A stimulating, if simplistic, Darwinian take on human nature.
Human minds and cultures are playthings of primeval urges, according to this provocative treatise on evolutionary psychology.
We think of society, with its complex organization and advanced technology, as the triumph of reason over brute passions, but biophysicist Miller says that the rational intellect is the handmaid of emotional drives laid down by natural selection. Emotions hardwired in DNA are what generate desires and goals, Miller says, so a purely rational man would lack initiative and a survival instinct; having no emotional preference for safety over danger, he would sit passively as his house burned down around him. The author grounds this reasoning in a lucid, engaging overview of evolutionary theory and neurobiology—and then he’s off to the races with breezy evolutionary rationales for every behavioral and social norm under the sun. Natural selection, he says, gave us genetic propensities for both altruism and skepticism; for men to want slender women, and women dominant men; to love the Mona Lisa (a mother-figure smiling at our inner toddler) and hate child murderers (“such acts threaten the gene succession”); and to fear God, even if he is merely “a lie told by our genes to compel us to act in ways that increase our biological success.” Miller sticks mainly to confident assertion and rarely cites scientific evidence proving the genetic basis of these traits. (He does review, as a real-world model of natural man, an 18th-century account of a Canadian Indian tribe whose men wrestled over women, beat their wives and jubilantly massacred rival bands.) Not all scientists would follow him in ascribing cultural differences between European settlers and indigenous hunter-gatherers to genetics, or embrace his Nietzchean vision of human development. (“As we look back through the ages at the smoldering remains of a thousand fires of genocide, we see one figure only emerging from the hanging pall—Homo sapiens sapiens triumphant!”) Still, Miller dishes up intriguing food for thought about what makes us tick.
A stimulating, if simplistic, Darwinian take on human nature.Pub Date: July 20, 2010
ISBN: 978-1453601488
Page Count: 188
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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