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Books > Science & Mathematics > Biology, life sciences > Human biology & related topics > Biological anthropology > Early man
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Lucy's Legacy - Sex and Intelligence in Human Evolution (Paperback, New edition)
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Lucy's Legacy - Sex and Intelligence in Human Evolution (Paperback, New edition)
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A primatologist's musings on evolution, with special attention to
the myriad changing roles of the sexes and to the development of
intelligence and human interdependence. Jolly is a visiting
lecturer at Princeton. She tells a good tale in her quest to
explain where we came from and where we're headed ("Biology offers
an increasingly coherent view of human nature and humanity's place
in nature"), and she shows us that "human interdependence grew with
our species' history, and now gallops forward to engulf the
biosphere." The driving force of evolution, she argues, is the
building of larger organisms that serve "the self-interest of their
component parts." After laying out her idea of evolution, Jolly
looks in part two at "Wild Societies." What behaviors do we have in
common with other animal groups? What can we learn from them about
ourselves? How did our interactions with other animal groups spur
the development of human intelligence? "Developing a Mind," part
three, looks more deeply into the evolution, individual and
species-wide, of intelligence, including growth from embryo to
adult. And finally, in part four, "The Age of Humanity," Jolly
describes how culture develops and how we move continually from
acting as individuals to acting in groups. Her final chapter
speculates on where we're headed: One educated guess is that we may
be moving toward the development of a global organization, or
organism. "Such an organism would be a new biological synthesis, as
cells and bodies once were, directed in part through conscious
human purposes." Jolly enlivens her instruction with snippets of
poetry and other writings (from Dorothy Parker to Mallarme), and
her own colorful prose ("Scientists are indeed fallible. We depend
on our social context like a litter of puppies. We can't survive
without the mothers' milk of praise, preferably accompanied by the
regurgitated meat of funding"). Jolly is an enthusiastic guide; she
has fun with all this, and readers will too. (Kirkus Reviews)
Alison Jolly believes that biologists have an important story to
tell about being human-not the all-too-familiar tale of
selfishness, competition, and biology as destiny but rather one of
cooperation and interdependence, from the first merging of
molecules to the rise of a species inextricably linked by language,
culture, and group living. This is the story that unfolds in Lucy's
Legacy, the saga of human evolution as told by a world-renowned
primatologist who works among the female-dominant ringtailed lemurs
of Madagascar. We cannot be certain that Lucy was female-the bones
themselves do not tell us. However, we do know, as Jolly points out
in this erudite, funny, and informative book, that the females who
came after Lucy-more adept than their males in verbal facility,
sharing food, forging links between generations, migrating among
places and groups, and devising creative mating strategies-played
as crucial a role in the human evolutionary process as "man" ever
did. In a book that takes us from the first cell to global society,
Jolly shows us that to learn where we came from and where we go
next, we need to understand how sex and intelligence, cooperation
and love, emerged from the harsh Darwinian struggle in the past,
and how these natural powers may continue to evolve in the future.
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