Apes Monkeys Children And The Growth Of Mind

There was a time when the question "Where did we come from?" inspired philosophers, theologians and the occasional gentleman with an impressive beard. Then along came science and complicated matters enormously by introducing apes, monkeys, evolutionary psychology, developmental biology, and diagrams that appear to require a postgraduate qualification merely to interpret. Apes, Monkeys, Children and the Growth of Mind is one of those gloriously ambitious books that attempts to untangle the whole business without once resorting to the comforting explanation that "it’s all just a mystery."

Juan Carlos Gomez examines how the minds of humans and our primate relatives develop, asking what separates us from chimpanzees, gorillas and monkeys, and perhaps more intriguingly, what doesn’t. Children, it turns out, spend a surprising amount of time behaving rather like small primates anyway, only with access to crayons and the occasional biscuit. The book explores the origins of intelligence, communication, social behaviour and learning, following the evolutionary breadcrumbs that eventually lead to modern humanity and its remarkable ability to invent Wi-Fi while simultaneously forgetting why it walked into the kitchen.

Published by Harvard University Press, this is reassuringly serious. There are no chapters entitled "Ten Amazing Monkey Facts!" and nobody is attempting to convince you that your office manager is secretly a baboon. Instead, Gomez builds a careful and fascinating comparison between species, drawing on decades of behavioural research to ask how minds emerge and why ours developed in such extraordinary ways. It is thoughtful, scholarly and entirely the sort of book that causes one to stop halfway through making tea because a paragraph has unexpectedly rewritten one’s understanding of evolution.

The title deserves special recognition. Apes. Monkeys. Children. Three groups united by curiosity, social complexity and an occasional tendency to throw things when frustrated. It sounds almost like the guest list for a particularly chaotic birthday party, yet within a few pages it becomes clear that the comparison is both profound and surprisingly persuasive.

This volume is in fine condition, looking considerably younger than the evolutionary timescales it discusses. The pages are crisp, the binding is excellent, and it appears to have escaped the sort of rough treatment one might expect from either an inquisitive chimpanzee or a distracted undergraduate writing an essay at three o’clock in the morning.

As always, Crappy Old Books delights in offering books whose names sound faintly ridiculous until you realise they are quietly explaining the biggest questions humanity has ever asked. This one won’t tell you why your neighbour insists on mowing the lawn every Sunday at precisely eight o’clock, but it may well leave you with a rather deeper appreciation of why humans became humans in the first place—and why we’re still only a few evolutionary steps away from getting distracted by shiny objects.

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