Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Good read

Creationism is silly. We are imperfect. Our memories occasionally fail us. Many of us make bad choices. And natural selection is often misundertsood.

These are not original ideas but Gary Marcus ties them together in a short and readable book, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind. He brings up the various "bugs" in our cognitive equipment and presents modern explanations from behavioral and neural experiments.

This is all so much more satisfying than the evolutionary-psychology-can-explain-all-quirks approach.