Promethean Fire: Reflections on the Origin of Mind [Paperback]

Charles J. Lumsden (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 14, 1999

There is a missing link in human evolution about which few facts are known and surprisingly little has been written. It is not any one of the intermediate forms connecting modern man to his apelike ancestors. It is something much more challengingthe early human mind. How did it come into existence? And why? In Promethean Fire Charles J. Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson take us down the twisting corridors through which our species traveled in the two-million-year odyssey from Homo Habilis to modern man. They ask why, out of the millions of species that have emerged and gone extinct, human beings alone took the last, abrupt journey to high intelligence and advanced culture. Lumsden and Wilson attribute the sudden emergence of the human mind to the activation of a mechanism both obedient to physical law and unique to man. This "Promethean fire" is geneculture coevolution, a mutually acting change in the genes and culture that carried man beyond the pervious limits of biologyyet restrains his nature on an elastic, unbreakable leash. The authors' argument builds impressively from across the entire range of biological and social sciences, but their presentation is essentially lyrical. They share with the reader their reconstructionboth stunning line drawings and colorful vignettesof how the primitive mind may have functioned in exercising cultural choice with genetic bias. Step by step, they guide us through the diverse categories of evidence, including recent studies of incest avoidance, color vocabulary, infant gaze patterns, taste discriminations, and phobias, which led them toward the theory of cultural transmission based on the importance of genetic filters in individual mental development.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Edward O. Wilson is Pellegrino University Professor, Emeritus, at Harvard University. In addition to two Pulitzer Prizes (one of which he shares with Bert Hölldobler), Wilson has won many scientific awards, including the National Medal of Science and the Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 228 pages
• Publisher: iUniverse (October 14, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1583484256
• ISBN-13: 978-1583484258
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,194,512 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gene-culture coevolution., December 21, 2002

By 

Luc REYNAERT (Beernem, Belgium) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Promethean Fire: Reflections on the Origin of Mind (Paperback)

This book proves that there is no division between culture and biology, but that both are intertwined. As the authors state: Gene-culture coevolution is "a complicated interaction in which culture is generated and shaped by biological imperatives while biological traits are simultaneously altered by genetic evolution in response to cultural innovation." (p.20)

The authors illustrate this coevolution convincingly, mostly by the case of brother-sister incest.

In fact, this theory tells us how the mind is 'formed', but doesn't explain the origin (come into being) of the mind. The title is a little bit misleading.

It is an original work, because it broadens Darwinism with cultural aspects.
It is also an important work, because it counters the Standard Social Science Model which proposes a fundamental division between biology and culture.
Not to be missed.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Provocative work emphasizing gene-culture coevolution, October 23, 2010

By 

Steven A. Peterson (Hershey, PA (Born in Kewanee, IL)) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Promethean Fire: Reflections on the Origin of the Mind (Hardcover)

The focus of this work is ambitious. The authors say (Page v): "What was the origin of mind, the essence of humankind? We will suggest that a very special form of evolution, the melding of genetic change with cultural history, both created the mind and drove the growth of the brain and the human intellect at a rate perhaps unprecedented for any organ in the history of life."

The authors begin with a cursory definition of mind. They then describe a possible evolutionary history to explain the origins of the human mind. The development of the mind, they argue, came about because of gene-culture coevolution, a Promethean fire. Thereafter, they consider sociobiology, rules of mental development, the social worlds of Home sapiens. They conclude by raising implications for the human sciences.

All in all, provocative reading. . . . This marks a change in E. O. Wilson's thinking from his pathbreaking work "Sociobiology." The implications for humankind in this book are more subtly advanced and are less reductionist than in his magnum opus. The book is well written and remains thought provoking today, decades after its original publication.

3.0 out of 5 stars Baby steps towards a theory of cultural evolution, January 4, 2012

By 

Tim Tyler (Boston, USA.) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Promethean Fire: Reflections on the Origin of Mind (Paperback)

The book was published in 1983. Two years earlier, the pair had published Genes, Mind and Culture, one of the early pioneering work on cultural evolution. This book was intended as more of a popular work. The topic is: the evolution of the human mind. The book contains multiple illustrations, autobiographical passages and narratives concerning the lives of our distant ancestors.

The book is not terribly well written and gets boring in places. The autobiographical bits are about the sociobiological controversy and about how Lumsden and Wilson wrote their last book, and this content is not that great. The narratives about the lives of distant ancestors also get painful. There's a large section about aliens who learn everything and other aliens which have entirely genetically-specified behaviour. There is some science, but it is often fairly loose and references are rare.

Lumsden and Wilson define their notion of a culturegen, go into their idea that genes hold culture on a leash, and discuss gene-culture coevolution. They complain about how difficult the whole subject is.

Their theory boils down to the idea that genes predispose organisms to acquiring particular sorts of culture and culture in turn goes on to affect the genes. This is fine as far as it goes. However, the book only mentions the fact that culture is transmitted once and doesn't mention that it is inherited at all. The book doesn't mention the idea that cultural evolution might resemble organic evolution - the key idea which most subsequent work is based around.

Lumsden and Wilson do cite Dawkins, Cavalli-Sforza, Feldman, Boyd, Richerson, Durham and Campbell. However, their citation doesn't go far beyond listing their names - Lumsden and Wilson don't seem to have grasped that most of these authors had a much more significant and well-developed theory than their own.

The last two chapters are the best. The penultimate one goes into the author's ideas and looks in some detail into the ways that culture might influence genes and the ways that genes might influence culture. The last chapter proposes a unified science of humanity. Perhaps read those chapters first if you want to avoid being put off. Or, perhaps skip this book unless you have a particular interest in the thinking of the authors. This book probably isn't going to teach you much that you couldn't get more easily elsewhere.