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The Bookshelf

William H. Calvin

 
                         SEATTLE, WASHINGTON 98195-1800 USA  

William H. Calvin
Affiliate Professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences
University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle

The Evolution of Human Minds:
The Ice Age Emergence of Higher Intellectual Functions

Monday, February 3, 2003      Chicago

The suite of higher cognitive functions includes syntax, multi-stage planning, structured music, chains of logic, games with arbitrary rules, and our fondness for discovering hidden patterns.  It's likely that they share some neural machinery.  But the archeological record suggests that they are late-comers - that the three-fold enlargement of the ape brain into the human brain was complete about 150,000 years ago, but that these "behaviorally modern" aspects were seldom seen before about 50,000 years ago.  What happened to reorganize the brain, to make it more creative and versatile, back during the middle of the most recent ice age?

 You can read more on the subject in my recent book, 

A Brain for All Seasons:
Human Evolution and Abrupt Climate Change

For the brain side of things, you will find many of the references in my earlier books,

• The Cerebral Code, (MIT Press 1996)
• How Brains Think, (Basic Books 1996)
• Lingua ex Machina (with the linguist Derek Bickerton; MIT Press 2000), and
• Conversations with Neil’s Brain (with the neurosurgeon George Ojemann, 1994),

More generally (the links to Amazon include descriptions and reviews):

• Helena Cronin, The Ant and the Peacock (Cambridge University Press 1992).
• Antonio R. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness.  (Harcourt 1999).
• Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable (Norton, 1996).
• Terry Deacon, The Symbolic Species  (W. W. Norton 1997).
• Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (Simon & Schuster 1995).
• Daniel C. Dennett, Freedom Evolves  (Viking 2003).
• Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies  (W. W. Norton 1997).
• Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee (HarperCollins 1992).
• Donald Johanson, Blake Edgar, From Lucy to Language (Simon & Schuster 1996).
• Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics (U. Chicago Press 1993).
• Melvin Konner, The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit (W. H. Freeman 2001).

• Ernst Mayr, This is Biology: The Science of the Living World  (Harvard University Press 1997).
• Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate (Viking 2002).

• Ian Tattersall, Becoming Human  (Harcourt Brace 1998). 
• Ian Tattersall & Jeffrey Schwartz, Extinct Humans (Westview Press 2000).
• Mark Turner, The Literary Mind (Princeton 1996).
• Frans de Waal, Good Natured:  The Origins of Right and Wrong (Harvard University Press 1996).  Together with his other books for general readers, such as The Ape and the Sushi Master, Bonobo, Peacemaking Among Primates, and Chimpanzee Politics, you get a good view of what the ape-human transition might have been from.
• Frans de Waal, editor, Tree of Origin:  What Primate Behavior Can Tell Us about Human Social Evolution (Harvard University Press 2001).  An excellent, readable collection of chapters by nine primatologists.
• Alan Walker and Pat Shipman, The Wisdom of the Bones (Knopf 1996).

• Jonathan Weiner, The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (Knopf 1994).
• Edward O. Wilson, Consilience (Knopf, 1998).
• Richard Wrangham, Dale Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (Houghton Mifflin 1996).