Customer Reviews

The Ascent of Mind: Ice Age Climates and the Evolution of Intelligence

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It is a pity that this spirited rant,which theorizes how sudden and cyclical global climate change pumped out ever stranger variations of hominids, is typically purchased by readers who buy books on cognition and neurology. Despite the "brainy" title, it is chock full of fascinating theories not just on the size and performance of the human brain but on many aspects of natural selection mechanics, and would be equally at home on the bookshelf of an anthropologist, paleontologist, geologist or meteorologist. Bringing home his ideas with modern everyday examples and an entertaining narrative structure, Calvin explains the usually stuffy and arcane study of our prehistoric ancestors and their less fortunate cousins in terms of systems of complex cause and effect, including the fluctuating environment and hominids' own changing mix of attributes. Dig this book up! [p.s. Great airplane reading--can't tell you why.]

There are the occasional brilliant works written by people just slightly outside of the field. Books that excite imaginations and run with a dozen new theories. They're often wrong, or only partly right, but the book isn't really any the worse for that. This book, The Ascent of Mind, is one of my best examples of such writing. (I'd pair it with The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.) There are ideas aplenty here, enough to make Jared Diamond happy, covering human evolution, archeology, psychology, climatology, and geology. The core idea is that human brain evolution was greatly, perhaps principally, spurred on by global environmental changes.

Good to see this classic back in print!