Figments of Reality: The Evolution of the Curious Mind [Paperback]

Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen are a biologist and a mathematician team who have worked together to write a book on evolution; and not just biological evolution either. They discuss the origin of life, intelligence, consciousness, concepts of reality, social order, cities, and global civilization all within a 299 page volume.

Each chapter is opened with a charming quote, usually drawn from the lore of the behavioral sciences, that illustrates in capsule the content of the chapter. My favorites were the woman scientist and her chimpanzee subject, the viper with its "dead snake" pose, and the parrot whose protest over going through a boring word list made his intelligence far more apparent than reciting the list ever could.

Addressed in these chapters were some pretty heavy duty concepts. It's not that I hadn't come across them before in my reading, but that the authors' approach was novel, at least to me. Their treatment of the statistics of evolution and especially their analysis of the "Mitochondrial Eve" hypothesis were particularly enlightening. Until they likened it to the opening and ending moves of a chess game, with it's myriads of potential moves between beginning and end, I had not given much thought to how misleading are the cladal diagrams of evolutionary trees. They point out that the reductionist view, that looks for a core and a root to everything, is misleading because it neglects the total picture of what is going on in the environment and the emergent aspects of the interactive parts.

In the instance of the mitochondrial studies, they point out that a breeding population would probably have been at least 100,000 individuals, and the theory of 1 Eve and 99999 Adams, doesn't make much sense. As they note, it's much more likely that there were 50,000 of each gender, some of whom carried a particular stretch of DNA. Pointing out that there is a difference between the descent of a molecular sequence and the descent of a species they write, "Possibly there did exist a Mitochondrial Eve, but she is not the Mother of Us All: she represents a particular molecular sequence for mitochondrial DNA, embodied in a population of women possessing the molecule, from whom all modern mitochondrial DNA molecules descend (p. 88)."

More intriguing still was their discussion of complicity, which is a synergy among constituent parts that gives rise to unexpected results, sort of the old saw "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." They feel that this type of unpredictable interaction among complex variables is what has given rise to human consciousness and even to the group think that occurs in crowd behavior. As they write, "One of the universal features of complicity is the emergence of new patterns, new rules, new structures, new processes that were not present, even in rudimentary form, in the separate components (p. 245)." They note that a complicity between language and intelligence might have worked synergistically, in a lock step fashion, enhancing both characteristics and in combination with what they term "extelligence," the variously stored knowledge of generations of humans, may possibly have lead to consciousness and civilization.

In their comparison of cellular evolution and village/town evolution, they again appeal to a complicity among parts, in this case individuals-or more correctly among professions-that created towns from villages. As unspecialized bacteria specialized and commingled to form nucleated cells, the members of villages began to specialize and create a larger more resilient town and as that grew, cities.

The most unique concept they presented-at least not one I'd heard before-was the possible explanation for the god phenomenon. They suggest that someone, Abraham for instance, might have been impressed by the extelligence of the environment, that "something outside himself" that knew more than he did. As they write, "It is a very small step from `There is Something out there' to `There is a Being out there (P. 264).'"

Steven was right again. This is a wonderful book. It definitely gets one thinking along new channels.

--Richard Brodie, author, Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme

Arguing that humans are "in nature but not of it" the authors separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom. What makes us different is our mental complexity. We can control our thoughts, make choices, impact the surrounding environment instead of merely responding to it. How did we come to be that way? The record of evolution shows that life's origins were clearly very simple. Perhaps, as they relate, a beginning as simple as some molecules "hitching a ride" on crystals as a step in learning the process of replication. From such origins, life progressed through building complexity in gradual steps, with some branches able to increase in complexity leading to such as you and i. The mechanism works in "phase space" by combining simple forms in a process they call "complicity." Complicity is Nature using existing "scaffolding" to build successful features. In short, evolution.

The flip side of this captivating book is their crusade against "reductionism." This straw man is a frequent target for those unable or unwilling to see human beings as an integral part of the animal kingdom, hence, a product of the evolutionary process. You will not find the target of their attack until you peruse the bibliography, but it becomes clear that their aim is Richard Dawkins. His "selfish gene" concept and his proposal on cultural aspects, a major element in their argument, are assaulted or ignored. How did the human mind evolve its distinct characteristics if not through genetic processes? The authors make great show of cultural continuity as an expression of human mental capacity. Yet, they fail to identify the roots of that persistence. The root was postulated by Richard Dawkins as the "meme," the mind's equivalent of genetic transmission of characteristics. Given Dawkins' concept preceded Figments by over a decade, their omission of the term is an astonishing oversight.

The great irony here is Cohen and Stewart's reliance on Daniel C. Dennett as a source for much of their thinking. One can envision that jolly, St Nicholas-like countenance hardening as he read their deviant interpretation of Dennett's thinking. Figments was published shortly after Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea, which effectively refutes much of Cohen and Stewart's thesis. Dennett uses "cranes," a more active instrument, instead of "scaffolding" to describe evolution's methods. Likewise, he nods favourably toward memes as the mechanism of cultural transmission, which Cohen and Stewart ignore completely. They rely on the mechanism Dennett considers a perversion of Darwinian thought, the "skyhook" to bring humans to an elevated role in the animal kingdom. Cohen and Stewart are to be commended for their innovative approach and unconstrained imaginations. Still, this highly readable and provocative book must be balanced with Dennett's more realistic analysis. Buy them both, you'll gain much insight into who you are.