A Brief History of the Mind: from Apes to Intellect and Beyond.A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE MIND From Apes to Intellect and Beyond WILLIAM H. CALVIN William H. Calvin, Ph.D., (born 30 April 1939) is a Professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is a well-known popularizer of neuroscience and evolutionary biology, including the hybrid of these two fields, neural Darwinism. In a play on the title of Stephen Hawking's best selling book, Calvin considers how the human mind has developed over the pest 7 million years and what the future holds for us. The author, a neurobiologist neurobiologist a specialist in neurobiology. , considers a few milestones on the road to consciousness. Among them is a brain-volume growth spurt growth spurt Pediatrics A period of rapid growth in middle adolescence; ♀ ↑ ±8 cm/yr ±age 12; ♂ ↑ ±10 cm/yr ± age 14; GS is orderly, affecting acral parts–ie, hands and feet grow before proximal regions, about 750,000 years ago, when hominids developed advanced hunting techniques and formed protolanguages. The real boom in the development of the mind, however, came long after human brains reached their current size, argues Calvin. He fixes this time at about 50,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens began speaking in sentences. It is at this point that our species pulled far ahead of all other creatures, Calvin contends. On the basis of evidence from the fossil record, he offers his account of the emergence of the human mind. OUP OUP (in Northern Ireland) Official Unionist Party , 2004, 219p., b&w photos, hardcover, $26.00. |
|
||||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion