The Human Instinct Book Summary - The Human Instinct Book explained in key points

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The Human Instinct summary

Name: The Human Instinct
Rating: 4 (227 reviews)
Author: Kenneth R. Miller

Kenneth R. Miller

How We Evolved to Have Reason, Consciousness, and Free Will

4 (227 ratings)

27 mins

Table of Contents

The Human Instinct
summarized in 8 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 8

What’s in it for me? A whistle-stop tour of human evolution.

For tens of thousands of years, we humans lived by stories that made sense of our place in the universe and how we came to be. Amongst all creatures – the stories said – we were special.

Then, about 150 years ago, Charles Darwin dealt those stories a serious blow. He advanced an idea, called natural selection, which said that variations in organisms that aid in survival tend to flourish. All living organisms – humans included – had evolved over time.

This was a simple, yet world-shaking idea.

For those who deny it, and for many of those who accept it, the theory of evolution would seem to imply that those old stories had it dead wrong. If we evolved like any other organism, then our lives have no special meaning or purpose. When we pretend otherwise, we’re fooling ourselves. We’re no more significant, free, or unique than a slug or a potato.

Fortunately, as we’ll learn in these blinks, evolution doesn’t actually require this dire interpretation of humanity and the meaning of life. We are unique animals in the epic tale of creation. And we have evolution to thank for it.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why we’re not at the pinnacle of evolution, but we’re nonetheless unique among Earth’s organisms;
why deferring to evolution as an explanation for everything leads to some bad ideas; and
how evolution gave us the capacities of free will, consciousness, and reason.

Natural selection explains a lot, but not all, of our evolution.

Charles Darwin gets top billing as the founding father of the theory of evolution by natural selection, but another British naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, actually beat him to it.

Wallace and Darwin were colleagues, penpals, and a source of support to one another. In fact, a letter from Wallace prompted Darwin to publish his groundbreaking work, On the Origin of Species in 1859.

But, as time passed, Wallace began to have doubts. The theory wasn’t enough.

How could it be, he wondered, that a mind adapted for mere survival could paint a portrait, construct a cathedral, or compose a symphony? How could such a mind uncover the scientific truths of the universe?

The answer may lie in a truth that both Darwin and Wallace understood: not all evolution is directly attributable to natural selection. In other words, evolution leaves room for accidental and fortuitous outcomes.

The strange abilities of the human brain may result from one such happy accident.

About three million years ago the human brain began to grow, and within what amounts to a geological instant, it tripled in size.

We’re still exploring why this happened, but we know this much: our new, big brains not only helped us walk, talk, forage, and hunt, they also gave us abilities that had no immediate bearing on survival. That’s the “accidental and fortuitous” part.

For example, our big brains made it possible for us to contemplate ourselves, the earth, and the stars. They made it possible to find answers by creating myths, religion, art, literature, math, and science. They made it possible for us to understand evolution itself.

In 1979, the evolutionary biologists Steven Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin coined a term for the happy accidents of evolution: spandrels.

They borrowed the term from architecture, and it describes the triangular forms that allow an arch to support a dome in, for example, a cathedral. In their essay “The Spandrels of San Marco” Gould and Lewontin use the architectural features as a metaphor for the occasionally beautiful and often powerful byproducts of evolution.

As we move through the next few blinks, keep spandrels in the back of your mind. We’ll learn more about how spandrels of the brain made us what we are. But first, we have to come to terms with some of the potentially dispiriting implications of our natural origins.

Learning that we’re mere products of evolution may be dispiriting, but we can’t ignore the evidence.

So, we’ve established that we’re part of evolution, just like any other organism. For many, this truth hurts. It’s a demotion from the ordained place we held in our myths. Back in Darwin’s days, and for a good while after that, those who opposed evolution didn’t have to dig very deep to find evidence that seemed to contradict the new theory. The fossil record connecting us to ancient apes was riddled with gaps and misinterpretations.

Naturalists sought the “missing link,” a species to serve as a halfway mark between us and our ape ancestors, but they hadn’t had much luck. The so-called “Java Man,” uncovered in the forests of Indonesia, was little more than a piece of skull. “Piltdown Man” from the dirt of southern England turned out to be a hoax. All in all, humanity’s evolutionary fossil record wasn’t much to go on.

We’re not the pinnacle of evolution.

In the early 1700s, a Swedish man called Carolus Linnaeus gave himself a big job. He set about drafting the first thoroughly systematic classification of every organism on Earth. In 1735, he brought forth his work as a book titled Systema Naturae.

Linnaeus’s work had a huge impact on zoology, and it influenced the taxonomy of animals for centuries. For example, it was Linnaeus who introduced the binomial classification system which uses two names for every organism, one for the genus, and one for the species. It’s thanks to him that we’re known as Homo sapiens, which, by the way, means “the thinking human.”

Looking to evolution as an explanation for everything can lead to some very bad ideas.

In February 1978, the biologist E. O. Wilson stepped up to the podium at the annual meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Science. Wilson had a new field of inquiry to propose: Sociobiology.

Wilson had risen to prominence by brilliantly decoding societies of fire ants. Sociobiology, Wilson hoped, would apply a similar analysis to all of Earth’s creatures: from microorganisms to prairie dogs and, most importantly, human beings. The new science aimed to reveal the biological roots of all forms of human organization.

The human brain, for all its flaws and exceptional power, is a product of evolution.

Before moving on, let’s review a bit of what we’ve covered so far. First, humans are a part of – not apart from – evolution. No other origin story has empirical evidence that can hold a candle to the explanatory power of evolution through natural selection.

But this truth came with a cost. We’ve lost the confidence once given by our creation myths. To compensate, we may be tempted to rearrange evolution to put ourselves at the top, but the science doesn’t allow it. On the other hand, looking to evolution to explain everything about humanity has its own pitfalls.

Evolution doesn’t explain away the individual experience of life.

Consciousness. It’s a problem.

When, for example, does it begin?

The brain is a product of evolution, and the possibility of free will comes built-in.

Like Thomas Nagel, the seminal French philosopher René Descartes pondered the gap between mind and matter.

For Descartes, the body was a “machine made of earth,” a mechanism operating under the cause-and-effect laws of physical science. In contrast, he firmly believed that he went about his life acting and making choices more or less according to his own discretion.

An understanding of evolution can imbue our life with meaning.

If you were a Londoner in 1803 with an interest in anatomy, you might have chanced upon a strange demonstration led by an Italian physician named Giovanni Aldini.

Aldini was a practitioner of galvanism, the study of biological electricity. That day he’d gotten his hands on the cadaver of an executed criminal, and in front of an audience, Aldini touched the dead man’s face with conducting rods, sending electricity into the body.

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What is The Human Instinct about?

The Human Instinct (2018) is a celebration of humanity’s development of reason, consciousness, and free will through the process of evolution. It shows that our remarkable capacities are all the more unique for having arising from natural origins.

Who should read The Human Instinct?

Theologians, philosophers, scientists, and anyone else interested in the condition of our peculiar species
Anyone curious about evolution and what it means for humanity
Humans who enjoy contemplating our place in creation

About the Author

Kenneth R. Miller is a professor of biology at Brown University and the acclaimed author of Only a Theory and Finding Darwin's God. Miller testified as an expert witness in support of evolution in Kitzmiller v. Dover in 2005, a modern-day Scopes Monkey Trial.

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