Bad Boys, Polyliths, and the Heterotechnic Revolution Summary and Analysis

UCLA psychology professor Patricia Greenfield studies human intelligence as it unfolds in child behavior twenty years earlier. She proposes a hierarchical rule generator in the human brain that overcomes naive childhood impulses. She claims to know how a child will solve her stick puzzle simply by knowing the child's age. The MIT Professor Jeanne Bamberger corroborates Greenfield's opinion referring to a "felt path" that she describes as "exactly how chimps would do it." Older children pass the "chimp stage" so that by eleven they are not orderly solvers but improvisers who behave with intelligence. Other scientists as well, like Haeckel, Reynolds and Dunbar confirm aspects of the evolutionary process perceived in Greenfield's theory.

Anthropologist Peter Reynolds spends years in direct observation of chimpanzees, New Guinea villagers and aborigines in...