The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent

In The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent, Lynne A. Isbell weaves together facts from anthropology, neuroscience, palaeontology, and psychology to explain that our emotional connection to snakes has a long evolutionary history. This history, Isbell says, is responsible not only for snake fear--the serpent in the garden of Eden, the world-creating Rainbow Serpent of Australian aboriginal myth and B-grade cinema fare--but also for our keen primate vision and perhaps even our facility with language...The book is always rewarding...Her snake tales from long years in the bush are informative and often funny. Isbell writes solid evolutionary science and also takes calculated risks. -- Barbara J. King Times Literary Supplement 20091009 The anthropologist and animal behaviorist Lynne Isbell elegantly posits here that the human facility with language evolved largely thanks to snakes. Coolly testing hypotheses and assessing evidence across an impressive range of disciplines--neuroscience, primate behavior, paleogeography, molecular biology, and genetics--she argues that our distant primate relatives developed their exceptional ability to see and identify objects that were close by and in front of them in order to detect and avoid what was almost certainly their most dangerous predator--the snake...And so, Isbell avers, Genesis has it right: the snake made us human. This groundbreaking, intellectually scintillating work is nonfiction at its absolute best. Isbell ranges widely, unpacks her evidence meticulously, synthesizes disparate and difficult material economically, addresses counterarguments scrupulously, and writes cleanly, often gracefully, and occasionally even playfully. The Atlantic 20100401