From: 00prneubauer@bsu-ucs.uucp (Paul Neubauer)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: some books (was Re: Young earth creationist logic NOT!)
Date: 19 Aug 92 19:44:35 GMT

In article <1992Aug17.212949.4147@access.digex.com>, 
 huston@access.digex.com (Herb Huston) writes:
> Have you read _The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human
> Animal_ by Jared Diamond yet (I'm on page 122)?  If not, it's ISBN 0-06-
> 018307-1.

I'll second Herb's recommendation!  I'm strictly amateur, without
Herb's credentials or knowledge, but I also found Diamond's book
fascinating reading.  I read it recently and can only say that Herb
is likely to enjoy the rest of the book too.

Another book that I heartily recommend was also cited by Max Webb
(mongo) in one of his posts a couple of months ago.  I am citing from
memory here so I may be garbling the title a bit, but I recall it as
_The Ascent of Mind:  Ice age climates and the evolution of
intelligence_  by William H.(?) Calvin.  (I do hope this book has
gotten some distribution beyond the Pacific Northwest.  Calvin is at
the U. of Washington, as I recall.  I found the book at Powell's in
Portland.)  This book (as fascinating as Diamond's) is another attempt
to explain why and how humans developed relatively large brains and
relatively high intelligence.  If Calvin's theory is correct, I would
expect to find more evidence of human development in (modern)
temperate zones, since Calvin argues that much of the development took
place at the periphery of the range rather than in the central
(African) zone and was the result of an alternately expanding and
contracting territorial range for early humanity (as a result of
alternate ice ages and interglacial periods).  Calvin's theories sound
pretty interesting to me and seem a lot better supported than, e.g.,
the theory that our large brains were originally an adaptation for
running in a hot climate, as proposed by a Finnish anthropologist
whose name I don't recall and presented (at least for me) by Marvin
Harris in _Our Kind_.  I generally like Harris' popularizations (of
his own and others' ideas), but I found Calvin's argument that large
human brains are an adaptation for throwing to be more convincing than
Harris' argument that they are an adaptation for running.  I still
recommend _Our Kind_ as worth reading.

None of these 3 books bothers to argue against creationism in any
serious vein, but all of them exhibit some of the power of the theory
of evolution in explaining things that would otherwise be simply
mysterious.  _The Third Chimpanzee_ in particular debunks a lot of the
dopey things that creationists say about human uniqueness.  For
example, it would be a worthwhile source for counterarguments to some
of what Chuck Maier and James Henley were recently asserting about
marriage.  My newsfeed is frequently slow, so other people (e.g.,
Chris Colby) had already posted some of the same points that I would
have been tempted to post from having found them in Diamond's book in
response to Maier and/or Henley.  (Regarding monogamy as a
reproductive and child-rearing strategy.)  Diamond also has some
thought-provoking things to say about "maladaptive" or "destructive"
behaviors like taking dangerous drugs and the evolutionary "function"
of such behavior in humans and other animals.

-- 
Paul Neubauer   00prneubauer@leo.bsuvc.bsu.edu  00prneubauer@bsuvax1.BITNET
                00prneubauer@bsu-ucs.UUCP       neubauer@bsu-cs.UUCP