Lucy's Legacy: Sex and Intelligence in Human Evolution [Hardcover]

If you keep the idea in the back of your head that most of what she writes about is fairly recently discovered while you read "Lucy's Legacy", you can't help but be amazed at the pace with which we're beginning to understand ourselves, even though Jolly doesn't make a big thing of it. Of course she also makes it clear that we don't know far more than we do.

And, oh yes, she makes a very good point that it's possible for selfish behavior at the level of genes to result in altruistic behavior by animals.

I do have a few criticisms, though they shouldn't discourage anyone from reading the book. They stem mostly from an attempt to do too much in under 450 pages, but her biases and areas of expertise undoubtedly play a role. Here are some samples.

First, the bibliography is mostly adequate, but there's too much to cover in one book and it would have been very useful to have pointers to books to go to for further reading in specific areas.

Second, important references are missing. Jolly cites work discussed in the excellent Walker/Shipman "Wisdom of the Bones", but fails to include that book. Similarly, she describes Roger Fouts' work with chimps and the personal problems he encountered because of his love for the animals but fails to cite his "Next of Kin. And, amazingly, the discussion of language and linguistics is done without a mention of Noam Chomsky.

Third, it's cruel to tell us that DNA's very efficient without explaining how efficiency is being measured.

Fourth, though she describes positions on two sides of the sociobiology wars, Jolly's not really fair to what I'll call the Gould camp. It's not, for example, intellectually honest to dismiss Gould's objections on the grounds that we're "programmed to deeply distrust - or even detest - the theory of sociobiology." It's also a jump from quoting Gould and Lewontin as saying theories like it "provided an important basis for the enactment of sterilization laws and restrictive immigration laws by the United States between 1910 and 1930 and also for the eugenics policies which let to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany" to her claim they were asserting that "proposing biological bases for human behavior leads straight to justifying the gas chambers." Gould wrote what I think was his best book, "The Mismeasure of Man", about the sordid history of testing for intelligence and how theories that came out of such efforts have been used to justify political positions. Unfortunately it's not cited (I'd have worked Carol Travis' "Mismeasure of Woman" into the discussion too, because we routinely see newspaper articles about how some newly discovered small physiological difference between the sexes explains behavioral differences).

Despite those objections - as you may have guessed, I do have serious reservations regarding the perspective from which Jolly views the subject - it was a great read. I imagine she's a wonderful teacher and that it's even more delightful to take her classes. I know I'd be thrilled to talk with her about the contents of her book.

Unlike writers such as EO Wilson who seem to argue that science has little if anything to learn from the humanities, Jolly believes that a comprehensive theory of human nature needs to draw on both the sciences and humanities to arrive at a synthetic view. I agree with her view that we cannot reduce humans to their genes, but nor can we ignore the role they play in our behavior.

The book is quite well written, and draws liberally on poetry, short stories, and politics as well as science to illustrate her points.