Selfless Memes

摘要

This year we celebrate the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth and the sesquicentennial of the publication of his magnum opus, On the Origin of Species. It was in a later work, The Descent of Man (1), that Darwin explicitly addressed the evolution of the human mind. He essentially argued for continuity of mind between humans and other animals. At the same time, he suggested that there is a kind of evolutionary hierarchy in which there is a greater cognitive gap between fishes and apes than between apes and man. It is only fitting that Frans de Waal, a professor of primatology at Emory University, publishes his latest book in the Darwin year, as he clearly has taken the master's lessons to heart.