A Brief History of the Mind: From Apes to Intellect and Beyond (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "WHAT IS IT LIKE, to be a chimpanzee?..." (more)
Key Phrases: structured stuff, brain boom, higher intellectual function, Future of the Augmented Mind, Ate Well, Aum Shinrikyo (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"What is it like, to be a chimpanzee?" asks Calvin, a neurobiologist at the University of Washington, in the first chapter of this fascinating history of the mind. While humans and other primates share many cognitive abilities, an accumulation of qualitative differences in perception, learning and time sense add up to an unbridgeable gap, he says. Tracing human evolution from the first upright hominid through tool making and on to structured thought and hypotheses about the future, Calvin (How Brains Think; A Brain for All Seasons) offers readers a concise, absorbing path to follow. Trying to imagine the thoughts and lives of early humans is not much different than trying to know what it's like to be a chimpanzee, as it turns out. Eventually, Calvin reveals how our evolving brains might have developed such bizarre abstractions as nested information, metaphors and ethics, thus paving the way for consciousness as we know it. He postulates the "mind's Big Bang" as tied to the development of language, offering as support the nativist mind theories of Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky. Presented with a pleasing blend of philosophy, neuroscience and anthropology, Calvin's ideas are accessible for anyone interested in a scientific look at how our brains make us different from chimpanzees. He adds a cautionary note, too: as human brains get smarter-and as our guts stay primitive and our technology skyrockets-we must get better about "our long-term responsibilities to keep things going."
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From Booklist

Calvin ponders how humans' higher-level mental abilities may have evolved, explicitly avoiding the thickets of what constitutes consciousness. Instead he investigates the increments of intellect that can be inferred from the fragments of discovered fossils and artifacts. His observations about the separation from ape-level awareness that a hominid skull or an Acheulean hand axe represent don't stand alone; Calvin buttresses his observations with the evolutionary advantage that the hominid possessed or that the tool conferred. When he chronologically approaches the Homo genus (having started the story seven million years in the past), Calvin orients his readers toward two behaviors, the throwing of objects and protolanguage. Although these behaviors were probably manifest in earlier species, Calvin wonders why they flowered into recognizably humanlike abilities only several tens of millennia ago, and then long after the appearance of anatomically modern humans. His equally curious readers will weigh his explanation, which integrates syntax and the precocity of children, as they appreciate the author's adeptness in covering so much material in so brief a space. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (April 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195159071
• ISBN-13: 978-0195159073
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,058,087 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The rise of "beyond the apes" intelligence, August 24, 2004

By	Dennis Littrell (SoCal) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

The central event in this book is the human mind's so-called "big bang" which occurred some 90,000 to 50,000 years ago.

(These are neurobiologist William Calvin's numbers from page 111 where he notes that "it now appears that humans were behaviorally modern before the last great Out of Africa" which is now understood as taking place between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago, as determined by the latest tweaking of the mitochondrial DNA dating data.)

Professor Calvin leads up to this event by starting with the proto ape that was our ancestor (and the ancestor of modern apes) that lived some seven million years ago. He takes us from that ape's jungle habitat to the woodlands, where our ancestors learned to walk upright, to the savannahs where they ran down, killed and ate large game animals. Somewhere along the way we got smart. But, Calvin wonders, did we get smart enough?

He sees a disconnect between our abilities and the world we have inherited. He asks: "Where does mind go from here, its powers extended by science-enhanced education and new tools--but with its slowly evolving gut instincts still firmly anchored to the ice ages?" Are we just a "rough-around-the-edges prototype, the preliminary version that evolution never got a chance to further improve before the worldwide distribution occurred?" (p. 178)

In other words, are we using Stone Age instincts to cope with Information Age problems? It is interesting to note that in psychologist Keith Stanovich's recent book The Robot's Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin (2004) he is concerned with the same problem from an entirely different point of view. He writes about the "potential mismatches between the cognitive requirements of the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation and those of the modern world."

Of course the problem, as both writers point out, is that cultural evolution out-sprints the biological so that our genotypes are still in the woodlands and on the savannahs as the ice ages come and go while our phenotypes have to deal with traffic jams, weapons of mass destruction, and the paperwork for our HMOs.

One of Calvin's more intriguing ideas comes from his dictum that "behavior invents and...New form follows new function." (p. 159) He argues that the higher intellectual functions of humans came from the development of a "structured suite" of brain machinery that "is shared in part with some nonintellectual functions." (p. 94) He sees "accurate throwing" as part of this structured suite, and argues that learning to hit a moving target (say a small animal), because it involved several parts of the body (hand, wrist, arm, shoulder--and eyes and legs for that matter) in close coordination, several parts of the brain were used simultaneously as well. Consequently a "structured suite" developed in the brain that later was used for the development of symbolic language. What he is saying is that, the syntax of language--that is, the "something" does "something" to "something": the subject-verb-object structure of language that works so magically for us--actually came from the body's experience running down game in Africa.

I think Calvin is on to something here because that syntactic structure which is common to people everywhere, regardless of what language they speak, mirrors the action of the world. What is important in the environment is what is being done or what is happening (the verb), by whom and to whom (or what): the bull gores the lion; the monkey peels the fruit, the wind blows the tree down, etc.

Another of Calvin's pet ideas is that education "perhaps more than any of the imagined genetic changes" is what will best help us cope with the challenges of the modern world. (p. 184) He argues that if children are exposed to "structured stuff" at younger ages, and if they can "softwire their brains to better handle" such stuff, "the more precocious children will soon double the amount of structured speech heard by the next generation." (p. 154)

Of course our brains are still being "softwired" after we leave the womb and for some many months afterwards as our experiences serve to strengthen certain neurons and discard others. It seems, however, that Calvin is getting at something larger here, a kind of quasi-Lamarckian accelerated evolutionary process. Indeed I think he intends this example as a possible explanation for the "big bang" that took place in the Pleistocene. To be honest I have no idea whether he is right or not. Certainly it is an interesting idea.

Interesting is this comment from page 104: "[M]uch of [our] higher intellectual function seems half-baked, what you ordinarily see in a prototype rather than a finished, well-engineered product. Perfection you don't get, not from Darwinian evolution...But culture...can sometimes patch things up, if society works hard enough."

This is my first experience with reading Calvin, and I can say that reading this book is like engaging in a conversation with a wise and learned man who likes to share his ideas.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Story of the Minds Big Bang, March 24, 2004

By	Celia Redmore "Celia Redmore" - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

"A Brief History of the Mind" is a breezy, readable account of the evolution of modern humans from ancient African primates, starting around 7 million years ago. There have been some interesting new insights in the field during the past few years, and the story is well worth retelling. Indeed, what makes humans so different from other animals is that we would consider telling "our story" at all.

The core of the book is the chain of events that could have created our modern minds from those of our ancestor apes. It stresses the concept of humans getting an evolutionary "free ride" from fortuitous changes. For example, the author offers the controversial suggestion that the increased cortical connections that eventually enabled our higher thinking abilities originally benefited pre-humans by helping them coordinate the complicated body movements used in hunting herd animals. Those with more neural connections had a better chance of bringing home lunch. Intelligent thought was simply a happy later by-product.

Anthropologists usually look backwards, but this History takes a quick peek at the future. Modern minds are far more than the hardware of cortex and neurons. Human infants start busily "softwiring" language and other skills into their brains as soon as they are born. William Calvin considers this new stage of evolution - one that we actually have some control over - and comes up with some surprising, and disturbing, predictions for our postmodern future.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME, September 17, 2004

By	The Spinozanator (Waco, Texas) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

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For a short book, (fewer than 200 pages), Dr. Calvin provides a wealth of information from a wide variety of scientific disciplines, and a HUGE bibliography. He approaches evolutionary cognitive development from the standpoint of a neurobiologist.

He has excellent, entertaining quotes to begin and finish many chapters, and nice illustrations. He provides brief (one paragraph) chapter summaries in the Table of Contents. I read that first, and reread individual chapter summaries before and after each chapter. In chapter 8, he discussed this structured, obsessive, pattern-seeking behavior of mine.

Here is the plot: 7 million yrs ago, we emerged from the apes. Bt 160,000 yrs ago, we were homo sapien. By 50,000 yrs ago, we were homo sapien sapien - same physique, same sized brain, just soft-wired more elegantly. Dr. Calvin says, "It's just in the last 1% of that up-from-the-apes period that human creativity & technological capabilities have really blossomed. It's been called 'The Mind's Big Bang'."

How did this happen?

On page 153, he listed 5 candidates, all of which he said were probably operative, but he has a favorite. (Interestingly, he leaves out Matt Ridley's favorite from THE RED QUEEN; that it's all about the battle between the sexes.) In Dr. Calvin's theory, "Evo-Devo," he relies on syntax development and spear-throwing skills as catalysts to the "Mind's Big Bang," and spends a lot of of time explaining his thoughts. He is obviously very well informed about language development. I won't try to explain this complex theory here, but I did think it had merit. I thought, however, that for the crown jewel of his book, it was not presented clearly enough.

I began to wonder where gene change was going to fit in. As I read, I searched for indications that the current brand of natural selection was in play. In one segment, he suggested what sounded exactly like vertical transmission of memes, although he didn't call them memes. He extrapolated this into the future, saying, "a number of present day human abilities have some potential for future elaboration even without natural selection." I couldn't help but wonder what Richard Dawkins would think about this. It sounded awfully Lamarckian to me.

As the plot unfolded, the existing product (our minds) was shown to be jury-rigged and unfinished, in evolution's usual fashion...so, as humans, we have tendencies to misinterpret in our own favor, rationalize, use faulty logic, wage war, etc. In short, we are "NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME."

This book is well-written, extensively researched, and entertaining, about a subject in which informed speculation appears to be the state of the art. Too bad we don't have hard evidence for the "how" of evolutionary cognitive function such as what mitochondrial DNA is to geneology.

I recommend this book highly, and am inspired to read more on the subject, probably from books he mentions. Because his charts in chapter 8 were unclear, I give him a 4.