Kirjahaku

In Women After All, anthropologist Melvin Konner traces the arc of evolution to explain the relationships between women and men. Drawing on colourful examples from the natural world—the octopus, the black widow spider and coral reef fish, which can switch from male to female in a single reproductive career—he sheds light on our biologically different human identities and the poignant exceptions that challenge the male/female divide. We meet hunter-gatherers in Botswana whose culture gave women a prominent place, inventing the working mother and respecting women’s voices around the fire. History upset this balance as a dense world of war fostered extreme male dominance. But our species has been recovering over the past two centuries and an unstoppable move towards equality is afoot. It will not be the end of men but it will be the end of male supremacy and a better, wiser world for women and men alike.

Believers is a scientist’s answer to attacks on faith by some well-meaning scientists and philosophers—a firm rebuke of the “Four Horsemen”: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. Melvin Konner, who was raised as an Orthodox Jew but has lived his adult life without such faith, explores the psychology, development, brain science, evolution and genetics of the religious impulses we experience. He views religious people with a sympathetic eye; his own upbringing, his apprenticeship in the trance dance religion of the African Bushmen and his friends in Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and other faiths have all shaped his perspective. He concludes that religion does much good as well as undoubted harm and that for at least a large minority of humanity, the belief in things unseen neither can nor should go away.

This book is an intellectual tour de force: a comprehensive Darwinian interpretation of human development. Looking at the entire range of human evolutionary history, Melvin Konner tells the compelling and complex story of how cross-cultural and universal characteristics of our growth from infancy to adolescence became rooted in genetically inherited characteristics of the human brain.All study of our evolution starts with one simple truth: human beings take an extraordinarily long time to grow up. What does this extended period of dependency have to do with human brain growth and social interactions? And why is play a sign of cognitive complexity, and a spur for cultural evolution? As Konner explores these questions, and topics ranging from bipedal walking to incest taboos, he firmly lays the foundations of psychology in biology. As his book eloquently explains, human learning and the greatest human intellectual accomplishments are rooted in our inherited capacity for attachments to each other. In our love of those we learn from, we find our way as individuals and as a species. Never before has this intersection of the biology and psychology of childhood been so brilliantly described."Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution," wrote Dobzhansky. In this remarkable book, Melvin Konner shows that nothing in childhood makes sense except in the light of evolution.