Kevin Laland: Darwin's Unfinished Symphony

Laland's recent book on cultural evolution is out. It is titled: Darwin's Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind.

The blurb reads, in part:

Kevin Laland shows how the learned and socially transmitted activities of our ancestors shaped our intellects through accelerating cycles of evolutionary feedback. The truly unique characteristics of our species--such as our intelligence, language, teaching, and cooperation--are not adaptive responses to predators, disease, or other external conditions. Rather, humans are creatures of their own making.

It goes on to say:

This book tells the story of the painstaking fieldwork, the key experiments, the false leads, and the stunning scientific breakthroughs that led to this new understanding of how culture transformed human evolution. It is the story of how Darwin's intellectual descendants picked up where he left off and took up the challenge of providing a scientific account of the evolution of the human mind.

This sounds promising. Laland has previously written other books on the same topic. The book Sense and Nonsense was a well-written overview of the subject area. The first edition had a whole chapter omn memetics. Kevin's recent book apparently mentions memes only in a brief footnote explaining how irrelevant they are. Laland also once co-authored the paper Mathematical Models for Memetics which proposed that the various schools of cultural evolution would benefit from putting their heads together and encouraged meme enthusiasts to get their math on.

The publisher has a page about the book which offers some endorsements and has a table of contents. ArsTechnica has a review. The review says:

[Laland's] contribution is to realize that the spark that got the whole thing started were innovations in food-processing techniques that let us get more energy from our diet. More efficient eating allowed for brain growth, an extension of lifespan, and population growth.

I'm not sure whether Laland can take credit for that one. That's pretty much the thesis of the book The Driving Force: Food, Evolution and the Future (1991) by Michael Crawford and David Marsh.

Anyway, I am pleased to see that the books on cultural evolution keep on coming.