Prologue
I always smile when I hear Garrison Keillor say, “Be
well, do good work, and keep in touch.” It is such a
simple sentiment, yet so full of human complexity. Other
apes don’t have that sentiment. Think about it. Our
species does like to wish people well, not harm. No one
ever says, “Have a bad day” or “Do bad work,” and
keeping in touch is what the cell-phone industry has
discovered all of us do, even when there is nothing
going on.
There in one sentence Keillor captures humanness. A
familiar cartoon with various captions makes its way
around evolutionary biologists’ circles. It shows an ape
at one end of a line and then several intermediate early
humans culminating in a tall human standing erect at the
other end. We now know that the line isn’t so direct,
but the metaphor still works. We did evolve, and we are
what we are through the forces of natural selection. And
yet I would like to amend that cartoon. I see the human
turning around with a knife in his hand and cutting his
imaginary tether to the earlier versions, becoming
liberated to do things no other animal comes close to
doing.
We humans are special. All of us solve problems
effortlessly and routinely. When we approach a screen
door with our arms full of bags of groceries, we
instantly know how to stick out our pinky and hook it
around the door handle to open it. The human mind is so
generative and so given to animation that we do things
such as map agency (that is, we project intent) onto
almost anything-our pets, our old shoes, our cars, our
world, our gods. It is as if we don’t want to be alone
up here at the top of the cognitive chain as the
smartest things on earth. We want to see our dogs charm
us and appeal to our emotions; we imagine that they too
can have pity, love, hate, and all the rest. We are a
big deal and we are a little scared about it.
Thousands of scientists and philosophers over hundreds
of years have either recognized this uniqueness of ours
or have denied it and looked for the antecedents of
everything human in other animals. In recent years,
clever scientists have found antecedents to all kinds of
things that we had assumed were purely human
constructions. We used to think that only humans had the
ability to reflect on their own thoughts, which is
called metacognition. Well, think again. Two
psychologists at the University of Georgia have shown
that rats also have this ability. It turns out that rats
know what they don’t know. Does that mean we should do
away with our rat traps? I don’t think so.
Everywhere I look I see tidbits of differences, and one
can always say a particular tidbit can be found in
others aspects of biological life. Ralph Greenspan, a
very talented neuroscientist and geneticist at the
Neuroscience Institute in La Jolla, California, studies,
of all things, sleep in the fruit fly.
Someone had asked him at lunch one day, “Do flies
sleep?” He quipped, “I don’t know and I don’t care.” But
then he got to thinking about it and realized that maybe
he could learn something about the mysterious process of
sleep, which has eluded understanding. The short version
of this story is that flies do sleep, just as we do.
More important, flies express the same genes during
sleeping and waking hours that we do. Indeed,
Greenspan’s current research suggests that even
protozoans sleep. Good grief!
The point is that most human activity can be related to
antecedents in other animals. But to be swept away by
such a fact is to miss the point of human experience. In
the following chapters, we will comb through data about
our brains, our minds, our social world, our feelings,
our artistic endeavors, our capacity to confer agency,
our consciousness, and our growing knowledge that our
brain parts can be replaced with silicon parts. From
this jaunt, one clear fact emerges. Although we are made
up of the same chemicals, with the same physiological
reactions, we are very different from other animals.
Just as gases can become liquids, which can become
solids, phase shifts occur in evolution, shifts so large
in their implications that it becomes almost impossible
to think of them as having the same components. A foggy
mist is made up of the same stuff as an iceberg. In a
complex relationship with the environment, very similar
substances with the same chemical structure can become
quite different in their reality and form.
Indeed, I have decided that something like a phase shift
has occurred in becoming human. There simply is no one
thing that will ever account for our spectacular
abilities, our aspirations, and our capacity to travel
mentally in time to the almost infinite world beyond our
present existence. Even though we have all of these
connections with the biologic world from which we came,
and we have in some instances similar mental structures,
we are hugely different. While most of our genes and
brain architecture are held in common with animals,
there are always differences to be found. And while we
can use lathes to mill fine jewelry, and chimpanzees can
use stones to crack open nuts, the differences are
light-years apart. And while the family dog may appear
empathetic, no pet understands the difference between
sorrow and pity.
A phase shift occurred, and it occurred as the
consequence of many things changing in our brains and
minds. This book is the story of our uniqueness and how
we got here. Personally, I love our species, and always
have. I have never found it necessary to lessen our
success and domination of this universe. So let us start
the journey of understanding why humans are special, and
let’s have some fun doing it.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Human
by Michael S. Gazzaniga
Copyright © 2008 by Michael S. Gazzaniga.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Ecco
Copyright © 2008
Michael S. Gazzaniga
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-089288-3
