David C. Geary: Evolution of Brain, Cognition, and Intelligence

David C. Geary is a highly prolific developmental psychologist, who shows the same type of intelligence, talent, and imperviousness to the political winds that Steven Pinker displays.

Geary's latest, The Origin of Mind, is a superlative examination of the evolution of brains, human cognition, and modular-integrated intelligence. Like anything that has evolved, the human brain bears remnants of its origins, of its earlier versions. Geary discusses the different selection pressures bearing on brain development, and connects the behavioural outcomes to the ecological forces that shaped them.

Similar to Pinker, Geary does not shy away from issues that the PC Thought Police try to hide. In an earlier book, Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences, Geary discusses the evolutionary origins of modern day sex differences. Geary's technical and scientific approach to that issue is a useful addition to The Essential Difference: The Truth about the Male and Female Brain by Simon Baron-Cohen, Sex on the Brain : The Biological Differences Between Men and Women by Deborah Blum, and Taking Sex Differences Seriously by Steven E. Rhoads.

Here is an interesting short review of Geary's more recent book.