R Smith 2006-09-20

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

This book blew me away. The author has a PhD in the field and I assume has done extensive research, so I can guess his assertions are based on sound theory. I may not be an expert in the area, but the author's ideas and general premises are very interesting. We may never know exactly how the brain evolved, but this author presents an interesting and fun exploration into this subject.

Wayne Ferrier 2004-06-24

11 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

Evolutionary psychologists and cognitive archaeologists have argued that homo sapiens developed large brains to be able to do the immense calculations of social interaction in one's own tribe. Human tribes are large and thus require lots of Machiavellian calculating in order to come out on top and compete for status and resources. This same argument states that our brains have Swiss army knife architectures. Meaning that various domains of intelligence developed separately in homo sapiens; one for tool making, one for dealing with the natural world, one for language, one for society, etc, but in the past they never interacted much and thus there was little awareness of self-which is a social biological explanation of Freud's unconscious mind theory. As human tribes got larger and more complex the social domain took off and by constant interaction and competition, it in turn got "contaminated" by other domains...the Darwinian fittest watching and observing the movements and behaviors of others and hence their unconscious domains, so that cross domain fluidity occurred. This is why Mithen thinks the cultural explosion occurred, a contaminated Machiavellian social domain gathering and compiling non-social domain intelligence to help compete in the social arena. This is a powerful argument because it means that our innate cutthroat tendencies encourage us to gather extra-cutthroat intelligence.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and read it from cover to cover. The only caveat I have with it is that occasionally Mithen's arguments are not soundly based in logic. Often, he'll make a statement saying if A then B, but he'll never say why B. Often he'll make statements that if we observe this behavior then we know that this is true, because "...that is what we expect..." and he'll never back up or explain how if that is so then why is it expected?

There are many leaps of faith here, the ultimate is at the end of the book where he claims that the entire work now thwarts any argument that the mind had a supernatural origin, even though he only invested perhaps a sentence or two on this bold statement and presented no arguments to support it. I am always amazed when scientists do that. They often do not support their materialist, atheistic conclusions with any scientific evidence, argument or experiment. All they do is describe a possible scenario for how reality works, which we expect science itself will eventually expand on or delete as antiquated anyway. Who's to say a supernatural force didn't design the very system Mithen describes, or natural selection, punctuated equilibrium, etc; simply because these scientists' concepts of spirituality, religion and deity are not themselves very developed.

Just because evolution is self-perpetuating, does it mean that this isn't an ideal system that a supernatural mind would come up with? A metaphor is in order: an embryo grows in spite of the fact that the father withdrew his penis from the womb a long time before. Does that make the father unreal? This idea somehow escapes the scientific mind. Scientists need to use scientific method to examine why a supernatural force did not design his own hypothetical system, or leave it alone in agnostic obscurity. Often scientists attack other people's "concepts" of deity and not deity itself and then claim that they have taken down the whole, when nothing of the sort occurred. And, of course, this is unscientific. I am thinking straw man here.

There are too many ifs when that assortment of problems is questioned. For example, if our brains evolved in an atmosphere of Machiavellian intrigue, and the natural tendency would be to go with gravity, would a deity knowing that forbidding man from consuming the metaphorical fruit is nothing more than cross-domain fluidity? Would telling them not to do it insure that they would, and in doing so set the stage for the creation of a nation through and by the function of evil? It takes an understanding of Genesis and Mithen to ask such a question. One can still believe that religion could be an unintended accident or it could be hard-wired, inevitability or a cause, and we are right where we left off. Mithen hypothesized what was there, how evolving minds reacted but not what instigated them. And when reading Mithen, holding these limitations in mind, he nevertheless, has a lot of interesting things to say.

M. A Michaud 2003-12-17

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

In this book, Mithen takes on the formidable task of describing how the mind of modern humans emerged from the minds of earlier hominids. The scarcity of hard evidence from prehistoric times, particularly about physical changes in the brain, makes this difficult to do. Mithen adopts the concept that there are different kinds of intelligence such as general, social, and technical. In his view, human ancestors evolved from having only general intelligence to supplementing that with other, specialized intelligences that enabled tool-making and language. The explosion in cultural creativity between 60,000 and 30,000 years ago occurred when these various intelligences were integrated, making possible art, religion, and science. Consciousness adopted the role of an integrating mechanism for knowledge that had been trapped in separate specialized intelligences.

Mithen writes that the use of metaphor and analogy is the most significant feature of the human mind. He has to rely on metaphor and analogy to convey some of the ideas in this book. While his speculations are generally persuasive, they often rest on a frustratingly vague substrate. Mithen's epilogue on the origin of agriculture, being better founded on evidence, is more specific. The book is illustrated with numerous diagrams, some of them too schematic to be scientifically useful.

Carlos Camara 2003-01-31

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

This is a great book, and along with M. Donald's Origins of the Modern Mind, the most comprehensive and plausible theories of the evolution of the mind. I leave out of this comment evolutionary psychologists, like Pinker or Tooby and Cosmides, because they focus on the results of evolution, not the process itself.

Mithen's point is that to fully understand the modern mind and its origins, psychology, cognitive science, philosophy and neuroscience are not enough (these are the classical fields, theres of course sociology, AI, etc...) but that archeology has something to add as well. In fact, as he shows, it is a fundamentlal piece of the puzzle to understand the archeological history of primates in order to see what that has to say about the changes the mind went through across evolution. When others might have focused on language, and its origins, Mithen focuses on the actual evidence: bone remains, ancient tools, etc.

Mithen thus divides the evolution of man and his mind in stages, four of them, starting with the common ancestor of man and ape, about 6 million years ago, then with H. Habilis, then H. Erectus and the Nearthentals and finally with, well, us, or Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Mithen basically argues that the mind and its evolution can be understood on the context of the modularity-workspace models of the mind, and that changes in the mind across evolution are simply changes in the interactions (and appearence, existence, use or disuse) of these mental modules and the workspace (which he calls general intelligence). The modules are natural history intelligence, technical intelligence, Social intelligence and language.

This approach works well, and for example, shows that the difference between say, an ape (the model for our common ancestor) and a Nearthental, mindwise, is just that while the ape has general intelligence, well developed social intelligence (apes live in groups and interact a lot), their technical and natural intelligences are rather poor (they struggle to build tools, to say the least). Language is, although this point is controversial, absent. The nearthantal, with his natural and technical intelligence almost as developed as his social intelligence (they migrated, had hunting strategies, knew to forage well, built "complex" tools) and language, would have a much more complex or closer to modern mind. This example is an oversimplification of course, but examplifies Mithens strategy adequately. In similar fashion, Mithen describes the differences and reasons for these differences, in the minds of primates, hominids, and finally man, as well as the gradual change from ape-mind to human-mind.

Things in the book, and theoretically, get interesting when H. Sapiens arrives. The difference is not only on how developed the modules or the workspace is, but how these interact. So, the modern mind is what it is because natural science intelligence say, can interact with language and with social and technical intelligence as well. Thus men might want to depict animals (natural) on walls by drawing them (technical) for social purposes. Thus the origins of art. In a similar way, religion appeared. The appearance of pathways across modules and general intelligence, building a meta-workspace, argues Mithen, is the cause of the cultural explotion, of the modern mind. This is again oversimplified, but Mithen does a good job of arguing for why and how this came about.

As an interesting note, Mithen talks of consicousness's possible role as an integrator of distributed information in the modules. Consciousness is to Mithen present on the modules by themselves, and thus argues H. Habilis was in that sense consicous, but sees reflexive consciousness as taking its modern form by the addition of connections between modules, the creation of a meta-workspace. This is in close and curious agreement with Baars theory of consicousness, or with neurocognitive workspace models of consciousness (Dehaene's The Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness).

In closing, this book does much in adding to our understanding of the evolution of the mind, and thus should be read by anyone interested in this most precious aspect of hman life.

Stephen A. Haines 2002-05-01

27 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

Mithen makes a valiant effort to establish the evolutionary roots of human intelligence. It's a complicated task, with so little physical evidence to support his endeavour. Still, he uses what there is with commendable ability. In presenting the development of intelligence, he falls back on three metaphorical images - the Swiss Army Knife, cathedral architecture and a dramatic play. The Swiss Army knife is a collection of specialized tools, each applied without relation to the others. You don't decork a wine bottle while trimming your fingernails. The cathedral is comprised of a central nave with connecting chapels. The chapels only connect to each other as intelligence develops. The drama is the history of hominid evolution, vague and obscure in the beginning, growing more discernible with more fossil evidence.

As with most cognitive studies, Mithen's book summarizes what is known of the similarity of chimpanzee [our nearest relative] intellect and abilities in contrast with our own. As do many of his colleagues, he finds our primate cousins lacking in all but minimal skills. With the chimpanzees thus disposed of, he moves to examine the hominid record. This is the great strength of this work. Instead of the usual tactic of portraying what is known of today's human intellect and projecting backward, Mithen starts at the beginnings of human evolution to carry his argument forward. Along the way he utilizes anthropology, morphological studies, even climate and geography. He uses evidence well, assuming little and carefully building the model. Key points in the narrative are two periods of hominid brain enlargement, which he uses to enhance his model of special "intelligences."

With the earliest hominids having only a Swiss Army knife array of mental tools, each segment of intelligence had to develop independent of the others. According to Mithen, this situation led to each "tool" building a separate "chapel" in the mind. Based on a central "nave" of "general" intelligence - keeping the body going, food gathering, sex - new intelligences would arise around it. These new intelligences are technical, natural, social and linguistic. Each operated independently of the others, so that tool-making enhanced "technical" intelligence, while learning about bird migration or fruiting seasons developed "natural" intelligence. The Swiss Army knife aspect prevented these intelligences from interacting until the emergence of Homo sapiens. Then, according to Mithen, a "cognitive fluidity" tore through the walls of the "intelligence chapels" to acquire the broad range of abilities the mind exhibits today. While direct evidence of all this activity is, necessarily missing, the forceful presentation and elegant logic make it all a captivating read.

It's easy to critique Mithen's thesis. All you need is a competitive model of cognition. However, that would be unfair to what he has achieved, a carefully synthesized model of how human intelligence developed. Even without bringing in a competitive thesis, Mithen falls down in two important areas. After lengthy discussion of tool-making enhancing "technical" intelligence and its role in developing hunter-gatherer societies, he blithely omits any input from the "gathering" half of those communities. While rarely mentioning that tool-makers/hunters are almost exclusively male, even among chimpanzees, he restricts mention of female roles to the need to give birth to small-headed babies. He also depicts the changing of "social" intelligence associated with grooming in early hominids to the development of speech later. He ignores the possibility that speech is just as likely to have arisen within the community of females, who had greater reason to utilize it.

The second major flaw is his conclusion on how modern minds evolved from earlier ones. He argues that the "social" intelligence became the tool that opened the walls of his "intelligence chapels" of the cathedral. Since there is no reason to believe that intelligence should be so pigeon-holed as Mithen makes it, "social intelligence" as an integrating force is vague at best. Although i promised not to employ a competitive thesis, it's difficult not to refer the reader to Daniel C. Dennett's Multiple Drafts model of consciousness. If Mithen had consulted Dennett's Consciousness Explained, instead of blithely dismissing it, he would have discovered that his cathedral and chapels would have been built up over time instead of needing serious renovation at the end. Mithen would have been able to use the same evidence, indeed, the same metaphors, but with progressive construction instead of building then redecorating. Knocking down mental walls is not a satisfactory technique to build intellect. Instead, Mithen should have kept the theatre metaphor, which he restricts to history, and built up his drama from a soliloquy to a full cast epic. That would have allowed him to enlarge mental capacities through new players, scenery changes, improved interaction among the cast, perhaps with himself taking the final bow. Given the work he's obviously put into this and the wealth of evidence he's considered and offered us, a smattering of applause [after a careful reading of the libretto] is not out of order.