Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

CHAPTER 39: ‘THE BEST IDEA EVER’

1. Bodmer and McKie, The Book of Man, Op. cit., page 259.

2. Colin Tudge, The Engineer in the Garden, Op. cit., pages 257–260.

3. Bodmer and McKie, Op. cit., page 257.

4. Ibid., page 259.

5. Ibid., page 261.

6. A. G. Cairns-Smith, Seven Clues to the Origin of Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

7. Ibid., page 47.

8. Ibid., page 74.

9. Ibid., page 80.

10. Richard Fortey, Life: An Unauthorised Biography, London: HarperCollins, 1997; Flamingo paperback, 1998, pages 44 and 54ff.

11. Ibid., pages 55–56, where the calculation for bacterial production of oxygen is given.

12. J. D. MacDougall, A Short History of Planet Earth, New York: Wiley, 1996, pages 34–36. Fortey, Op. cit., pages 59–61.

13. Ibid., page 52. See also: Tudge, Op. cit., pages 331 and 334–335 for a discussion of the implications of Margulis’s idea for the notion of co-operation. Fortey, Op. cit., pages 68–69.

14. For slimes, see: Fortey, Op. cit., pages 81ff; for Ediacara see ibid., pages 86ff. The Ediacara are named after Ediacara Hill in South Australia, where they were first discovered. In March 2000, in a lecture at the Royal Institution in London, Dr Andrew Parker, a zoologist and Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, attributed the Cambrian explosion to the evolution of vision, arguing that organisms had to develop rapidly to escape a predator’s line of sight. See: The (London) Times, 1 March 2000, page 41.

15. Fortey, Op. cit., pages 102ff.

16. MacDougall, Op. cit., pages 30–31.

17. John Noble Wilford, The Riddle of the Dinosaurs, London and Boston: Faber, 1986, pages 221ff.

18. Ibid., pages 226–228.

19. Walter Alvarez, T. Rex and the Crater of Doom, Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 1997; Penguin paperback 1998, page 69. See also: MacDougall, Op. cit., page 158.

20. For a traditional view of dinosaur extinction, see: Björn Kurtén, The Age of the Dinosaurs, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968, pages 211ff.

21. Alvarez, Op. cit., pages 92–93.

22. Ibid., pages 109ff.

23. Ibid., pages 123ff.

24. MacDougall, Op. cit., page 160; and see chart of marine extinctions on page 162.

25. Alvarez, Op. cit., page 133.

26. Tattersall, The Fossil Trail, Op. cit., pages 187— 188.

27. Donald Johanson and James Shreeve, Lucy’s Child: The Discovery of a Human Ancestor, New York: Viking, 1990, pages 201ff.

28. E. S. Vrba, ‘Ecological and adaptive changes associated with early hominid evolution,’ in E. Delson (editor), Ancestors: The Hard Evidence, New York: Alan Liss, 1988, pages 63–71; and: E. S. Vrba, ‘Late Pleistocene climatic events and hominid evolution,’ in F. E. Grine (editor), Evolutionary History of the ‘Robust’ Australopithecines, New York: Adine de Gruyter, 1988, pages 405–426.

29. Tattersall, Op. cit., page 197.

30. Christopher Stringer and Clive Gamble, In Search of the Neanderthals, London: Thames & Hudson, 1993, pages 152–154. These interpretations in the latter part of this paragraph are doubted in many quarters.

31. Tattersall, Op. cit., chapter 15: ‘The cave man vanishes’, pages 199ff.

32. Bodmer and McKie, Op. cit., pages 218 and 232–233.

33. Brian M. Fagan, The Journey from Eden: The Peopling of Our World, London: Thames & Hudson, 1990, pages 27–28. Bodmer and McKie, Op. cit., pages 218–219.

34. Colin Renfrew, Archaeology and Language, London: Jonathan Cape, 1987, pages 9–13.

35. J. H. Greenberg, Language in the Americas, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986.

36. Brian M. Fagan, The Great Journey: The Peopling of Ancient America, London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 1987, page 186.

37. See especially: Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Francesco Cavalli-Sforza, The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolution, New York: Helix/Addison Wesley, 1995 (first published in Italy by Arnaldo Mondadori Editore Spa, 1993), pages 156–157.

38. Ibid., page 187.

39. Ibid., page 185; and see a second candidate in the chart on page 186.

40. Renfrew, Archaeology and Language, Op. cit., page 205.

41. Paul Johnson, Daily Mail (London).

42. E. O. Wilson, On Human Nature, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1978, page 167.

43. Ibid., page 2.

44. Ibid., page 137; and see also the charts on page 90.

45. E. O. Wilson, Biophilia, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1984.

46. Stephen R. Kellert and E. O. Wilson (editors), The Biophilia Hypothesis, Washington DC: Island Press, 1993, page 237. See also: James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979; paperback 1982 and

47. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, London: Longman, 1986; Penguin 1988.

48. Ibid., page 90.

49. Ibid., page 158.

50. Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Op. cit., page 21.

51. Ibid., page 82.

52. Stuart Kauffman, The Origins of Order: Self-Organisation and Selection, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

53. Ibid., page 220.

54. John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry, The Major Transitions in Evolution, Oxford, New York and Heidelberg: W. H. Freeman/Spektrum, 1995.

55. Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct, New York: Morrow, 1994; Penguin 1995.

56. Ibid., page 301.

57. N. Eldredge and S.J. Gould, ‘Punctuated equilibrium: an alternative to phyletic gradualism,’ in T. J. M. Schopf (editor), Models in Palaeobiology, San Francisco: Freeman Cooper, 1972, pages 82–115. See also: N. Eldredge, Reinventing Darwin, New York: John Wiley, 1995, pages 93ff, where the debate is updated.

58. S.J. Gould and R. C. Lewontin, ‘The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: A critique of the adaptationist programme’, Proceedings of the Royal Society, volume B205, 1979 pages 581–598.

59. S.J. Gould, Wonderful Life, London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989.

60. Simon Conway Morris, The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

61. S.J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, Op. cit.

62. Steven Rose, Leon Kamin and R. C. Lewontin, Not in Our Genes, Op. cit.

63. R. C. Lewontin, The Doctrine of DNA: Biology as Ideology, Toronto: Anansi Press, 1991; Penguin, 1993, pages 73–74.

64. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, Glencoe: The Free Press, 1994.

65. See also: Bernie Devlin, Stephen E. Fienberg, Daniel P. Resnick and Kathryn Roeder (editors), Intelligence, Genes and Success: Scientists Respond to The Bell Curve, New York: Copernicus, 1997, page 22.

66. Ibid., pages 269ff.

67. Ibid., pages 167ff.

68. Herrnstein and Murray, Op. cit., page 525.

69. Ibid., page 444.

70. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, Op. cit., page 375.

71. Robert Cook-Deegan, The Gene Wars, Op. cit., page 110.

72. Bodmer and McKie, Op. cit., page 320.

73. Cook-Deegan, Op. cit., page 286.

74. Ibid., page 339.

75. Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.

76. John Maddox, What Remains to be Discovered, Op. cit., page 306.

77. John Cornwell (editor), Consciousness and Human Identity, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, page vi.

78. Ibid., page vii.

79. Ibid.

80. J. R. Searle, The Mystery of Consciousness, London: Granta, 1997, pages 95ff.

81. J. R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992; and Cornwell (editor), Op. cit., page 33.

82. Roger Penrose, Shallows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

83. Searle, The Mystery of Consciousness, Op. cit., pages 53ff.

84. Ibid., page 87.

85. Cornwell (editor), Op. cit., pages 11–12.

86. Robert Wright, The Moral Animal, New York: Pantheon, 1994, page 321.

87. Olaf Sporns, ‘Biological variability and brain function,’ in Cornwell (editor), Op. cit., pages 38–53.