By David C. Geary - The Origin of the Mind: Evolution of Brain, Cognition and General Intelligence: 1st (first) Edition

by David C. Geary

This groundbreaking book sets out a comprehensive, integrated theory of why and how the human mind has developed to function as it does.

Genres: Psychology, Science, Evolution, Neuroscience, Biology, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published October 15, 2004

About the author

David C. Geary is a cognitive developmental and evolutionary psychologist with interests in mathematical learning and sex differences. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1986 from the University of California at Riverside, he held faculty positions at the University of Texas at El Paso and the University of Missouri, first at the Rolla campus and then in Columbia. Dr. Geary is currently a Curators' Professor and a Thomas Jefferson Fellow in the Department of Psychological Sciences, and served as department chair from 2002-2005. He has published more than 240 articles and chapters across a wide range of topics, including cognitive, developmental, and evolutionary psychology, education, and medicine, including three sole-authored books, Children's mathematical development (1994), Male, female: The evolution of human sex differences (1998, now in second edition. 2010), and The origin of mind: Evolution of brain, cognition, and general intelligence (2005), and one co-authored book, Sex differences: Summarizing more than a century of scientific research (Ellis et al., 2008). He is co-editing a series of five books on Advances in Mathematical Cognition and Learning with Drs. Dan Berch and Kathy Mann Koepke. The first volume, Evolutionary origins and early development of basic number processing should be published in late 2014 or early 2015. He has given invited addresses in a variety of departments (anthropology, biology, behavior genetics, computer science, education, government, mathematics, neuroscience, physics, and psychology) and Universities throughout the United States, as well as in Canada, Europe and East Asia.

Reviews

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is both extremely well researched but also extremely dense. Case in point (from the introduction):

I worked under the assumption that motivational, affective, behavioral, cognitive, and brain systems have evolved to process social and ecological information patterns (e.g., facial patterns) that covaried with survival or reproductive populations during human evolution. My specific proposal is that all of these systems are ultimately and proximately focused on supporting attempts by the individual to gain access to and control of the social (e.g., mates), biological (e.g., food), and physical (e.g., demarcation of territory) resources that supported survival and improved reproductive prospects during human evolutionary history.

More unfortunately, references are in-line so textual flow is frequently interrupted by author/year references.

That said, if one can slog through the interrupted prose, the material is current and the hypotheses are well thought out and argued.

[W. West · Rating 5 out of 5]

good

[A · Rating 3 out of 5]

This books contains a tremendous amount of well-researched information. Sadly, because of the very nature of the topic, this book is very dense. I can't blame the author for that. However, it is also true that the book is not very well written. The chapters are randomly organized in my opinion, the writing is extremely verbose and repetitive (many ideas are repeated over and over in different paragraphs). Also, the figures and tables are really bad in term of layout as well as in terms of how informative they are. Finally, half of chapter is simply irrelevant.

On the positive side, all the information presented is really well documented, with tons of references. I think this book is for people who already have a background on neurosciences, evolutionary biology, etc. and who also are willing to read dense stuff.

[Corey Butler · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a challenging read, and probably not for a general audience, but it is an excellent and well researched survey of what we know about the evolution of the human brain. The coverage of the substrate of fluid and crystallized intelligence is particularly good.