How Brains Think: The Evolution of Intelligence

✍ Scribed by William H. Calvin

• Publisher: Phoenix
• Year: 2001
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 192
• Series: The Science Masters Series
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

What constitutes consciousness or intelligence? This is a question that has proved to philosophers to be an intellectual dead-end. Now William Calvin, by looking closely at animal and human intelligence and a wide range of evolutionary evidence, has broken new ground that will help us understand mental illness and illuminate the whole notion of what it is to be a person.

Calvin begins by asking what intelligence is. He moves to the Why of intelligence, where evidence from chimpanzees is important, before coming to the all-important How of intelligence, the cerebral codes and Darwinian processes that operate within seconds to produce intelligent thought and action.