Promethean fire : reflection on the origin of mind

There is a missing link in human evolution about which few facts are known and surprisingly little has been written. It is not any one of the intermediate forms connecting modern man to his apelike ancestors. It is something much more challenging-the early human mind. How did it come into existence? And why?
In this highly readable new book, Charles J. Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson take us down the twisting corridors through which our species traveled in the two-million year odyssey from Homo habilis to modern man. They ask they why, out of the millions of species that have emerged and gone extinct, human beings alone took the last, y to hint Elli abrupt journey to gene and advance Was it some divine spark that freed man from purely genetic constraints? Is the mind inde pendent of the body in a way that separated culture from organic evolution? Quite the contrary, the authors say: Lansden and Wilson attribute the sudden emergence of the human mind to the activation of a mechanism both obedient to physical law and unique to man. This "Promethean fire" (an allusion to the original metaphor of the origin of mind) is gene culture coevolution, a mutually acting change in the genes and culture that craned man beyond the previous limits of biology-yet restrains his nature on an elastic, unbreakable leash.