STONE AGE PRESENT

Rating:
Summary: Good, but keeps the rose-colored glasses on
Review: The point implied in the title is a good one: we are stone age animals living in an electronic jungle. The Environment of Evolutionary Adaption, which was the savannas of Africa, disappeared for most of us long ago; but genetically and phenotypically speaking we have changed very little. Thus the first four words of the title are beguiling; the rest after the colon, I suspect, was something formulated by a committee of book biz editors trying to spice up the presentation.

This is evolutionary psychology written by a journalist, readable with some worthwhile insights. It should be compared to Richard Wright's The Moral Animal (1994) and Matt Ridley's The Red Queen (1993) from the same time period. This is a comparison that could be extended to other books on evolutionary psychology, including anthropologist Marvin Harris's Our Kind (1989): sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson's earlier, On Human Nature (1978); Robert Jay Russell's The Lemur's Legacy (1993); Richard Wrangham's Demonic Males (1996), etc. Incidentally Amazon has all these books and others, so you might want to do a little comparison shopping. What one notices is that Allman's book is, relatively speaking, a feel-good, sanitized narrative. Our stone age ancestors did not kill a cow and cut up its carcass and distribute it to others in order to enhance their power and prestige and to gain reproductive favors, as most "observers" would have it; but, according to Allman, to share "with friends and neighbors" and "courting lovers." It is amazing what a difference terminology can make. Allman almost allows us to embrace evolutionary psychology and its rather unflattering insights and keep the rose-colored glasses on. The tone is positive and reasoned. The book is also as politically correct, although not as annoyingly PC, as Wrangham's Demonic Males.

I should mention that one of the major themes in this book and in recent evolutionary psychology is that our brains grew big and smart to deal with the our complex social lives. This is the current wisdom. Well, as Satchel Paige said, "The social ramble ain't restful," and as I've always said, socializing is a lot of work. Yes, I think this really does explain how our brains got to be so big. We needed to be really smart to outsmart the other guy. We needed to be smart to juggle all those intrigues, social, political and sexual. I like the way this insight fits with the female's abhorrence of nerds: the fact of the matter is, not being social is also not being smart! So there, nerds!

Like Harris, Allman does not see civilization or the rise of agriculture as necessarily a good thing for the average Joe. And he is firm in discounting the idea that human beings represent "progress" on the evolutionary scale. Interestingly, Allman reports extensively from Robert Axelrod's work on cooperation in an attempt to make us look like good guys. Axelrod is the guy who devised the computer models testing the prisoner's dilemma and held the competition that revealed the now well-known and celebrated "Tit for Tat" strategy that won it (initially cooperate and then act toward the other as that other has acted toward you: tit for tat). Tit for tat also appeared in Wright's The Moral Animal and in Ridley's The Origins of Virtue and elsewhere. I think Axelrod might have had a press agent. At any rate, tit for tat is now seen as needing a random and forgiving variation in order to defeat various other strategies, including ruthlessly non-cooperative ones.

This is a pretty book, originally from Simon & Schuster, very well edited and copyread (thank you!).

Rating:
Summary: Good, but keeps the rose-colored glasses on
Review: The point implied in the title is a good one: we are stone age animals living in an electronic jungle. The Environment of Evolutionary Adaption, which was the savannas of Africa, disappeared for most of us long ago; but genetically and phenotypically speaking we have changed very little. Thus the first four words of the title are beguiling; the rest after the colon, I suspect, was something formulated by a committee of book biz editors trying to spice up the presentation.

This is evolutionary psychology written by a journalist, readable with some worthwhile insights. It should be compared to Richard Wright's The Moral Animal (1994) and Matt Ridley's The Red Queen (1993) from the same time period. This is a comparison that could be extended to other books on evolutionary psychology, including anthropologist Marvin Harris's Our Kind (1989): sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson's earlier, On Human Nature (1978); Robert Jay Russell's The Lemur's Legacy (1993); Richard Wrangham's Demonic Males (1996), etc. Incidentally Amazon has all these books and others, so you might want to do a little comparison shopping. What one notices is that Allman's book is, relatively speaking, a feel-good, sanitized narrative. Our stone age ancestors did not kill a cow and cut up its carcass and distribute it to others in order to enhance their power and prestige and to gain reproductive favors, as most "observers" would have it; but, according to Allman, to share "with friends and neighbors" and "courting lovers." It is amazing what a difference terminology can make. Allman almost allows us to embrace evolutionary psychology and its rather unflattering insights and keep the rose-colored glasses on. The tone is positive and reasoned. The book is also as politically correct, although not as annoyingly PC, as Wrangham's Demonic Males.

I should mention that one of the major themes in this book and in recent evolutionary psychology is that our brains grew big and smart to deal with the our complex social lives. This is the current wisdom. Well, as Satchel Paige said, "The social ramble ain't restful," and as I've always said, socializing is a lot of work. Yes, I think this really does explain how our brains got to be so big. We needed to be really smart to outsmart the other guy. We needed to be smart to juggle all those intrigues, social, political and sexual. I like the way this insight fits with the female's abhorrence of nerds: the fact of the matter is, not being social is also not being smart! So there, nerds!

Like Harris, Allman does not see civilization or the rise of agriculture as necessarily a good thing for the average Joe. And he is firm in discounting the idea that human beings represent "progress" on the evolutionary scale. Interestingly, Allman reports extensively from Robert Axelrod's work on cooperation in an attempt to make us look like good guys. Axelrod is the guy who devised the computer models testing the prisoner's dilemma and held the competition that revealed the now well-known and celebrated "Tit for Tat" strategy that won it (initially cooperate and then act toward the other as that other has acted toward you: tit for tat). Tit for tat also appeared in Wright's The Moral Animal and in Ridley's The Origins of Virtue and elsewhere. I think Axelrod might have had a press agent. At any rate, tit for tat is now seen as needing a random and forgiving variation in order to defeat various other strategies, including ruthlessly non-cooperative ones.

This is a pretty book, originally from Simon & Schuster, very well edited and copyread (thank you!).