Whether skeptic or fan, this is the most provocative, entertaining, and funny book about evolution. How one bacteria cell, in 3 billion years, possibly created the occasional sentient human being is beyond a bizarre journey. Between these nonfiction covers are short, soul-warming animal stories, whence our essences originated, and a longer look at how our emotional and cognitive evolution rendered our physical transformation rather trite. How we ascended from archaically violent to fairly civilized can be summed up by my favorite childhood joke: we went to a fight and a hockey game broke out.
In the middle of this book, which took 10 years to write, is a passionate 20th century American novel that spans 4 wars and 4 generations of a family. The nightly dreams of these nonfiction people and the interpretations of their dreams will leave you knowing them, and the stars of the tale are the women who finally brought teleology to our long, slow, random evolution.
The uniqueness of this unlikely book is that it didn't come out of academia and it offers sorely needed push back against major sociological assumptions. Humans were trapped inside tribal groupthink and are evolving a new individualism that may snap our last binding chain—the strongest chain and the one keeping our free will at arm's length. The eternal conflict between our sacrifice and selfishness brought us face to face with freedom of choice.
