In God's Image: The Natural History of Intelligence and Ethics

We are seeing explosive advances in the science of human evolution, to a point where our genome can be compared in molecular detail with the genomes of other primates. At the same time, the neurobiology of the higher cognitive functions has reached a point where we can scan the activity of the living brain to make thoughts and feelings visible. In this book, Gerhard Meisenberg explains the processes by which the brain creates intelligent reasoning and judgments about proper courses of action. He illuminates the big issues of human nature from the point of view of neurobiologist, evolutionary biologist, and molecular geneticist in turn. The results are disturbing. The author descries humans as crudely programmed robots with fairly predictable behavior, unable to transcend the limitations that culture and genes impose on their thinking. The author knows how to turn information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom. The book unifies the biological and social sciences, and shows how this powerful new science answers the big questions about human existence: the nature of reasoning and problem solving, the way ethical judgments are produced from a bundle of social instincts, the world, why countries fight wars, why Europe rose but the Middle East declined over the last millennium, and much, much more. This new science can predict the future: Will our present civilization survive, or will it self-destruct? And in what direction is our species evolving biologically?