Descartes’ Baby starts off with an anecdote about, fittingly enough, Rene Descartes. He reportedly had an automoton daughter that behaved as a real girl would, which disturbed those around him so much that one man tossed it into the sea. It was an interesting story, and has something to do with behavior — but didn’t really have anything to do with what child development tells us about all human behavior. The opening to the book is an indication of what the reader has ahead of him; while the book discusses human behavior and how children are the same as or different than adults, a lot of the material seems to be evidence in support of the genetic basis for behaviors that already are thought to have a genetic basis, rather than presenting new discoveries that only studying children could provide.

Full review: http://libwen.wordpress.com/2010/12/29/descartes-baby-how-the-science-of-child-d... ( )

Very very impressive.

The basic story is the assumption that babies are born not just with innate baby physics, an intuitive understanding of how material object in the world should behave, but even beyond that with innate baby psychology, an appreciation that some of the things in the world have intent.

From this starting point (which is filled in with plenty of interesting observations about experiments done involving babies) we go on to discuss the case of people born without this innate sense of psychology (ie autistics), issues like "what is art", our sense of morals, why people universally seem so keen to imagine the existence of a spirit realm of some sort, and our sense of disgust.

In many ways this covers the same sort of territory as the wilder sociobiology theorists, but comes across as much more satisfactory.
I think this is because the author isn't starting from the (not necessarily relevant) point of "how does an appreciation of art derive from life on the savanna". Rather he's starting with the much more pragmatic view of "as best we can tell, what does it appear that babies are born with", and proceeding from there.
It also helps that he seems rather more philosophical, and rather more willing to admit that he doesn't have all the answers (while not giving up and saying that there are no answers to be found, that it's all a mystery). ( )

TBR