cover image The Marvelous Learning Animal: What Makes Human Nature Unique

The Marvelous Learning Animal: What Makes Human Nature Unique

Arthur W. Staats. Prometheus, $27 (350p) ISBN 978-1-61614-597-2

Eminent behavioral psychologist Staats distills 50 years of research and discoveries into this passionate and persuasive argument for a revision of what he calls The Great Scientific Error%E2%80%94namely that science, in its effort to explain humanity's progress, has privileged biology and notions of innateness over humans' ability to learn. Staats fine-tunes this revision by explaining that the brain is a "mechanism that performs the learning responsible for behavior," but is not "the cause of behavior." In his attempts to defend this paradigm of learning, Staats takes on many popularly held scientific beliefs. In the realm of psychopathology, for example, he attacks the idea that a dyslexic child's brain is "defective," positing instead that the child has simply not had a "successful reading learning experience." Staats goes on to compellingly argue that the advent of language%E2%80%94a learned and consensual system of knowledge%E2%80%94marked the point where "what was learned took the determining role" in humanity's evolution, given that a people's "language repertoire" would enable hard-won lessons to be transferred to subsequent generations. Staats ends by encouraging further research on this "new paradigm," wherein a simplistic divide like that between nature and nurture would finally be cast off for a more nuanced appraisal of what constitutes "humanness." (May)