Customer Reviews

Stone Age Present

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The point implied in the title is a good one: we are stone age animals living in an electronic jungle. The Environment of Evolutionary Adaption, which was the savannas of Africa, disappeared for most of us long ago; but genetically and phenotypically speaking we have changed very little. Thus the first four words of the title are beguiling; the rest after the colon, I suspect, was something formulated by a committee of book biz editors trying to spice up the presentation.

This is evolutionary psychology written by a journalist, readable with some worthwhile insights. It should be compared to Richard Wright's The Moral Animal (1994) and Matt Ridley's The Red Queen (1993) from the same time period. This is a comparison that could be extended to other books on evolutionary psychology, including anthropologist Marvin Harris's Our Kind (1989): sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson's earlier, On Human Nature (1978); Robert Jay Russell's The Lemur's Legacy (1993); Richard Wrangham's Demonic Males (1996), etc. Incidentally Amazon has all these books and others, so you might want to do a little comparison shopping. What one notices is that Allman's book is, relatively speaking, a feel-good, sanitized narrative. Our stone age ancestors did not kill a cow and cut up its carcass and distribute it to others in order to enhance their power and prestige and to gain reproductive favors, as most "observers" would have it; but, according to Allman, to share "with friends and neighbors" and "courting lovers." It is amazing what a difference terminology can make. Allman almost allows us to embrace evolutionary psychology and its rather unflattering insights and keep the rose-colored glasses on. The tone is positive and reasoned. The book is also as politically correct, although not as annoyingly PC, as Wrangham's Demonic Males.

I should mention that one of the major themes in this book and in recent evolutionary psychology is that our brains grew big and smart to deal with the our complex social lives. This is the current wisdom. Well, as Satchel Paige said, "The social ramble ain't restful," and as I've always said, socializing is a lot of work. Yes, I think this really does explain how our brains got to be so big. We needed to be really smart to outsmart the other guy. We needed to be smart to juggle all those intrigues, social, political and sexual. I like the way this insight fits with the female's abhorrence of nerds: the fact of the matter is, not being social is also not being smart! So there, nerds!

Like Harris, Allman does not see civilization or the rise of agriculture as necessarily a good thing for the average Joe. And he is firm in discounting the idea that human beings represent "progress" on the evolutionary scale. Interestingly, Allman reports extensively from Robert Axelrod's work on cooperation in an attempt to make us look like good guys. Axelrod is the guy who devised the computer models testing the prisoner's dilemma and held the competition that revealed the now well-known and celebrated "Tit for Tat" strategy that won it (initially cooperate and then act toward the other as that other has acted toward you: tit for tat). Tit for tat also appeared in Wright's The Moral Animal and in Ridley's The Origins of Virtue and elsewhere. I think Axelrod might have had a press agent. At any rate, tit for tat is now seen as needing a random and forgiving variation in order to defeat various other strategies, including ruthlessly non-cooperative ones.

This is a pretty book, originally from Simon & Schuster, very well edited and copyread (thank you!).

My feelings about this book are twoflod. On the one hand, Allman presents a good overview of how the human psyche developed during the last tens of thousands of years. He provides a comprehensive survey of how external challenges faced by our Stone Age ancestors developed behavior traits that characterized the human spices at the end of the Stone Age (roughly 8000 years BC). I'm not an anthropologist nor an evolutionary psychologist to give a professional judgement here, but for me his story seems logical and sound.

On the other hand the premise on the first cover of the book and the key message of it are in my opinion too dangerous and misleading. Allman focuses on explaining how evolution has shaped modern life, almost rejecting that behaviour (and thus values) of modern human should be caused primarily not by evolution (nature), but by the value system that has been designed and adopted by our very best specimen contrary to our [still Stone Age] genes. Consider two different characters: the pagan hero and Jesus. As Allman explains, in cooperating with other humans our ancestors evolved and followed a "Tit-for-Tat" strategy, that is "act toward the other as that other has acted toward you". The behaviour of the praised pagan hero was mostly in accordance with it. But what Jesus preached is entirely different: "offer the wicked man no resistance. On the contrary, if anyone hits you on the right cheek, offer him the other as well" (Matthew 5:38-39). The difference between the Stone Age and modern behaviour is also clear in relations between sexes. The pagan hero's desire to have plenty of women is a direct result of our male ancestors' instinct to spread his genes into as much females as possible, to guarantee descendants and thus continuation of his genes. Thus the pagan hero felt no guilt and saw no harm in having affairs with different women. Christianity shifted the emphasis from sex to empathy and love, something that is completely useless in terms of evolution but absolutely necessary for realization of our spiritual life. What the Buddah preached is also extremely different from the Stone age behavior: just feel the difference between the goal of Nirvana (buddhism) and the goal of material posessions (Stone age).

My key message here is that biologically we do still consist of mostly the Stone age genes (Allman is right), but only because not enough time has passed to modify them to the necessities of new reality. We now have a completely different set of challenges and goals (external as well as internal), to which our Stone age genes are often counter-productive. Thus our key challenge in mental development is to overcome most of these genes, and we really have a mental capacity to do it - just look at Buddha, Jesus, Mother Teresa and many others.

The sad truth is that although the key challenges of the Stone Age are now extinct (the problem with food and production is generally solved, at least in Europe and USA), in modern society we still have much more beings with the Stone Age behavior (and thus values) than the martyrs of love and faith. And the biggest danger of this book is that it emphasizes in no way how important it is to overcome our Stone age genes and instead develop what is so necessary for our new way of life: love, faith, reason and spontaneous activity that emerges from the heart.

I recommend this book as a historical overview of how the psyche of human beings had developed from dawn till dusk of the Stone age, but please do not interpret the findings of this book as a guide for action. We now face different challenges that require completely different attitude and behavior, and it's a pity that the author does not emphasize this obvious fact.

Each chapter in this book is devoted to a different topic: language, culture, cooperation, sex, among others. Each one of these topics can be covered by itself in a whole book. Given that, the book does not tell you much about each topic. Second, even though the title of the book is stone age present, most of the experimental work discussed in the book is from nonhuman primate studies. The book is however interesting, easy-to-read, and a good start for non-academics.