A Darwinian Survival Guide: Hope for The Twenty-First Century III

The remainder of the book was not particularly stunning to me, though I do think that the backgrounds and views of Brooks and Agosta are among the most suitable ones for this particular subject. One of my concerns with the press, voters, political leaders and public policy is that when environmental changes occur, from a scientific standpoint, the best solutions may take decades to implement simply because the belief systems held by the public are not amenable to rapid adjustment. The authors repeat the idea that I mentioned earlier while discussing the essay Why We're in the Sixth Great Extinction and What It Means to Humanity, that GDP is not the appropriate measure to use when conditions such as climate change and mass extinctions are occurring. At the moment, the developed world is obsessed with business growth and military power, with the political leaders in the U.S. and elsewhere focusing on the economic advancement of their countries while ignoring significant changes in their habitats that could result in their deaths. It doesn't help that, from a biological standpoint, we are just a current element in the biosphere, and that our belief systems, which may have had some value thousands of years ago, do not necessarily today. Men and women who are obsessed with becoming rich and famous are, in the end, just large mammals who, like other mammals, just happen to be alive now. As Brooks and Agosta aptly point out, we are a transient part of the biosphere, which is far more resilient than any existing species; it will be around long after we're gone. The biosphere itself can't survive forever and will disappear within about five billion years. I might add that if some of the tech bros think that they can circumvent death by transforming themselves into electronic or other entities, it is my view that any departure from our familiar lives as organisms is itself a kind of death.

Brooks and Agosta do not support conventional conservation measures and have their own ideas:

...nature is not fragile. It is robust because it copes with change by changing. The notion of a delicately balanced nature is antithetical to an evolutionary system. In evolution, change is the fundamental mechanism that allows living systems to persist. The biosphere is dynamic, not static, and resilient, not brittle. Most biologists readily accept this, recognizing that any appearance of stasis in nature is an illusion. Still, the message seems to have been missed by much of conservation biology, including researchers and policy makers, and the public, which looks to conservation biology for insight and understanding. This is exemplified by two misconceptions that permeate conservation efforts. The Gaia hypothesis represents the idea that the biosphere acts as a set of coordinated subsystems working to maintain a system-level homeostasis—that mythic balance of nature. This reinforces the idea that without human interference, the biosphere would somehow exist in a timeless, unchanging state of perfection. From this emerges such nonevolutionary ideas as "returning nature to the way it was"—the rewilding of the planet typically inspired by a nostalgia for idyllic nature in a past state of "perfect balance" that never actually existed. The butterfly effect is another popular metaphor for describing the biosphere. It rests on the common misconception that ecosystems are so delicate, the extinction of even one species can cause entire ecosystems to collapse. Meteorologist Edward Lorenz proposed the metaphor in 1972 as a thought experiment in the context of predicting the weather. The idea is that small changes in one part of the system—like a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil—could have large effects on the whole system—such as causing a tornado in Texas. The butterfly effect metaphor was co-opted by environmentalists as a true description of the delicate balance of nature. It represents a dire warning about the loss of any species, and the need to urgently maintain nature in its current or even some previous state. Yet nature is a complex evolutionary system, so the butterfly effect is an extremely poor metaphor to portray it.

The authors also question the ideas presented by E.O. Wilson in Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life. They don't go into much detail, but they seem to disapprove of it. Though I think that it is possible that Wilson's idea, i.e. making about half of the planet a wilderness, could work in terms of preserving biodiversity, as a practical matter it would be extremely difficult to implement. And humans might continue to damage the environment. Brooks and Agosta seem to draw heavily from their experiences at the Área de Conservación Guanacaste in Costa Rica, which they consider to be "a spectacularly successful experiment in growing an evolutionary commons and avoiding neoprotectionist approaches to conservation." Thus, their recommendations revolve around the development of human habitats in rural locations where the local ecosystems can be healthy while simultaneously supporting humans who are following sustainable practices. Drawing from history and current events, they consider cities unsustainable. Besides the fact that cities tend to make people less cooperative, they are subject to military attack (Gaza, Beirut, Tehran and Kyiv). Above all, large cities generally have unstable ecosystems, and the ones in coastal regions may soon flood due to climate change.

Actually, I was already following their recommendations without having read the book. This is easy to do if you de-civilize yourself a little and follow your hunter-gatherer instincts. The book itself is hardly a textbook on survival practices for the Anthropocene, but I think that it is a good starting point. I have no difficulty imagining a world governed by AI-assisted field biologists.

A Darwinian Survival Guide: Hope for The Twenty-First Century II

The middle section of the book covers human history over the last 11,500 years. This is an immense timeframe as far as humans are concerned, and I am attempting to incorporate the information included here with what I already knew. We don't know much detail about anything that occurred over 5000 years ago, but the main change was the development of agriculture. This is widely seen to be the underlying cause of changes from the nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles that had facilitated the survival of humans during the last Ice Age. Agriculture led to sedentary lifestyles that gradually permitted the development of small towns and, eventually, cities. One of the strengths of humans as nomadic organisms was their ability to just move on whenever conditions became undesirable at a particular location. With the sedentary lifestyles that were facilitated by ample local food supplies, new risks emerged. One was the development and spread of new diseases. Another was the need to protect property. Besides local theft and other crimes, the risk of outright invasion gradually increased, and when a city or town was invaded, the local inhabitants often had nowhere to go. Many ancient towns and cities were abandoned, and, over the centuries, this problem has not been solved. Imagine yourself as an inhabitant of the Gaza Strip today.

There were also social changes that occurred during this period, and it would appear that societies gradually became less egalitarian. Among hunter-gatherers, it seems that women and men were treated equally, and that women may even have held positions of authority. By the time of the Bronze Age, about 6000 years ago, improved weaponry seems to have precipitated the growth of patriarchal societies and increases in violence and wars. In many parts of the world, there was a gradual shift from polytheism to monotheism. Not coincidentally, the monotheistic religions tend to be built around all-powerful male gods. The best example that I know of regarding the evolution of warlike behavior is the Yamnaya culture, which dates from the Bronze Age. They were technologically advanced for the time, and, starting in Western Asia, moved to Europe and Northern India, with the men spreading their Y-chromosomes everywhere they went. When they arrived in new regions, presumably they killed the local men. They were also the originators of the Indo-European languages, which are now spoken by nearly half the people on earth. As I wrote earlier, the Yamnaya may have been the ancestors of both the ancient Greeks and the Vikings. It is possible that Yamnaya behavior was behind the Trojan War 3000 years ago and the Viking invasions from 793 AD to 1066 AD. The Vikings liked to travel, and they discovered North America nearly 500 years before Christopher Columbus. As time passed, male violence seemed to increase everywhere. This can be seen in the building of large barriers designed to keep out invaders. The Great Wall of China was built about 2000 years ago. Hadrian's Wall was built in 122 AD by the Romans to keep Picts out of England. Offa's Dyke was built in about 757 AD to keep the Welsh out of Mercia, which is now the English Midlands. As far as gene-spreading goes, because of a unique feature of his Y-chromosome, Genghis Khan, who died in 1227 AD, is thought to have 16 million male descendants. Since he was Mongolian, you can't simply say that gene-spreading occurred only in Western Asia, Europe and Northern India. In conjunction with the general increase in violent behavior, it should also be noted that cooperation gradually declined when H. sapiens increasingly encountered people who were not part of their group.

While male violence is a danger of modern life, it pales in comparison to the negative effects of human population growth. 6000 years ago, the world population was only about 7 million. 3000 years ago it was only about 50 million. In about 1800 it first reached 1 billion. By 2075, it is projected to be over 9 billion. It is the collective behavior of modern H. sapiens that has caused the Anthropocene era. This is an era of existential risk for us, though we have the tools available to avert our extinction or near-extinction. In the remaining third of the book, Brooks and Agosta will provide their solutions.

A Darwinian Survival Guide: Hope for The Twenty-First Century I

I've been reading this 2024 book by Daniel R. Brooks and Salvatore J. Agosta. Because it covers themes that I've discussed on this blog many times, rather than provide a detailed discussion of the book, I'm only going to mention things that interest me now. In my readings, I've come to feel that field biologists such as Brooks and Agosta are the best qualified to write books concerning how we should think about our context as organisms on Earth. Frankly, at this point I'm quite tired of scientists who come up with cute mathematical formulas that describe biological events, and then go on to be lauded as the latest scientific geniuses; my feeling is that a full understanding of biological events is well beyond human cognition. This academic phenomenon, I think, is related to Sabine Hossenfelder's dislike of string theory in physics. Mathematics, while obviously a valuable tool in the sciences, has also become a shortcut to professional advancement in the field of biology. Underlying this phenomenon is the prestige that was conferred to physicists such as Albert Einstein. I prefer field biologists who write in the scientific tradition that dates from Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace and can be seen in varying degrees in writers such as E.O. Wilson, Jonathan Losos, Rachel Carson, Frans de Waal, Jane Goodall, Ian Tattersall, Robert Sapolsky and Nichola Raihani. What concerns me is that we seem to have entered the Anthropocene epoch, which entails not just climate change, but the potentially preventable deaths of billions of people, when little action is being taken by many modern governments. For example, the three branches of the U.S. federal government are currently led by people who are scientifically illiterate, several other countries are theocracies, and many of the remaining countries are led by oligarchs who take no interest in science that is unrelated to their continued control of their governments. I must also point out that, in a situation like this, democracy is hardly a panacea, because most voters are scientifically illiterate and are therefore likely to vote for scientifically illiterate candidates. Furthermore, in democracies, the most popular candidates are often the ones who promise the most to voters and diligently avoid the suggestion that voters may ever have to make sacrifices.

Parts of the book discuss the biosphere and ecosystems:

The biosphere is robust, responsive, and resilient. There are, however, limits to the evolvability of its species. Darwinian evolution produces prodigious amounts of potential to cope with change, but it cannot anticipate the future. Organisms might appear to do so, yet only in the sense that conservative inheritance provides a means of "predicting" that tomorrow will be mostly like yesterday and today. Day-to-day, this tends to be a sufficient strategy for survival. Most of the time tomorrow is like today, but periodically, this fails. As Darwin and Wallace recognized, extinction is a fundamental part of evolution....When the environment is stable, evolution is survival of the fit with the fittest dominating numerically. When the environment changes, evolution is survival of the fit with the fittest becoming less numerous or going extinct, replaced by variants that were less fit in the previous environment. If by chance no variant is fit enough to cope with the change, then despite whatever preexisting potential the system may have had, it will go extinct....The biosphere is dynamic and resilient. Its ecosystems will not fall apart if some species are lost. The robustness of ecosystems to perturbations increases as additional levels of complexity emerge, and high levels of complexity is a hallmark of the biosphere. That complexity is embodied in the diversification of species and the interactions they form with each other. The conservative nature of inheritance and capacities for ecological fitting ensure enormous amounts of potential within the biosphere at any time. If the loss of a few species or even the breakdown of some ecosystems could cause the entire biosphere to collapse, life on this planet would have disappeared long ago.

There is also discussion of mass extinctions:

Paleontologists have identified five episodes that they call the great mass extinctions. Narratives focusing on what was lost give the impression of a biosphere teetering dangerously close to the gambler's ruin. But in a Darwinian world, so long as some life survives, much evolutionary potential is preserved. The most recent mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs, for example, led not only to an explosion of mammal diversity including us but also the diversification of the few dinosaur species that survived into what we now call birds. By concentrating on the aftermath of the great mass extinction events, the potential for evolutionary renewal becomes apparent. Mass extinctions are mass evolutionary resets producing new diversity following close encounters with the gambler's ruin.

The evolution of the genus Homo is discussed. The genus is about 2.3 to 2.8 million years old. H. sapiens is about 300,000 years old. The authors describe the origin of H. sapiens in much the same way as the authors of other books I've read, but their description is slightly more nuanced. At first we lived at the edges of savannahs in Africa but also spent time in forests. Initially, the savannahs were extremely dangerous to humans because of the presence of large predators. Over thousands of years, the surviving humans developed bipedal gait, language, large brains, tool-making skills and a high level of cooperation. It sounds as if there may have been a few Homo species that have never been identified. It also seems that our understanding of the migrations out of Africa is probably incomplete. The movements and their timing outside of Africa are also unclear. The genetic data isn't always available, because genes don't preserve well in the hotter regions of Africa. We do know that our ancestors interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans. But there is also a strong possibility that there were several other Homo species that have never been identified and are now extinct. We may never know all of the details of our evolutionary background, but it would appear that our ancestors gradually acquired slightly greater skills and were eventually more adaptive than the other Homo species. Before the last Ice Age, they were able to make a variety of tools and were able to make complex objects such as ocean-going rafts. When different groups of hunter-gatherers met, there initially were not hostilities, and trading and intermarrying began. Sometimes they would run into different Homo species. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was probably correct at least in the sense that at times in the past, when resources were readily available and populations were relatively low, there were fewer hostilities between different members of the Homo genus.

As far as I've read, I'm up to the Last Glacial Period, which started about 100,000 years ago, peaked about 20,000-25,000 years ago and ended about 11,500 years ago. During this period, all of the known Homo species except H. sapiens became extinct . We may be in the process of moving from an apocalyptic cold period to an apocalyptic hot period. I will continue reading and will have one or two more posts.

The Controversial Origin of War and Peace: Apes, Foragers, and Human Evolution

I came across this article, by Luke Glowacki, in 3 Quarks Daily. It is an unusually academic article for them to post, but I read it with interest, because war has been so much in the headlines recently. Unfortunately, the article is extremely narrow in scope and focuses mainly on the timeline in the history of war. The questions become "Did war originate with our common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos or later?" and "If it originated much later, was it present among Homo sapiens hunter-gatherers?" I think that the article could have been improved by spending more time defining the role of war and aggressive behavior within a species.

Chimpanzees are known to behave aggressively toward other chimpanzee groups. Bonobos are not as well understood, but they don't seem to be as aggressive as chimpanzees. Glowacki fails to mention that bonobos operate in matriarchal hierarchies, and I think that gender could be a useful lens for discussing war, since female primates are generally less physically violent than male primates, and are accordingly smaller and weaker. Although there is evidence that human hunter-gatherers engaged in warlike behavior, it is somewhat unclear how that manifested itself prior to the development of agriculture about 10,000 years ago. Glowacki does at least mention that, as a practical matter, it would be difficult for early hunter-gatherers to organize and coordinate anything that would resemble a modern army. He finishes by saying:

Recognizing that the capacity for both war and peace may be an outcome of our evolutionary history better explains how our species today can create durable peaceful relationships among societies that encompass billions of individuals but at the same time petty grievances and disputes can precipitate war with little provocation. We carry their evolutionary legacy today in our own struggles to create a more peaceful world, but one in which we all too often turn to violence.

I did not find this saccharine conclusion very enlightening.

My preferred way of looking at human behavior is through the lens of our evolutionary development of eusocial behavior, or, more broadly, cooperation. This occurred in tandem with bipedal gait and, later, the development of language. Through this process, Homo sapiens in effect outcompeted not only chimpanzees and bonobos, but all other hominids. Evolutionary processes permitted humans to achieve greater fitness than all other primate species. Rather than pretty this up for a feel-good moment, I prefer to compare humans to eusocial insects. I am reminded of my earlier post, "The Brutality of Life," in which I described bumblebees:

Every spring, a fertilized queen sets out to start a nest. She finds a site, often a hole in the ground, and begins to lay eggs. The queen emits chemicals that cause all of the eggs to become females that do not reach maturity. The nest then becomes a factory where the queen continues to lay eggs and her daughters tend to the eggs, find food and defend the nest. Toward the end of summer, the queen stops emitting the chemicals that control the development of her eggs and offspring. Some of her daughters mature to adulthood, and some males are born. The daughters start to lay their own eggs. Initially, the queen attempts to eat all of the eggs laid by her daughters, but eventually, her mature daughters attack and kill her. The mature daughters that have been fertilized leave the nest seeking shelter for the winter. In the spring, the process starts again.

It seems to me that scientists often ignore the most basic principles of Darwinism. Natural selection is not a pretty process, and for the most part it's just a numbers game: did a species survive, and, if so, how? We like cooperation and social harmony, but that is only because we have evolved to feel that way. Most species don't, and that includes bumblebees. While, ostensibly, bumblebees are eusocial, like us, the queens exert complete biological control over all of the other members of their hive. Eusociality itself does not imply equality. The end result is that bumblebees are an extremely durable species, while nearly all bumblebees are, in effect, slaves. In his essay, "Brain Size and the Emergence of Modern Human Cognition," Ian Tattersall describes how modern humans evolved in a rather haphazard manner during periods of vacillating climate change. In an evolutionary sense, this means that we just happened to have the right characteristics at the right times, and we could easily have become extinct with slight environmental differences. As a cautionary note to optimists, I often feel compelled to point out that our notions of morality do not correspond with the universe in general and are simply evolutionary characteristics that have helped our species survive. On the other hand, on a more purely rational basis, there is ample reason to remove from office leaders whose aggressive military actions cause the pointless loss of human life and unnecessary humanitarian crises. The long list of offenders includes not just Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Putin, but Benjamin Netanyahu and George W. Bush.  

In my opinion, the major problems that we are facing now are human overpopulation and anthropogenic climate change. Those two conditions alone are generating pointless wars. Most countries, including the U.S., currently lack governments that seem capable of addressing those risks.

Brain Size and the Emergence of Modern Human Cognition

This essay, by Ian Tattersall, from Rethinking Human Evolution, is probably the last I'll discuss from the book. Like the other essays, it challenges conventional wisdom regarding human evolution and makes some good points.

For reasons previously explored both by this author (Tattersall 1997, 2015) and by the editor of this volume (Schwartz 2006, 2016), paleoanthropology has been mired since the mid-twentieth century in the beguiling notion that evolution in the hominid family (hominin subfamily/tribe, if you prefer; the difference is notional) has consisted essentially of the burnishing by natural selection of a central lineage that culminated in Homo sapiens. Yet accretions to the hominid fossil record over the same period have, in contrast, consistently shown that hominid phylogeny instead involved vigorous evolutionary experimentation. Over the seven-million-odd years of our family's existence, new species and lineages were regularly thrown out onto the ecological stage, to be triaged in competition with organisms both closely and distantly related. Extinction rates were high to match. Further, it is by now well established that all this took place in the context of constantly oscillating climates and habitats (deMenocal, 2011), to which steady, perfecting adaptation would not have been possible, even in principle.....the gradualist interpretive framework has tenaciously lingered, leading to the widespread application in practice of a strictly minimalist systemic approach that has often been justified by spectacularly contorted reasoning (see Spoor et al. [2007], and Lordkipanidze et al. [2014] for classic examples).

Tattersall looks closely at brain size in various hominids. The generally accepted narrative, which I've mentioned before, is that our ancestors first became bipedal due to climate change and the replacement of forest with savannah; this led to dietary changes in which meat provided a more efficient energy source, and cooperation increased, leading to language development and increased brain size. Tattersall says that, although brain size did increase generally in hominids, there is no evidence that this increase alone correlates with increased intelligence. One hypothesis is that the demands of human childrearing required higher intelligence. Tattersall adopts a different position. He thinks that the development of language in early Homo sapiens provided the main impetus. By about 100,000 years ago, humans were sufficiently adept in the use of symbolic language that they were able to manipulate symbols in their thinking processes, which roughly corresponds with what we think of as intelligence. So, Tattersall's view is that what we think of as intelligence is an unexpected byproduct of the acquisition of language. And, although brain size did initially play a role, it doesn't necessarily now. For example, the now- extinct Neanderthals had larger brains than us but apparently lacked our capacity for symbolic manipulation. Additionally, human brain size has been decreasing for tens of thousands of years. Tattersall compares this to early brute force computers (such as Deep Blue), which had to be large to solve problems, whereas recent, smaller algorithmic computers solve even harder problems more efficiently. On the whole, Tattersall's point is that the development of human cognition did not occur within a context of steady movement toward a likely end; a more accurate description is that, at any given time, nature seems to be conducting various survival experiments for which no outcome is clear. Additionally, energy usage often plays a role in evolution. Neanderthals had large bodies and brains, so they were energy-inefficient compared to humans. Strangely, we are now running into similar constraints with cryptocurrencies and AI, which are already straining our energy resources. It looks as if the evolutionary model for both animals and machines may be the movement to lower energy consumption combined with higher performance. Without the sun, we wouldn't be here.

These thoughts relate to those of other writers I've discussed. For example, Giorgio Vallortigara has shown that even chicks use basic arithmetic and geometry, but without symbols or language. This is a good example of how a cognitive function can become more useful through the use of symbolic reasoning. There is also somewhat of a connection with the work of Vinod Goel, who discusses the evolution of the human brain, which is actually a wider look than Tattersall's discussion. Tattersall is probably only talking about the prefrontal cortex, which is relatively small, and the rest of the human brain is mostly quite ancient. Looking at this only from the present, the determinists I've discussed may have some relevance, because they specifically emphasize human limitations and the variability of skills within the current population. This group includes Robert Sapolsky, Robert Plomin, David Reich and Kathryn Paige Harden. While Tattersall is apparently happy that evolution managed to allow us to be here today, he doesn't discuss the liabilities that we've inherited from our evolutionary past. Having myself observed human behavior for seventy-four years now, there is a lot not to like about it.

Human and Mammalian Evolution: Is There a Difference?

This short essay, by John de Vos and Jelle W.F. Reumer, is another from the book I'm reading. I found it interesting and will just sum it up.

From ancient times to the present, there has been a conceit regarding the place of humans in the world. De Vos and Reumer state this nicely as follows:

When God created the world, he did so in a succession of different steps. The creation of animals was one such step. The creation of mankind was another one. Ever since, mankind has been considered (i.e., has considered itself) not to be part of the animal kingdom. This notion—that Homo sapiens is a species next to, above, or outside the mammalian world—has long perverted science. Ernst Haeckel's famous "Stammbaum des Menschen/Pedigree of Man," published in 1874, shows "man" in the highest branch of the tree, above the rest of the living world, although part of the apes.

Commendably, these authors prefer to study humans as mammals, and their research shows that, in the past, environmental changes affected humans just as much as other mammals. The Pliocene period, 5.3 to 2.6 million years ago, entailed a cooling of the planet, during which forests were transformed to grassy plains in the American prairies, the Eurasian steppes and the African savannahs. Horses and antelopes evolved from smaller, shorter-legged animals to have longer legs, new dental characteristics and increased socialization. The Pliocene, with its increase in grasslands, was also the time of origin for early hominids such as Australopithecus.

Thus, both the evolution of human bipedalism and erect posture on the one hand, and of the long-legged running gait in horses on the other, are the result of Miocene-through-Pleistocene climate change in conjunction with the reduction of forest ecosystems and increase in open habitats....Humans, antelopes and horses are mammals that adapted to a new environment, and their evolution reflects their convergences.

There are also parallels between humans and other mammals seen in studies of island paleontology:

Although the mechanisms leading to observed phenomena remain unclear, these studies have given rise to what is called the "Island Rule." That is, in general, small mammals (shrews, hedgehogs, rodents, leporids) become larger when isolated on islands, and large mammals (elephantids, hippopotamids, bovids, cervids) become smaller....Although until fairly recently one might have wondered if humans would be an exception to the Island Rule, the possibility emerged with the discovery of the remains of a Late Pleistocene hominid on the Indonesian island of Flores....Claims of microcephaly notwithstanding, the specimens are more reasonably seen as evidence of island dwarfing and of a separate species.

During the Late Pleistocene, many large mammals became woolly: the woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, musk ox and cave bear. At that time, the climate was cold and dry. But at the end of the Pleistocene, the climate became warmer, and most of the woolly species became extinct. As a speculative matter, the authors suggest that Homo neanderthalensis, which had evolved during the Pleistocene, may also have been "woolly," and became extinct along with the other woolly mammals.

The point of the authors is that large mammals are large mammals, and there are probably convergences when different species experience the same environmental changes. From a scientific point of view, I think this is fairly obvious – though it would be heresy to many.

Sex, Reproduction, and Scenarios of Human Evolution

This is a short essay by Claudine Cohen in Rethinking Human Evolution, edited by Jeffrey H. Schwartz, which is part of a series in theoretical biology. I will probably read several of the essays and comment separately on each one. I am attempting to update myself in a field that I find interesting.

In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin speculated that in early human history mate selection was performed by females, based on the physical and social characteristics of males, and that these choices affected the characteristics of males over time. This is the same idea that I mentioned a few years ago, regarding speculation that Dutch men are the tallest in the world because Dutch women selected them, considering tall men better providers than short men. However, Darwin thought that mate selection later became a male behavior, and that women began to adorn themselves so as to make themselves more attractive to men. While Darwin admitted that sociocultural practices can affect mate selection, he thought that, after the early period, males generally tended to dominate women.

From the 1920's to the 1970's, cultural anthropologists rejected biological evolutionary models in favor of human social structures. In the mid-1970's sociobiology was popularized by E.O. Wilson and gene-maximization was popularized by Richard Dawkins. I think that Cohen may conflate Wilson's views with those of Dawkins, because they are not identical. She thinks that Dawkins's support of gene-maximization is reductionistic and provides an unsubstantiated advantage to males. Wilson's views are more concerned with group or multi-level selection, which are different things entirely. In any case, Cohen favors maintaining the importance of socio-cultural factors in human sexual behavior and she seems to dislike genetic explanations of this subject. When she wrote this essay (in about 2016), other deterministic models, such as Robert Sapolsky's, were not well known. I think that the clunky old cause-effect model of determinism, especially through genes, is giving way to a messier model such as Sapolsky's. Under that model, specific behaviors of humans do emerge causally, but we can barely comprehend how. Different sexual behavior does emerge from different social contexts, but those contexts also fit within broader deterministic models. While Cohen does seem to approve of Darwin's views, she does not focus on the central Darwinian idea that species go extinct for a wide variety of reasons: if a species goes extinct as a result of its social practices, it lacks fitness, according to Darwin, and social causes may be just as causal as the earth being struck by a large asteroid. I think that many people, even in the sciences, inject free will into their theories because it provides the feeling that we have control over our destinies – even though we don't. 

I found Cohen a bit more enlightening in other areas. The fact of concealed ovulation in humans, but not in other primates, had been a puzzle to me. Was it to conceal paternity? There is a convincingly simple hypothetical explanation for this: bipedal gate. The genital exposure of female humans is much less conspicuous than that of other primates, not attracting as much attention. So it is quite conceivable that, with the gradual development of other erogenous zones in the female body, the role of sexual signaling from the vulva gradually declined. The increasing complexity of human social structures, including the use of clothing, may also have reduced the desirability of conspicuous estrus:

In the absence of visible estrus, human sexual behavior and reproduction become disconnected (Godelier, 2004). Consequently, the uniquely human manifestations of eroticism and sexual pleasure (see Bataille 1957, 1961), coexist with, and may even replace, the physiological function of procreation (Zwang 2002).

More generally:

The acquisition of concealed ovulation has been viewed as a key event leading to the transformation of gender relationships and roles in human groups. If it was related to the acquisition of Hominin bipedal gait, its roots lie well before the origin of the genus Homo. Understanding concealed ovulation – its origin, causes, and effects – is likely fundamental to understanding human evolution and the emergence of social structure, as is reflected in its being the starting point of several scenarios of "hominization."

Another interesting area that Cohen delves into is the social and other effects of the demands of raising human babies. The workload is so high that a male partner is generally needed to at least provide food. But cooperation spills over into the surrounding group, leading to general cooperation within that group. More interestingly, humans are the only primates with menopause, and other female primates remain fertile up to their deaths. 

Whereas young female apes leave their mothers to join their male partners' territories (patrilocality), the positive role of grandmothers is favored by matrilocality, that is, the cohabitation of daughters with mothers (in contrast to cohabitation of the son's mother and his wife). In turn, this leads to a close and harmonious distribution of roles for caring and educating children. In humans, matrilocality permits a better environment for raising young children. Older women, freed of reproductive constraints, can achieve the status of a wise and dominant figure, and contribute to the welfare of their group, by virtue of the knowledge and experience they acquired over a long period of time, one that extends well beyond the cessation of fertility.

In this vein, Cohen suggests that figurines such as the Venus of Willendorf (28,000-25,000 BCE) are not symbols of fertility, but represent the importance of postmenopausal women in those societies.  

A Clarification on Randomness and Determinism

On some of my posts, I've referred to evolutionary and other processes as random. It is possible that that is correct in a strict sense, but in keeping with my general view of determinism using Robert Sapolsky's model for biological processes, I think that some further explanation is in order. A problem arises because we may not always be able to explain the exact events that cause specific speciation. On a basic Darwinian level of explanation, we can now see how Homo sapiens outcompeted other Homo species. Since we may never know exactly how this was inevitable, and, given the nature of the language that we use to describe biological processes, "random" is probably an acceptable term for describing that evolutionary event. However, if you look at this process through the lens of physics, randomness may apply only to subatomic particles that have no effect on macro biological processes. It is possible that we may never be able to understand exactly why there was never any chance that we would not come into existence.

I think that, because of our cognitive limitations, evolution may always appear directionless, i.e., undetermined. So, going forward, it may be necessary for scientists to discuss evolutionary events with explicit warnings regarding human cognitive limitations in their understanding of complex biological processes over long periods of time. Because of this development, my use of the term "random" may apply primarily to subatomic events. In reference to biological and evolutionary events, "random" may simply mean that we lack the capacity to describe them deterministically. So, when I say "random," that may just mean "we have no way of knowing."

This is a fairly significant distinction. Our languages themselves came about as evolutionary adaptations, so the context for their applicability is somewhat limited and is primarily related to the survival of our ancestors. As I've said, there was no evolutionary advantage to understanding some of the fundamentals of the universe. It is possible that this is one area in which AI may eventually surpass human cognition.

Scientist: E. O. Wilson: A Life in Nature

This biography of Edward O. Wilson, by Richard Rhodes, was published in 2021, just before Wilson died at the age of ninety-two. I was reluctant to read it initially, because it is short and was probably timed to coincide with Wilson's death. The book itself does supply an adequate account of Wilson's life and sums up his work reasonably well. However, since I have already read seven of Wilson's books, this one didn't add much to my knowledge. Because Wilson was one of the most significant biologists to follow Charles Darwin, I think that a more complete biography may appear within the next few decades.

Wilson was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1929. Neither of his parents attended college, but his father had reasonably good jobs as an auditor of rural electrification programs and as an accountant. His assignments required periodic moves. One of the major shortcomings of this book is that Wilson grew up in what I think was a highly dysfunctional household, and this fact isn't specifically examined. His father was an alcoholic, and his parents divorced when he was seven. That year, he had an accident in which his fishing bait struck his right eye and damaged it. The wound wasn't treated properly at the time, and he later became blind in that eye. This was significant, because he was already spending time outdoors observing small objects such as ants.

From an early age, Wilson was exceptionally industrious. After his parents divorced, he stayed with his father, who remarried. His mother moved away and also remarried. He became an Eagle Scout. Because of his father's moves, he attended several different schools, and he skipped a year. His birth parents supplied financial support for college, though they were not wealthy. At the University of Alabama, he completed both bachelor's and master's degrees in four years and then went to graduate school. Eventually he transferred to Harvard, where he completed his Ph.D. At Harvard, the atmosphere was highly competitive, but he received a teaching position there and stayed for the remainder of his career. One of his colleagues was James Watson, author of The Double Helix and co-discoverer of DNA, who was dismissive of field biologists like Wilson. Wilson was initially somewhat dismissive of genetics, which he called "reductionist." However, he became more interested in genetics when William Hamilton published his theory of kin selection. 

Wilson's research interests changed over time, which you can see in the titles of his main books: The Theory of Island Biogeography; The Insect Societies; Sociobiology: The New Synthesis; On Human Nature; The Ants; The Diversity of Life; Concilience: The Unity of Knowledge; The Social Conquest of Earth; and Half-Earth. 

Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, became extremely controversial in 1975, when it was published. It was reviewed in the New York Review of Books, which prompted a group called the Sociobiology Study Group to submit a letter of protest titled "Against Sociobiology." That group included two of Wilson's colleagues at Harvard, Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould. They were ideologically Marxists and became a model for later politically-correct groups that automatically reject theories that present deterministic models for human behavior, which they immediately link to racism and eugenics. In 1978, at a symposium, when Wilson was about to speak, protesters interrupted, and one of them dumped a pitcher of ice water on his head. Wilson was not psychologically prepared to be the victim of protests such as this, and he disliked this period in his career. I think that Wilson did tend to favor deterministic models, which, after all, is what scientists generally do, and, coming from the South, may have internalized some racial stereotypes, but the protest against him was unfair, because he certainly had no racist agenda and was shocked by this treatment. This was probably a cautionary lesson to later biologists who chose to adopt deterministic models – Robert Sapolsky, for instance – and may explain some of the obliqueness of their writings. In my view, the New York Review of Books permanently tarnished its intellectual reputation by publishing a purely ideological criticism of Wilson that made life difficult for him for several years, even when his ideas were clearly more tenable than those presented by his critics.

Wilson later had run-ins with Richard Dawkins, after Dawkins published The Selfish Gene in 1976. Dawkins, following the arguments of William Hamilton, advocated a position in which evolution is driven by the multiplication of genes rather than organisms or species. From his work on ants and his observations of humans, Wilson advocated eusociality as a driving force in evolution. It is not entirely clear who won this argument – they may both be wrong – but eusociality is not currently seen as a suitable explanation for evolution in general. First of all, there are very few eusocial species, and one would expect far more of them if that were a driving force. However, it is clear that the eusocial characteristics of ants permitted them to become dominant species. Similarly, it is clear that human cooperation permitted humans to survive when all of the other Homo species perished. Also, humans are the only primates that are flourishing now. I think that the "grand theory" model in science has become obsolete. To a certain extent, it is the result of pointless competition among scientists: everyone wants to be the next Darwin or the next Einstein. I think that recent scientific findings indicate that, while the physical world may behave according to a set of rules, those rules, if they exist, are probably too complex for human understanding. Every language that we use, including mathematics, exists as a product of human evolution, and is ultimately not suited to answering fundamental questions about the nature of reality. Language is best suited to activities such as exchanging information, finding food, escaping enemies, building bridges and engaging in cooperation. In order to survive as a species, you don't have to understand the universe. Furthermore, even if we wanted to, recent findings indicate that humans are not fundamentally rational.

The main thing that I think is missing from this book is a meaningful discussion of Wilson's personal life. His father served in World War I, became an alcoholic, with ulcers, and committed suicide by shooting himself in the head when he was forty-eight. This sounded familiar to me, because my father served in World War II, became an alcoholic, with ulcers, and committed suicide by shooting himself in the head when he was fifty. This behavior is now routinely referred to as PTSD, yet Rhodes has nothing to say about it. Near the end of the book, he recounts interviews that Wilson had with the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Wilson said that he enjoyed being alone very much, and, more tellingly I think, said:

I want to feel that I'm in control, that I cannot be driven out of it, that I cannot be stopped, that I will be well regarded for being in it, and that entails control, and control means ambition. It means constantly extending one's reach, renewing, extending, innovating.

I don't have enough information to say this with much certainty, but it seems possible that Wilson's unstable childhood caused him to compulsively seek control for the rest of his life.  Rhodes says almost nothing about Wilson's adult personal life. It sounds as if Wilson did not pursue women at all until he arrived at Harvard. Once there, he seems to have dated only one woman, Irene Kelley, who did not have a college degree and worked in the Harvard admissions office. They married in 1955. She did not have any children, and they adopted a daughter, Catherine, about whom Rhodes says almost nothing. Irene died shortly before Wilson in 2021. So, to a certain extent, this book is opaque regarding Wilson's inner life.

Different: Gender through the Eyes of a Primatologist

As with Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, I found this more recent book by Frans de Waal somewhat informative, but, at the same time, annoying to read. The informative aspects relate to his expertise in primates, while the annoying aspects relate to his anecdotal style of writing. Most of his research experience comes from observing primates, and when he writes about them it seems as if he is describing friends and family members who happen to be chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, baboons, orangutans or macaques. Rather than focusing on conceptual issues, which are my main interest, he loves to describe the variability of primate behavior within species and between species. In this instance, I think the book would have been more effective if he had stuck to humans, chimpanzees and bonobos, which are closely related.

Socially speaking, we are not that different from chimpanzees and bonobos. Chimpanzee males are larger, stronger and more physically violent than females. They form hierarchies led by alpha males and maintain territories, which involves attacking and killing members of other groups. Males and females spend most of their time living with their own sex. Social tensions are relieved by grooming others. Alpha males usually have a broad range of social skills and do not rule by brute force; they are often respected by others. The dynamics are quite different in bonobo groups, because, though they are also hierarchical in structure, they are led by alpha females instead of males. Bonobo males are closer in size and strength to females and can be controlled by females who work in concert. The females can be violent and aggressive when necessary, but are usually less so than male chimpanzees. Bonobos stand out from other primates in that, comparatively speaking, they are sex maniacs. They behave in a bisexual manner. Females, who have evolved large clitorises, spend a great deal of time with other females in the missionary position rubbing their clitorises together.

To the extent that there is any theme to the book, it is that gender is not a social construct, and that most primates follow similar gender behavioral patterns. Males focus on physical activities and are not interested in child rearing. Females focus on child rearing and self-decoration. Humans differ from other primates mainly in the development of nuclear families. De Waal thinks that the nuclear family arrangement can cause domestic violence, particularly when there are external stresses, such as the pandemic. The book also touches on transgender issues and notes evidence of transgender behavior in one chimpanzee. 

The general outlook that de Waal seems to advocate is that we are primarily biological entities, and, as such, many of the categories and classifications that we come up with to explain human behavior are crude oversimplifications or misrepresentations that don't capture the complications of the underlying biological processes. One idea that he specifically rejects is mind-body dualism, which allows people to think that they are not their bodies. As I myself have said before, Simone de Beauvoir herself is guilty of this error. Although de Waal describes himself as a feminist, he says that he has had conflicts with ideologically rigid feminist women.

One observation that I found interesting was that, while male chimpanzees attempt to resolve conflicts with other males, female chimpanzees do not attempt to resolve conflicts with other females:

Given that four out of five female conflicts go unreconciled, it's fair to say that female chimpanzees are touched more deeply and are less willing than males to get over their disagreements. In the wild, too, females rarely make up after fights. They tend to disperse, which makes for an easy solution.

This helps explain why some of the females I've known became dogmatic and inflexible when disagreements arose. There was no discussion, and they simply left.

I was a little disappointed by the limited treatment of transgender issues in the book. This is probably because not much research has been done on the subject. The opposite is true for homosexuality and bisexuality, which are now widely accepted and understood. Some aspects of transgender identity may be explained by genetic differences at conception or hormonal exposure during fetal development. In theory, transgender issues could be handled in exactly the same manner as homosexuality or bisexuality. However, if, like me, you adopt a completely materialistic view of the universe and human life, it seems that you are your body. As a materialist, I have difficulty understanding why someone would make risky physical changes to their body through surgery and hormone therapy in order to match their perceived gender identity to their body. It is possible that further research may justify those procedures, but I am a little concerned that, without proper guidelines, children, left to their own devices, may make poor decisions. For example, at this moment, there are probably millions of socially awkward children who erroneously think that becoming transgender would make them more popular. I think that some research-based guidelines are in order.

Alfred Russel Wallace: A Life

I finally finished this book by Peter Raby. It isn't very long, but I didn't find it very engrossing. I read it mainly to learn about Wallace's relationship to Charles Darwin and how they agreed or disagreed. In particular, I wanted to know whether Wallace was intentionally marginalized by Darwin and the British scientific community.  

Wallace was born in 1823 in Wales, of English and Scottish descent, and was the eighth of nine children. His father was a non-practicing lawyer who thought that he could live off his investments, but he wasn't shrewd and found that he didn't have enough income to support his family. This caused them to move frequently, and Alfred's schooling ended in 1837, when he was fourteen; he began looking for work. Initially he moved to London and lived with his older brother, John, who was an apprentice builder. In London, he was exposed to the radical politics of the time. Later in 1837, he began an apprenticeship as a surveyor with his eldest brother, William, which lasted six years. This position left him with lots of time outdoors. In 1843, his father died, and William's surveying business was moribund. For a time, Alfred held a teaching job in drawing, mapmaking and surveying. There he met Henry Bates, who encouraged him to collect insects and later accompanied him to South America. William died in 1845, and Alfred and John unsuccessfully attempted to revive his surveying business. Then Alfred and John decided to start an architecture and civil engineering business. Alfred was recruited to give lectures on science and engineering at the local Mechanics' Institute.

Inspired by Alexander von Humboldt's account of his travels in the Americas from 1799 to 1804, and Darwin's account of his travels in The Voyage of the Beagle (1831-1836), Wallace and Bates decided to travel to the Amazon in 1848 and cover their expenses by collecting insects and other animal species and selling specimens to collectors and museums. Wallace stayed for four years, keeping notes and observing the indigenous population. He was joined by his brother, Herbert, who died there of yellow fever. On his return trip in 1852, without Bates, there was a ship fire that destroyed his collection, which, fortunately, was insured. Back in London, he wrote some papers and met a few scientists, including Darwin.

Since Bates and others were already exploring the Amazon, Wallace elected to explore the Malay Archipelago, this time better-prepared, again collecting specimens. The trip lasted from 1854 to 1862 and was far more successful than the Amazon trip. At times, Wallace had a huge staff of helpers. While there, he sent a paper to Darwin that outlined his ideas concerning evolution, which was still a nascent topic. Darwin panicked, because he had been sitting on his idea for years but had yet to publish much about it. The result was the joint reading of Wallace's paper with a hastily-assembled paper of earlier writings by Darwin at the Linnean Society on July 1, 1858. The title of Wallace's essay was "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type." Both essays were later published. Because Darwin's essay was based on earlier writings, his paper was read first. There is much discussion in this book and elsewhere about whether Wallace was treated fairly, and I think that he was. Darwin did have an advantage at that point, and he began writing On the Origin of Species while Wallace was away at sea. The fact is that Darwin went out of his way to assist Wallace: he could have thrown Wallace's paper in the trash and forgotten about it, and no one besides Wallace would have known the difference. Furthermore, in their subsequent interactions, Darwin was always magnanimous with Wallace and significantly boosted his career.

Wallace organized his collection while living with his sister, Fanny, and her husband. He became a defender of the theory of natural selection and met Darwin at his house. He had a courtship but was rejected in 1864 shortly before the wedding by his fiancée, presumably because he had little money – at the age of forty-one. In 1866, Wallace married another woman, Annie Mitten, who was the daughter of a moss expert. They had three children, two of whom survived to adulthood. Like most of his family, he was poor at managing money and ran into financial difficulties. I might add that, Darwin, comparatively speaking, came from a financially savvy family. The situation improved when he published The Malay Archipelago in 1869 and it became his most popular book. He made several attempts to get a well-paying job but always failed. Like Darwin, he was an introvert, and he probably made a weak impression at interviews. Similarly, both of them disliked participating in public events. In 1881, Darwin campaigned for and won a pension for Wallace, which relieved some of his financial pressures.

Evolution was only one of Wallace's interests. In science he is also known for advancing biogeography and ecology. But he also became a proponent of phrenology, hypnosis, and spiritualism, the latter in the form of séances. Once he believed something, it was difficult to change his opinion. He attended many fraudulent séances but still found them convincing. This caused his scientific colleagues to raise their eyebrows. In my view, he substantially weakened any claim he might make to be a leader in evolutionary thought by stating that humans are exempt from evolutionary forces and are operating on a plane that is separate from physical reality and includes God. Not only is this a ludicrous idea, but it also misunderstands the important idea that humans are part of nature and not much different from other animals. That is something that Darwin understood perfectly well, so I think Darwin deserves far more credit for the development of early evolutionary theory than Wallace.

Wallace also adopted many of the progressive ideas of his day. He was an early advocate of socialism and had opinions on women's rights. He did not support the private ownership of land. But he also led a campaign against vaccinations. 

More so than Darwin, Wallace liked to observe people throughout the world. Whether it was through the Romantic poets or Rousseau, he held a sort of noble savage theory and found that indigenous people were purer and happier than modern Westerners. On a late lecture tour of the U.S., he had a negative impression of American culture, which he thought followed the European exploitative model, in which the environment is essentially trashed just so that a few people can get rich.

Because Wallace lived to the ripe old age of ninety, he became one the most famous scientists of his era. After that, he sank into obscurity, and I think that is probably appropriate. His skills seem to have been quick learning, good observation and good writing. He was also talented at developing ad hoc theories, but seems to have lacked the follow-through to become a good theorist. So, on the whole, I'm not particularly impressed, and see him mainly as part of the British intellectual milieu of the mid-to-late nineteenth century: George Eliot, G.H. Lewes, Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, William Morris, Charles Lyell, Robert Owen, T.H. Huxley, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, etc.

Born Knowing: Imprinting and the Origins of Knowledge

More than any of the other books that I've discussed on this blog, this new book by Giorgio Vallortigara is almost purely scientific. Although it is very short, it describes in some detail the research that he and others have conducted on early cognition in animals. The primary animals used in this type of research are newly-hatched chicks, because they are readily available and easy to test. Also, because they can be tested at a very young age, they are better-suited than humans or most mammals for distinguishing inborn patterns of behavior from those influenced by experience. Much of the challenge in this type of research is in constructing tests which clearly indicate the origins of specific chick behavior. For this reason, the discussion is quite dry and logical, and therefore the book, though extremely well-written, would not appeal to most readers.

I won't attempt to describe all of the tests in detail, because I'm mainly interested in the general findings. The most general finding is that infant animals are primed at birth to respond to specific stimuli, and that their attention to those stimuli is inconstant and changes as they develop. The earliest stimuli that chicks pay attention to relate to animacy, specifically whether an object has a face, is self-propelled and moves with biological motion. Of course, this mainly concerns the identification of the mother and siblings and is extremely important in early life. At this point in the research, it is not known whether this type of knowledge is encoded at the level of single neurons or within complex circuits of several neurons.

One interesting experiment involves the presentation to chicks of drawings of geometrically impossible objects, such as one conceived by Roger Penrose, along with similar geometrical objects that exist in nature. The chicks prefer the possible objects. According to Vallortigara, "Simply, during the course of evolutionary history, natural selection has promoted the incorporation into the nervous systems of certain statistical regularities that are typical of visual scenes in the natural environment." Another discovery with chicks, which was made fifty years ago, is that they automatically make visual choices as if light always comes from above, even when it doesn't. Human visual perception is similarly influenced by drawings, depending on how the shading is applied. Other experiments indicate that chicks engage in rudimentary thinking without language. This includes a rough way of performing addition and subtraction, along with a basic understanding of geometry.

Vallortigara is cautious about claiming that chicks or other animals have innate knowledge in these areas, partly because it is difficult to know exactly when experience begins in most species. However, he is unapologetic in claiming that there are no such things as "higher" and "lower" organisms, since all organisms are products of natural selection that applies equally to all organisms. In fact, chick research indicates that the rough cognitive plan of chicks isn't much different from the rough cognitive plan of humans.

I find these ideas interesting, because they relate to some of the ideas that I've expressed on this blog. As I said some time ago, humans are quite similar to chipmunks. These ideas also apply to what I consider to be some errors that have occurred in the history of ideas. Because, as animals, we prefer beauty and simplicity, we tend to use them inappropriately when we describe reality. Thus, for example, Occam's Razor may technically be incorrect when reality is actually very messy and complex, such as in the case of quantum mechanics. The fact that we prefer to keep things simple or aesthetically pleasing doesn't mean that reality is simple or aesthetically pleasing. This point, of course, was brought up earlier by Sabine Hossenfelder. Another bad idea, which I've been thinking about more recently, is the nature of language. Until recently, most philosophers thought that thinking requires language, and it is now empirically clear that that is not the case. It appears to me that many mathematically-minded thinkers are completely incorrect if they think that the universe is a mathematical entity. Specifically, Bertrand Russell once thought that he could completely explain the world by starting with logical notation and using it to generate all of mathematics. The actual situation seems to be that animals evolved to use mathematical conceptions – unconsciously for the most part – purely as a matter of survival. This suggests that mathematics is not identical with nature, i.e., Bertrand Russell was wrong, and, for that matter, so was Plato. Another mistake along these lines occurred in economics when the rational agent concept became widely adopted. In that instance, economists preferred the simplicity of the theory, though it was never an accurate description of reality. I should also note that one of the difficulties in developing AI is that computer scientists tend to assume that the human model is the best one to follow. It probably isn't, but, on the other hand, it would be hard for computer scientists to come up with something better than billions of years of evolution did.

I don't think that most of my readers would find this book enjoyable to read, but I think it is an excellent entry point for discovering much of the faulty reasoning that passes for knowledge and wins awards. Language and mathematics are perhaps the best tools that we have at our disposal, but one must be wary of their animal provenance.

The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World

I've been reading this new book by Nichola Raihani at a very leisurely pace and finally finished it. Raihani's background is in evolutionary biology and psychology, which is somewhat broader than that of most similar authors. I found it informative with respect to the latest research in these areas, but was a little surprised to see how the disciplines have changed in recent years. For example, the term "symbiosis," which I grew up with, is obsolete, as is the name "E.O. Wilson." On the other hand, Raihani is a great fan of Charles Darwin, and I give her extra credit for that. One of the main things that I like about the book is that it provides an unvarnished account of how life evolves – so clearly that it becomes obvious how tenuous it is that we even exist.

The early chapters describe pre-human evolution, such as the introduction of mitochondria, a type of bacteria, into other living cells. Mitochondria were once independent organisms, and they became part of eukaryotes, initiating the evolution of multicellular organisms. This is the kind of happenstance that characterizes evolution and results in significant evolutionary changes. In this instance, mitochondria became the energy source that made higher forms of life possible. There is also much discussion of our distant ancestors and how they differed from other primates. It has been inferred that serial monogamy has been common throughout human history, based in part on the fact that human testicles are an intermediate size between those of gorillas and chimpanzees. Gorilla males have small testes because they have captive females and don't need much semen to reproduce, whereas chimpanzee males mate frequently with multiple females in order to reproduce and accordingly have large testes. Comparatively, human males must have mated with fewer females than chimpanzees but did not have captive females at their disposal in the manner of gorillas.

Until very recently it was thought that humans were born immature because of their head sizes, but it is now believed that metabolic stress on the mother is the actual cause: there is a limit to the size of a baby that can be sustained by the mother. Another interesting idea, which occurred to me earlier, is that the attachment theory of child-rearing is not supported by existing evidence. According to two studies, children who were raised by their mothers were no better adjusted than children who spent more time away from home, when examined later. This makes sense, because alloparenting was the norm throughout human history, and the current arrangement with nuclear families is an aberration.

The bulk of the book describes the role of cooperation in evolution and specifically in the case of humans. Cooperation has always been linked to species survival, but not necessarily in the same manner as in humans. Other primates do not engage in much cooperation, which makes humans more like meerkats or ants in some respects. Some fish resemble humans in the limited sense that their behavior is monitored by other fish, and they can develop reputations; in that case, the level of cognition is extremely low and does not imply true socialization. As in other books that I've read, there is discussion of how humans became cooperative on the basis of food shortages on the savannahs of Africa. Chimpanzees and gorillas did not live on savannahs, had plentiful food supplies, and therefore did not develop cooperative behavior. Hunter-gatherers were generally egalitarian as social units, and this changed when farming became the primary source of food. Farming led to increased populations in static locations and encouraged the development of social hierarchies, which permitted some individuals to engage in selfish behavior that increased their reproductive success.

For the present era, Raihani discusses how selfishness has made a comeback. She notes that selfishness has been the most dominant form in nature, and that cooperation exists only in small pockets. In the current environment, there are many incentives to cheat other individuals and to dismiss out-groups. To some extent, these preferences can be affected by socialization. For example, perhaps due to the influence of the Roman Catholic Church, northern Italians are more inclined to cooperate with wide groups to which they have little exposure than southern Italians, who tend to be more clannish and disregard higher authorities. This has been demonstrated in a study in which it is seen that people are more likely to return found wallets in the north than in the south. In the U.S., conservatives are typically unwilling to expend resources helping groups other than their own, thus their preference for low taxes. Raihani notes that cooperation does have costs, and that in many circumstances it is not irrational to engage in selfish behavior. Finally, in the current era, with climate change accelerating, she emphasizes how functioning states build cohesion in which a collectivist mindset permits the development of solutions to otherwise insurmountable problems.

I appreciate Raihani's straightforward description of our situation, in which she does not resort to using ridiculous phrases such as "the better angels." Human behavior has always been about survival, and trying to pretty it up isn't going to solve any problems. I think that she is somewhat better prepared to discuss these issues than others because of her knowledge of evolution and psychology. She also has some familiarity with economics. However, with the problems now facing mankind, it would also be helpful to have some knowledge of political systems and AI. Although we are living in challenging times, we have the tools available to survive if we choose to use them.

Transcendence: How Humans Evolved through Fire, Language, Beauty and Time II

 The "Beauty" section describes how humans, unlike other species, came to value and use objects that had no immediate practical use. This occurred in cultural contexts, and what counted as beautiful could vary from one tribe to another. The origin of beauty is probably associated with mate selection, where symmetrical faces are indicative of genetic health. Sabine Hossenfelder, the author of Lost in Math, could benefit from reading this part, which shows how even physicists may be influenced by cultural biases. Vince is stretching the term considerably to include many of the cultural influences that affect how people behave. She weaves beauty in with the development of trade and travel over thousands of years. When the Yamnaya migrated out of western Asia 5,500 years ago on horses and carts, they set the stage for what were to become trade routes. The kinds of things that were traded, such as silk and jewelry, were not essential and indicate that the prestige that we associate with aesthetic objects is fundamental to being human. She notes that even Columbus, much later, was primarily seeking a new route to the Indies in order to procure spices – hardly a critical commodity. Trade routes established contact between distant societies and facilitated the dissemination of knowledge worldwide. Specifically, Vince emphasizes the importance of the cities that appeared on trade routes and became central to the advancement of knowledge.

Hunter-gatherer groups are generally thought to have been more egalitarian than we are today. This was because men and women contributed equally to the food supply. Women were not as tied down by child-rearing as they are now, because other women shared the task. Although hunter-gatherers were violent like us, with small groups and set lifestyles there was no particular reason for men to take dominant roles. This all changed with the introduction of farming about 10,000 years ago, as discussed in The 10,000 Year Explosion. Men became the primary procurers of food, and agricultural communities created laws, private property and administration, which had previously been unnecessary. In this vein, though the book was published in 2019, Vince gets in some jabs at Donald Trump, possibly the apotheosis of stupid male aggression.

In Vince's view, the progress of civilization resulted primarily from cross-cultural fertilization, especially when people from a variety of locations became concentrated in cities. Her thesis is that the main importance of language is in its passing of knowledge from one person to another, which permits information to proliferate, as if it were a cultural version of genes. She likes to point out that innovation is actually quite rare, and that most of the development of civilization is based on copying. I think that this is true, and though she doesn't use this example, I am often amused by the arrogance of American exceptionalists. When I was growing up, Americans made fun of "rice burners" from Toyota. Now Toyota is almost twice as large as GM and Ford combined. In other words, most of the skills in one part of the world can easily be replicated elsewhere under the right conditions. Though it may not occur, there is no inherent reason why China couldn't surpass the U.S. economically in the next few years.

Vince's views on different ethnicities are fairly conventional. She embraces the popular idea that, since all humans are closely related, they're not all that different. This is generally true, but, though she recognizes that divergences occur, I don't think that she would concede, for example, that Ashkenazi Jews possess certain intellectual skills that other ethnic groups do not. In her discussion of genes and culture, she leans toward the more politically correct side that emphasizes culture more than genes as the deciding factor in which group prevails in specific circumstances.

The final section, "Time," reviews our understanding of time, and how it developed. I didn't find it particularly relevant, though I liked hearing about the influence that astronomy has had on the history of ideas. Vince morphs this into a discussion of reason, and she brings up some topics that interest me, such as human cognitive limitations and AI. She does not delve into the questions that come up in the event of the development of superintelligence. Though she does mention the research that I've discussed by Daniel Kahneman, she is somewhat more sanguine than I am about the future prospects for humanity. She correctly notes that religion usually interferes with reason and was responsible for the Dark Age. She mentions some of the avenues by which humans may significantly increase their longevity. In the end, she seems to cop out a little by comparing humans to superorganisms, such as slime molds. This might appeal to some of her more scientific readers, but to me it begs the main question: what is the future of mankind? While the ideas of equality and cooperation are central to the book, like most writers, she doesn't provide much of a roadmap. I thought that this was one of the better books that I've read on these subjects, but it was not completely satisfying, because it made no predictions. That may not be undesirable, though, given our inability to predict the future accurately. Vince, apparently, has not read E.O. Wilson, who provides the vocabulary that I prefer in this field. There is no specific mention of group selection, though that concept seems to support her conclusion.

Transcendence: How Humans Evolved through Fire, Language, Beauty and Time I

In order to take a break from Bertrand Russell, I decided to read this short book by Gaia Vince, who is a science journalist. I have been avoiding books by Yuval Noah Harari, such as Sapiens: A Brief History of Tomorrow, because, according to reviews I've read, they contain errors. Harari is a historian, and apparently he has delved into areas in which he has no particular expertise. Vince, on the other hand, is a science writer, and she seems to have a good grasp of the relevant research. I've so far read three of the five sections and find them to be informative and well-written. This is one of my favorite subjects, and I am always surprised to see how little people are interested in it, because it explains both how we came into existence and who we are now. There is no way to acquire a good understanding of human nature without familiarizing yourself with this research, yet many people seem to prefer living in ignorance. 

The first section, "Genesis," briefly describes the physics of the formation of the solar system, the atoms and molecules that were present, and the early evolution of the planet. It becomes apparent that a series of chance events, such as the asteroid collision that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, were necessary for us to reach our current position in the world. The next section, "Fire," discusses the emergence of the first hominid species on the savannas of Africa and the complex interplay between the environment, genetic mutations and culture. The most important change then was the movement from a primarily vegetarian diet to a mixed diet that included meat. This was first made possible by wildfires on the savannas, which killed animals and made them available to eat. When cooking was invented, plant foods were broadened, providing, with meat, greater nutrition from the environment. Some plants that had been inedible became edible through cooking. Improved nutrition is what precipitated hominid divergence from other primates. For most mammals, brain size is limited by nutrition, because large brains like ours require more energy than most animals can afford, given the amount of energy necessary to find and digest food, escape predators, etc. 

Once the diet of our ancestors changed with cooking, other characteristics of modern humans began to emerge. Our brains continued to increase in size, making it necessary to walk upright in order to balance them. Childbirth and childrearing became increasingly problematic, with babies whose heads were too large to fit through their mothers' birth canals and birth at a period far from maturity. In many species, babies are born almost mature, and their mothers soon become unnecessary for their survival, but human children take years to become independent. The difficulties associated with childbirth probably made women instinctively cooperative with other women, because it became necessary for their survival and the survival of their children. Alloparenting became the norm for humans.

The section, "Language," describes how the size of the brain continued to increase when language came into existence. Vince says that hunter-gatherers were multilingual and would change languages according to the territory they were in. Language itself causes increases in brain size, and the more languages you know the larger your brain has to be. The use of language made it easier to expand knowledge, and stories became the medium for storing that knowledge. Our early ancestors were awake far longer each day than other mammals, and they used the extra time to tell stories around a fire in the evening.

As with many books that I read, I like to compare the ideas with actual experiences that I've had in my life. I have noticed that women are more innately cooperative than men. Whereas men tend to be solitary and engage other men in competitive activities such as business or sports, women tend to be more practical and are constantly trying to expand their networks of female friends, which they instinctively know they may need at some point. At this stage in my life, I find that all of my male friendships have been superficial and transitory. In old age, all of the men I know have limited social lives, except for the ones presented to them by women. Women continue to establish social networks with other women throughout their lives. This situation actually mimics other eusocial species, in which the role of males is minute and colonies are controlled by females. It isn't hard to see that males often rise to power through aggression alone and frequently have very little to offer to society as a whole. In a political context, you can see just how incompetent male leaders such as Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Nicolás Maduro and Rodrigo Duterte compare to competent female leaders such as Angela Merkel, or, in the U.S., Gretchen Whitmer. To be sure, some men are effective leaders and some women aren't, but I think that an incompetent leader is more likely to be male than female.

I've also been thinking about language as it applies to me. I am not much of a linguist, and my attempts in school to learn French, Spanish and Homeric Greek met with limited success. I feel that it took me a long time to become proficient in English. Rather than being multilingual, I even disliked learning American English when I moved here from England. My family continued so speak with English accents at home, and I always experienced cognitive dissonance when I used English pronunciations rather than American pronunciations. According to Vince, multilingualism stresses the brain, and those who know multiple languages have to actively suppress other languages when speaking in one. I think that it would have been easier for me to learn other languages if I had grown up hearing them, but I didn't.

There are two more sections left in the book, and I should finish up on my next post.

Charles Darwin: The Power of Place V

During his final years, Darwin seems to have scaled back on his work a little. He continued with plants, writing on insectivorous ones, and then switched to plant growth. His last book, on worms, turned out to be the best selling of all his books. His son, Francis, completed medical school but, like Darwin's brother, Erasmus, had decided not to pursue a medical career, and instead he worked with his father on his scientific projects. Another son, George, who taught mathematics, helped him with his math. Francis married and provided him with his first grandchild, Bernard, who was raised in Darwin's house when Francis's wife died shortly after childbirth. Although Darwin was modestly wealthy and his books had sold well for scientific works, as with comparable families in his social class, he had a large staff of about twelve people, which makes his household seem bizarre if you compare it to contemporary ones. He was thrifty in his expenditures, and by the 1870's this had put him at a disadvantage in his experimentation, since biological research had expanded considerably and he did not possess suitable laboratory equipment.

He wrote an autobiography, which was intended primarily as a family document, with no thought of publication. According to Browne, it offers a straightforward account of his life without referencing his emotional state or inner life. At Cambridge, "My time was wasted, as far as academical studies were concerned....we sometimes drank too much, with jolly singing and playing at cards afterwards." He said that in his later years he couldn't stand reading poetry or Shakespeare. According to Browne:

Looking back, he reckoned that he learned nothing at school; nothing from his father, who considered him "a very ordinary boy"; nothing from two universities except that which he performed under his own steam. Everything accomplished on the voyage was from his own hard work.

His depiction of himself as entirely self-made can hardly be accurate. If, for example, Henslow hadn't set him up for the Beagle voyage and he hadn't befriended Lyell, it would be hard to imagine him attaining either the necessary inspiration or the subsequent success of his scientific career. He also expressed harsher views on Christianity than he generally did among his friends and family.

In 1880, Wallace, who, besides becoming a spiritualist, was bad at handling his finances and was going broke. Darwin generously assisted him by going through channels to arrange for a government pension for him. Darwin's brother, Erasmus, died in 1881. Finally, Darwin himself died on April 19, 1882, probably from heart failure, at the age of seventy-three. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Summing up Browne's two volumes, I would say that while they are extremely thorough, they focus more on the details of Darwin's daily life than on the role of his ideas in the history of science. I don't think that she emphasizes enough how much change has occurred in the last 150 years of scientific research, and how viewing Darwin close up fails to highlight his strengths and weaknesses as a scientific thinker. From my point of view, as a dabbler in scientific readings, the ideas of Darwin and his peers seem primitive, though they were radical at the time. For example, Lyell, who is considered the founder of modern geology, had no knowledge of plate tectonics and little idea of the age of the planet. The fossil record in 1870 was minute compared to what we have today, and the evolution of the plant and animal kingdoms is vastly better-understood. Both Lyell and Darwin seem to have been wrong about gradualism, though Browne hardly explores this fact. For example, Darwin would be astounded to read Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution, by Jonathan Losos, which I discussed earlier. In that book, Losos demonstrates how evolution can occur in only a few years, rather than thousands or millions of years. There is also a tendentiousness in Darwin's thinking, which seems to include the idea that evolution gradually leads to perfect organisms. In his mind, contraception was a bad idea, because it prevented the development of superior humans. More fundamentally, he didn't understand that sexual reproduction works well mainly because random mutations produce fitter organisms over time. He thought that, in advanced societies, males usually select their mates, and that their choices ultimately determine the fitness of their descendants. The actual situation is far more complex than that, and it sounds as if Darwin was simply repeating orthodox views of the social hierarchy in his milieu. So, although Darwin seems to have been a clearer thinker than most, he understandably lacked the superhuman ability to transcend various Victorian ideas, such as that of progress, which I don't think holds up well under scientific scrutiny.

I was also a little disappointed that even though Browne's discussion is sometimes sociological, she doesn't fully contextualize Darwin as a beneficiary of class privilege. It is easy to imagine someone like Darwin, who was a poor student and avoided confrontations, not flourishing at all under different circumstances. Today, someone like him probably wouldn't be admitted to Cambridge, and without family and college connections it would have been difficult for him to befriend Lyell and others and become part of the inner circle of scientists who called all the shots in Victorian England from behind the scenes. Browne describes how Darwin was quite talented at pulling strings in order to achieve the outcomes that he desired. He was also good at recruiting surrogates, Huxley in particular, to defend him, and therefore was able to avoid nearly all public contact. I don't think that if you placed him in a modern research environment, where he would be forced to adopt a narrow specialty and follow specific procedures, he would have done well at all. Browne does touch on this, but I don't think enough, because Darwin's success hinged on certain aspects of his environment that do not exist today.

One other point I thought I'd mention is that Darwin's opposition to religion was not something that he dreamed up by himself. Both his father and his grandfather were similarly skeptical, as was his brother, and Darwin probably absorbed it from his family.
In the broadest historical sense, it seems possible that the Reformation, led by Martin Luther, Henry VIII and John Calvin, sufficiently reduced Catholicism in the U.K. and Germany to free up scientific inquiry that might otherwise have been suppressed because of theological dogma. It may be no coincidence that the Industrial Revolution began in the U.K., whereas Catholic countries such as France, Spain and Italy significantly lagged. Even today it is notable that the countries most resistant to Darwinism tend to be the most religious. I might add that Darwin seemed to believe that morality had its origins in evolution rather than in religion, which I think makes him a precursor of E.O. Wilson, who popularized the idea of eusociality.

On the whole I found these books rewarding, though I could have done without the excessive detail. That tended to make the reading a bit too much like a BBC miniseries when I think it would have been more interesting to get to the heart of Darwin's ideas with briefer excursions into social history.

Charles Darwin: The Power of Place IV

Though Darwin's health remained uneven, he continued to write books. His next one was The Descent of Man, which was published in 1871. This filled in another gap left by Origin of Species and directly discussed the process of human evolution from earlier species. We know far more about this today than Darwin could possibly have known, but at the time it cemented his position as the primary thinker behind the idea of evolution. As with his other books, he drew from his many correspondences and was helped in the editing by his family, in this case particularly by his daughter, Henrietta. The book sold well, and Darwin's celebrity increased. Besides his knack for writing popular books, he looked the part of a sage, with a tall stature, a long gray beard and a serious countenance. I noticed that Daniel Dennett, the contemporary philosopher, seems to be doing a perpetual Darwin imitation in his physical appearance. This book was followed by On the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872, which turned out to be his most popular book to date. It sounds lighter than the others and contained many illustrations, which made it easier for the public to absorb.

By 1872, the Darwin family had become a mini-industry, and his wife, children and siblings all played roles in attending to the demands that arose. Emma, for her part, did not share Darwin's views on religion, but this didn't cause a rift between them, perhaps because in those days feminism wasn't prominent and married couples operated more on a duty-based model than one based on equality. The children were open to the ideas of their father, and they became comfortable with his brand of skepticism. Darwin didn't particularly like being popular, and his family became adept at managing the growing stream of visitors arriving at their house, sometimes unannounced.

In 1869, Wallace had published an unexpected article in the Quarterly Review in which he partially rejected natural selection. Apparently he had been taken in by the then-popular worldview of spiritualists and mediums who had been staging séances. This came as a shock to Darwin, but didn't damage their relationship. What is interesting to me is that Wallace consequently forfeited some of his authenticity as a co-founder of the theory of natural selection. In this instance, Darwin's plodding, empirical method proved to be an advantage over people who were in some respects more intelligent than he was. Though Darwin was not given to psychological self-analysis, he recognized that he had an ability sometimes lacking in university people and intellectuals, because he doggedly stuck to empirical procedures. Apparently, Wallace got carried away in thinking that a separate layer of reality that was unrelated to most species had provided for the development of humans. This explanation left the door open to spiritual forces and a human consciousness that transcended physical reality. I have noticed a similar phenomenon myself, particularly during the 1960's and 1970's, when gurus were popular, though they usually turned out to be charlatans. Part of this can be attributed to the fact that people with high IQ's have a greater tendency to become unhinged from reality than practical, down-to-earth people. In person, Darwin was not a scintillating conversationalist, and he never dazzled those in his presence with the variety of his ideas.

The popularity of spiritualism during the Victorian era leads up to my favorite part of the biography, which includes G.H. Lewes and George Eliot. Darwin was on friendly terms with Lewes, who had written a favorable commentary on pangenesis, and Darwin had visited them at their house in 1868. He also attended one of their Sunday literary gatherings in 1873. Middlemarch was published in 1871, and George Eliot was at the peak of her fame in the 1870's. Though Lewes and Eliot were slightly disreputable, because they weren't married, they became acceptable for socializing by both men and women around this time. Emma was dying to meet George Eliot, and, as it happened, in January, 1874, Darwin's son, George, arranged a highbrow séance at Erasmus Darwin's house in London with the medium Charles Williams. In attendance were Lewes, George Eliot, Francis Galton, T.H. Huxley, Emma and Darwin, among others. Some of them were believers, but many were skeptics. Darwin described the event as follows:

We had grand fun, one afternoon, for George hired a medium, who made the chairs, a flute, a bell, and candlestick, and fiery points jump about in my brother's dining room, in a manner that astounded every one, and took away all their breaths. It was in the dark, but George and Hensleigh Wedgwood held the medium's hands and feet on both sides all the time. I found it so hot and tiring that I went away before all these astounding miracles, or jugglery, took place. How the man could possibly do what was done passes my understanding. I came downstairs, and saw all the chairs, etc., on the table, which had been lifted over the heads of those sitting around it. The Lord have mercy on us all, if we are to believe in such rubbish. F. Galton was there and says it was a good séance.

According to Henrietta Darwin, "Mr. Lewes I remember was troublesome and inclined to make jokes and not sit in the dark in silence."  Francis Darwin reported that his father said "it was all imposture." Not long after this, Charles Williams was exposed as a fraud.

If you're tired of hearing about Charles Darwin, your misery will soon be over. Darwin has only nine years left to live, and my next post will be my last on Janet Browne.

Charles Darwin: The Power of Place III

When Alfred Russel Wallace got home, he and Darwin developed a cordial relationship but did not seem especially close. Wallace moved in with his sister's family in London and, after spending several years living in exotic and remote locations, he disliked the crowded city. Furthermore, although Darwin introduced him to his scientific peers, such as Charles Lyell, Wallace was an introvert and felt uncomfortable in wealthy, upper-class society. One senses that Darwin deliberately distanced himself from Wallace as co-discoverer of natural selection, and he avoided being photographed with him. Behind the scenes in England there was always political infighting within the scientific community as one person or group tried to outflank another with the goal of domination. In particular, the Darwin-Huxley-Lyell-Hooker group was often in conflict with a group led anonymously by Richard Owen, which regularly produced articles critical of Darwin's work.

Darwin's further research at home occasionally resulted in books. Before Wallace came back, a lesser-known naturalist, Henry Walter Bates, had returned from the Amazon, and Darwin took a great liking to him. Bates was more complementary to Darwin than Wallace, because his research helped buttress Darwin's main theory without the potential for stealing it. Bates specialized in butterflies and had noticed that some mimic others in their appearance, and that this is an example of natural selection at work. Darwin was delighted to have a non-threatening naturalist offer examples that supported his theory, and he strongly encouraged Bates to publish, which he did. Nevertheless, Wallace remained a crucial ally of Darwin, and, in an 1864 article, Wallace became the first to explicitly advance the idea that natural selection had produced modern humans. In a peripherally related manner, within scientific circles at that time, the notion that some races are superior to others was widespread. Darwin had been disappointed that some of his friends, Lyell in particular, stopped short of linking natural selection to humans, and Wallace's ideas were therefore closer to those of Darwin.

During the 1860's, Darwin's health deteriorated further, and though he was only in his fifties he looked old. With his increasing fame, prominent medical doctors visited him in Downe (the spelling had changed from Down), but none of them were able to cure him. At times he was bedridden for protracted periods. Friends, such as Henslow, and two of his sisters died. However, Darwin continued his research. Because of his celebrity, he began to socialize at the highest levels of English society, and Emma was ecstatic about getting to know the Tennysons personally. His five surviving sons initially provided him with some consternation, as they showed no particular talents, but, like him, once they started in college they generally improved by applying themselves, in much the same way that he had earlier.

His research from this period resulted in the publication in 1868 of Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication. In this book he attempted to explain how sexual reproduction actually works and allows traits to be passed from parents to offspring. He was not mathematically-minded and typically relied on the observation of physical attributes, which prevented him from developing a theory such as Mendel's, with dominant and recessive traits. He came up with a theory that he called "pangenesis," in which living matter contains unseen "gemmules" which carry inheritable characteristics from parents to offspring. This book was completely ignored and did nothing to enhance his reputation. In Darwin's defense, I suppose that you might say that it was a very early speculation about genetics, but it was of little value at a time when molecular biology didn't exist and the very idea of DNA was several decades away. In any case, Darwin was well aware that his theory of natural selection would remain incomplete without such understanding.

Other than the social and historical aspects described in the book, I am still finding it lacking in the sense that little is done to sum up Darwin's ideas in relation to modern science. The reader is left with the impression that Darwin had one important insight, which he maximized to the utmost by employing a pragmatic careerist strategy that made him the primary beneficiary of acclaim. In Browne's account, if you took away Darwin's privileged background and gave it to Alfred Russel Wallace, today we might be talking about Wallaceism instead of Darwinism, and Charles Darwin might be seen as an obscure Victorian hobbyist.