The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates The Complexities of Human Thought - Softcover

"Marcus strikes a rare and delicate balance of scientific detail and layperson accessibility in this overview of an exploding field of inquiry....a joy to read....Marcus gives most readers more than enough to think about here." Publishers Weekly "Expert and lucid... carries the reader to the edge of current knowledge." Noam Chomsky "Marcus does particularly well to make the relevant issues in these areas understandable to the lay reader, and does an even better job of dispelling the myths that impede the way we think about genes and their role in making brains, and hence minds.... Anyone interested in the topic would be encouraged to read this book." Nature"

In The Birth of the Mind , award-winning cognitive scientist Gary Marcus irrevocably alters the nature vs. nurture debate by linking the findings of the Human Genome Project to the development of the brain. Scientists have long struggled to understand how a tiny number of genes could contain the instructions for building the human brain, arguably the most complex device in the known universe. Synthesizing up-to-the-minute research with his own original findings on child development, Marcus is the first to resolve this apparent contradiction. Vibrantly written and completely accessible to the lay reader, The Birth of the Mind will forever change the way we think about our origins and ourselves.