Interesting, but also quite academically

Overall, I read the book with profit. It provides many aspects of the evolution of life in the foreground, which play only a subordinate role in numerous treatises. This includes for example the different types found on such between mutualism, in the course of which, where appropriate, be accompanied specializations with the loss of former skills. Exactly analogously owned the Chapter 3 "Losing It" for me the strongest of the entire book.

The same applies to the assessment of the author on the importance of fossils and so-called "missing links". Of course, and the fossils have had a great importance for the understanding of evolution. For example, we can know that there was once a T-Rex and in what geological era he lived today only because of the fossils found. The evolution itself is however long such a fact that often demanded Missing Links (or closing alleged "Fossil gaps") for the validation of evolution no longer require it.

Interestingly, I found his remarks about the interpretability of many fossil finds. Often it seems from a small skull and a few other bones "creative" to construct an entirely new species. Much of what he writes, just shows once again that science is operated by scientists, their own interests (and their own success) track. Anyway: The Chapter 4 "The Beowulf effect" was for me also among the strongest of the book.

Disturbing I felt, however, the constant messages that incidentally the author tries to accommodate. Because on the one hand talk of harmful ideas for alleged evolutionary higher development who was still skeptical about Darwin, and for launching the work of Karl Ernst von Baer and Ernst Haeckel was (37):

"It is this Haecklian bastxxdization of natural selection that's responsible for (...) The engine did drives evolution forward, from simplicity to complexity, in a series of maneuvers with a definite beginning Ciceronian and a culmination in Man ..."

The "culmination in Man" is the other point he tries to refute, and to which he devotes almost the entire second half of the book.

The arguments that he presents here, are ultimately conceivable weak. Gee approaches the topic from the perspective of a hardcore biologist who judged a living solely by its genetically mediated features and capabilities. This leads to strange beliefs and insights (155):

"If language is not uniquely human, Either in its function or its complexity, what about writing, the recording of language in symbolic form outside the body, it can be examined did preserved and disseminated for more than Widely spoken language ever can? ( ...)
Is not writing - and, by extension, the power of writing to address many people at once - the key to the current domination of the earth by humans? Well, Perhaps. Except thatmany animals use search extracorporeal forms of communication, and many animals have little in the way of language, and Perhaps less of brains. One thinks of the pheromone trails of ants, or the trails of voles uxxne - and These Are just two examples of extracorporeal communication and reporting did we know about. "

And elsewhere (156):
"The dogs are trading information about who's who, who's been around, who has Said What to Whom, and, Perhaps most of all, Their state of health We humans do it through vision, language, and sound -. Dogs do it through smell . The modality is different, but the end result is just the same. "

These statements are hard to beat in dubiousness and professional narrowness hardly.

The special thing about the writing of the people is not that one thus can distribute information to many other people, but that man with her - and in this he is absolutely unique in nature - invented its own about the DNA and the brain also reaching maintain competence level, stored in the knowledge, replicated and modified (and thus evolved) can be.