The Journal of Heredity 2002:93(6)
© 2002 The American Genetic Association 93:462-464
Book Review |
The Making of Intelligence
University of California San Diego Anthropology Department La Jolla, California 92093-0532
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
By K. Richardson. Columbia University Press, New York, 2000.
Review snippets on the cover of my copy describe this book as a "whodunnit," a "quietly passionate polemic," and a "thought-provoking view." In what follows, I can only belabor what one reads between those lines: the frustrating absence of a balanced, scholarly treatment of intelligence.
Richardson has two central theses. The first is that human intelligence, that which allows us to build airplanes, cure some diseases, and make movie sequels, is best viewed as lying not inside our heads but in the interaction between our minds and the environment. Intelligence is an emergent property of person-in-society, not an inborn capability or an epigenetically developed trait of individuals. There is certainly a sense in which this is true (see, e.g., Hutchins 1995), and there are several recent accounts of the role of a "cultural ratchet" in the evolution of human intelligence