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Interactions between cell surfaces allow embryo to develop
Analytic and innovative, yet fairly easy to read, book on the place-dependent interactions of cell surfaces with other cell surfaces that regulate the processes of embryological development in metazoans (ie, animals).

Heavy going, big payoff
Edelman's Topobiology provides an excellent introduction to the field of molecular embryology. In the book you will be introduced to CAMs (cell adhesion molecules), SAMs (substrate adhesion molecules), and CJMs (celljunction molecules) that are produced and used by the body to keep itselforganized and literally stuck together as it develops and grows. Theprocesses of development and growth are extremely complex, and involveinteractions among many different entities in the body. As the headersuggests, this book is not an easy read; it presents abstract concepts, andthe author uses extremely complex sentence constructions to tell his story.This is not a book for the faint of heart, it is written with theprofessional biologist in mind.

If you have the strength and the courage,I suggest that you give this book a try

P.S.I am the "reader"from Manchester College in the previous review -- I didn't get my name onthat one though.

Thick going, but worth the effort
Edelman's Topobiology provides an excellent introduction to the field of molecular embryology.In the book you will be introduced to CAMs (cell adhesion molecules), SAMs (substrate adhesion molecules), and CJMs (celljunction molecules) that are produced and used by the body to keep itselforganized and literally stuck together as it develops and grows.Theprocesses of development and growth are extremely complex, and involveinteractions among many different entities in the body.

As the headersuggests, this book is not an easy read; it presents abstract concepts, andthe author uses extremely complex sentence constructions to tell his story. This is not a book for the faint of heart, it is written with theprofessional biologist in mind.

If you have the strength and the courage,I suggest that you give this book a try. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (21)

A very interesting and informative account of a distinguished neurologist's theory of consciousness
In this concise and informative book, author Gerald Edelman, M.D., Ph.D., attempts to provide readers an understanding of his theory of consciousness based on scientific evidence rather than philosophical inquiry. Dr. Edelman, who won a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his research applying Darwinian principles to his study of the diversity of antibodies, applies Darwinian principles of selection and variation to the nervous system. He is well-published in the topic of consciousness both in scholarly journals and in books such as Neural Darwinism (1987), Topobiology (1988), Remembered Present (1990), Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (1992), and A Universe of Consciousness (2000, written with Giulio Tononi). This book consists of 200 pages and is divided into a table of contents including subtitles, 12 chapters, a useful glossary, an index, and a rather limited bibliography.

The book, appropriately, opens with a poem by Emily Dickinson which describes the brain as "wider than the Sky," "deeper than the sea," and "just the weight of God." In this way Dr. Edelman affirms that to explain consciousness is no easy task, but it is nonetheless the task which he undertakes, and he mostly succeeds. The most basic premise on which Dr. Edelman's theory rests is that consciousness can be explained via scientific inquiry. He attempts to answer the question:"How can the firing of neurons give rise to subjective sensations, thoughts, and emotions?" The answer is framed for the lay reader, although at times the prose becomes dense and reads more like scholarly article than a book for a general audience. Still, the contents of the book are interesting enough to encourage the reader to push past the dense portions. The book provides an excellent overview of brain anatomy related to consciousness, connection and communication between different parts of the brain, the causality between the nervous system and consciousness, and the neurological differences between non-conscious activities and consciousness.

In the first brief chapter of the book, Dr. Edelman defines what he means by "consciousness" by outlining some of the key properties which his theory attempts to explain, such as that it is continuous, continually changing, not exhaustive, and integrative. Dr. Edelman also explains that consciousness as a process is the "dynamic accomplishment of the distributed activities of neurons in many different areas of the brain." This quote, indeed, is a very neat summary of his view and is representative of his writing style.

The first section of the book consists of a brief lesson on the anatomy of the brain focusing primarily on the thalamus, cortex, brain stem, basal ganglia and the various interactions between these regions. Special attention is focused on re-entrant pathways between the thalamus and cortex as Dr. Edelman asserts that it was the development of these connections that allowed the development of consciousness by allowing organisms to integrate present inputs from the environment with memory (neuronal memory) of past events and link the two via categorization. Additionally, Dr. Edelman explains Neural Darwinism (more specifically the theory of neuronal group selection, TNGS) which essentially states that due to the extreme variation in brain chemistry and pathways, a path must be selected, and the paths that are selected are based on value-systems from the brain stem. Essentially, neuronal or genetic memories of what is good and bad for the organism drive the selection of pathways via re-entrant pathways connecting the thalamus to the cortex. Thus, consciousness results from this never-ending selection of pathways at each instant in time driven by value-systems from the anterior brain. Dr. Edelman systematically explains this concept by linking the functions of the above-mentioned brain systems to Dr. Edelman's Theory of Neuronal Group Selection.

While most of the book focuses on primary consciousness and a thorough explanation thereof, the latter part is dedicated to explaining higher order consciousness. According to Dr. Edelman, "primary consciousness is the state of being mentally aware of things in the world, of having mental images in the present." Conversely, higher order consciousness is "the ability to be conscious of being conscious, and it allows the recognition by a thinking subject of his or her own acts and affections." Thus, only an organism with higher order consciousness has a concept of past and future and can plan accordingly. Dr. Edelman asserts that only humans and some higher primates (to a lesser degree) have higher order consciousness. Rather than really explaining a neurological basis for higher order consciousness, Dr. Edelman just states that like primary consciousness, it was evolved. He also hypothesizes that higher order consciousness probably stems from the ability to formulate language and develop a semantic system. Instead of delving into the highly interesting topics of identity and the mind-body problem as implied by the titles of his last two chapters, Dr. Edelman seems to avoid the titles of these chapters and really just summarizes his theory of consciousness.

Overall, Dr. Edelman accomplishes his goal of concisely and clearly explaining his theory of consciousness. However, it must be noted that some of the language in the book would be difficult for someone not accustomed to reading some scientific academic literature. Additionally, it can be vexing that Dr. Edelman does not seem to like recognizing other researchers' work within his text. Even his bibliography seems quite short given the range of information he covers. He seems to pose his theories and hypotheses as facts and does not recognize other biologically based theories of consciousness, which do exist. Additionally, he does not really address criticism of his theory. Still, I would recommend this book to anyone looking for an interesting and overall enjoyable account of a brilliant scientist's theory of one of the most interesting topics in philosophy, psychology, and now neurology.

Wider Than The Sky
Seems like a good overview of consciousness, a topic that has intrigued me for a long time. Have not seriously read most of book yet, only browsing and selected pages.

Evades a lot of the issues
This brief book, intended for a lay audience, is one of a series by Gerald Edelman. It lays out his concepts of the neural basis of consciousness, but I, as a neuroscientist, found it very disappointing. The problem was not the level of simplification required for helping the intended audience grasp the terminology and basic concepts of neuroscience. Rather, my discontent stemmed from Edelman's raising of testable hypotheses and then unceremoniously dropping them. For example, he posits that higher consciousness arises evolutionarily at the transition from reptiles to mammals, but he never goes on to discuss how one would really assess this intriguing idea. Can you find neuroantomical or physiological differences in the two groups that can reveal deep insights into consciousness? We are never told.

Not Written for all Audiences
"Is it possible to summarize a theory of consciousness in a short compass?I think it unlikely unless if the summary is addressed to those who have already taken the long excursion with that audience in mind I shall try."(pg113)

This is how Edelman begins chapter 10, but I believe it is a good quote to sum up the positive and negative aspects of this book in general.
I read and enjoyed his book.Parts were difficult and took a couple of reads.The difficult spots were usually cleared up by a rereading though and didn't diminish from a sense of hearing what he had to say and getting an impression of his view of consciousness.

A Taste of Brilliance, Then A Let Down
I was disappointed by this book.I have read a number of recent works on consciousness, and in them I've seen quite a few positive references to bioscientist Gerald Edelman. Philosopher John Searle, who some regard as the "dean" of the consciousness debate, says that Edelman may understand the physical and functional workings of the human brain better than anyone else (see Searle's The Mystery of Consciousness).Edelman's work regarding the brain's ability to set up ad-hoc looping circuits between the many "maps" within it (i.e., small segments that specialize in a particular task, e.g. the area that identifies colors from visual inputs) is very powerful.It addresses many important questions, such as how we experience things in a unified manner when many different areas of our brain separately process the elements and sub-elements of sight, sound, smell and touch.

Thus, I had hoped that Wider Than the Sky would be Edelman's attempt to unfold his powerful insights regarding brain-mind dynamics before the reasonably educated masses.Unfortunately, Dr. Edelman chose to zip through his important ideas so as to dish out a warmed-over version of philosopher Daniel Dennett's functional materialism. This book should be compared with Steven Pinker's How The Mind Works.Pinker wrote a long book that eventually did what it promised, despite breezy asides about Queen Elizabeth, Lilly Tomlin, Leonard Nimoy and the like. Pinker ultimately stuck to analyzing the processes by which the human brain forwards the interests of the body to which it is attached, within a changing and challenging environment.Pinker remained agnostic to the ultimate question of what consciousness is and what its nature might be.I myself would have preferred it if Edelman had stuck to that script.

Edelman does indeed give the reader a taste of some important concepts regarding the dynamics of the brain.These would include: re-entrant neuron looping between processing areas; neural group selection (or day-to-day Darwinism, the on-going shaping of the "plastic" brain); degeneracy (i.e. the ability to quickly change the looping circuits in a way that responds to new stimuli, but doesn't immediately drop the thought or perception that you were attending to); and "value systems" (a spaghetti-like network of connections originating under the cortex, which in effect spray the brain with mood and mind-altering chemicals such as serotonin and ACH at the right times, helping the body to enforce its basic agenda of survival, reproduction and probably other "higher-order" agenda derived from learning experience).But Edelman doesn't take the time to develop these fascinating ideas with needed examples and analogies, so as to help the lay reader to appreciate what he and his team have discovered regarding brain processes.He's like those "I'm only going to say this once" professors that you try to forget once the semester is over.

Instead of explaining his research, Dr. Edelman leads us up the metaphysical mountain of consciousness, where we sit at his feet as he purifies us of any superstitious, dualistic notions regarding who we are and what it's like to be human.He tells us that consciousness, as we "folk" think of it, is ultimately just a side-effect of material interactions.He explains that qualia is really a function, i.e. the brain's ability to discriminate different portions of a mental image. And he fails to acknowledge those who had put forth similar ideas in the past.It's a shame; Edelman rushes through the really innovative research that he is doing, to dwell on a set of ideas that you could get the hang of in an hour or two from one of those Totem / Icon "comic books" (i.e., Introducing Consciousness by D. Papineau and H. Selina).

Edelman takes some other interesting positions, but fails to alert the reader as to their speculative and controversial nature (I mean, isn't that what footnotes are for?).Regarding emotions and feelings, he gives them minimal consideration, passing them off as a side-effect of value system operations (those mind chemicals, remember?).By contrast, some mind analysts such as Antonio Damasio and Susan Greenfield give emotions top-billing.Edelman dismisses the notion advanced by Jerry Fodor that the mind uses a "language" of sorts between its specialty components, and the related notion regarding proto-language, which underlies Chomsky's views about the universal elements of all human languages.I can't say that Edelman is wrong here, but a footnote acknowledging the existence of differing viewpoints seems to be the usual practice.Are Nobel Prize winners permanently excused from the need to footnote?

One more example of Dr. Edelman's intellectual rope-walking without a net: he posits that the human brain has greater computing capabilities than the hypothetical "Turing Machine", which is an intellectual keystone of computing theory.This sounds OK until you do a search on the topic and discover "hypercomputation", a very uncertain and controversial concept.I'd venture that Dr. Edelman is wandering quite far from the zone of expertise where he earned a Nobel Prize (regarding his work in immunology).The same applies to his metaphysical (or anti-metaphysical) admonitions regarding "folk understanding" of human consciousness. His thoughts would make for a lengthy and interesting footnote, for sure.But this book is not about footnotes - it has none (although it does contain a very useful glossary).Wider Than the Sky is another unfortunate example of a brilliant person doing some very interesting research about the brain, who gives in to the temptation of lecturing mere mortals regarding their unenlightened assumptions. I hope that Dr. Edelman came closer to the Pinker tradition of exposition and respect for the general audience in his (Edelman's) other popular works (Bright Air, Brilliant Fire and Second Nature).But I'm not in any hurry to bet on it -- too many other interesting authors on the mind and consciousness to get to. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Daedalus, published by Thomson Gale on June 22, 2006. The length of the article is 5360 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The embodiment of mind.
Author: Gerald M. Edelman
Publication: Daedalus (Magazine/Journal)
Date: June 22, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 135Issue: 3Page: 23(10)

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

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A look at how the mind works discusses computers, evolution, Descartes, Schro+a5dinger, the nature of perception, language, and individuality and ponders connections between psychology, physics, medicine, philosophy, and more. National ad/promo. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (16)

Fascinating Thesis Marred by Opaque and Overly Complex Exposition
Having read this book roughly twice, I'm still not sure I'm up to offering a review but that may, itself, be an important comment because clarity often reflects theoretical adequacy. The book's main thesis seems to boil down to this: Brains are a product of what Edleman calls selectional events, reflecting an operational principle specific to living systems. In this he draws a distinction at the very outset between the hit or miss outcomes of evolutionary development by random selection (which produce species differentiation by changing the individual members of species over time) and the instructional development people cause to happen via algorithms (step by step procedures for getting things done, either by describing the steps needed to get things done to one another, by following such steps, or by producing those steps in computational code which can then be translated into the digitized electronic signals we think of as 0's and 1's that govern computer operations).

Selection, of course, is serendipitous, whatever blueprint establishes each individual being the result of eons of trial and error in the selectional process that preceded it. Edelman takes this idea and applies it to how individual brains operate on a daily, and instant by instant, basis. Extending the idea of selection, as he has previously identified it in human immune systems (where antibodies in our bloodstreams selectively bond with invading agents, based on their "fit", and those which bond more closely out-produce those which don't, thus increasing the "right" type of antibodies in the bloodstream), Edleman suggests that the waxing and waning of the brain linkages (which, he claims, embody our mental processes) occurs in roughly the same way.

This is somewhat controversial because of 1) its implications (it challenges more accepted functionalist accounts which liken brain operations to algorithms such as those a computer can perform); and because of 2) its failure to fully account for how the selecting actually alters the strengths of the linkages or how the linkages themselves give us the features we associate with consciousness (things like awareness, intentionality, understanding, etc.). And yet, given that he has so thoroughly laid out his case for this kind of biological mechanism driving brains, and that he seems to have covered the obvious operational issues as they apply to what we presently know about brains, his thesis has a certain plausiblity. But it remains highly complex and even controversial because it boils down, in the end, to a number of somewhat abstruse and not intuitively apparent claims.

It's really all about memory in the end, Edelman says, though he defines this function so broadly that it's no longer recognizable as what we call memory in ourselves. Memory at its most basic level is the capacity of a self-contained, self-replicating system to retain changes and, via self-replication, to pass them on to descendent systems. Of course, "memory" also means the ability of a computational system to recover stored coded data and, in us, the ability to summon up past images, thoughts, associations, etc. Are these all the same thing? Edelman suggests they are and claims that it is the increasing systemic complexity and resultant sophistication that makes the primitive memory we find in relatively simple systems and their components (including the capacity to reproduce progeny with like "fits" as we find in immune systems) into the kinds of things we call memory in ourselves. It is this memory principle, a product of the selectionist dynamic (or perhaps the reason that selection manages to occur?) that, on his view, is the foundation of the kinds of features we recognize as consciousness in ourselves.

Alas, Edelman's thesis is anything but simple (which I'm guessing, is already apparent from my efforts here). In the end it seems to amount to the claim that brains, being organic and the result of the previously described selectional processes, are uniquely complex in structure and operation in the universe, each uniquely differentiated from all other brains (because even twins' brains, constructed on a shared blueprint, will have changed in their lifetimes in ways unique to each individual). It is this complexity of structure, this "morphology", he tells us, that is responsible for the things brains do. Consciousness, he argues, is built on levels of operation in the brain and primary or animal level consciousness (which itself has levels) forms the necessary foundation for higher level consciousness in which self-awareness and self-reflexiveness become possible. These levels are only possible because of the intrinsic complexity of brain morphology.

Edelman lays out a picture of how the different parts of the brain are responsible for different features and notes how many of the features we treat as unitary in ourselves (e.g., memory, perception, conception, etc.) may be best understood, upon reflection, to really be the result of the elaborate collaboration, through cross brain linking of neuronal groups in different brain centers responsible for different things. These combine to produce the various constituent operations that, when further joined through what he calls "reentrant loops", become the features we recognize in ourselves like awareness, understanding, remembering, intentionality, conceptualizing, believing, etc. He calls his model of how brains work, built on all of this, the Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (TNGS), because, he explains, different neuronal groups (not individual neurons) must operate together through the cross-brain linkages already mentioned to produce each instance of consciousness in ourselves. Such instances are thus complex occurrences and not the simple unified phenomena they appear to be on introspection.

Human memory, for instance, he describes as a complex phenomenon that differs from the relatively simple memory function which computers rely on. What we recognize as memory in ourselves is never exact, he points out, because it consists of a bunch of different linked constituent elements running in parallel and impinging on one another, albeit never exactly in the same way, each time a remembered item is summoned up. Unlike computational memory, which involves the exact replication of a coded instruction in each instance (a failure of this level of precision being a failure of the computational memory function), human memory is seen to be rough, approximate and ever-changing (think Roshomon or the related phenomenon of "false memory" as described by modern psychology). This feature of our memory happens because remembering in us is a function of a complex reconstruction process that depends on the relative strengths and linkages of the connecting loops between the implicated neuronal groups. As such this makes creativity and metaphor possible but it also means that each instance of recall introduces changes through new associations.

It's because of his claim that brains are uniquely complex (more like a jungle than a powerplant as he puts it) that he insists that computationalism, the thesis that consciousness can be replicated on computers, is unsound. We need brains he says, because consciousness is a biological product requiring the complex morphology and historical development, reflecting selection, that only organic systems can achieve. On this last point, though, I think he may well be mistaken.

Edelman often uses "consciousness" in a relatively unsophisticated way and seems to be under the impression that computations, as performed by computers, are purely abstract without, as John Searle (whom he cites) puts it, causal efficacy in the world. In fact, computers are as physically instantiated as brains and computational processes on computers as physical as they must be in human brains. But his answer as to whether a computer can be conscious does not stop with this claim about the abstract nature of computational processes. He makes the further point that computers, running on logic, are instructionally based whereas our brains, running on "selection", are not. In this he seems to disregard the notion that selection in evolution itself provides its own set of instructions (our genomes), even if they're not conceived in advance by any mind. Similarly he seems to overlook the obvious fact that the genetic mechanism, itself, appears to be a form of information processing just as computations in computers are (though genetic information processing may, in fact, be more complex).

Moreover, if what constitutes consciousness in us is a range of features which occur together (awareness, intentionality, understanding, perception, conception, etc.), then the real question is not whether brains and computers can accomplish the production of these features in the same way but whether they can both achieve the same functional output at all. If computers can produce the features we associate with consciousness, how they do it is likely to be less important than that they can and his argument that computers can never be expected to do what brains do would be wrong.

Nevertheless, he has offered a very compelling picture of the incredible complexity that confronts us (especially if you're a computationalist) in endeavoring to achieve the goal of creating synthetic minds. For Edelman, everything hinges on his argument for uniqueness and complexity, which he derives from the principle of selection that, he tells us, is unique to self-contained, self-perpetuating systems like living things. Computers, on the other hand, are pre-set operational functions ("syntactical" systems, again echoing another of Searle's famous criticisms) which are guided by an outside mind (the programmer) and therefore unable to react to an open-ended world of unpredictable and ever changing inputs. But in claiming this, he presumes that computers lack the ability to be open-ended because they are programmed though this is by no means clear -- or likely to be any truer than his related claim that consciously programmed computational machines are qualitatively different from organic machines that have evolved over eons as a result of a selectional mechanism. After all, does it really matter where the programming comes from, as long as there's programming there?

Edelman's underlying position is that the genetic programming of evolutionary selection leads to an open-ended tangle of unpredicted, and unpredictable, synaptic connections -- and their more macro neuronal group links which strengthen and weaken according to their ongoing interaction with external stimuli. It is this waxing and waning of the neuronal group pathways between the different brain centers and their sub-parts that gives rise to the facets of consciousness on his view -- an activity that is nothing like the computational processing of machines as found on computers.

Yet, in this he seems to be disregarding the fact that computational programs can also involve multiple sub-systems doing different, interrelated things, and that such systems can be designed to implement open-ended reactions to an unpredicted world of stimuli once basic parameters are set. Such parameters need be no more obtrusive than our own evolution-driven genetic codes, after all.

Edelman's thesis is worth thinking about and may well offer some interesting directions for understanding how brains work and for developing new thinking machines that may depart from the standard computational model we rely on today (the universal Turing machine). Unfortunately Edelman's writing is not up to the level of the ideas presented (on my view).It may be the case that the complexity of Edelman's thesis would not admit of any more succinct or precisely written text than he has provided but, in spite of my own difficulties here in explicating his ideas, I rather think he could have (and should have) been clearer. Certainly his failure to be clear is at least a prima facie reason to question the potency of the underlying ideas.

SWM

Brilliantly Sobering
This book is my introduction to Dr. Edelman, and I was stunned.Yes, I understand that this is a synopsis of his overall trilogy, and I am thankful for that.Now I can go to those volumes to dig deeper, if I don't move on to more recent works.I read this as a result of a recommendation in response to someone reviewing Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works (see my review of of that, if they'll print it).Edelman is clear, concise, and informative (and I like his wry humor).He shows all the marks of a great teacher, especially by patiently walking us through the tough neurologic stuff.I call this review Brilliantly Sobering because, once I had absorbed and understood his Theory of Neuronal Group Selection, the whole thought process business (and evolutionary and developmental progression of same) made sense for a change (unlike with Pinker's lame computational analog), and that actually startled me into thinking about HOW I think (and then, as a result, how I act -- what a change of pace for a student of Buddhism).Like I said, sobering.So next thing I did was pick up a copy of The Symbolic Quest: Basic Concepts of Analytical Psychology by Edward C. Whitmont (highly recommended) to help figure out WHY I think the way I think.Anyway, thank you, Dr. Edelman, I look forward to following you to where you've gone next.Meanwhile, I think I think I'll have a beer.

evolutionary mindbrain
Very dense, although I understand this is one of the easiest of this author's output to get through.Also made somewhat uneasy by author's slam-bang insistence on the Darwin evolutionary development of the mindbrain,which of course is the thrust of his thesis, to the exclusion of most other possibilities.Edelman has an answer, but not ALL of the answer and his one-sidedness puts me off I guess. Difficult to read, basically.

Consciousness as a biological Darwinist adaptation.
This is a very important book.
It proves convincingly that consciousness is a matter of ... matter (the biological matter of the brain) and that it is the outcome of a long history of biological adaptations.

It also proves that the mind is not a computer or a Turing machine, that human language is not a computer language and that physics is not sufficient to explain its working. The morphology of the brain goes deep, but not as deep as to attain the quantum level.
On the contrary, Edelman explains clearly that the mind is a process that operates in a 4 dimensional world; that it doesn't have a perfect memory or doesn't order events or objects logically. It is subject to mutation in order to select and to adapt and creates itself aspects of the reality by cultural and language interaction. Into the bargain, the biological structure of the brain is different for every individual.

Edelman's theory has also far reaching philosophical implications. It is the death of essentialism (there are no 'essences', only populations with different individuals) and of idealism (the world was there before the mind).

Is Edelman's TNGS (theory of neural group selection) the end of the story? Absolutely not. It is only the beginning. It forms the basis for further investigations. But it clearly indicates which way to follow and which ways not.

I have only one reservation: Edelman's nearly unconditional admiration for Freud.

This is an essential read.

a bit watered-down
I am a huge fan of Edelman, but I regretted having bought this book; I would say this is a kind of half-successful attempt at vulgarizing what he explained so well elsewhere: there is nothing to be found here that wasn`t already explained in more detail in "Neural Darwinism" and "The Remembered Present". So stay away from this one if you read the others. If you never read anything by him, go for his "Neural Darwinism". Reading his books was definitely a great intellectual experience of my life. Go for it!

PS: Da man is a genius. ... Read more