I promised a response to Tomasello's book but I've decided to do it
here on a new thread as the 'Making your Mind Up Thread' seems to have
run out of steam and anyway, the book has very little if anything to
do with determinism and free will.
Overall, I found it a very interesting book though I struggled with
Tomasello's presentation; at times, it reads more like a desertion
intended for peer review by others already familiar with the subject
material rather than a book for general readers. I almost gave up
about halfway through the book but I'm glad I persevered with it.
I found it refreshing that he clearly recognises the distinct
behavioural differences between the species he has selected; that
there is a hierarchical structure to the development of behaviour with
discrete steps; that humans are unique in some respects and
effectively at the peak of that hierarchical model. It seems to me
that behaviour is synonymous with intelligence and too often I have
seen human intelligence dismissed as just a little bit up a continuum
from other species and that, for example, the incredibly complex
man-made world I see outside my office window somehow isn't really
much different from the complexity of an ants nest. I can understand
the dislike for talking about humans as "special" in some subjective
way with potential religious implications but that does not justify
ignoring the features that make us unique. Tomasello does not fall
into that trap.
What I found very educational was the amount of research that has gone
into the behaviour of various species, especially the great apes. I
was aware that there was research but I wasn't aware of the extent of
the findings. Having said that, I would have liked the author to go
deeper into some of the specific research work rather than an endless
list of single findings with just a cite to the paper. I found a list
of references taking 16 pages for 136 pages of text a bit overwhelming
in terms of sources for further reading, hence my eartlier comments
about his presentational style.
The book is limited in its scope but that is not a criticism of the
author who freely admits its limitations; that is a feature of the
extensive nature of consciousness (of which behaviour is a product).
It is impossible to cover all aspects of it in any one book and I
think Tomasello has given a useful insight into some aspects of it.
What I found less positive however were that he simply puts the
development of behaviour down to evolution without making any real
attempt to suggest how that evolution might have taken place. He does
make several references to the influence of brain size and structure
but the jury is out on that. To the extent that there is correlation
with size, it is with brain size relative to body size, not absolute
size - an elephant brain is 3 times the size of the human brain but I
don't think anyone would claim an elephant is more intelligent than
humans. It doesn't even stand up particularly well within humans as a
species; Einstein who is generally regarded as one of the most
intelligent people who ever lived, had a brain that fell at the low
end of average size for human beings. [1]
I'm wandering away a bit from the main thrust of the book but this
thing about brain size intrigues me. For example, are humans smarter
because they have bigger brains or have the bigger brains come from
increasing intelligence? A Scientific American puts it: "Thus, on
average, a bigger brain is associated with somewhat higher
intelligence. Whether a big brain causes high intelligence or, more
likely, whether both are caused by other factors remains unknown." [2]
What strikes me as particularly significant about this is that humans
clearly have distinct features of consciousness/intelligence that do
we do not see at all in other species and those features give clear
survival advantages. If they are due simply to brain size (or any
other physical explanation), why have those features not arisen in
other species, particularly the other great apes? This would seem to
come down on the side of dualism with the mind *not* being just a
product of our brains.
To return to Tomasello's book, one other thing irritated me a bit. In
several areas, he draws out the similarities in the behaviour of other
great apes compared to human children up to about 5 years of age; he
suggests that the behaviour of human children ion that age group
equates to behaviour of humans in early stages of evolution but that
seems to me to be an assumption without any real evidence to support
it.
If I were rating the book, I would give it 3 stars overall - very good
on description but weak on explanation.
[1]
https://www.science.org/content/article/closer-look-einsteins-brain[2]
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-brain-size-matter1
Ping Arkalen - Evolution of Agency