The Making of the Civilized Mind

The Making of the Civilized Mind is the fourth and final volume of the series, The Evolution of Human Intelligence. In this volume, the author discusses the sociobiological status of the human brain in producing social and cultural behavior. Itzkoff argues that culture is a unique product of man’s biology traceable to the earliest stages of Homo’s evolution. However, it is the variability of human intelligence in producing different forms of culture that provides the central argument of the book. Here, Professor Itzkoff shows how high intelligence leads to abstract symbolic thinking and that civilization itself can be seen as a form of cultural life that has been produced by the highest forms of abstraction in such fundamental areas as technology, religion, philosophy, science, music, etc.