ABSTRACT
I have endeavoured in the preceding nine chapters to describe the essential features of hominid evolution with special reference to the brain. It has been a strictly Darwinist story with the key roles of chance genetic mutation on the one hand and on the other hand the ‘sifting’ of the resulting phenotypes in the ‘sieve’ of natural selection. In this manner it was possible to develop plausible explanations of the development of the human brain to its evolutionary pinnacle in Homo sapiens sapiens. Necessarily much detail is unknown because our scientific knowledge is still far too primitive, but in principle it has been possible to explain the manner in which evolution brought about the anatomical and functional changes in the brain with the consequent wonderful, or even transcendental, course of hominid evolution.
