Skip to main content

Thinking Big - Clive Gamble, John Gowlett and Robin Dunbar ****

When I was young, my main exposure to popular science was through my Dad's collection of Pelican paperbacks, where academics expounded on the likes of animals without backbones or some archeological wonder such as Howard Carter's discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb or Schliemann's adventures uncovering Troy. On the whole I preferred the archaeology titles, as they tended to have more of a story - but when I read Thinking Big, I was plunged back into that world.

 The topic helps - we've got a combination of archaeology, palaeontology and psychology here - but there's also something about the feel of the book. The authors are generally rather serious about what they're doing, there's that same small, finicky print and the reader does have to work reasonably hard to get much out of it.

 Part of the difficulty is that the thread of the book is quite meandering and the underlying science sometimes feels distinctly vague. At the core is the 'social brain hypothesis' - the idea that the size of the brain (or to be precise, certain aspects of the brain) is correlated to social group sizes and that the story of the evolution of homo sapiens is driven strongly by these social group sizes and their implications.

 The reason the science can seem vague is that inevitably there is a lot of hypothesising going on here. Apparently many archeologists don't like the approach taken and prefer to adopt a WYSWTW - What You See is What There Was - mantra. The trouble with this is that it is guaranteed to be wrong, where the approach taken by the authors only might be wrong. the WYSWTW fans simply deny the existence of anything in prehistoric society that doesn't leave concrete remains. But you can't find a fossilised belief, a mummified song or the remains of a conversation - so this leaves their picture of the life of these early hominins and humans that is very sparse and boring.

 The alternative approach taken in this book is to accept that there was more going on than will leave remains and to try to make deductions from how developing brains will, for example, be able to deal with more levels of intention (I know that you are aware that she is lying, for example) and will be reflected in different group sizes, with the significant implications these will have for culture. Throw in how factors such as religion, music and language can also impact the effectiveness of social groups and there seems to be a way here to feel crudely back to the social life of our ancestors.

 Although it's not written in a hugely approachable style - too academic in approach - and the driving concept suffers from an inevitable degree of vagueness, this feels like an important piece of work and one that anyone with an interest in early human and pre-human society should add to their reading list.

Paperback:  

Kindle:  

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more