Evolution and the Human Mind: Modularity, Language and Meta-Cognition [Paperback]

When I read the subtitle of this book, "Modularity, language, and meta-cognition", as well as the description, I thought it would present a scientific discussion of the interaction between archaeology, evolutionary psychology, studies of animal behavior, linguistics, and so forth. Some of this book does indeed provide such discussions. However, seven of the sixteen authors are philosophers, not scientists, and while philosophers do a good job of discussing philosophical topics, they make lousy scientists. I slogged through several of their chapters, slashing through the dense prose philosophers are wont to write, trying to find the lost treasures of meaning I was sure had to be hiding somewhere in their chapters. Alas, this intellectual Indiana Jones came up empty-handed: there was nothing of scientific value in those chapters.

This book is the end result of an interdisciplinary project organized by the University of Sheffield. They selected a distinguished group of scientists and philosophers and brought them together for a series of workshops and a final conference. The intention was to kindle some interdisciplinary fire among these disparate scholars. Unfortunately, interdisciplinary efforts such as this suffer from a terrible law of diminishing returns: the value of the end result is inversely proportional to the number of scholars multiplied by the heterogeneity of their disciplines. In other words, you can get good results by getting together a lot of scholars from closely similar backgrounds, or just a few scholars from disparate backgrounds, but otherwise, you're doomed to failure. There is no evidence in the chapters that anybody paid much attention to anybody else in the workshops. The book has thirteen chapters presenting thirteen independent and unconnected approaches to the problems of the evolution of human cognition.

As I mentioned earlier, some of the chapters are valuable. Steven Mithen has a chapter, and everything he writes is worth reading. The same thing goes for Robin Dunbar. A few other chapters are interesting. But I don't think that the book overall is worth buying.