The axemaker's gift : a double-edged history of human culture

The host of the popular science series on public television, "Connections," and a psychologist trace the advantages and dangers of human inventions and argue that the time has come to turn away from specialized, technological knowledge. 35,000 first printing.

At the close of this century of creativity and discovery, humanists and scientists alike wonder: How could human beings in all their brilliance - those "axemakers" with the genius to invent, lead, inspire, heal, design - have brought the world to the brink of destruction? The answers can be found in The Axemaker's Gift, an imaginative and brilliantly informed double-edged history of human culture. James Burke, a leading expert on the interaction of technology and society, and Robert Ornstein, a pioneer in charting the evolution of consciousness, show how the interaction between innovation and the brain has continually reshaped the world and, more important, the way we think.

Publishers Weekly

Prolific psychologist Ornstein and historian Burke, best known for his PBS-TV series "Connections", have written an ambitious, entertaining, not always convincing survey of the interaction of technology, culture, history and the human mind. Early hominids' use of tools, they maintain, altered the brain's structure over millennia, favoring reason over emotion and fostering sequential thinking, which generated language, logic and rules. With the advent of agriculture and writing in Mesopotamia came social hierarchy. The authors strain mightily to prove that successive advances in technic - the Greek alphabet, the weight-driven clock, Gutenberg's printing press, scientific method, London's stock exchange, modern clinical medicine, computers, etc. - radically altered the structure of society, increasingly concentrating power and knowledge in the hands of a specialized ruling elite that imposed ever greater degrees of conformity on the masses. A "cut-and-control'' outlook that divides the world into manipulable units is held responsible for our present ecological crisis. The authors' proposed solution is a world of small communities with participatory democracy and "webbed education'' whereby information-technology users can access all knowledge as a dynamic whole. (Sept.)

At the close of this century of creativity and discovery, humanists and scientists alike wonder: How could human beings in all their brilliance - those "axemakers" with the genius to invent, lead, inspire, heal, design - have brought the world to the brink of destruction? The answers can be found in The Axemaker's Gift, an imaginative and brilliantly informed double-edged history of human culture. James Burke, a leading expert on the interaction of technology and society, and Robert Ornstein, a pioneer in charting the evolution of consciousness, show how the interaction between innovation and the brain has continually reshaped the world and, more important, the way we think.

In this journey through human culture, historian James Burke and psychologist Robert Ornstein take a look at history, seeking to explain how the most innovative and brilliant animal ever could have both invented so much and landed us in the precarious spot we are in today, with resources shrinking, population ballooning, and the ecosystem in trouble.

"At the close of this century of creativity and discovery, humanists and scientists alike wonder: How could human beings in all their brilliance - those "axemakers" with the genius to invent, lead, inspire, heal, design - have brought the world to the brink of destruction?" "The answers can be found in The Axemaker's Gift, an imaginative and brilliantly informed double-edged history of human culture. James Burke, a leading expert on the interaction of technology and society, and Robert Ornstein, a pioneer in charting the evolution of consciousness, show how the interaction between innovation and the brain has continually reshaped the world and, more important, the way we think."--BOOK JACKET. Argues that the cumulative effects of technology have reshaped our world and the way we think and have resulted in our valuing innovation and analysis and ignoring older kinds of knowledge born of intuition. This ancient knowledge must be rediscovered for our survival in the future