Terrence William Deacon Knihy

This revolutionary book provides fresh answers to long-standing questions of human origins and consciousness. Drawing on his breakthrough research in comparative neuroscience, Terrence Deacon offers a wealth of insights into the significance of symbolic thinking: from the co-evolutionary exchange between language and brains over two million years of hominid evolution to the ethical repercussions that followed man's newfound access to other people's thoughts and emotions.Informing these insights is a new understanding of how Darwinian processes underlie the brain's development and function as well as its evolution. In contrast to much contemporary neuroscience that treats the brain as no more or less than a computer, Deacon provides a new clarity of vision into the mechanism of mind. It injects a renewed sense of adventure into the experience of being human.

Human language is one of the most distinctive behavioural adaptations on the planet. Languages evolved in only one species, in only one way, without precedent, and without parallel. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution have produced hundreds of thousands of species with brains, and tens of thousands with complex learning abilities. Only one of these has ever wondered about its place in the whole scheme, because only one - through its language - evolved with the ability to do so. This book aims to alter the understanding of what it means to be human: the universe isn't a soulless, blindly spinning clockwork, but instead nascent hear and mind.

A radical new explanation of how life and consciousness emerge from physics and chemistry.

Examines the emergent processes that bridge the gap between organisms that think and have consciousness and those that do not and discusses the origins of life, information, and free will.