It's very surprising not to see any reviews of 'Aping Mankind' from this magnificent neuroscientist and philosopher, Raymond Tallis on Amazon. The main gist of this book - and this is coming from the perspective of an atheist, as Tallis calls himself - is that human being are way more marvelous than whatever is revealed by neuroscience or natural selection. It's extremely important to note that Tallis is not depreciating the magnificent achievements of modern science at all. No, instead, what we get here is a vigorous defense of intellectual humility.
There has been a decades long obsession with neuroscience, which is extremely healthy, but this can often cause many people, including distinguished scientists and philsophers, to say that the brain does more than is actually warranted by the evidence. Tallis goes through extensive evidence and examples in a humorous and determined manner to show that the brain is not a human being and we simply cannot be reduced to neurons and electo-chemical processes in the brain, nor will the so called 'hard problem' of consciousness (and it's not clear it should be called the 'hard problem', for reasons explained inside) ever be solved, so far as we have our current scientific method in mind, and even future breakthroughs in the field - seem to lack promise.
The second focus of Tallis, has also been tackled by other distinguished philosophers like Thomas Nagel and Jerry Fodor, but none of these two, despite there lively styles, offer such obvious insights and clues as Tallis does. We can certainly try to understand some very basic phenomena through natural selection - elementary survival-related things mostly - but when it comes to issues of love, decision making, morality and many other topics natural selection is wrong... Well, perhaps 'wrong' is misleading word, at these high levels of biological life, natural selection is guess work: one could easily use natural selection to explain why we like certain abstract paintings, like (insert you favorite painter here), and use the very same argument to show why this art is not compelling to many people. The same problems arise in a plethora of cases.
It would be hard to imagine some of the people reading this review not thinking that Tallis must be wrong because he does not understand neuro-science and natural selection well enough, or one could think that Tallis is right in one case (natural selection), but is wrong in the other (neuroscience) and vice-versa. If you think Tallis is plainly wrong, and want to find out who could believe this stuff, read the book. If you think Tallis may have some good points, then learn even more about them, read the book. If you, like me, always wondered how there could be so many science book claiming to explain human behavior via the brain or evolution, then no more persuasion is needed, read the book.
There are also plenty of good sections that deal with some sensible areas in neuro-science, as well as some plausible accounts of the areas in which natural selection is a safe bet in explaining some human activities. A favorite chapter of mine has to do with scientists' and philosophers own enchantment with certain contemporary paradigms like the current fascination with AI, and with certain words like 'information', which was really refreshing and intuitive. There is plenty, plenty more in this book, but this can be put aside.
After giving so much praise to 'Aping Mankind', why am I not giving it 5 stars? The one flaw that I kept finding in Tallis's thought, is one that seems to me to be a bit confused - though hinting in the right direction - is that Tallis often talks as if consciousness where some kind of separate phenomena from the physical universe, and he keeps repeating this point, without formally committing himself to a kind of Cartesian-like dualism. I'm not denying that its an awesome phenomena, but to flirt so strongly with dualism seems to suggest that we know so much about bodies, or what the sciences study, than we are justified in believing. If it becomes so hard to think of consciousness as completely in touch with other phenomena in the world, though with some very special properties, then there is a risk of interpreting Tallis' informed critique as a call to empty spiritualism, which is an issue this author has tried to overcome, with mixed results.
Other than this, this book is awesome, and should be read by anyone who has a remote interest on these topics. You should be interested, because, after all, we are A BIT more complicated than apes.
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- Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2017
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- adomacReviewed in the United Kingdom on December 10, 2018
Dramatically and surgically explodes the many neuro- based pseudo sciences.
