The Runaway Brain: The Evolution of Human Uniqueness
The human brain is astonishingly different from the brain of any other animal. Why? Have we somehow fooled Mother Nature and escaped from the laws of evolution? Written like a detective story, this book brings together a wealth of new research from paleontology, genetics, and neurobiology to explain the runaway evolution of the human brain. Evolutionists and human paleontologists have tended to assume that our intellect began to burgeon when our ancestors developed the ability to walk upright, to grasp and carry objects, or to form cooperative groups for hunting. While these and many other factors are important, this book shows that they are only some of the latest steps in a long evolutionary story that began a billion years ago. By now, the brains of many different animals are much larger than those of their predecessors and are superbly adapted to environments that have slowly become more complex. But our own distant ancestors were the only ones to enter a new evolutionary path, a feedback loop that involved their brains, their bodies, and an ever more complicated environment that they largely created themselves. The result, for better and sometimes for worse, is our own astonishing species. The author shows how this view of our evolution as a runaway process casts light on a number of major questions that recent discoveries have raised about our past. These include the identity and true role of the mitochondrial Eve, the origin of human diversity, and the confusion and controversy surrounding our fossil record. Two major views of recent human evolution hinge on the time at which people like ourselves first arose. Did they do so in several different parts of the Old World, the so-called "multiple origins" model, or did they appear suddenly and recently, perhaps driving all the more primitive hominids to extinction?
