Welcome to another First Impression Friday. In case this is your first time, here’s the rundown:
• Based on this sampling of your current read, give a few impressions
and predict what you’ll think by the end.
• Did you think you’d love and ended up hating it? Or did you think
you’d hate it and wound up loving it? Or were you exactly right?
• Link back to Storeys of Stories so I can enjoy reading all the
First Impression Fridays out there!
It has been A WHILE since I did one of these. So pumped for this!
Let’s talk about The Ape That Understood the Universe by Steve Stewart-Williams.
“The Ape that Understood the Universe is the story of the strangest animal in the world: the human animal. It opens with a question: How would an alien scientist view our species? What would it make of our sex differences, our sexual behavior, our child-rearing patterns, our moral codes, our religions, languages, and science? The book tackles these issues by drawing on ideas from two major schools of thought: evolutionary psychology and cultural evolutionary theory. The guiding assumption is that humans are animals, and that like all animals, we evolved to pass on our genes. At some point, however, we also evolved the capacity for culture – and from that moment, culture began evolving in its own right. This transformed us from a mere ape into an ape capable of reshaping the planet, travelling to other worlds, and understanding the vast universe of which we’re but a tiny, fleeting fragment.”
I find evolution fascinating. Because though we’re all pretty familiar with the basic concept of evolution, I have no idea how it really and truly happens. And this book deals with a lot of evolution of our minds. Culture.
A single human’s capability for intelligence hasn’t really changed, but as a species we take every man and woman’s experiences with us going forward. Each child is given a cumulative education of everyone that came before us.
Plato and Socrates were two of the greatest minds that have ever existed, but if you were to pluck them out of their element and put them face-to-face with a 5-year-old from 2018 that kid is going to run circles around those geezers (figuratively AND literally.)
I can’t wait to dig further into this book, but since it is a non-fiction (although one I’m really interested in) I’m guessing I’m going to run into some really slow parts. I hope I’m wrong on that, but still, I’m going to guess…
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