ASCENT OF MIND ICE AGE CLIMATES AND THE EVOLUTION OF INTELLIGENCE BY WILLIAM h CALVIN
REVIEWS - Ascent of Mind Ice Age Climates and the Evolution of Intelligence by William H Calvin - "There are the occasional brilliant works written by people just slightly outside of the field. Books that excite imaginations and run with a dozen new theories. They're often wrong, or only partly right, but the book isn't really any the worse for that. This book, The Ascent of Mind, is one of my best examples of such writing. (I'd pair it with The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.) There are ideas aplenty here, enough to make Jared Diamond happy, covering human evolution, archeology, psychology, climatology, and geology. The core idea is that human brain evolution was greatly, perhaps principally, spurred on by global environmental changes.
Good to see this classic back in print!AN ARGUMENT THAT THE ICE AGE CLIMATES PRODUCED EVOLUTIONARY CHANGESBy Steven H Propp William H. Calvin (born 1939) is a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, and a well-known popularizer of neuroscience and evolutionary biology (e.g., see his books Inside the Brain, Conversations With Neil's Brain: The Neural Nature Of Thought And Language, etc.).
He wrote in the Preface to this 1990 book, "There are several things I hope to contribute to the debate about human evolution through this book... The first is that... There were many abrupt [climate] shifts during the last 2.5 million years of fluctuating climate known as the Ice Ages... That 2.5 million-year period is exactly when our brains enlarged and reorganized beyond the ape standard, exactly when tool-making became prolific... A second involves how hominids might have discovered hunting... Third, I suggest that there is a three-part cycle of evolutionary alterations in body proportions... another predicted result is a considerable fluctuation in adult height during ape-to-human evolution." (Pg. xiv-xv)
He observes, "evolution above the one-call level didn't really get going until crossing-over was invented by eukaryotes about one billion years ago; promptly thereafter, multicellular life developed in a big way, inventing about 50 major ways of structuring a body plan during the next half-billion years. Mutation didn't acccomplish that: it was permutation. What affects the rates at which genes come to stick together, or develop new points at which to break apart during crosBy Phil Riggs on June 27, 2013One million years, approximately 22 ice age cycles explain why we fight for territory and life. Our ancestors moved south and then north repeatedly. Our ancestors survived. Small brains stayed in one spot and died.