Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony
By Kevin Laland Princeton University Press £27.95
Whether humans are different in kind or degree from the rest of the animal kingdom remains a matter of debate, but there’s no getting away from the gulf between us. Chimpanzees use sticks to fish for termites; people build particle accelerators. Animals communicate; humans speak. Animals do things as their forebears have for millennia; we build civilisations in the blink of an evolutionary eye.
As Laland reveals, human endeavour is a vast, cooperative effort that cannot be explained by natural selection alone – atomic physicists leave no more descendents than anyone else. Our success, he argues, is not down to language, tool-use, empathy or any other single factor, but rather a “whirlpool” of cultural and biological processes. In this book, he scours the animal kingdom for clues to why we are a species apart.