Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique by Michael S. Gazzaniga

Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique

by Michael S. Gazzaniga

(Ecco, $27.50)

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One familiar illustration of human evolution fails to capture a decisive moment, says neuro­scientist Michael Gazzaniga. Sure, a long line of ape-like ancestors can be imagined parading forward in time before Homo sapiens stood fully erect on two legs. But that picture isn’t complete, writes Gazzaniga, unless you imagine “the human turning around with a knife in his hand” and severing the imaginary cord that connected him to his closest forebear. Though humans are “made up of the same chemicals, with the same physiological reactions,” as those ferried about by all the other animals on earth, our outsize brains enable us to perform complex tasks that mark us as unique. “We create art, pasta Bolognese,” and books about cognition. We routinely wish each other well, and mean it.

Gazzaniga has done the public a real service, said Andrew Newberg in The New York Sun. Neuroscience has made dramatic strides in recent decades, and this “intellectual romp” through its many highlights offers laypeople a chance to get up to date about what the experts have been discovering. Gazzaniga’s most interesting theme is not simply that we are unique but that the capacities of our brains have evolved in response to a particularly human socializing impulse. Humans can maintain social networks three to four times larger than those of chimpanzees, for instance. Without language and a complex moral sense—two uniquely human traits—such feats of collegiality would be impossible.

Gazzaniga’s enthusiasm about his field sometimes outruns his evidence, said Adam Keiper in The Wall Street Journal. He seems to believe that “biological science is superior to every other way of thinking about human life,” and that his fellow neuroscientists are on the brink of fully explaining love, morality, the impulse to create, and many other human mysteries that have puzzled philosophers for eons. Yet he fails even to prove most of his claims about human exceptionalism, said Robert Burton in Salon.com. Because Gazzaniga often appears to be “shading scientific findings to support his thesis,” you’d be well advised to simply “enjoy his selection of data and draw your own conclusions.”