Customer Reviews

The Artificial Ape: How Technology Changed the Course of Human Evolution

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Wow. This is a fascinating, lively and beautifully written book, and it's utterly persuasive. I could not stop reading it, and now that I have finished it I can't stop recommending it. The interweaving of anecdote, theory and scientific evidence is masterful, and he has something quite extraordinary to offer to the conversation about human evolution.

Well written and eye opening. Any of the Darwinian Realists out there will enjoy this book. Makes one think till it hurts...and that's a great place to be.

This is an fascinating book which is well argued and beautifully written. The idea that the early adoption of technology enabled us to dominate the planet although we have become the weakest ape is highly though-provoking. This book is a must for anyone interested in human evolution.

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"There are seven species of great ape on [this] planet. Six of them live in nature. One cannot live without artificial aid. Humans would die without tools, clothes, fire, and shelter. So how, if technology compensates us for everything we do, did we ever manage to evolve in the first place? With such innate differences, how did the weakest ape come out on top?...

This book traces humanity back more than 2 million years...to a point just after we diverged from the ancestors of chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans...

This book insists that there was an actual moment when we became human...It was a moment seized by a female [who], for the very first time...turned to technology to protect her child. In that moment, everything that we were going to become was made not just possible but inevitable."

The above extract comes from this interesting book Timothy Taylor, Ph.D. He is an archaeologist who teaches at the University of Bradford in the U.K. He is also an author and editor-in-chief of the "Journal of World Prehistory."

A major mystery of human origins is how our ancestors separated from other great apes and set out on a different evolutionary path. With time, they began to walk upright, lost their body hair, and grew relatively larger brains. These new physical traits changed our ancestors to such a degree that they could no longer exist in nature with the other primates unless they had special protection. While Darwin's theory explains our common descent, scientists are still trying to discover why we became the weakest ape.

Taylor's answer: it was an early use of objects, tools, and new technology that changed us thus allowing us to initially survive and eventually thrive. Examples include the use of baby slings that allowed for the freedom of arms to use tools and fire that enabled cooking. As a result of our continued ingenuity through tool use we grew significantly larger brains. He even argues that humans made choices that allowed them greater control over their own evolution.

In fact, this process continues today as we push the limits of science and technology, extending our powers.

Unfortunately, Taylor provides little evidence and, in my view, weak arguments to support his claims. As well, he seems to overlook some obvious problems. For example, take his claim of tool-use leading to increased brain size. It seems to me that chimpanzees have probably been using tools as long as humans but this has not led to increased brain size. The same reasoning can be extended to other animals known to use tools.

Also, there are frequent (and long) digressions concerning areas of human cultural evolution that, in my view, are not well-connected to the main arguments. In my case, this lead to confusion and sometimes even frustration.

Despite everything I've said, this book is quite interesting in parts. It is full of original ideas, packed with information, and provides good speculation about the prehistoric past of humans.

Finally, Taylor, in emphasizing human intelligence, discusses the famous "Drake equation" (after astrophysicist Frank Drake). He says "N is the answer Drake wanted, the number of technological civilizations in the universe." NO. `N' is the number of technological civilizations in our Galaxy.

In conclusion, this is a good book for those interested in reasonable speculation about the prehistoric past of humans.

(first published 2010; introduction; 8 chapters; conclusion; main narrative 205 pages; acknowledgements; notes; bibliography; index)

<<Stephen Pletko, London, Ontario, Canada>>

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The headline in this book arrives six pages before the end: it is the theory that the invention of the baby-carrying sling allowed humans to evolve from woodland apes two million years ago. The sling would have solved the problem of how a bipedal species with a narrow pelvis and constricted birth canal could dramatically increase its brain size. The solution was to allow the infants to be born prematurely when the head was just small enough to pass but too big to support itself unaided. For the parent to remain productive while raising an infant, technology was needed to carry it - an artificial marsupial pouch. Ever since then, says the author, humans have been completely dependent on technology to the point where it "has taken a leading role in evolution" (p 194) by separating us from our environment.

The author sees Tasmania as a test case for his theory. According to previous accounts, the aboriginal inhabitants lost their technology after they were cut off from mainland Australia by rising sea levels. The explanation for this has been that skills were forgotten because the Tasmanians did not have enough neighbours to refresh them. The author sees this as a challenge because if our minds evolved to invent technology, why could we not reinvent it? He argues very persuasively that the Tasmanians remained totally dependent on technology, that reports of their backsliding were exaggerated, and that a reduced toolkit was sensible and comparable to that of other groups in analogous situations. His evidence does not seem to me to undermine the theory that larger populations are more technologically innovative, in fact it enriches it. The Tasmanians had ideas that might have helped some mainlanders too.

The book has copious and detailed descriptions of archaeological finds to justify the argument that we have long been dependent on technology. Whether the author succeeds in showing that our use of technology amounts to `artificial selection' displacing `natural selection' (p. 28), that `survival of the fittest' does not apply to humans and that `Darwin was fundamentally wrong about evolution's causes' (p. 7) depends on his definition of terms. His sample definition of `fitness' (p. 28) as `the ability to adapt to one's environment' is quite original. He could have made a better case for technology causing artificial selection by pointing out that stone weapons made it possible for the weaklings to regularly cull any would-be alpha males. This would explain the disappearance of violent ape dominance behaviour from our species.

The author makes it clear that his book aims to answer the key question of `how' humans managed to increase brain size (the baby sling), not `why' (p. 29). He briefly mentions some explanations of `why'. The `standard answer' (social organisation) he dismisses as a theory that the larger brain `made us more similar to what we were to become' (p. 69). He is surprised that our brain has grown so big, given that it now far outranks the competition (p. 189). If a cheetah were to improve its speed as much as we have improved our brain, says Taylor, it would be capable of 200 miles an hour when the top speed of its prey is only 50. He does not examine whether we faced greater challenges than today in our period of brain evolution that might have justified its expansion. He mentions another theory: that the size increase was driven by technological warfare. This is in line with his final conclusion: `technology, within a framework of 2 to 3 million years, has, physically and mentally, made us. We long ago began adapting our minds and bodies to a hidden agenda. The result is a new, symbiont form of life - one that breaks all the rules' (p. 198). This sounds like the epidemiological theory of culture that holds that we've been `taken over' by it, except that technology would have begun the takeover ten times as long ago.

This was a great read! especially for people who understand the distinction between natural and "artificial selection." The "3rd System" that Taylor hypothesizes is intriguing as a priori to the rapid escalation of human intelligence and brain-size, going way beyond what would be considered "biologically necessary" according to the accepted view of natural selection/evolution.

One thing that I found important which I think Mr Taylor missed is that while slings are important for carrying children- SHOES are even more important, especially when your weight (a woman's, presumably) has been increased by 10 or so pounds (the child) and you're walking long distances on two feet vs all fours. I'm thinking that skin pelts wrapped around the feet and sewn with plant fiber may have been developed even before the sling. No fossilization to prove it. Maybe the author would comment.

This is the kind of pseudoscience that is appealing at first because it's wrapped in the appearance of serious science. This guy's an anthropologist, not a real scientist, and it shows. The arguments he's making are one unjustified assumption piled on top of another.

1. He assumes that the archeological record establishes that tool making predated the emergence of hominids. The record of hominid fossils is very poor--it's absurd to say that crude chipped stone tools that are 10% older than the earliest known hominid fossils prove anything about which came first. There's only one sample of each (the oldest tool and the oldest fossil). The foundation of his argument is thin air.

2. He clearly has no idea how evolution operates or what Darwin meant by "survival of the fittest." He assumes that losing fingernails or a muscular jaw reduced the physical prowess of hominids, and so it was really "survival of the weakest." This is the worst sort of pseudoscience because he's either utterly ignorant or is willfully playing word games to come across as clever and innovative. He is neither. "Fittest," in Darwin's usage, means best able to pass on your genes to the next generation. If you don't need a muscular jaw or long, thick fingernails to successfully reproduce that doesn't matter. Again, another of his primary assumptions is a complete fallacy.

3. He assumes that because there were simple stone tools around when the first hominids were around that it then must mean that they used them to craft slings to carry their babies. He has zero evidence for this assumption, and he admits it. He just wants it to be true. It feels sensible to him. How could they not have crafted slings to carry their babies? It would have been really useful to them so they must have done it. As stupid as that sounds, that is the extent of his evidence. Of course it would have been really useful if they had used those tools to pound papyrus into mush and flatten it out to make paper so they could keep long-term records of events that shaped their lives such as the annual timing of game migrations, the timing and duration of rainy seasons, and debts owed to one another for food or labor provided. By this guy's logic, they did write that stuff down, but like the baby slings and all the other marvelous stuff they made because it would have been useful--it's all rotted away and we'll never find evidence of it. This is the definition of pseudoscience: theories that cannot be tested that are created because it makes someone feel good (in this case feel wealthier because he can make some money off of exploiting a gullible public with sensationalism).

One could go on and on about the gibberish in this book, but suffice it to say that in an interview about the book he referenced his belief that the sun will die and kill humanity in 4 million years. He's only off by a factor of one thousand, but that seems to be the margin of error that is his comfort zone as a gibberish spewing hack.

In between the arguments of a God or no God is the non-Olympian land of mere mortals. This is where this book has a brilliant prognosis. Surely, the greatest achievement of man was the creation of civilization. That civilization has gone on to automate discovery, innovation, and change, becoming the substantive truth of intelligent design. Coming onto the Savannas and out of the trees, the cognoscente animal had little choice but to implement decision-making and discovery devices through the intelligent design machine called civilization. The rest of the Great Apes and some university denizens may not know this but progress screams otherwise.

A book on man and technology that is NOT available by ebook or audiobook (ie published only in the oudated hardback form). Did the publishers not read their own book??