Capsule Reviews

Masters of the Planet, Learning from the Octopus, Darwin’s Devices, and Psychology’s Ghosts

Written byBob Grant

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by Ian Tattersall
Palgrave Macmillan, March 2012

How did Homo sapiens arise from a ragtag ancestral line, scratching out an existence and competing with kindred species in harshest Africa, to become one of the most successful organism in Earth’s history? Researchers have been digging for answers to this question for decades, and paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall finds in the quest fodder for his latest book, Masters of the Planet.

The unfolding story, Tattersall writes, fits “comfortingly well with our emerging views of the multilevel mechanisms underlying evolutionary change.”

The transformation that “levered humankind away from the ‘lower’ animals,” according to the author, was acquiring the complex array of traits that set us apart first from the rest of animal life and then from all the other ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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