The Monkey in the Mirror: Essays on the Science of What Makes Us Human

Rating:
Summary: Evolution? Read Just This One.
Review: This book is a great summary of the past century's debates on Evolution. It is well and clearly presented by a master of the science. There is a small hidden agenda regarding the author's theory of "exaptation" (which BTW should probably be called "abaptation" as the opposite of "adaptation"). Anyway, for those of us not deeply interested in the creationist/evolutionist debates this book begins as a clear statement of the conflict and ends with an interesting and insightful prediction of our future. The book is short. If you only want to read one of these Human Evolution texts. . .read this one.

Rating:
Summary: Evolution? Read Just This One.
Review: This book is a great summary of the past century's debates on Evolution. It is well and clearly presented by a master of the science. There is a small hidden agenda regarding the author's theory of "exaptation" (which BTW should probably be called "abaptation" as the opposite of "adaptation"). Anyway, for those of us not deeply interested in the creationist/evolutionist debates this book begins as a clear statement of the conflict and ends with an interesting and insightful prediction of our future. The book is short. If you only want to read one of these Human Evolution texts. . .read this one.

Rating:
Summary: Evolution? Read Just This One.
Review: This book is a great summary of the past century's debates on Evolution. It is well and clearly presented by a master of the science. There is a small hidden agenda regarding the author's theory of "exaptation" (which BTW should probably be called "abaptation" as the opposite of "adaptation"). Anyway, for those of us not deeply interested in the creationist/evolutionist debates this book begins as a clear statement of the conflict and ends with an interesting and insightful prediction of our future. The book is short. If you only want to read one of these Human Evolution texts. . .read this one.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting and Iconoclastic!
Review: What made humans human? Why study science at all? Is evolutionary psychology science or informed speculation? Who were the Neanderthals? If these look like lofty questions, that is because they are. But author Ian Tattersall does his best to speculate answers (or at very least, discourse on why one can't be had.)

Tattersal is somewhat iconoclastic. For instance, he tries to dispell the 'myth' that evolution is a gradual process of small tinkerings and explicates the view (first made by SJ Gould) that evolution consists of much stasis punctuated by radical changes. He also rails against the 'ultra-adaptationism' prevalent in things like evolutionary psychology - the view that all (or at least, most) traits should be explained as ones 'selected for' due to their adaptationary benefit. Nonsense, Tattersall retorts. As evolution doesn't work on the reductionistic 'trait' - but rather than holistic individual - level, many of our traits could more easily (and plausibly) be explained as ones that were part of individuals who made it due to OTHER traits - exaptations that simply 'came along for the ride,' only to be utilized later.

The reason I bring all this up is that these ideas are integral to Tattersall's essays (almost to the point of repitition). From his conjecture that the 'human' brain wasn't a gradual process, but appeared somewhat rapidly (with many of its functions coming to use only later), to his discomfort with evolutionary psychology (no, he does not say that traits have no genetic basis, as one reviewer caricatured. Rather, he suggests that evolutionary psych is oversimplistic and quite untestable), these essays draw on the iconoclastic ideas outlayed in the preceeding paragraph.

There is one big con and one big pro to this book. The con is that Tattersal is quite repititious in that he brings the same two ideas back as the prime mover of every essay. The pro is that his view of what science is, is profoundly honest. From the first essay (on why science is so important and successful) to the last, he sees science as something that should never be afraid to admit that it doesn't quite know yet, a process that is ongoing in the collection of information and the testing of theses, and something that, to qualify as science, MUST be testable somehow (which is why evolutioanry psych gets Tattersall's criticism).

All in all, a good book.