- Published: 17/08/2000
- ISBN: 9781862073685
- 127x20mm
- 336 pages
As We Know It
Marek Kohn
As We Know It is an account of how the human mind has evolved. It is a theory of mind: it tells us how our immediate ancestors might have thought and seen the world in the absence of language, gods or culture. Marek Kohn relates that ancient heritage to our humanity and examines the influence of our hominid past on our own behaviour, as creatures who speak, symbolize and create. Central to the book is a meditation on the handaxe, crafted again and again for hundreds of thousands of years by our proto-human ancestors. In his reconstruction of the uses and meaning of the handaxe, Kohn takes us into an alien world that is strangely close to our own. This is a work of sociobiology insofar as it applies Darwinism to human culture. Unlike almost all works of ‘evolutionary psychology’, however, it seeks to recapture Darwinism from the political right and to show that a better understanding of our evolutionary history need not lead to an imposing of limits on who we are and what we may become.
£7.99
Utterly fascinating ... a beautiful and moving picture of evolution
Andrew Marr, Observer
Beautifully captures the state of play ... Kohn has proved once more that he is a fine commentator on science
Colin Tudge, New Statesman
This is a model science writing: clear, conscientious and exciting, showing both what we know and what we don't ... Anyone interested in human evolution should read it
Andrew Brown, Independent
From the Same Author
Dope Girls
Marek Kohn
Now a major BBC TV series: a tour through the seedier side of Britain between the wars, and the moral panic that led to the criminalisation of drugs – reissued with added material.
27th November 1918, London. Just 16 days after the end of the Great War, with the nation on its knees, Billie Carleton takes to the stage for the last time. She is found dead the next day in her bedroom. The cause of death: a cocaine overdose. The drugs were traced back to the Chinese community in Limehouse. And for nearly half a century, Billie Carleton’s case was to linger in popular imagination: a cautionary tale of the relationship between young girls, dope and predatory men.
This is the story of how drug use was transformed into a national menace. It’s the story of how morphine and cocaine, once commonly available in any chemist’s shop, became the subject of vicious narratives targeting racial minorities and the working classes. And it’s a reflection on how drugs provide a way of speaking simultaneously about women, race, class, sex and the nation’s place in the world – both in at the turn of the 20th Century and in Britain today.
