Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind | 
 enlarge | Author: Gary Marcus
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co
Category: Book
List Price: $24.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  64 reviews
Sales Rank: 6724
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.8 x 0.9
ISBN: 0618879641
Dewey Decimal Number: 153
EAN: 9780618879649
ASIN: 0618879641
Publication Date: April 16, 2008
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Product Description
Are we noble in reason? Perfect, in God's image? Far from it, says New York University psychologist Gary Marcus. In this lucid and revealing book, Marcus argues that the mind is not an elegantly designed organ but rather a "kluge," a clumsy, cobbled-together contraption. He unveils a fundamentally new way of looking at the human mind -- think duct tape, not supercomputer -- that sheds light on some of the most mysterious aspects of human nature.
Taking us on a tour of the fundamental areas of human experience -- memory, belief, decision-making, language, and happiness -- Marcus reveals the myriad ways our minds fall short. He examines why people often vote against their own interests, why money can't buy happiness, why leaders often stick to bad decisions, and why a sentence like "people people left left" ties us in knots even though it's only four words long.
Marcus also offers surprisingly effective ways to outwit our inner kluge, for the betterment of ourselves and society. Throughout, he shows how only evolution -- haphazard and undirected -- could have produced the minds we humans have, while making a brilliant case for the power and usefulness of imperfection.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 59 more reviews...
 Missing some relevant factors July 22, 2008
It was with great interest that I received a review copy of "Kluge", because I myself am halfway through writing an Environmental Psychology book about modern human society.
I was dismayed to find that the author gives 13 pieces of advice at the end of book, of how human beings can avoid our instinctual reactions and be more rational, and then doesn't follow them. He doesn't "consider alternate hypotheses" (as I will elaborate) and he doesn't "distance himself".
Many EP authors, such as Rubin, describe how our instinctual propensity to belong to groups, leads in modern society to our predilection to pick ideological groups to support. We choose between Democrats, Republicans, Conservatives, Liberals, as well as Jocks, Goths, Cheerleaders, Stoners, and more in High School, and later Evangelicals, Atheists, Newagers and on and on.
Unfortunately, almost all academicians and scientists do the same. They accept the media conventional wisdom that "evolution" and "intelligent design" are opposing sports teams. Like Marcus, they immediately fall prey to the emotional responses (that ironically, he describes in detail in this book) that "science" and "evolution" are "us" - our tribe - and must be defended. It's interesting that only a philosopher like John Paul II has ventured that evolution and intelligent design are not intrinsically incompatible.
Mr. Marcus disproves his own overall premise - that the human mind is haphazard and thus not designed - partway through the book. In Chapter Six, he mentions video games, and how they have to be balanced somewhere between too easy and too difficult. But he fails to notice how this can be applied to his premise - because he doesn't follow his own advice to "consider alternate hypotheses" and "distance himself". Somehow, he is postulating a "designer" of the human mind who is stupider than a video game designer. This is what he is clearly saying with his premise that any imperfections in the human mind indicate that it is not designed. In reality, if all human minds were perfect, then human life would be like a video game that was so easy, it became boring. That would be "Stupid Design", not intelligent design.
I'm not trying to start yet another discussion of ID (there are already too many hundred thousand page discussions on that subject), but from the cover, subtitle and conclusion of the book, it seems to be the premise of the book to "debunk" it, and it clearly fails to do so.
Furthermore, as other reviewers have mentioned, the author's grasp of Evolutionary Psychology that is evidenced in this book, is somewhat lacking. I will echo that the author seems to largely ignore the effects of Sexual Selection, and I will second the recommendation of "Red Queen" as an excellent text on that subject.
Marcus strangely also largely ignores the effect of the fact that modern civilization has only existed for 10,000 years - far too recent for any genetic adaptations - and thus we are adapted for a situation far different from modern human society. Bizarrely, he does mention this factor in a footnote in Chapter Seven where he quotes Kurt Vonnegut, and dismisses it with the odd statement "mental disorders have been around as long as humans have". Uh, how can he possibly know that ? No writings exist from before civilization, so there is no way to know either way. From an EP viewpoint, the human mind is adapted to a tribal lifestyle, and it is certainly a reasonable, even probable premise that all of the problems that Marcus describes in his book are simply a result of human society changing far more quickly than humans can genetically adapt.
Having said all that, I do give Marcus points for his interest in this important subject matter, and in his relatively readable presentation of the ideas. Our media encourage the viewpoint that some people ("experts") are highly rational and competent. To the extent that this book helps to disabuse people of this unrealistic notion, it can be of value.
Wonderful start - then kluge sets in July 18, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The author begins with the proposition that a lot of things in nature - including systems in living organisms, even mankind - seems as if they have been cobbled together in haphazard fashion. The idea of intelligent design will not survive a close reading of this book. The great Portuguese king, Alfonso the Wise, once confided to his companions (perhaps while swatting a mosquito) that, if he had been present at the creation, he might have offered a few useful suggestions to the creator.
Marcus is a little more specific. He doesn't offer suggestions but he points out odd lapses in how things like eyes and minds work and how brains do what they do and suggests that there's a lot of "stuff" floating around in how we are put together that is pure artifact. It's there because it's there and it isn't the most efficient or best or even most plausible approach to the evolutionary problem we think it was meant to address.
Marcus is a smart and witty writer but I suggest keeping a salt shaker handy. Science is constantly discovering that things it thought were meaningless or actual problems have some real value. Diseases that we inherit turn out to be protective against much more serious diseases that we could catch. "Useless" organs or systems turn out to have subtle life-protective functions. Too often we see something that we don't understand and label it a mistake instead of a signpost of our own limits of perception.
I think that existence in nature exposes an organism to a tremendously powerful sculpting process and that what survives ought to be presumed to have survival value and function, even if we haven't discovered it yet.
Marcus propounds his very different thesis - that there's a lot in what we are that seems senseless and incomprehensible, if not actually non-functional - and then seems to run out of steam.
The best part of the book, the tests of the validity of his hypothesis and the implications if it is true, remain unarticulated. Marcus is a university professor. From the feel of this book, he is probably a good one. Yet, if he got something like this as a student paper, he would probably guess that it was a first draft and return it for revision with some very pointed and helpful comments.
I enjoyed this book until about halfway through when it seemed to get lost. Worth reading as a humbling exercise, but not clear whether the proper humbling is from realizing that we are highly imperfect and contingent creatures or from realizing that we understand a lot less about what we are and how we are put together than we would like to believe.
 The Clusterf*$#@* Mind July 12, 2008
The term Kluge, pronounced similarly to "huge", was first popularized in early 1962, in an article written by Jackson Granholm, a computer pioneer. Mr. Granholm defined the word as "an ill-assorted collection of poorly matching parts, forming a distressing whole."
Mr. Marcus asserts that Evolution yields suboptimal, patchwork designs, in particular the human mind. While it is widely accepted that the human body has many quirks -- wisdom teeth, the retina's backward installation resulting in blind spots in both eyes, a spine that is conducive to back pain, and even the replication process of the DNA -- what gets short shrift is the imperfection of the mind. A mind seemingly impervious to optimal design and prone to a host of human cognitive idiosyncrasies explained eloquently and in detail in this book.
Our contextual memory is unreliable. Our belief system is subject to mental contaminations stemming from superstition, manipulation, and fallacy. The brain mechanism that controls our everyday choices is susceptible to the "weakness of the will". We tend to live in the moment rather than plan for the future, a remnant of our days without refrigerators when life was, as Thomas Hobbs put it "nasty, brutish and short." Most pleasures stem from the "ancestral reflexive" part of the mind that is shortsighted.
While most of Mr. Marcus' assertions are plausible, I took issue with one in particular: That the evolutionary process is inherently flawed because it's not possible to build a superior design from the ground up. Consequently, improvements are made to existing, archaic systems ad nauseam. Mr. Marcus seems to discount the idea that evolution is a painfully slow process of building solutions to life's existing problems. In the long run, existing kluges will be replaced with superior designs for which new challenges will arise. Therefore, no matter how elegant and perfect the design, at any given period, kluges will exist because conditions, e.g. the environment and natural predators aren't static, and living organisms must stay adaptable or perish. The very nature of adaptability trumps perfection. A perfect system today will be less adaptable to the challenges of tomorrow.
Some suboptimal designs will persist in the long run (blind spots in the eyes), but they are hardly of any consequence in the grand scheme of things. The human mind, as Mr. Marcus correctly postulates, is mired in imperfection for the demands of today's life. But today's demands have been around for less than a spec of time in the billions of years since the creation of life. In the year 1900, life expectancy was 30 years. Therefore, it made sense that puberty's onset was as early as the early teens. Nowadays, teen pregnancy has become a detriment to the parent (used singularly because at that age, the father is usually not around), and offspring.
Mr. Marcus eventually offers advice on how to compensate for the shortcomings of the mind, but alas, his remedies are no more effective than telling an overweight person to diet and exercise. Lacking are specific exercises or courses to compensate for the suboptimal design of the mind. Nevertheless, the first step to every problem is to correctly identify the problem, and in that endeavor, Mr. Marcus does a magnificent job of facilitating awareness of our flawed brain. Kudos to him.
Too much not so hidden agenda... July 5, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
In his first chapter, Marcus writes that little attention has been paid to the evolutionary development of the human mind - and the kluges produced in that process. As a result, we have been deprived of unique evolutionary insight and clues to how we can improve ourselves with awareness of our inefficient mental proclivities.
On the latter point, it is Marcus' belief that humans can and should develop a more rational approach to thinking to overcome these kluges. As he points out the shortcomings of the mind in memory (foggy), choice (irrational), language (imprecise), pleasure (short-term emphasis), beliefs (self deception) and mental disorders (fragility), he holds up economic utility theory as the ideal for making choices, a computer the model for perfect memory - logic in general - which appears to be the basis of wisdom - as the anecdote.
On the former point, he uses kluges as a way to dismiss creationism and intelligent design, arguing that the mind would be much more efficient if there was a "creator" behind all this. To reach that conclusion Marcus would have to assume the definition of perfect by the "creator" involved making a perfectly logical, free of defects being. Is that logical or narrow thinking? If Marcus had assumed the "creator" defined perfection differently - or didn't have perfection as a goal at all, he wouldn't have been able to end each chapter as he does now - saying that these kluges are "proof" that intelligent design is bogus.
No doubt, Marcus believes he has been able to overcome his mental kluges and produce a very rational book. I would have rather he spent more time on evolutionary origins of behavior rather than so conspicuously trying to discredit creationism/intelligent design with this lame argument. It not only detracts from what is otherwise an easy to read book on a fascinating topic but makes me question what he missed due to his "confirmation bias."
 Where was the psychology? June 28, 2008
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
The author's view of the human mind is very narrow. Emotions, anxiety, etc. are not really needed. Thinking is really like playing chess.
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