The Arthur M. Sackler Colloquia of the National Academy of Sciences address scientific topics of broad and current interest, cutting across the boundaries of traditional disciplines. Each year, four or five such colloquia are scheduled, typically two days in length and international in scope. Colloquia are organized by a member of the Academy, often with the assistance of an organizing committee, and feature presentations by leading scientists in the field and discussions with a hundred or more researchers with an interest in the topic. Colloquia presentations are recorded and posted on the National Academy of Sciences Sackler colloquia website and published on CD-ROM. These Colloquia are made possible by a generous gift from Mrs. Jill Sackler, in memory of her husband, Arthur M. Sackler.

In The Evolution of Mind, outstanding figures on the cutting edge of evolutionary psychology follow clues provided by current neuroscientific evidence to illuminate many puzzling questions of human cognitive evolution. With contributions from psychologists, ethologists, anthropologists, and philosophers, the book offers a broad range of approaches to explore the mysteries of the mind's evolution - from investigating the biological functions of human cognition to drawing comparisons between human and animal cognitive abilities.

MAN AND BRUTE. Taking up the problems of psychogenesis where these were left in my previous work, I have in the present treatise to consider the whole scope of mental evolution in man. Clearly the topic thus presented is so large, that in one or other of its branches it might be taken to include the whole history of our species, together with our pre-historic development from lower forms of life, as already indicated in the Preface. However, it is not my intention to write a history of civilization, still less to develop any elaborate hypothesis of anthropogeny. My object is merely to carry into an investigation of human psychology a continuation of the principles which I have already applied to the attempted elucidation of animal psychology. I desire to show that in the one province, as in the other, the light which has been shed by the doctrine of evolution is of a magnitude which we are now only beginning to appreciate; and that by adopting the theory of continuous development from the one order of mind to the other, we are able scientifically to explain the whole mental constitution of man, even in those parts of it which, to former generations, have appeared inexplicable. In order to accomplish this purpose, it is not needful that I should seek to enter upon matters of detail in the application of those principles to the facts of history. On the contrary, I think that any such endeavour—even were I qualified to make it—would tend only to obscure my exposition of those principles themselves. It is enough that I should trace the operation of such principles, as it were, in outline, and leave to the professed historian the task of applying them in special cases.

What makes us human? How did we develop language, thought and culture? Why did we survive, and other human species fail? The past 12,000 years represent the only time in the sweep of human history when there has been only one human species. How did this extraordinary proliferation of species come about - and then go extinct? And why did we emerge such intellectual giants? The tale of our origins has inevitably been told through the 'stones and bones' of the archaeological record, yet Robin Dunbar shows it was our social and cognitive changes rather than our physical development which truly made us distinct from other species.

A New York University psychologist argues that the mind is a "kluge"-a clumsy, cobbled-together contraption-as he ponders the accidents of evolution that caused this structure and what we can do about it.