Customer Reviews

Origin of Mind: Evolution of Brain, Cognition, and General Intelligence

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The brain has long been the most mysterious of the organs. Part of the problem has been that the brain can be viewed in so many different ways. The same organ can think of Einstein's Theory of Relativity in one instant and be smiling and talking baby talk to an infant the next.

In this book Dr. Geary brings together research from neuroscience, behavior genetics, and cognitive science along with the behavioral sciences such as primatology, anthropology, and sociology to present an integrated view of the brain as we know it today.

The chapter "General Intelligence in Modern Society" is brilliant in it's explanation of IQ testing and its relationship with society. It both confirms, explains, and rejects the findings in the best seller "The Bell Curve" from 1994. "The IQ test," Dr. Geary says, "was designed to predict educational outcomes." And in this it works very well - in one study 20% of the people in the 99th percentile had Ph.D. degrees. He then discusses other aspects such as motivation, family, social presures and more as reasons for achievement in education, work and income. There's far too much to cover in a short review like this one.

This is not a book that has been dumbed down for the general reader. It is a definitive tome on the state of the understanding of the brain as it exists today. It is fascinating reading, but not something that you're going to race through in an afternoon.

This is an thoughtful, erudite and complex book weaving together various strands of research in evolution, neural organisation, cognition and mind together. Every page is littered with references, not carelessly I hasten to add. The author's main thesis, as i understand it, is that the mind essentially 'runs' simulations, and this is an evolution endowmnet arising from ontogenetic requirements to exercise control of behaviour and the environment. Anyone locked into folk psychology, especially Stich's simualtion theory, will find much to ponder here. Geary holds that folk psychology has many 'anchors' that orient the human organism towards fundamental activities to sustain itself, e.g. social cues. These anchors are shaped in development under evolutionary imperatives. Much of the book is devoted to teasing out in detail the framework that allows this to occur. The notion of a fluid intelligence is introduced to debnk the g factor (as too limitinf a construct) and explain adaptive behaviours. Each chapter deserves a review by itself. Overall, the book is tremendously impressive and detailed however, it still faces to problem of splicing folk psychological concepts with neuroscientific data, and it is here that most critics will focus there attention. Geary has assemled a welther of piece sof evidence and argumentation to make this work, but eliminativtists will not be satisfied. Having read this book quickly, I can state baldly that it is the first book in years that I will reread. Lots of food for thought.

David Geary texts are always a pleasant reading! This is a book to understand about the evolution of our mind and a prelude of what is coming on the field.

People often complain that modern psychology is a ragbag of phenomena without a theory to make sense of it all. The Origin of Mind makes that complaint obsolete, because in it David Geary has given us a coherent and satisfying framework for the sciences of mind. It combines an impressive coverage of the latest literature with hard thinking about how to synthesize topics like evolutionary psychology, neural plasticity, human development, and intelligence testing. The Origin of Mind is invaluable both as a reference work and as a road map for the sprawling territory covered by modern psychology and neighboring sciences.

-Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University; author of How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate

Human nature is one of natural selection's most stunning feats. David Geary takes seriously the implications of this for psychology-that it must be an evolutionary discipline. He sets out the theories with admirable clarity and deals systematically with the wealth of multidisciplinary evidence. This book pioneers a Darwinian synthesis, pulling together the disparate strands that currently criss-cross the study of the human mind. Here lies the future of psychology. So now read on.

-Helena Cronin, Professor, The London School of Economic; author of The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today.


In his book, The Origin of Mind: Evolution of Brain, Cognition, and General Intelligence, David Geary shows that he is indeed a scholar for the 21st century, providing a truly interdisciplinary synthesis on a topic of both great theoretical and practical importance: human intelligence. He presents clearly research from neuroscience, behavior genetics, and cognitive science (among others) and integrates them in an evolutionary framework to yield a comprehensive theory of the human mind. This book will be must-reading for anyone interested in intelligence, cognition, or human evolution.

-David F. Bjorklund, Professor, Department of Psychology, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, F; coauthor of The Origins of Human Nature: Evolutionary Developmental Psychology

I purchased this book based on my professional and personal interests and the positive reviews on Amazon. I am a practicing psychiatrist with a research background in neurophysiology and a longstanding interest in the origin of the human mind and the nature of consciousness. This is an exploding area in neuroscience and Dr. Geary's efforts to bring the latest developments in evolutionary theory to bear in a comprehensive review are admirable.

Here are the points I found most interesting. The human mind is unique in it's ability to create a sense of self which is stable over time and capable of utilizing past memories of self to generate behaviors likely to produce a desirable imagined future (a mental time machine). Human evolution was not driven so much by climatic or ecological change as by the need for different human tribes and subspecies to compete for and defend available ecological nitches. This produced brain systems supporting complex social behavior, abstract reasoning, the use of tools, and verbal communication. It also resulted in what the author calls an "evolutionary arms race". Read: evolution favored a war-like species capable of forming powerful inter-group attachments and loyalties and deeply rooted hostilities toward outside groups defined by geographic, racial, and cultural (and I would add religious) boundaries. Does this ring a bell as you read the newspaper?

However, unless you are a professional evolutionary neurobiologist, be warned. The task of diving for valuable pearls (and they are there) in this book is formidable. There is excessive use of undefined jargon. The organization is poor. Sections headings are uninformative. The badly needed glossary is simply absent.

I immediately abandoned any attempt to read the book cover to cover. Fortunately, an Introduction and Overview is provided which summarizes the content of each chapter. It also explaines the author's central theses and allows one to skip directly to the chaptes of most interest. For instance, Chapter 7 elaborates the brain functions distinguishing humans from apes and lower animals, their anatomical correlates, and the pressures driving their evolution.

Alas for a good editor! What is "folk biology" and "folk psychology"? With luck we will have spotted their parenthetical translations: "understanding other species" and "understanding other people". Ponder this sentence: "Comparative similarity is particularly divisive, as it provides strong evidence in support of the proposal that the human brain and mind are products of natural selection." The surrounding text doesn't help either, although one gleans that "divisive" has something to do with nature versus nurture.

My suggestion: read the introduction and overview very carefully. Skip around in the book. When something makes sense, highlight it. Take time, leave the book and come back to it. Your efforts will be rewarded.

Wayne Phillips