Don Ross

This is a masterful integration of scientific insights on “the human path to ecological domination,” a scholarly work made accessible to the intelligent non-specialist with care to explain the basic terms and concepts. It surveys human choice patterns (“gambles”), conceived broadly to include both motivational and genetic selection, from their very earliest history through the stimulus of the ice ages, the changes wrought by cooking fires, farming, writing, and capital markets, to our current confrontation with looming ecological disaster. The authors frame these patterns as risk management, but their analysis goes beyond familiar behavioral economics to bring in recent evidence about migration patterns, cortical neuron densities, genocidal epidemics—and elephants. The elephants might seem like comic sidekicks at first, but the authors, who do actual laboratory experiments on their choice-making, point out that elephants are the only species with comparable brain neuron densities to have evolved alongside homo sapiens on the African savannah during the late Pleistocene epoch. Elephants’ augmented neurons are cerebellar rather than cerebral and their anatomy is very different, but through “convergent evolution” they developed a flexibility of choice-making as great as that of humans and well beyond that of non-human great apes. The authors argue cogently that comparison with elephants provides the best evidence about how humanity developed during that distant period, as well as the best illustrations of humans’ unique intellectual bent: Dense cerebral packing has both blessed and cursed people with such great powers of imagination that the line between fact and fantasy is often tragically obscured, whereas elephants’ dense cerebellar packing has made them pragmatic reasoners. The authors summon a hypothetical elephant anthropologist to give a trenchant account of peoples’ puzzling preoccupations; this is the high point of the book’s broad range of illustrative examples. It was a pleasure to read this many-faceted ecological history, even the stern warning at the end. This behavioral economics at its best.