How we got to be human

This book is about what science frequently dodges or even denies: subjective life as experienced by animals as well as humans. Mixing what is known from science with some novel ideas, science writer William Libaw provides a provocative thesis on the origins and evolution of consciousness. Among the ideas presented are the following: for the earliest animals that had it, subjective experience itself had Darwinian adaptiveness in a rapidly changing environment; the use of gestures and deception among apes and some birds suggests conscious concepts in their mental activity; spoken language came first from the mouths of a group of children who inherited the previously unused genetic language capability; and human males have retained the animal rutting instinct and amplified it with conceptual prurience. As the subjective world of any other creature cannot be observed directly, this book plays detective to deduce from behavior some of the concepts that play a key role in ape and human minds.--From publisher description.