Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence [Format Kindle] Author: Gary Lynch | Language: English | ISBN:
B00FO6LH3O | Format: PDF, EPUB
Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence Download for free books Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence from 4shared, mediafire, hotfile, and mirror link
Présentation de l'éditeur
Our big brains, our language ability, and our intelligence make us uniquely human.
But barely 10,000 years ago (a mere blip in evolutionary time) human-like creatures called "Boskops" flourished in South Africa. They possessed extraordinary features: forebrains roughly 50% larger than ours, and estimated IQs to match--far surpassing our own. Many of these huge fossil skulls have been discovered over the last century, but most of us have never heard of this scientific marvel.
Prominent neuroscientists Gary Lynch and Richard Granger compare the contents of the Boskop brain and our own brains today, and arrive at startling conclusions about our intelligence and creativity. Connecting cutting-edge theories of genetics, evolution, language, memory, learning, and intelligence, Lynch and Granger show the implications of large brains for a broad array of fields, from the current state of the art in Alzheimer's and other brain disorders, to new advances in brain-based robots that see and converse with us, and the means by which neural prosthetics-- replacement parts for the brain--are being designed and tested. The authors demystify the complexities of our brains in this fascinating and accessible book, and give us tantalizing insights into our humanity--its past, and its future.
Direct download links available for Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence [Format Kindle]
Granger & Lynch are both accomplished neurobiologists, but they clearly didn't do their homework on evolutionary biology & evolutionary anthropology. How so? The "Boskop" race of humans that are a central point of discussion in this book only existed for about 40 years, after researchers started digging up ancient crania in South Africa, & before they started analyzing them with modern science. Google the topic, & you'll find that in the professional literature, the Boskops were dismissed as artifacts of shoddy scholarship over 50 years ago! To make a long story short, geological & archeological contextual affinities are a bit more important than similarities of morphology in identifying populations. Are Shaquille O'Neal & Yao Ming from the same population because they're both extremely tall? This is basically how the Boskops were created by early 20th century scientists...
Par KNMWT15K
- Publié sur Amazon.com
The thesis at the heart of this book is highly questionable. Take a look at what paleoanthropologist John Hawkes' has to say:
"I hate to think that the theme of a 2008 book was pulled straight from a 1958 essay, but I don't know where else they would have gotten the idea. No anthropologists have written much about the so-called "Boskopoids" since 1958. There is no such thing as an "IQ estimate" for a fossil human; that's entirely nonsensical. There's no question that there have been massive cultural changes in the last 10,000 years. But the idea that our brains' functions have atrophied from some Pleistocene state has been left long behind in the dust of nineteenth-century race studies.
So I'm left wondering: Why would two neuroscientists, after going to all the trouble to write a book about the evolution of the human brain, use completely obsolete anthropological information without doing a simple Google search to see if the facts have stayed the same as in 1923?"
Based upon this, you've got to wonder...
[...]
Par Christopher Ryan
- Publié sur Amazon.com
Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence Download
Please Wait...