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  • The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve

  • By: Steve Stewart-Williams
  • Narrated by: Tom Lawrence
  • Length: 15 hrs and 32 mins
  • 4.7 out of 5 stars (105 ratings)
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The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve

By: Steve Stewart-Williams
Narrated by: Tom Lawrence
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Summary

The Ape That Understood the Universe is the story of the strangest animal in the world: the human animal. It opens with a question: How would an alien scientist view our species? What would it make of our sex differences, our sexual behavior, our child-rearing patterns, our moral codes, our religions, our languages, and science? The book tackles these issues by drawing on ideas from two major schools of thought: evolutionary psychology and cultural evolutionary theory.

The guiding assumption is that humans are animals, and that like all animals, we evolved to pass on our genes. At some point, however, we also evolved the capacity for culture - and from that moment, culture began evolving in its own right. This transformed us from a mere ape into an ape capable of reshaping the planet, travelling to other worlds, and understanding the vast universe of which we're but a tiny, fleeting fragment.

©2018 Steve Stewart-Williams (P)2019 Steve Stewart-Williams

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  • 07-06-23

Starts well then drops off

A really good start, interesting, insightful and then it becomes a very long drawn out repetition on one particular aspect for multiple unnecessary chapters.

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explains a lot.... nearly everything

really interesting.. brilliant...
author is convincing and never shoves the information down your throat
but there is a lot of information. I will be going again from the start.

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Wow...

Anyone harbouring doubts as to evolutionary theory should hear this; those that retain those same doubts after listening to this should give up upon and all further research, because nothing short of divine intervention will sway them 😏

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Great if you haven’t read the books referenced

There isn’t anything new in here but if you have read the main material referenced (the selfish gene, the rational optimist, anything by David Buss) then this is a fantastic filter of those ideas. If I read it 6 years ago, it would be a 5 star review but I didn’t actually learn anything new but that’s not the authors fault. The book is very well written and is much more digestible than something like The Selfish Gene for example.

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