- 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
This is a discussion of the transformation of drug use (especially morphine and cocaine, which was once commonly available in any chemist’s shop) into a national menace. It revolves around the death of Billie Carleton, a West End musical actress, in 1918. Its cast of characters includes Brilliant Chang, a Chinese restaurant proprietor and Edgar Manning, a jazz drummer from Jamaica. They were eventually identified as the villains of the affair and invested with a highly charged sexual menace. Around them, in the streets off Shaftesbury Avenue, there swirled a raffish group of seedy and entitled hedonists. Britain was horrified and fascinated, and so the drug problem was born amid a gush of exotic tabloid detail.