Customer Reviews

Promethean Fire: Reflections on the Origin of Mind

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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.

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.

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.