From spears to speech

摘要

After a century of neglect, the mind has suddenly become an issue of evolutionary interest once again. Partly thanks to evolutionary psychology (by which I don't mean the pastiche that the media has largely been responsible for creating), the differences between human and non-human minds and their origins have begun to spawn a number of books. Notwithstanding the enthusiasm in the 1970s and 1980s for the similarities between humans and our primate cousins, both in popular culture and among academics, the fact is that humans are very different from even our ape sister species. William Calvin's latest book looks at how different we really are.