Kluge : the haphazard evolution of the human mind

Gary F Marcus

2009

Houghton Mifflin

"How is it that we can recognize photos from our high school yearbook decades later but cannot remember what we ate for breakfast yesterday? And why are we inclined to buy more cans of soup if the sign says Limit 12 per customer rather than Limit 4 per customer? In Kluge, Gary Marcus puts the burden squarely on evolution. Arguing that our minds are not nearly as elegantly designed as we might like to believe, Marcus suggests that the imperfections are the result of evolution's tendency to pile new systems on top of old ones -- and those systems don't always work together. The end result is a "kluge," a clumsy, cobbled-together contraption. In a tour of the essential areas of human experience -- memory, belief, decision-making, language, and happiness -- Marcus unveils a fundamentally new way of looking at the evolution of the human mind and sheds light on some of the most mysterious aspects of human nature."--Back cover