Summary

The author is an applied mathematician (econometrics, systems theory) who has been associated with the RAND Corporation, the University of Arizona and the Technical University of Vienna. He is a man of evidently wide-ranging curiosity and considerable scholarship. Here he has, in a style calculated to be as lively as possible, undertaken to review for general readers the state of current thought on six diverse topics: the origin of life on Earth, the sources of human behavior and social patterns, how we acquire language, the fundamental nature of our thinking processes, the possible existence of intelligence elsewhere in the universe, and the impact of our own scrutiny on what we observe as real. He has created, therefore, an occasion to review the frontiers of several sciences, and to cast a modern light on the eternal question "What is Man?" (NW) Annotation(c) 2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)