Pop Neuroscience Needs to Evolve
My critical take on Joseph Jebelli's new book How the Mind Changed
Popular science seems to be a particularly fraught form of non-fiction that is prone to simplification, misleading claims, and hype instead of rigor. This may be even more true for works of popular neuroscience, an obviously complex field, where even among top experts there are many institutional, philosophical, and methodological issues. Reading audiences aren’t blameless in this given their revealed preferences for these simple works, but the path out of the wilderness has to be forged by those at the interface between active research and the intellectually curious public. Enter Joseph Jeblli, a former neuroscientist turned popular science communicator with full TEDx flare, whose new book How the Mind Changed: A Human History of Our Evolving Brain is an exemplary example of the issues with popular science writing.
How the Mind Changed by Joseph Jebelli is billed as an accessible book on the evolution of the human brain. And Jebelli does initially make an earnest effort to cover human brain evolution, but after a few chapters his focus wanes. Before even beginning to develop this complex topic with sufficient depth, nuance, and epistemic humility, he begins spinning through topics, delivering chapters on autism spectrum disorders, psychometrics, and brain-computer interfaces. These topics are of course related to the evolution of the brain and could have sustained whole books themselves, but they are peripheral to Jebelli's purported central theme. These are also topics that should be discussed after robustly establishing the narrative of human brain evolution. His writing on this topic is just too thin to justify the special topics. Jebelli unforgivably cheats the full scope of evolution by starting immediately with the early primate brain and then mentioning a few genetic and morphological adaptations that contributed to brain expansion. Then, poof! Humans! Even to most lay readers, this narrative will feel flimsy.
Jebelli's musings about the complex science of brain evolution are not only haphazard, but also weirdly polemical in unscientific ways. Some of the position-staking-out is warranted and expected. For instance, Jebelli provides a pithy argument for materialism, debunking mind-body dualism and casual understandings of "free will." This is consistent with the empirical record and the current state of neuroscience despite being over-simplified. But even when Jebelli’s positioning is reasonably substantiated he wavers as his points on “free will” are seemingly contradicted by later comments on other topics, including the importance and power of human agency. On intelligence and autism, Jebelli veers wildly into science denialism and advocacy. He dismisses mainstream psychometrics and essentially endorses the rigorously debunked theory of multiple intelligences (see Waterhouse 2010). He also severely misunderstands or misrepresents the nature of autism and the purposes of autism research. For example, he incorrectly claims there is not a female protective effect against autism, arguing that Simon Baren-Cohen's systematizing "extreme male brain" model has been overturned. This is inconsistent with up-to-date research published in high-impact journals (See the Sebat lab's recent paper). Plus, he makes incredibly sloppy claims about the role of autism in the evolution of the human brain and economic development; these claims are patently inconsistent with how evolutionary theory is understood and tested. These ideas are almost entirely without empirical support and emerge more from advocacy groups than active scientists.
There are of course some interesting tidbits in How the Brain Changed, but they are overwhelmed by discount Gladwellism (i.e. a glibness about complex topics done in an engaging style or as Sunday Times writer Bryan Appleyard states "the hard sell of a big theme supported by dubious, incoherent but dramatically presented evidence") and stealth demagoguery cloaked in the veneer of scientific respectability. Human brain evolution is a serious and important topic that all educated people should try to understand. For a good lay introduction and alternative to this book, I recommend checking out Bret Stetka's A History of the Human Brain: From the Sea Sponge to CRISPR, How Our Brain Evolved. It is a more sustained and balanced work that is also accessible to a lay audience.
2 out of 5 stars