Dave O’Reilly’s Blog

	Food of the Gods Author: Terence McKenna Rating:
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Sometimes it’s nice to read books that aren’t the type you’d normally read, so I thought I’d give this one a go. The main thing it has done is inspired me to write a long post explaining why I think it was a load of crap.

McKenna begins by introducing the concept of shamanism and the integral role that drugs play in it. He explains what he believes are the higher “dimensions” of consciousness that can be achieved through the use of psychadelic substances. However, he does it without ever explaining what he actually means by these higher dimensions, all he says is that they can be achieved through the use of drugs. For me, this is just a circular definition, appealing to the common notion of a higher spiritual “plane” of some sort.

He asserts that shamans and archaic societies generally had some form of mystic knowledge that is lost in our modern society but can be accessed through the shamanic process and through the use of psychadelic substances. He claims this without giving any evidence to support the assertion, of course.

In the second chapter he explains his hypothesis that human evolution was strongly influenced by the consumption of psilocybin mushrooms. How could my consumption of psilocybin mushrooms have any effect on the inherited characteristics of my children? The transfer of inherited characteristics has already taken place!

Claiming that the experiences of a parent are somehow inherited by the child is clearly Lamarckian evolution. Lamarckian evolution is the assertion that an organism can pass on characteristics acquired during its lifetime to it’s offspring. The canonical example of Lamarckian evolution is that giraffes have long necks because parents of many generations of giraffes had to stretch to reach higher leaves. Therefore, somehow the experience of neck stretching is passed on to the children.

Even setting aside the fact that he is using a theory that has been superceded by the theory of natural selection, he states his hypothesis that mushrooms influenced human evolution as if it was a fact and offers not a shred of evidence. To quote Carl Sagan, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, and no evidence is offered here. Personally, I think the hypothesis is unfalsifiable and therefore not of any scientific value.

I was going to write a similar paragraph for each of the chapters that follows, but it suffices to say that it’s just more and more of the same unfounded claims; each chapter building on the baseless claims of the previous ones.

One final note on the shamanism issue. I would like to propose the following alternative hypothesis for the effect of chanting as part of the shamanic “tool kit”. I have nothing to base this on, it’s just an example of a non-supernatural explanation. Given that humans have had a long exposure to magic mushrooms (which I think is quite a reasonable assertion), and the well known synisthesia that can be experienced by people who have taken large doses, it seems reasonable that at some point someone would have observed that a certain rhythm or song made people feel happy, and another one made them feel pensive and yet another made them feel sad. Couldn’t this just be the reason for the effects of chanting while taking drugs? Why introduce a more complicated spiritual explanation?

Having said all that, I don’t deny that drugs have had a massive influence, both positive and negative on humans individually and collectively. All of the subjective mumbo jumbo notwithstanding, I think that the experiences seem very real to the person taking the drugs, and I also think that some amazing insights might be achieved through the use of drugs. However, that doesn’t mean that the experiences that a person taking drugs is having are real, and certainly doesn’t call for any supernatural explanation. All of the subjective experiences can be adequately explained in terms of neurochemistry.

To summarise, this book is one big anecdote with lots of unfounded hypotheses and idle speculation. I only gave this book one star because the software that I use doesn’t allow you to give a rating of zero. I suggest that you save your money and buy a real science book.

	Sex, Time, and Power: How Women’s Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution Author: Leonard Shlain Rating:
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As in the bestselling The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, Leonard Shlain?s provocative new book promises to change the way readers view themselves and where they came from. Sex, Time, and Power offers a tantalizing answer to an age-old question: Why did big-brained Homo sapiens suddenly emerge some 150,000 years ago? The key, according to Shlain, is female sexuality. Drawing on an awesome breadth of research, he shows how, long ago, the narrowness of the newly bipedal human female?s pelvis and the increasing size of infants? heads precipitated a crisis for the species. Natural selection allowed for the adaptation of the human female to this environmental stress by reconfiguring her hormonal cycles, entraining them with the periodicity of the moon. The results, however, did much more than ensure our existence; they imbued women with the concept of time, and gave them control over sex?a power that males sought to reclaim. And the possibility of achieving immortality through heirs drove men to construct patriarchal cultures that went on to dominate so much of human history. From the nature of courtship to the evolution of language, Shlain?s brilliant and wide-ranging exploration stimulates new thinking about very old matters.

A very interesting book, but the one problem I had with it is that I think he pushes his hypothesis a tiny bit too far in places. It’s quite common in popular science books for the author to try to explain life, the universe and everything in terms of the topic of the book, sometimes even bordering on absurdity. In this case, there is a very small amount of that, but overall I think the book provides an interesting philosophy on the evolution of the relationships between men and women. There are a lot of points made in the book that make a lot of sense, and it’s difficult to refute or validate them without a much deeper understanding of human anthropology.

There’s certainly food for thought in this book…lots of little “factoids” to share with other interested, or not so interested, parties. Anyway, it’s well worth a read.