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ALPHABETICAL BRAIN™ VOCABULARY
HUMANIST GALAXY
OF SECULAR SCIENCE STARS
WILLIAM CALVIN
March 26, 2021
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE MIND:
From Apes to Intellect and Beyond
by William H. Calvin.
Oxford University Press,
2004 (i-xx, 219 pages)
BOOK OUTLINE
Note = Numbers in parentheses refer to pages
Quote = "History is concerned not with events but with processes. Processes are things which do not begin and end but which turn into one another." by R. G. Collingwood, British Historian/Philosopher 1939. (xii)
Quote = "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." from Publisher's blurb
"Can you tell the story of the world in an evening around the campfire, the way an old-fashioned shaman used to do? The history of the mind is surprisingly brief. Instead of starting with a big bang, I start with an introduction to one idea --- the 'Minds Big Bang' --- and then I look beyond, to the mind's next advances." (xi-xx)
SOME STAGE-SETTING PERSPECTIVE (xix-xx)
PREFACE (xiii-xx)
note = "If you have trouble with the taxonomic names, just remember that they nest inside one another:" meaning they are recursive: (xix)
Animals
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Mammals
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Primates
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Monkeys
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Apes
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Hominids
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US
1) WHEN CHIMPANZEES THINK: The way we were, seven million years ago? (3-13)
note = "Chimps may not be as sociable with humans as a dog that thinks you are its pack leader, or a cat that mistakes you for its mother, but chimp-to-chimp they clearly have a substantial fraction of instinctive human social behavior. They even play blindmans buff. Yet they do not plan ahead very much." (v)
note = "The chimps lack language and symbol, virtually lack true teaching, and there is no evidence of the sort of metacogntion --- awareness of mental process --- that is the essence of human culture." (12)
note = "The Homo lineage is a spin-off, to use a modern term, of the lineages of the bipedal woodland apes. It occurred about 2.4 million years ago. The bipedal apes keep going, evolving into more heavily built vegetarians, until they die out about a million years ago. It is hard not to think of them as a woodland version of the gorillas, specializing themselves into an evolutionary dead end. That is the usual fate of many species and it tends to be aspects of mind --- such as having the omnivore's wideset of food-finding tactics --- that can provide the versatility needed to avoid getting trapped." (v)
2) UPRIGHT POSTURE BUT APE-SIZED BRAINS: In the woodland between forest and savanna (15-22)
note = "The dark woods are not where we want to be. We prefer fewer trees, along with a view of some water and grass which is why waterfront property is now so expensive. Our ancestors were likely digging up veggies, but not making sharp tools. Did the bipedal apes stand upright for the view, to carry the baby or to avoid taking the midday 'heat hit' on their broad back?" (v)
3) TRIPLE STARTUPS ABOUT 2.5 MILLION YEARS AGO: Flickering climate, toolmaking, and bigger brains. (23-32)
note = "In Africa, there was a spinoff with a bigger brain. A new species usually starts out as a small, isolated population. Imagine, say, the big company's branch office in Nairobi losing communication with the parent and having to manage on its own ideas and resources, to sink or swim as an independent in a worsening climate." (vi)
note = "No one really knows yet what toolmaking, a bigger brain, and more chaotic climate have to do with one another, but these relationships give one some proof for thought. Was the hominid of 2.5 million years ago still thinking pretty much like an ape, just with woodland overlays? They probably became much more daring, having to play games with those lions. It became much more important to know what you could get away with. They surely had an overlay of advanced hunting instincts by then, going considerably beyond the instinctive group maneuvers seen in chimps and bonobos when they hunt. And their social instincts had likely changed as well, with more cooperation and sharing." (30)
4) HOMO ERECTUS ATE WELL: Adding more meat to the diet fueled the first hominids out of Africa (33-44)
note = "Food preparation likely began cooking savory stew. By 1.7 million years ago, Home erectus had spread out of Africa into the grasslands of Asia and was eating a lot of meat. Accurate throwing is a difficult task for the brain. You cannot rely on progress reports as you launch (your nerves are too slow). Without timely feedback, you have to make the perfect plan as you 'get set' and there are a million ways to get it wrong, any one of which will cause dinner to run away. So better short-term planning has an immediate payoff. Perhaps that improved their planning for other occasions as well." (vi)
5) THE SECOND BRAIN BOOM: "What kicked in, about 750,000 years ago?" (45-52)
note = "When the ice age climate switched into oscillations that were slower and bigger, brain size started growing faster. But why? More demanding hunting techniques? Or, ought we to be thinking about the beginnings of proto-language, the short sentences of modern two-year-olds but without the structuring needed for long sentences?" (vi)
6) NEANDERTHALS AND OUR PRE-SAPIENS ANCESTORS Two-stage toolmaking and what it says about thought (53-60)
7) HOMO SAPIENS WITHOUT THE MODERN MIND The big brain but not much to show for it (61-82)
8) STRUCTURED THOUGHT FINALLY APPEARS The curb-cut principle and emerging higher intellectual function (83-106)
9) FROM AFRICA TO EVERYWHERE Was the still-full-of-bugs prototype what spread around the world? (107-126)
10) HOW CREATIVITY MANAGES THE MIXUPS Higher intellectual function and the search for coherence (127-138)
11) CIVILIZING OURSELVES From planting to writing to mind medicine (139-150)
12) WHAT'S SUDDEN ABOUT THE MIND'S BIG BANG? The moderns somehow got their act together (151-159)
13) IMAGINING THE HOUSE OF CARDS Inventing new levels of organization on the fly (161-170)
14) THE FUTURE OF THE AUGMENTED MIND A combustible mixture of ignorance and power? (171-190)
AFTERWORD (191-192)
RECOMMENDED READING (193-196)
NOTES (197-206)
INDEX (207-219)
Conscience (146, 185, 186)
Consciousness (xiv, 78, 79, 135, 145-147, 163, 179, 185, 186, 207)
AUTHOR NOTE, SUMMARY,
AND BOOK DESCRIPTION
AUTHOR NOTE = William H. Calvin is a neurobiologist at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle and President of the CO2 Foundation. He is the author of Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change (University of Chicago Press 2008, see Global-Fever.org) and thirteen earlier books for general readers. He studies brain circuitry, ape-to-human evolution, climate change, and civilization's vulnerability to abrupt shocks.
In Global Fever, he writes: "The climate doctors have been consulted; the lab reports have come back. Now it's time to pull together the Big Picture and discuss treatment options. At a time when architects are thinking ahead to more efficient buildings and power planners are extolling the virtues of 'renewable energy,' the climate modelers have discovered that long-term planning will no longer suffice. Our fossil fuel fiasco has already painted us into a corner such that, if we don't make substantial near-term gains before 2020, the long-term is pre-empted, the efforts all for naught. We are already in dangerous territory and have to act quickly to avoid triggering widespread catastrophes. The only good analogy is arming for a great war, doing what must be done regardless of cost and convenience."
Calvin's climate talk in Beijing at the Great Hall of the People is available in streaming video as are other recent lectures at NASA and Rice University.
SUMMARY = 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?"
BOOK DESCRIPTION = 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.
BOOK REVIEWS
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY REVIEW = "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."
BOOK LIST REVIEW = 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 proto-language. 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.
CHOICE REVIEW = In a series of short chapters, Calvin (Univ. of Washington, Seattle) examines current knowledge about the evolution of the human mind and adds his own fascinating speculation. Starting with humans' divergence from chimpanzees, he moves on to discuss the evolutionary impact of the emergence of upright posture, tool making, proto-language, structured thought, and writing, before looking to the future of the human mind. Like a teatime conversation with a mesmerizing scholar, this book is filled with intriguing ideas and conjecture.
As with any such conversation, though, sometimes it can be obscure, based on the knowledge it assumes, and frustrating in its lack of depth. Though a more thorough discussion of important themes raised in this book can be found elsewhere, e.g., Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works (1998) and Jared Diamond's Third Chimpanzee (1992), those looking for the latest ideas about the evolution of the human mind will find this book rewarding. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-level undergraduates and graduate students. W. R. Morgan College of Wooster
AMAZON READER REVIEWS
[1] Terrible Terrie - Too much theory without proof = 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 --- 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.
[2] The Spinozanator - [Quote from book: we as a species are "NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME" = 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. About 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 has 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 term The Red Queen; that it is 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 time explaining his own thoughts. He is obviously very well informed about language development. I will not 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 did not 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 as a species 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 do not have hard evidence for the "how" of evolutionary cognitive function such as what mitochondrial DNA is to genealogy. I recommend this book highly, and am inspired to read more on the subject, probably from books he mentions.
[3] Gary, K - An intriguing look at how our brains/minds have developed = I am still in the process of reading this book. The material within it is fascinating, and there is 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 am 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.
[4] Andrew Allison - This author is vastly under-appreciated. His books are guaranteed to be both informative and educational (his, out of print book, 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 the book, A Brain for All Seasons: Human Evolution and Abrupt Climate Change.
REMEMBER ALWAYS:
You Are Your Adaptable Memory!
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