With his new book, The Creative Spark, Agustín Fuentes, a primatologist and anthropologist currently at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, boldly puts forth the idea that what makes humans special is creativity. The ability of humans to switch back and forth between considering what is, and dreaming of what might be, and to then put these thoughts into actions (often collaboratively), has brought us a very long way from our primate origins to the tool-wielding, world-shaping force of nature of today. Along the way, Fuentes wants to do away with some of the dominant narratives regarding human evolution today, or rather, he thinks most of them oversimplify things and lead to distortions in our thinking. Instead, he presents a new synthesis that places creativity front and centre stage as being the most important mechanism that helped us overcome challenges.
primates
Book review – Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion
Once you have worked in the book industry for a while, you will notice that publishers like to throw around words like “provocative” and “paradigm-shifting” when promoting new books. And so it is with Evolving God, the subtitle of which promises a provocative view on the origins of religion. If you’re expecting religion-bashing as done by the likes of Richard Dawkins, look elsewhere. Though she speaks of the human religious imagination, she early on makes it clear that she herself does not wish to imply that humans make up their deities, nor does she claim that sacred beings are real in our world. This is outside of the realm of scientific inquiry and she remains agnostic on these matters. So much for being controversial.
Book review – Evolution’s Bite: A Story of Teeth, Diet, and Human Origins
“Show me your teeth and I will tell you who you are” Cuvier is reported to have said. That, in short, is the brief of this book. Drawing on a range of disciplines – such as archaeology, palaeoclimatology, materials science, primatology, anthropology and evolutionary biology – this book weaves a compelling narrative of what our teeth, and those of our ancestors, can tell us about our past diets, and how we came to be the species we are today. Why teeth? Because, as Ungar contends, teeth are special.
The Inquisitive Biologist