Anjan Chatterjee

There's this fad nowadays, the neuro-fill-in-the-blank approach that seeks to reduce explanations of just about anything to a combination of neural mechanics and vague evolutionary Just-So stories. Maybe some people find such tales reassuring. As a child I loved Kipling's Just-So stories precisely because they showed up the ridiculousness of ex post facto pseudo-evolutionary reasoning. I am more susceptible to the minority view, that "Instinct is a Cheshire Cat" (Klopfer 1973, see N.S. Thompson's review in Quarterly Review of Biology 49.2). To my relief and pleasure, Anjan Chatterjee's volume is smart and well-informed, and takes a generous and open-minded approach to art. No pleasantly simple origin stories are spun in this book, which will be accessible to casual readers. A true scientist, Chatterjee savors complexity rather than trying to reduce it, and he does so with modest charm.… (mere)