The Accidental Homo Sapiens: Genetics, Behavior, and Free Will

The central question addressed in this thoughtful but overly complex book is “What sets humans apart from the rest of the natural world?” Tattersall and DeSalle, curators at the Museum of Natural History, argue that the use of symbols, coupled with “something qualitatively unusual about the way in which Homo sapiens process information,” affords a way of viewing the world—typified by a concern with the future—unlike that of any other species, and allows for unrivaled behavioral plasticity. They lay this argument’s statistical foundations in the first two, sometimes heavy-going, chapters. In the three subsequent, more reader-friendly, chapters, the authors posit that while biological evolution has effectively ceased in Homo sapiens, it’s been replaced, thanks to the ability to adjust behaviors, by cultural evolution, “a restless technological and intellectual probing of our cognitive limits, with old ideas and technologies going out of fashion and new ones being introduced at an increasing tempo.” While Tattersall and DeSalle present some fascinating ideas—such as that humanity’s wide behavioral repertoire is tantamount to free will—the demanding nature of this book will largely restrict its audience to those already well-versed in evolutionary theory. Agent: Don Fehr, Trident. (Apr.)