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This bold and brilliant book asks the ultimate question of the
life sciences: How did the human mind acquire its incomparable power? In seeking
the answer, Merlin Donald traces the evolution of human culture and cognition
from primitive apes to the era of artificial intelligence, and presents an original
theory of how the human mind evolved from its presymbolic form. In
the emergence of modern human culture, Donald proposes, there were three radical
transitions. During the first, our bipedal but still apelike ancestors acquired
"mimetic" skill -- the ability to represent knowledge through voluntary
motor acts -- which made Homo erectus successful for over a million years.
The second transition -- to "mythic" culture -- coincided with the development
of spoken language. Speech allowed the large-brained Homo sapiens to evolve
a complex preliterate culture that survives in many parts of the world today.
In the third transition, when humans constructed elaborate symbolic systems ranging
from cuneiforms, hieroglyphics, and ideograms to alphabetic languages and mathematics,
human biological memory became an inadequate vehicle for storing and processing
our collective knowledge. The modern mind is thus a hybrid structure built from
vestiges of earlier biological stages as well as new external symbolic memory
devices that have radically altered its organization. According to Donald, we
are symbol-using creatures, more complex than any that went before us, and we
may have not yet witnessed the final modular arrangement of the human mind.
There have been other attempts to create an evolutionary history
of human cognition, but they have usually emphasized either cultural artifacts
or functional anatomy (such as the vocal tract or the enlarged brain). In contrast,
Donald's theory emphasizes cognition as the mediator between brain and culture.
Origins of the Modern Mind suggests many new areas of inquiry to specialists
in cognitive fields from neurobiology to linguistics, and will interest any curious
reader. Merlin Donald is Professor of Psychology,
Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. |
