The Monkey in the Mirror by Ian Tattersall, Harcourt Brace, $25, ISBN 0151005206
MEMORIES, good and bad, lie dormant in our minds until something triggers their recall. For me, a disagreeable memory from my schooldays is triggered by a single word, 鈥渆ssay鈥�. It meant finding the next clean page in my book and copying a dreaded title from the blackboard. It was usually something uninspiring: 鈥淭he best day of my life鈥� or 鈥淢y favourite holiday鈥�. Even today, just seeing the word essay is enough to bring back the anxiety of having to cover pages and pages with writing in an effort to win a tick and the precious, but rarely achieved, one-word comment 鈥淕ood鈥�.
For a writer who is a scientist the essay is good and bad news. The good news is liberation from the necessity to be comprehensive and the requirement to cite sources. And the bad news? Your writing and opinions must be worth reading. Few are brave enough to dive in. Some stay close to the poolside and write for science magazines. Others strike off for the deep end, competing with professional writers in The New York Review of Books. Only rarely does a publisher have sufficient confidence in a scientist to risk producing a collection of essays that have not been honed by previous publications.
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Ian Tattersall is a good and prolific writer of books about human evolution. He鈥檚 taken the plunge into the essay genre. Did he dive or was he pushed? Was it because his book titles have all but exhausted the ingenious ways you can combine the words human, evolution and extinct? Or did he鈥攐r his agent鈥攖hink the time was ripe to take on Stephen Jay Gould?
Some of the themes of his eight essays in The Monkey in the Mirror are vintage Tattersall: the bushiness of the human evolutionary tree, Neanderthals and the origin of modern humans.
Readers will learn that Tattersall came relatively late to human evolution. The study of lemurs was his introduction to evolutionary biology. Lemurs are an eccentric group of lower primates that are to Madagascar as finches are to the Galapagos Islands. His grounding in lemur evolution provides Tattersall with a valuable comparative perspective for interpreting variation in the human fossil record. Some researchers look at the fossil evidence for human evolution and interpret it as if it were sampled from a seamless continuity. These people opt to recognise relatively few species in our fossil record. Tattersall looks at the evidence, compares it with what he saw in the lemurs, and interprets the human fossil record as evidence for discontinuity. Thus, he recognises many more human taxonomic groups from the record. This same prejudice explains why he is in the vanguard of those who interpret the Neanderthals as a species in their own right.
The remaining five essays ponder the scientific process, what evolution is and is not, grades of human ancestor, the essence of humanity, the iniquities of evolutionary psychology and the future of human evolution. The writing is never dull, yet it is remarkable how much detailed science Tattersall incorporates.
He has definite opinions, but is rarely opinionated. His contempt for evolutionary psychology confuses reductionist鈥攁nd often unsophisticated鈥攁ttempts to explain the genetic basis of antisocial behaviour, with actively condoning such behaviour. I share his scepticism about the 鈥済ene for x鈥� school of evolutionary psychology, but still believe it is possible to do good, evolution-related research into the social behaviour of modern humans.
The Monkey in the Mirror would have definitely received a tick and 鈥淕ood try鈥� from my English master. My guess is that Tattersall is already part way through his next collection of essays. To judge by the ingenuity he has shown as a book writer, he will have fresh things to say about Neanderthals, and much else besides. Watch out, SJG鈥攖he English are coming.
