of assertions. This book would serve as a good exercise in logical thinking in general. Read more ›