Customer Reviews

Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition

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The shelves are crowded now with books on the origins of intelligence. Donald's 1991 book is still an excellent introduction. He begins with a fun though intense review of 19th and 20th century brain studies, exposing the workings of the human mind. Then he reaches back to our beginnings, examining chimpanzee intelligence for clues. After a look at various chimp talents, in socializing, politics, tool-making, and very limited vocalizing, he wonders how we humans got from there to here. Language has been central to human intelligence for many thousands of years. Donald speculates about a pre-language stage of physical mimicry and hand gestures. Even now we gesticulate and grimace to enhance our verbal communication. Upon the three-stage pattern of development, from grunts to gestures to language, humans then added literacy. This changed our modes of thought significantly, teaching us to address our ideas to a wide absent audience, ordering the ideas logically, and thereby moving us towards a more objective and systematic way of thinking. Since Guttenberg literacy has given us external storage systems of knowledge, which once again shifted culture, as we not only amassed information but struggled with the task of inventing rational storage and retrieval systems. Donald's work is full of fascinating pieces of information, connected in a provocative framework. This book is wonderful in its own right; it also provides excellent background for grasping the significance of later work, by Gellner or Diamond or Pinker, on the evolution of human culture and the origin and power of language in human life.

This is a fun book to read-- which is something for a book that credibly spreads across a number of disciplines and through some pretty dense stuff....

Donald is a credible writer and has a style that is simultaneously engaging without losing academic credibility. After opening up with a couple of chapters dealing with a review of literature stemming from before Darwin, he moves into an examination of archaeology, anthropology, and neurology trying to trace how the human mind came to function as it does (if you see it as special... or not....)

He traces through most of history. It is a broad, well-constucted swoop but one of which I still have not passed my final judgement. Perhaps it will take a couple of reads before I get to that point. What I am certain of is that this book, secondary to Julian Jaynes "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" made me THINK more about how we think than any other book I have come across.

I wholeheartedly recommend for you to buy this book if you have stumbled across this page....

Although I didn't finish this book altogether convinced (nor altogether unconvinced) of his schema for human cognitive evolution, I was nonetheless very pleased and very grateful for Merlin Donald's clear and thorough review of the facts. Donald carefully sorts through the wealth of anthropological, paleontological, physiological, linguistic, and, most intriguingly, cognitive-psychological data, to separate the real clues from the red herrings. He expertly demonstrates the complexity and nuances of the evidence, while at the same time building his outline of a theory of the emergence of human consciousness. While I found this theory somewhat hazy and incomplete, particularly with respect to the "mimetic" stage he posits for H. erectus, it is quite acceptable in the spirit in which it is given: a tentative suggestion of what a plausible origins scenario must look like. From this perspective, his thoughts are most valuable, and by necessity provoke the reader to ruminate on the bewildering array of issues the author navigates so expertly. Merlin Donald does not adopt the strident, advocative tone that so many big-picture human evolution theorists do--rather, he lets the steady buildup of evidence and counter-evidence show you how he arrived at his ideas. The book is a dated, but still glittering, treasure of references and findings in the fields of linguistics, anthropology, and animal and human cognition--I have used it quite a few times simply to remind myself--and others--of the strange but true, and of how things don't always conform to the wished-for pattern. For instance, Donald's wonderful and almost touching account of "Brother John", a paroxysmal aphasic, is a perfect rejoinder to anyone who equates "language" with "intelligence".

This is a book that will forever change your view of what it means to be a human being. It is a work of enormous scope, from the minutiae of neurophysiology to archaeology and anthropology to the curriculum of mediaeval schools and modern systems theory, and everywhere closely researched with evidence weighed with care and insight.
The argument is broadly this: our evolutionary cousins, the apes, have brains which enable them to represent to themselves and remember "episodes" or events, something which their evolutionary predecessors either do not have or have only in a limited form.
Homo erectus, the evolutionary link between us and the apes, extended this ability to perceive events, into "mimesis", a capacity to reproduce events they have perceived by use of their own body. Donald shows how this ability, which involves no modifications of the body and relatively modest changes in the brain, allows for the voluntary representation and communication of events of the past and emotions not actually felt concerning things not actually present, a foundation for the later development of symbolic action. Homo erectus dominated the hominid world for a million years, adapting themselves to this "mimetic" culture. According to Donald, mimetic representation remains with us as a vestige of our homo erectus ancestry, as a fully functioning, underlying mode of representation and intelligence.
Homo sapiens in turn developed this ability into speech, with a radical adaption which occurred about 500,000 years ago. According to Donald, homo sapiens had a "mythic" culture hinged around the ability to tell stories, and this ability provided a means to make sense of the world and create a shared understanding of the world. This mythic culture survives to this day, constituting a crucial mode of understanding the world.
Modern human beings, homo sapiens sapiens, emerged only about 50,000 years ago with a rapid accumulation of a myriad of forms of cultural artefacts, culminating in the beginning of writing about 8,000 years ago. This led to a "theoretic" culture for which symbols held in material forms outside the body, play an essential role. According to Donald, human beings have evolved by biological adaptation to the culture it created and lived in and was crucial to its survival strategy.
There is a lot of maybe, perhaps, possibly and if in this work, but the best books open research programs rather than completing them, and Donald has certainly done this. The basic framework is very sound and argued convincingly but his suggestion opens up a plethora of questions begging for investigation.
In particular, the idea of several (episodic, mimetic and linguistics) modes of representation coexisting in consciousness has vast ramifications.

This book may be a bit dense to get through, but it is packed with fascinating ideas and highly worth reading for anyone interested in the evolution of the human brain and its relationship to the evolution of human culture. Donald's grasp of anthropology and cognitive science make this book an excellent introduction to what's going on in that field. But what makes it especially deserving are his own contributions, particularly his ideas on how written language and "the external storage of ideas" have allowed the brain - and culture - to make quantum leaps forward

This book is definitely different from everything that I have read about the brain/mind, since its approach is from an evolutionary perspective but considering theories and evidence from a lot of different fields: ethology, anthropology, comparative anatomy, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, sociology, etc. It describes the major evolutionary changes undergone by the human species, specially with regard to the human mind and its cognitive structures. There are several theories which explain the cognitive differences between apes and humans. One of them proposes that a gradual and constant increase in the relative brain size can explain the differences without the need for radical evolutionary leaps; others propose one, two or several major shifts, leaving the rest to gradual changes. Since the author believes that gradual changes would mean "more of the same" meaning improved abilities instead of totally new ones, he supports the theory of two major biological shifts plus one major cognitive change.

For each of the major shifts he explains with great detail the anatomical changes (in posture, in increased manual ability, in the vocal apparatus and the facial musculature and in the related control regions of the brain), as well as the cognitive and cultural changes that they brought about. Mr. Donald claims that although the changes are "integral", what really makes the difference are the changes in the "modes of representation" and therefore memory. The representation modes, memory, central controllers and the resulting cultures changed from "episodic" in apes to "mimetic" in homo erectus and finally to "mythic" or "narrative" (linguistic) in homo sapiens sapiens (modern humans). The last shift was not biological; the representation mode in humans changed from "mythic" to "symbolic" giving way to "theoretic" culture. The location of memory shifted from internal memory to external memory (written records) and other non linguistic symbols like mathematical and musical notations, diagrams and charts, etc. The use of externally stored symbols and information increased the storage capacity in unprecedented ways and extended the memory field of modern humans, allowing them to retrieve ideas, modify and correct them and finally re-store them for further future manipulations.

The author believes that while there are probably several functioning central controllers - episodic, mimetic and linguistic - since evolution always leaves vestiges of previous forms, one of them is always the "acting" one. He believes there is always one "central controller" (regardless of monism/dualism issues and their corresponding homunculus, homunculi or pandemoniae) although this role can shift to another controller from one moment to the next. The linguistic controller is probably commanding most of the time, but control can be taken over by any of the other two biological controllers, depending on the task at hand; damage to one of the controllers may leave the others intact.

Maybe some of the author's thesis regarding lateralization, locus of control, consciousness or even the precise evolutionary steps are incorrect or subject to some modifications, but the general idea and the global approach that takes evolution into account are quite appealing.

[...] Up to here my review, following is a narration of a strange thing that happened to me while reading this book:

More than a month ago I wrote a review of Mr. Dennett's Consciousness Explained, in which I reached exactly the same conclusion than Mr. Donald in his final chapter. This would not be that strange, but we chose exactly the same analogy and almost the same wording (he even treated the homunculi and pandemoniae with the same attitude than myself, although he was referring to Minsky not Dennett, but who Mr. Dennett cited several times in his book). Here the textual transcription of Mr. Donald; in my review on Dennett you can find my exact wording.

"Discussions of the mind-body problem can often degenerate into semantic quibbles, more vexing than illuminating. More than once I have been led around a conceptual Moebius strip by some well-meaning writer - entering the argument on one side and coming out on the side opposite to the entry point. Enter a dualist, exit a monist, reenter a monist, exit a dualist, and so on, forever."

I was kind of disappointed, since I thought my idea was original; if I was disappointed over this trivial concept, I can imagine Newton's feelings for Leibniz, who happened to discover how to solve differential equations almost simultaneously as himself and who published the results before Newton. Well, Mr. Donald arrived at his conclusion almost 20 years earlier, but it is still curious that this book came to my hands in a used books store precisely at this moment. Or maybe Mr. Dennett's proposal that ideas (memes) want to get themselves said is not so absurd after all...? Still I prefer to think of my mind as a thought creating entity rather than a meme reproducing machinery. Why then did my reasoning follow exactly the same path as Mr. Donald's? Never mind, I will get over it!!!

I concur with those reviewers who have praised this work. If you have found this book through an interest in consciousness, mind, culture, or the like then you owe it to yourself to read it before proceeding. Unless you are already conversant with external memory, as it relates to human consciousness, I believe you would be remiss to bypass it. Judge for yourself.

I am an oby-gyn specialist and readings of cognitive studies is one of my interests. Of course I prefer superficial writings and any book becomes out of touch and rejected as soon as it involves deeper issues. Paradoxically some rare books are easy to digest, yet exceedingly succesfull at promising new ways for capturing a glimpse. This work is such an attractive one. If consciousness will reveal its secrets someday, I feel that the key is evolutionary approaches and this master-piece of Donald is one of the bests in its era.

The book is 17 years out of date.

Donald writes, ""Broca's region" and "Wernicke's region" are convenient fictions, the truth being that aphasia can be caused by wide variety of legions that spare these areas, while occasionally the complete loss of these areas will spare language function altogether, provided the adjacent white matter and basal ganglia are not damaged. The implication is that higher-level integration appears to be fluid and plastic in its underlying anatomy, and the anatomy looks modular through out."

The current consensus refutes this position.