Reddit reviews The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (P.S.)

I always recommend Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin because it's less antagonistic and more matter of fact about our evolution. Another good choice might be The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond. Again, I'm trying to think of the less obvious and less vitriolic choices than Harris or Dawkins. Handing him something entitled "The God Delusion" is likely to just shut off his brain instantly.

Oh ... to combat the Young Earth mentality, you could consider something like A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.

An excellent book on this subject is Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee. It puts a lot of the atrocities, as well as beauty, that we see being accomplished by the human race around the world. Highly recommend it.

As the other person mentioned, random chance, but also random chance that hit on the damned lottery. This is our "great leap forward"

You owe it to yourself to check our award-winning Dr. Jared Diamond's book http://www.amazon.com/Third-Chimpanzee-Evolution-Future-Animal/dp/0060845503/

It discusses everything from testicle size (ours are pretty huge given the size of our bodies) to language and whether or not that was the key (Hey buddy distract that mammorth while I spear it). It also discusses other possibilities like cooking, which other folks like Pollan has written about and thinks was a major contributor in our quick acceleration (our closest relatives spend up to 12 hours a day chewing, we don't have to do nearly that much chewing because we have cooking. Sometimes this is a problem

I see; sorry about that. Your question is really phrased like a homework question.

One thing I would point out is that hunter- gatherers are behaviorally modern. The hunter gatherers who have survived the longest in the modern world are in extreme environments: the Arctic, the Kalahari, the Amazon. It takes great intelligence and cultural knowledge to survive in those environments. In Turkey, where grains grew wild and game was abundant, hunter gatherers apparently developed organized religion and built great monuments.

As fas as your question about the obelisk on 2001, that is a great artistic image for something dificult to concieve. We've never seen another sentient species, and there is a great gulf between us and chimps or dolphins.

Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel is a great book on how civilization has squeezed hunter gatherers out of existence. Diamond's Third Chimpanzee is a very readable acconut of human origins, although Diamond strays a bit farther from accepted anthropology there. Babel's Dawn is a great blog on the origin of language, the author considers multiple points of view.

I guess I must be talking to all the wrong people...thank you for your very well stated opinion. I concede that I am most likely guilty of "supernatural postering". I think maybe it is fear of that unknown that stops me short of admitting I know it's all a sham. I'll take a look at the FAQ (stupid me) and I'm ordering the book in the other window as I type this.

A book I found interesting on the topic of evolution from a scientific perspective is The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond

Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan

The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond

The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris

just so you know, that's exactly what we are