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Niccolo Leo Caldararo, Big Brains and the Human Superorganism: Why Special Brains Appear in Hominids and Other Social Animals Rowman & Littlefield, 2017.
Reviewed by Andrew Targowski
This book scrutinizes why humans have big brains, what big brains enable us to do, and how specialized brains are related to eusociality in animals. The humans have the most advanced eusociality among animals, which is defined by the following characteristics: supportive family care (including care of offspring from other individuals), overlapping generations within a colony of adults, and a division of labor into reproductive and non-reproductive groups. The division of labor creates specialized behavioral groups within an animal society that are sometimes called castes. Eusociality is distinguished from all other social systems because individuals of at least one caste usually lose the ability to perform at least one behavior characteristic of individuals in another caste.
In the first part of the book, the author discovers why brains expanded so slowly, and then why they stopped growing. This book hones down the number of theories on brain size evolution to a few, and these few lend themselves to testable hypotheses that lead to logical and practical explanations for the phenomenon. At the essence of this book is data resulting from original, previously unpublished research on brain size in several social mammals. These data support the idea that evolution of the brain in humans is the result of social interaction.
This book also traces the products of the social brain: ideology, religion, urban life, housing, and learning and adapting to dense, complex social interactions. It uniquely compares brain evolution in social animals across the animal kingdom and examines the nature of the human brain and its development within the social and historical context of complex human social structures. Caldararo proves that the reductions in human brain size follow the achievement of humans' enhanced eusociality, mainly triggered by domestication and complex social factors.
The second part of "Big Brains" scrutinizes the evolution of human consciousness as well as the idea of human cognition and the mind in the context of the physical means of function-that is, electrons, bonding, complex molecules and synapses. These physical means networks have formed a feature of life that Caldararo calls "humankind," with a uniform response...