The Tangled Wing : Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit

Rating:
Summary: my favorite science book ever
Review: Dr. Konner is just an awesome professor, with a great hilarious sense of humor and an intriguing way of wording things. Just like he told my NBB 201 class, you're going to learn very important things from him...wink wink. Not only does it cover a highly scientific array of information, it's also presented in a fun-to-read fashion. It won't put you to sleep.

Rating:
Summary: Substance delievered...
Review: I also reccomend, even more highly, Darwinian Happiness by Bjorn Grinde to gain critical knowledge of understanding your genes and improving overall quality of ife.

Rating:
Summary: an tentative review...
Review: I've only just begun to read this book and I want to clear up a possible misunderstanding about it. This edition is a rewritten version of the earlier book by the same title published seventeen years ago. This new edition takes into account the vast new findings in biology since that time. These recent findings have served to provide added weight to the earlier edition's discussions and conclusions.

Since I have been misled in the past by books referring to the "human spirit," I will provide the author's definition of that term from page xiii here-- "mind, thought, feeling, love, dreams, hope, admiration, decency, faith, and in general everything that the religious person takes as evidence for the soul...without need of divine assistance. The human spirit IS made of the sticky, pulpy stuff [of brains] and, except to the extent that some echoes of its throbbing may continue in other sticky pulps [of offspring], becomes silent when that stuff stops throbbing."

I will cite further from page xvii-- "I wrote "The Tangled Wing" to show what an integration [of behavioral and social science] might look like... But in some form this integration is bearing down like a bulldozer on theology, philosophy, and much of psycholgoy, and it has undermined key theoretical pillars of social science. Yet the bulldozer is no set of simple neodarwinian ideas. Rather, it is behavioral sicence itself set in a biological context..."

An intriguing endeavor. I will update this review when I have delved further into it.