Customer Reviews

The Monkey in the Mirror: Essays on the Science of What Makes Us Human

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

What made humans human? Why study science at all? Is evolutionary psychology science or informed speculation? Who were the Neanderthals? If these look like lofty questions, that is because they are. But author Ian Tattersall does his best to speculate answers (or at very least, discourse on why one can't be had.)

Tattersal is somewhat iconoclastic. For instance, he tries to dispell the 'myth' that evolution is a gradual process of small tinkerings and explicates the view (first made by SJ Gould) that evolution consists of much stasis punctuated by radical changes. He also rails against the 'ultra-adaptationism' prevalent in things like evolutionary psychology - the view that all (or at least, most) traits should be explained as ones 'selected for' due to their adaptationary benefit. Nonsense, Tattersall retorts. As evolution doesn't work on the reductionistic 'trait' - but rather than holistic individual - level, many of our traits could more easily (and plausibly) be explained as ones that were part of individuals who made it due to OTHER traits - exaptations that simply 'came along for the ride,' only to be utilized later.

The reason I bring all this up is that these ideas are integral to Tattersall's essays (almost to the point of repitition). From his conjecture that the 'human' brain wasn't a gradual process, but appeared somewhat rapidly (with many of its functions coming to use only later), to his discomfort with evolutionary psychology (no, he does not say that traits have no genetic basis, as one reviewer caricatured. Rather, he suggests that evolutionary psych is oversimplistic and quite untestable), these essays draw on the iconoclastic ideas outlayed in the preceeding paragraph.

There is one big con and one big pro to this book. The con is that Tattersal is quite repititious in that he brings the same two ideas back as the prime mover of every essay. The pro is that his view of what science is, is profoundly honest. From the first essay (on why science is so important and successful) to the last, he sees science as something that should never be afraid to admit that it doesn't quite know yet, a process that is ongoing in the collection of information and the testing of theses, and something that, to qualify as science, MUST be testable somehow (which is why evolutioanry psych gets Tattersall's criticism).

All in all, a good book.

The main advantage of this book is the fact that it is a collection of essays, which increases the readability and allows one to finish the book real quick. Further, the essays also quickly summarize some of the more common evolutionary theories of Gould and others before him, so as to act as a good 'summarizer'. It also elaborates the concept of exaptation, which seems to be a powerful thought, rich in potential.

The reason for the three stars is that the writer's bias against the 'science of evolutionary psychology' comes out pretty often, and thus makes the open minded reader familiar with the subject feel as if the writer is a little close minded on this. Further, not too many original ideas here, mostly a synthesis of work done already by others - worth the synthesis though

Dont expect too much from this book, but a neat little concise summary with perhaps a maximum of few new ideas coming from it

The Monkey in the Mirror is a collection of short essays on science and in particular on evolutionary science. Tattersall's discussion is clear and concise, and while I'm not entirely in accordance with all of his statements with regard to evolution, I feel that the work has much to say for itself. The very word "evolution" seems to bring a knee jerk response from many people, an almost "them or us" mentality of the besieged, and their oft made point that evolution is just an unproven "theory" and not law, makes the need for public education apparent. With recent attempts in several states to prevent educators from properly teaching these subjects or the insistence that philosophical or religious concepts be taught as equally valid explanations of natural phenomena, there is without doubt an urgent need to deliver a clearer message of what science is and is not. As Tattersall writes in his first chapter "In science it is no crime to be wrong, unless you are (inappropriately) laying claim to truth. What matters is that science as a whole is a self-correcting mechanism in which both new and old notions are constantly under scrutiny. In other words, the edifice of scientific knowledge consists simply of a body of observations and ideas that have (so far) proven resistant to attack, and that are thus accepted as working hypotheses about nature (p. 9)." Nor can one delete the study of evolution from the scientific curriculum and profitably substitute religious explanations. As the author points out, "The notion of evolution predicts the nested pattern of relationships we find in the living world; supernatural creation, on the other hand, predicts nothing. It is concepts of this latter kind that are truly untestable (p. 15)."

Only when the public is better educated on the subject of science can school boards and education committees more properly design programs to meet the needs of young people. Least the intellectual mistakenly think that science in the schools is only important to those who have decided to dedicate themselves to scientific careers, one might point out that it is the average voter who decides the fate of wetlands, nuclear waste sites, conservation of ocean resources, etc. and who needs at least a basic understanding of how life as we know it came to be and how our decisions can change that life drastically. The average farmer needs to know what the impact of his decisions with respect to land use, plant and animal pest control, cultivation of natural, bioengineered or hybridize plants, etc have on the environment and on his own continued prosperity. The home owner who over fertilizes his lawn or who indiscreetly disposes of toxic substances in his garbage bin also needs to understand the problems these decisions can cause for the community in which he lives. Any fear that such a person might feel over learning the concepts of science and of evolution might be alleviated by one of the more important statements in the book, "Scientific findings do not threaten anyone (except to the extent that Homo sapiens may prove incapable of controlling what science makes possible). But what is critical to understand is that our species (or, for that matter, God) is not in the least diminished by the idea that we emerged thanks to the processes of evolution (p. 55)."

Tattersall's book gives a nice overview of how life got to be as we know it and provides the reader with at least a small toolkit of information for thinking about the subjects of science, biological evolution, and mankind's part in the big picture.

There are eight essays. The first one, "What's So Special about Science?" explains to the general reader what science is and what it isn't. One of the points Tattersall makes is that "scientists are emphatically <not>...steadily building up a picture of <the truth>." (p. 8) Instead, "the solution of one scientific problem regularly leads to the identification of others...," so that the "successful climbing of an intellectual summit has always revealed new peaks beckoning beyond." (p. 7) Tattersall adds on page 30 that "science is a system of provisional knowledge" that "does not seek to understand ultimate causation..."

In the second essay, "Evolution: Why So Misunderstood?" Tattersall argues that many people think that science is an "authoritarian" system that "produces axioms that are unchanging for the ages." Consequently science runs afoul of other authoritarian (read: religious) systems that feel threatened from without. I think this is a good argument, but I think it is also the case that evolution is so incredibly complex that it is not easy to understand or appreciate. Tattersall writes on page 29 that "The notion of evolution is, after all, a pretty simple one..." Yes, the notion is relatively simple, so simple that Thomas Henry Huxley exclaimed, "How very stupid of me not to have thought of that!"; but after the notion comes an amazing, really stupefying mass of complexities. In truth very few people really understand even the basics of evolution beyond the initial idea. And within the ranks of the experts there are endless arguments.

The next two essays, "The Monkey in the Mirror"and "Human Evolution and the Art of Climbing Trees" reminds us that monkeys cannot recognize their reflections in the mirror, but that we and the chimpanzees can. Here Tattersall gives us his view on consciousness and its evolution based primarily on evidence from the fossil record. Tattersall's position is highly tentative and emphasizes how little we really know.

In the next chapter, "The Enigmatic Neanderthals" Tattersall sums up what we know about the Neanderthals and what happened to them. I was interested to notice that his ideas are not far removed from those presented fictionally many years ago by William Golding in his novel The Inheritors, namely that we somehow, probably by violent force, brought the big and strong Neanderthal to extinction. Golding (and the evolutionists of his day) emphasized the murderously deceptive mentally agile of homo sapiens as the decisive factor while Tattersall believes the jury is still out on exactly why they disappeared.

The final three essays attempt to account for our "humanity" and where we might go from here. Tattersall makes the very important point that speciation can only occur in isolated populations; consequently our population being both six billion strong and in full interaction, there is little prospect, barring catastrophe, for our further evolution. He writes, "the trend is exactly the opposite to what is required for any meaningful evolutionary change..." (p. 190) Of course there IS cultural evolution to consider, a subject that Tattersall understandably does not address in a collection of essays on biological evolution. For some ideas about what may become of us through cultural evolution see, Pierre Baldi's The Shattered Self: The End of Natural Evolution (2001) or Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999).

I have a couple of bones to pick (if you will) with Tattersall. First there is the little matter of attributing to Shakespeare the famous phrase "nasty, brutish and short" (p. 170) in describing human life in the wild. As most political and social science majors know, the phrase is from the Leviathan (1651) by Thomas Hobbes. Also, even appreciating that Tattersall is taking a causal tone here and forsaking the sort of scientific rigor and fairness shown in more academic tomes, there is no excuse for this from page 50, ""Much of the discussion of <adaptations> doesn't even have...[some minimal basis in empirical fact], as we will discover when we look at the arrogant pseudo-science of <evolutionary psychology> in a later essay."

Tattersall does take a quick look at evolutionary psychology in a later essay, but in no way does he support his dismissive charge or even indicate just who or what it is that is "arrogant." It is especially distressing to note that Tattersall throughout this book again and again prefaces his suppositions with words like "It seems reasonable to conclude..." or something similar (see for example, pages 96 and 98) yet he denigrates evolutionary psychology for no greater crime than drawing reasonable conclusions. He writes that his argument with evolutionary psychology is in its undue reliance of genetics (beginning on page 170), but actually the power of evolutionary psychology comes not from assigning behaviors to genes, but from drawing insights into our behavior from the process of evolution and from the behavior of other animals. From that evidence, it is reasonable to conclude any number of things, and they are worth noting, even if there is no way they can be proven, anymore than a host of Tattersall's conclusions about human evolution can be proven.

Furthermore he accuses (again unnamed) evolutionary psychologists of "defending rape as an <adaptive> behavior..." (p. 178). I personally know of no evolutionary psychologist who would do such a thing. Why doesn't Tattersall name one? What evolutionary psychology is saying is not that rape can be defended. It can't. But that there are evolutionary reasons for its existence. This is quite a different statement. There are evolutionary reasons for murder, etc., but in recognizing them, that does not mean we are "defending" them or are in any way in agreement with them anymore than Tattersall is in agreement with what we presumably did to the Neanderthal.

This book is a great summary of the past century's debates on Evolution. It is well and clearly presented by a master of the science. There is a small hidden agenda regarding the author's theory of "exaptation" (which BTW should probably be called "abaptation" as the opposite of "adaptation"). Anyway, for those of us not deeply interested in the creationist/evolutionist debates this book begins as a clear statement of the conflict and ends with an interesting and insightful prediction of our future. The book is short. If you only want to read one of these Human Evolution texts. . .read this one.

A collection of science essays is fraught with pitfalls for the unwary. If the author is well known or is in high position [Tattersall is both], or even simply articulate [Tattersall is] heedless reading may result in blind acceptance. The essay format, as Tattersall confesses in his Preface, lacks discipline. This book reinforces that assertion with a vengeance. The subtitle should be printed in glowing letters. "What Makes Us Human" is a large topic for a book of so few pages. After reading it, it seems to be a bit too ample for the author, as well.

Tattersall begins with an excellent summary of why we study science. Too many people still equate the search for "facts" with a quest for "truth." The author makes a valiant attempt to explain why these ideas must be kept separate. Since he must rely on the reader to understand this division, his success in the endeavour can only be guessed. The quest for "facts," as he ably states, often leads to a new quest for new facts. Science, then, is an ongoing and highly cooperative effort. Many "facts" unveil the need to seek further in an unrelated field of interest. He describes "science" as a "corporate" endeavour by many people to organize and relate the facts revealed.

From science in general, Tattersall moves to the more specific area of the study of evolution. After a brief presentation on Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace in development of the concept of "natural selection," he goes on to deal with "adaptation." How life changes is the core of evolution and he describes the travails of early thinkers after Darwin dealt with the processes. He describes the merging of Darwin's natural selection and the later knowledge of genetics as the "Evolutionary Synthesis," which he then castigates as "hardening into dogma." This rather dark pink herring is his way of easing into a challenge of gradual change typifying evolution. He states that "speciation remains poorly understood." Speciation may be poorly defined, but it's well understood. By claiming speciation is "poorly understood," Tattersall is free to introduce the worn-out concept of Punctuated Equilibrium, variously described as "punk eek" or "evolution by jerks." While he endeavours to build a case for the concept, it falls rather flat under his touch. Adding to the reader's confusion, he offers the Gouldian term "exaptation" to fog the image of adaptation as the mechanism of species change. The logic of substituting Gould's arcane term isn't presented.

Evolution, to most readers, is only important to humans. Tattersall expounds on diversity, environment, cladistics [grouped traits] as his lead-in to human evolution. At this point, however, we seem to leave the whole process of evolution behind. Tattersall is keen to show that behaviour patterns, while deceptively common among ape-like species, branch off into something altogether different in humans. Apes can't talk. Apes can't learn. Apes don't walk upright, or, according to Tattersall, have any reasoning power. He attributes "an unprecedented leap in body structure" to make modern humans ["punk eek", again]. From this, he derives the notion that this structure, powered by the new, improved brain, took us off the evolutionary path.

The key agent, according to Tattersall, is the implementation of "symbolism." Describing early hominid brains as "exaptations" awaiting fulfillment, he informs us that the fulfillment was "culture." He attributes "symbolic processes" in the brain as experience being converted to discrete symbols. We manipulate those symbols in ways other animals cannot, and the manipulation is accomplished through speech. To Tattersall, the innovation of "cultural symbolism" widens the gap between humans and the remainder of the animal kingdom. Animal behaviour has no relation to human behaviour, and any attempt to establish that link underlies what he terms the "arrogant pseudo-science of 'evolutionary psychology' ." His penultimate chapter is a denunciation of relating behaviour to genetics [although his memory gene fails him when he attributes to Shakespeare a quote of Thomas Hobbes'] which is sprinkled with reproachful buzzwords, distortion and use of newspaper headlines instead of serious research results. His sweeping accusations make one wonder if Tattersall has read any scientific publication of the past
generation.

The essay format may be forgiven many sins. It's not an academic treatise nor peer-reviewed scientific collection. Indexing, for example, while useful, would be onerous in so short a book. The lack of any further reading references, however, is inexcusable. Given the number of people and disciplines that he maligns so vigorously, it would have been a decided service to the reader to give us some reference to his targets. Tattersall hauls Steven Mithen up on the Gouldian charge of telling "just-so" stories, but fails to indicate where to read them. You may enjoy reading this type of presentation, but it's doubtful you'll learn anything from it.

Tattersall's essays leave something to be desired, in that not only are they popular, they are extremely popular. "Only the politicians, God help us, can do anything about them." The essays give Tattersall's take on what science is, evolution in general, and various aspects of anthropogenesis. A noticeable proportion of his discourse on evolution, human and otherwise, is bombast on what he considers the errors of biologists he doesn't like, such as Richard Dawkins (even if Tattersall attacks him anonymously). This review is colored by this fact. Evolutionary psychology takes yet another pummeling, here, and "selfish gene theory" (which, I'd like to point out, I don't like) is cursorily dismissed. Most of the essays are good articulations of Tattersall's positions, however the glossing over of differences limits both their usefulness and their pedagogy.

In seems that Tattersall chooses his opponents carefully so that they can be dismissed. Consider his discussion of a child's skeleton dated 24,000 years ago that some people claim is an intermediate form of homo sapiens and homo neanderthalensis. He quotes (I assume) someone calling calling it a "love child" and other arguments "special pleading," but doesn't actually discuss them. He may be right, but without reference to the actual discussion, it's very hard to tell from his polemic, which isn't always consistent with previous statements. He says, "Neanderthals and moderns did not interbreed. They are simply too different anatomically to not have belonged to different species." However, in the second chapter, Tattersall admonishes us to not look merely at such differences when deciding what is and is not a species, because "all [domestic dogs] are reproductively compatible, if not directly (think of Chihuahuas and Newfoundlands) then through intermediaries." I looked up the side-by-side comparisons in The Complete World of Human Evolution, and it seems to my untrained eye that there is less structural difference between them and us than between a Chihuahua and a Newfoundland. The explanation he gives simply isn't enough.

The anonymity of the people Tattersall doesn't agree with is annoying. He'll name Eldredge, his colleague at the American Museum of Natural History, and Gould when discussing their (viable to a large-to-great degree) theory of punctuated equilibrium, but he doesn't mention Dawkins by name or Smith or anyone else who might to some even minimal disagree with him. Additionally, the book has no bibliography, so neither can you look up the disagreements, yourself. This is a major failing for someone who begins with a very cautious, conservative definition of science in his first essay (the kind you'd find in The Skeptic). He says that science does not claim to find "the Truth," only to approximate it, but then he scorns his opponents, in some cases very distinguished opponents, as pseudoscientists (read, heretics) and so on. Again, Tattersall's rhetoric does not conform to his stated beliefs.

This is all very disappointing because Tattersall writes very nice popular prose and does tell some very interesting stories, full of interesting facts, and usually much more cautious than authors who inspire books like this. He is, after all, one of the leading experts in his field. However, in the end, I cannot recommend this book because of its unapologetic and apoplectic bias.

Remembering that Tattersall does articulate his own positions very well, I'd recommend buying Becoming Human instead of this one. Not "in addition to" because almost all salient points and almost all examples are common to both books, and Becoming Human lacks most of the annoying, propagandistic habits that Tattersall displays in this book.

I read this and _becoming human_ for an online class in human evolution at barnes and noble dot com. This is an extension and elaboration of the major points in _becoming human_. Actually a little bit better given the looser construction of the essay format, so read this rather than _becoming human_. Either is a simple basic intro to human evolution with a big dose of Neanderthal history, which is tattersall's field. Short, to the point with a minimum extrapolation and speculation, recommended for a light informative afternoon spent with our closest relatives.

It is one of the mysteries of the twentieth century that everyone thought they had a theory of evolution accounting for the descent of man, when in fact they didn't. And too many books on human evolution, attempting to fit a square peg into a round hole, start to beat around the bush and are are so confusing due to dogmatic reiterations of received theory you feel you have been had, if you can finish them. This short book of essays is an exception and cuts to the quick of the issues, and is really a 'must-read' for getting your bearings in this field, once ridiculed by a book called Bone Peddlers by William Fix. First, it makes clear how little we know about human evolution, in the paucity of fossils from which our understanding comes. That is essential, for we imagine that we are required to take on faith everything asserted in this field, when in fact, it is almost void of certainties. Next, it intelligently graduates from the disorderly punctuated equilibrium debate, in its several innings, to avail itself of new insights and proposals of the last generation, among them the idea of 'exaptation', non-adaptive innovations waiting on their realized use in a later context. The work of J. Schwarz in Sudden Origins with its considerations of developmental genes and the spread of recessive mutations comes to the aid of the overall perspective, whose novelty, correct or not, as a new form of evolutionary explanation is refreshing and intriguing. Rejecting the idea of natural selection as a creative force finetuning adaptations and distinguishing morphological change from speciation, the work proceeds briskly through the hominid sequence with a clarity not seen in most other works in this area, and makes clear the difference between anatomically modern and behaviorally modern man, and all this in relation to the issue of the Neandertals. There is still, in this reviewer's opinion, a void in the whole account, centering on the issues of consciousness and language, indeed Tattersall makes this clear, but at least the overall sequence begins to make sense with this ingenious new means to reconcile fast evolution and slow evolution, speciation, and much else. Although short, and at first apparently lightweight, this turned out to be one of the most useful books on human evolution I have read. I recommend not letting Darwinian armtwisters deflect your attention from some basic issues here.

I was looking forward to reading this book, as I have a great deal of respect for Ian Tattersall for his writings on human fossils. So I was surprised to discover that it is a poorly thought out slam of Evolutionary Psychology (EP).

It is not ipso facto a bad thing to be critical of EP, especially as some EP writings gallop ahead of any confirming experiments, but this author does a sloppy and embarrassing job of it. What is even more surprising is how much praise it got from the popular science press (Natural History, Science News, etc.) which is how I heard of the book.

Just to demonstrate its weakness, compare this work with the writings of Steven Pinker. Pinker, in "The Language Instinct", shows in great detail how complex, universal, and neuoanatomically-based the different brain units are that cooperate to produce language. He shows that languages are implementations of the X-bar grammar protocol that is uniform to all humans. In contrast, Tattersall just does some handwaving and mumbling about exaptation. (He has learned to drop the word "spandrel" at least.)

While Pinker in "How the Mind Works" (HTMW) describes the experimentorum crucis of Clark and Hatfield on gender differences toward sexuality, this author simply declares that the conclusions of EP come from a misreading of social and economic pressures. Certainly, there are economic pressures, but the whole point of science is to isolate different factors in observations. For example, David Buss in his textbook, "Evolutionary Psychology" (1999), cites many cross-cultural and cross-species studies which confirm the hardwired nature of gender differences in sexual behavior. Tattersall is oblivious to the methodological thoroughness of some EP research. Instead, he calls it pseudoscience. He seems jealous of the media draw of EP, but he fails to weaken the explanatory power of its research programme.

And why is it that he is so upset? It appears that the author clutches to a Gouldian anti-adaptation stance. While Tattersall and Eldredge have a strong point about the role of speciation in fixing variation, I think it is foolish to be so entirely anti-adaptationist. One has to ignore a lot of evidence in order to do so. Tattersall clearly rejects any version of Dawkin's selfish gene.

The author also makes the naturalistic fallacy (that "is" entails "ought") and accuses EP of being immoral. On page 178, he accuses EPers of 'defending' rape. As Pinker carefully explained in HTMW (see page 52 and following), explanation is not justification, even if there is the Spector of Creeping Exculpation in all explanations of human behavior.

Time and again in this book, the author choses not to accept the most parsimonious theory for the evidence, apparently because it does not fit his preconceived notions. For example, Pinker argued that language, being as complex as it is, must have gone through stages of development, where mental and physical adaptations (some of which could have been exaptations) gradually added to it until it reached its present state. Tattersall notes that the vocal tract is a liability unless you factor in language, and then notes that the larynx was in its current position 600 kyr ago, but then he insists that language leapt into being fully formed about 60 kyr ago through exaptation of unused brain real estate. No need to wonder why Gould was accused of being an accidental creationist.

Worse still, the author is not even consistent. On page 160, he says that knowing the minds of the human ancestors is "entirely guesswork." But on the very next page, he says, "what must have happened," was a scenario that again violates Occam's razor. Around page 120, he goes into great detail of the housekeeping habits of Neaderthals versus Sapiens (we Sapiens are neatnicks), but then claims (p. 170) that efforts to characterize the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness are terribly misguided.

I am embarrassed for the author for having written the book. Gould may have had his crank ideas, but he was not as sloppy as this. The quality of prose is high, but the reasoning behind the prose is shoddy. In my assessment, I agree with Changizi's review in Heredity and the Haines Amazon review.