Evolving Insight: How it is we can think about why things happen

by Richard W. Byrne

'Insight' is not a very popular word in psychology or biology. Popular terms-like "intelligence", "planning", "complexity" or "cognitive"- have a habit of sprawling out to include everyone's favourite interpretation, and end up with such vague meanings that each new writer has to redefine them for use. Insight remains in everyday as a down-to-earth, lay term for a deep, shrewd or discerning kind of understanding. Insight is a good thing to have, so it's important to find out how it evolved, and that's what this book is about.

Coming 30 years after publication of Richard Byrne's seminal book The Thinking Ape , Evolving Insight develops a new theory of the evolutionary origins of human abilities to understand the world of objects and other people. Defining mental representation and computation as 'insight', it reviews the evidence for insight in the cognition of animals.

The book proposes that the understanding of causality and intentionality evolved twice in human the "pretty good" understanding given by behaviour parsing, shared with other apes and related to cerebellar expansion; and the deeper understanding which requires language to model and is unique to humans. However, Ape-type insight may underlie non-verbal tests of intentionality and causal understanding, and much everyday human action.

Accessible to those with little background in the topic, Evolving Insight is an important new work for anyone with an interest in psychology and the biological sciences.

Genres: Science

208 pages, Paperback

Published May 3, 2016

Reviews

[Stephen Palmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Richard W. Byrne’s 'Evolving Insight,' the author takes a rigorous, superbly researched and even-handed approach to deciding one of the most difficult questions in zoology – do animals have anything like human insight?

First of all, Byrne has to delineate his territory, which he does by looking at what insight might be, the role of cognition in animals, vocal and gestural communication, social complexity, cultural possibilities, theory of mind, and – crucial to his thesis – the different roles of technical and social understanding (i.e. insight). After all this, three quarters of the book is done, leaving the final quarter to the gist of the book, which is that insight evolved twice in our hominid ancestors, once as a kind of general social intelligence (in which the crucial work of Nicholas Humphrey is mentioned) and once as a particular form of technical insight related to complex feeding patterns in great apes.

As I’ve indicated, this is a brilliant piece of work – I wish all science books were as even-handed and rewarding as this one. Arguments are put with clarity, the writing is admirable and the whole work is fascinating.

Personally, I was hoping for a little more on the role of consciousness and on the social intelligence theory of consciousness, but that isn’t really the book’s remit. It’s actually quite a specialised work, albeit written with verve and clarity for the general reader. At the end I felt a little frustrated that the book’s argument wasn’t taken one step further, but, as I’ve indicated, that wasn’t the author’s purpose. I think this book would best be read alongside the outstanding 'Thinking Big: How the Evolution of Social Life Shaped the Human Mind,' which I read and reviewed last year.

Kudos to Richard Byrne for this outstanding volume.

[Adil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really well-written, balanced, and faithful to evidence (no unnecessary hype), detailed yet accessible enough book by an expert. Great read if you are seriously interested in the topic. Probably a bit too serious if you are simply looking for intellectual stimulation on a random topic.