A Brief History of the Mind: From Apes to Intellect and Beyond 1st Edition

by William H. Calvin (Author)

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ISBN-13: 978-0195182484

ISBN-10: 0195182480

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This book looks back at the simpler versions of mental life in apes, Neanderthals, and our ancestors, back before our burst of creativity started 50,000 years ago. When you can't think about the future in much detail, you are trapped in a here-and-now existence with no "What if?" and "Why me?" William H. Calvin takes stock of what we have now and then explains why we are nearing a crossroads, where mind shifts gears again.
The mind's big bang came long after our brain size stopped enlarging. Calvin suggests that the development of long sentences--what modern children do in their third year--was the most likely trigger. To keep a half-dozen concepts from blending together like a summer drink, you need some mental structuring. In saying "I think I saw him leave to go home," you are nesting three sentences inside a fourth. We also structure plans, play games with rules, create structured music and chains of logic, and have a fascination with discovering how things hang together. Our long train of connected thoughts is why our consciousness is so different from what came before.
Where does mind go from here, its powers extended by science-enhanced education but with its slowly evolving gut instincts still firmly anchored in the ice ages? We will likely shift gears again, juggling more concepts and making decisions even faster, imagining courses of action in greater depth. Ethics are possible only because of a human level of ability to speculate, judge quality, and modify our possible actions accordingly. Though science increasingly serves as our headlights, we are out-driving them, going faster than we can react effectively.

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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."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Library Binding edition.

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 --This text refers to the Library Binding edition.

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Product details

Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press; 1 edition (October 8, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0195182480
ISBN-13: 978-0195182484
Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 0.7 x 5.4 inches
Shipping Weight: 13.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,945,091 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #196 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Psychology & Counseling > Evolutionary Psychology
- #970 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Anthropology > Physical
- #1237 in Books > Textbooks > Medicine & Health Sciences > Medicine > Basic Sciences > Neuroscience

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Too much theory without proof

ByTerrible Terrieon December 14, 2015

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

The book is of course interesting, being written by a neuropsychiatrist, but before the end I began to tire of two things he repeatedly asserted, of course without evidence because there is none. One is that spear throwing in hunting trained the mind to plan. Personally, I cannot see this, as it takes some thinking to decide how to throw, but this would become almost automatic with time. This is not true planning as far as I can see. The other thing is that he believes that nothing women did was important for developing the brain. He does mention a couple of words for things that women did, like "gathering," but there is no more than a mention. No mention of the planning involved in raising children.

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An intriguing look at how our brains/minds have developed

ByG. Klineon March 15, 2010

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

I'm still in the process of reading this book, but will come back to update my review once I'm done.

Be forewarned that this is a rather "cheaply" made paperback book. The cover is thin and the paper quality average. Inside there are a number of black and white photographs that appear as though they were colored photos copied from a high speed low quality scanner. Most of them are unintelligible. Of course, this isn't a photographic book and the images are only a small part of what is presented, but I would have appreciated being able to see the visual details that the author meant to convey.

The material within is fascinating, and there's quite a lot of content here that you won't find laying around the Internet. Calvin does have some intriguing observations and assumptions about how we've come to have the minds contained in our heads today. This book is like a documentary. It reads fairly well to the lay person, but it does get a bit stuffy at times. I recommend reading it in a quiet location where you can devote full attention.

What drew me to this book is the "beyond" part... Calvin's ideas as to where we are going as a species. Quite frankly, I'm alarmed at what is going on in the world today at the hands of human beings. We are at a pinnacle of technological prowess with pockets of reasonably peaceful societies, but we are still savagely destroying each other and exploiting natural resources with reckless abandon. Greed is at the forefront of our problems. And now we are at a phase where prominent people who are supposed to be highly esteemed and well respected are willing to risk their reputations for the gaining of finances and/or power. The social experiment of large scale civilization is a very mixed blessing and I'm very curious as to whether we are going to "make it." Perhaps we might reach that next "big bang" in the evolution of our minds such that we'll be able to transcend our most pressing faults and find a way to achieve a healthy sustainable form of society across the globe.

It is hard to be optimistic in this day and age... I'm hoping Calvin has something to say that can support an optimistic outlook.

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NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME

ByThe SpinozanatorVINE VOICEon September 17, 2004

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

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.

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Another gem from Calvin

ByAndrew Allisonon November 16, 2010

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This author is vastly under-appreciated. His books are guaranteed to be both informative and educational (his, out of print, "The River that Flows Uphill" is my all-time favorite non-fiction book). If you are still among the deluded who think that climate change is human-induced, read, "A Brain for All Seasons: Human Evolution and Abrupt Climate Change."

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Five Stars

Bychung hsiehon August 27, 2015

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excellent!

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Thought provoking yet personable

ByPaul Carletonon August 2, 2004

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

This is a thought provoking yet personable survey of the evolution of our species' mental abilities. I read it after I'd written my book, "Concept: A ProtoTheist Quest for Science-Minded Skeptics", else I might have used some of his ideas in my chapters eight and nine (I do reference two of his earlier books). He elaborates and illustrates many of the concepts (tho' sometimes he uses `concept' were I'd use `percept'). However he largely ignores the functions of the pre-, sub- and un-conscious, yet speculates on "The Future of the Augmented Mind." Also, while he mentions on pages 171-2 "the evolutionary trajectory we've been on," he doesn't elaborate (as I do in chapter eleven) and thus has difficulty sustaining his optimism about our future.

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Most recent customer reviews

A Brief History of Why I Did Not Enjoy This Book

I'll try to make this review brief because that's all this book really deserves. It all started off so well with a reasonably interesting table of contents.Read more

Published on October 29, 2010 by Chris Edwards

Savannah spear chucker to Shakespeare

Always a lively and informative read, Calvin has capped his many fine works on the human intellect with this book.Read more

Published on October 16, 2004 by Stephen A. Haines

The rise of "beyond the apes" intelligence

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.Read more

Published on August 24, 2004 by Dennis Littrell

Interesting to a weekend "scientist"

Dr. Calvin has done an excellent job detailing the history of how mind development may have transpired over the last several hundred thousand years.Read more

Published on August 4, 2004 by BigThinker

The Story of the Mind�s Big Bang

"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.Read more

Published on March 24, 2004 by Celia Redmore

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