Under The Microscope

FIGMENTS OF REALITY: THE EVOLUTION OF THE CURIOUS MIND by Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen; Cambridge University Press, 1997; 325 pp; $A39.95 (hard)

Reviewed by Peter Hyde

A well-written tome covering evolution, the mind, society and culture has a good chance of capturing my attention. This one succeeded and held it to the last page. Along the way there were many examples, anecdotes and explanations which just begged to be read out loud, usually as a prelude to a long, involved conversation.

The authors' main thesis is that evolution works by complicity, a recursive process whereby organisms react to and change their environment, while it in turn is changing them. This applies at every stage, from that of photosynthetic achaebacteria releasing poisonous oxygen into the earlier atmosphere to humans shaping our culture which in turn shapes us.

Out of this powerful recursive process comes a now-familiar story (after Dennett and others) of life as organised complexity following channels in a constantly-shifting phase-space of the possible. Somewhere along the line some of those channels lead to intelligence and then, somehow, consciousness, "free" will and culture.

The authors start at the very beginning ("Fifteen thousand million years ago, the universe...") but the meat of their story is in the concluding chapters on being human, free will, extelligence and dealing with complexity. Both the journey and the destination are worth the effort.

(Note: I don't know if it's age or what, but ten days on my memories of Figments are not strong -- it is as if its ideas and arguments were so easy to assimilate that they have entered my world-view without a fight. Or, just possibly, their entertainment value was not matched by equivalent profundity. To sort that out, I'll just have to read it again...)

Peter Hyde, NZSM