Darwin among the machines

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E. Fuller Torrey

Religions and mythologies from around the world teach that God or gods created humans. Atheist, humanist, and materialist critics, meanwhile, have attempted to turn theology on its head, claiming that religion is a human invention. In this book, E. Fuller Torrey draws on cutting-edge neuroscience research to propose a startling answer to the ultimate question. Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods locates the origin of gods within the human brain, arguing that religious belief is a by-product of evolution.Based on an idea originally proposed by Charles Darwin, Torrey marshals evidence that the emergence of gods was an incidental consequence of several evolutionary factors. Using data ranging from ancient skulls and artifacts to brain imaging, primatology, and child development studies, this book traces how new cognitive abilities gave rise to new behaviors. For instance, autobiographical memory, the ability to project ourselves backward and forward in time, gave Homo sapiens a competitive advantage. However, it also led to comprehension of mortality, spurring belief in an alternative to death. Torrey details the neurobiological sequence that explains why the gods appeared when they did, connecting archaeological findings including clothing, art, farming, and urbanization to cognitive developments. This book does not dismiss belief but rather presents religious belief as an inevitable outcome of brain evolution. Providing clear and accessible explanations of evolutionary neuroscience, Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods will shed new light on the mechanics of our deepest mysteries.

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Milford Wolpoff and Rachel Caspari

Race and Human Evolution is a far-ranging account by leading researchers in the field that describes the latest scientific evidence and the conflicting theories about human evolution. Milford Wolpoff and Rachel Caspari describe the "Eve" or "Out-of-Africa" theory, which holds that all living people are the descendants of a single common ancestor ("Eve") who began a new species of humanity in Africa some 200,000 years ago and whose progeny spread throughout the world, giving rise to the different human races. The authors show that the evidence of the fossil record and genetic data support "Multiregionalism," which posits that for some two million years human populations have been entwined in a network of widespread peoples who evolved together because they met and interbred, giving the races today many ancestors, not a single common one. Race and Human Evolution shows how the debate over the "Eve" theory reflects a long history of theories about human origins and race that has been fraught with social and political implications. The debate now raging cannot free itself of this background. Certain to be controversial but also to illuminate an argument that has persisted for centuries and which persists in some of today's most inflammatory social and political issues, Race and Human Evolution provides an authoritative account of the science and the scientists behind the controversy over the origin of humanity and its racial differences.

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Randy Moore, Mark Decker, and Sehoya Cotner

A unique chronology with entries describing the key events in the 3,000-year conflict between religion and science over the explanation and definition of life on Earth.

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Kim Sterelny

"Science has seen its fair share of punch-ups over the years, but one debate, in the field of biology, has become notorious for its intensity. Over the last twenty years, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould have engaged in a savage battle over evolution that shows no signs of waning. Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker, conceives of evolution as a struggle between gene lineages; Gould, who wrote Wonderful Life and Rocks of Ages, sees it as a struggle between organisms. For Dawkins, the principles of evolutionary biology apply just as well to humans as they do to all living creatures; for Gould, however, this sociobiology is not just ill-motivated but wrong, and dangerous. Dawkins' views have been caricatured, and the man painted as a crazed reductionist, shrinking all the variety and complexity of life down to a struggle for existence between blind and selfish genes. Gould, too, has been falsely represented by creationists as rejecting the fundamental principles of Darwinism itself." "Kim Sterelny moves beyond caricature to expose the real differences between the conceptions of evolution of these two leading scientists. He shows that the conflict extends beyond evolution to their very beliefs in science itself; and, in Gould's case, to domains in which science plays no role at all."--Jacket.