The Enchanted Loom: Mind in the Universe (A Touchstone book)

Rating:
Summary: Masterpiece on the development of the human mind
Review: This book takes the reader on an overview of the history of life (after a review of the formation of earth), culminating in the human mind and then onto speculations about the future of the mind (robotic minds to be sent into the cosmos as immortal explorers). I read this because I was curious about the proto-mammal(s) from which all sprung after the passing of the age of the dinosaurs.

I was immediately linked into a graceful narrative chock full of ideas, from the development of an acute sense of smell - enlarging certain portions of the mammal brain beyond that of its reptilian competitors - for (warm-blooded) night stealth, to the evolution of the human thumb and, finally, the passage from tree to veldt of proto-humans (where they needed the brains to make tools). It is a breathtaking adventure that is also a quick read with ideas that stick. There are also beautiful illustrations that lighten the text and help to engrave it in memory.

Interestingly, I found this book because of a critique by SJ Gould, in which Gould argued that Jastrow's interpretation made the human ascent look inevitable as well as placed man at the top of the animal hierarchy as inherently superior because of the human brain. Not so, argued Gould, who said that every species is the result of their own evolutionary pressures and hence were superior survivors in their original environmental niches; if you ran the history of life over again in slightly different circumstancs, he argues, the human brain almost certainly would not have evolved.

This criticism aside, this is a masterpiece of science popularisation. Warmly recommended.