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From Liam’s Pictures from Old Books

Cooking has long been a hobby of mine and we’ve acquired and sold a few interesting cookbooks, but it’s a specialty that deserves more focused attention than we can generally spare. But the lure of a good cookbook is still undeniable to me. I will even read them like novels.

There’s a recent article in the Economist that caught my attention on the work of Richard Wrangham, of Harvard University (via: Arts & Letters Daily). Dr. Wrangham believes that cooking has played an important part in human evolution and he is conducting experiments to try and prove that hypothesis.

He also believes that there is scientific evidence that processed food is bad for us. Not exactly an earth-shattering revelation these days, but an interesting line of inquiry within the scope of cooking as an evolutionary road.

I’ve long been fascinated by similar ideas such as those entertained people like Claude Lévi-Strauss and Arthur C. Clarke that our tools helped evolve us in some way, rather than strictly the other way round.

And many people have studied the impact of language and writing on human evolution.

The question I have is: have books been around long enough to have any kind of meaningful effect on human evolution? And if they have, will the transition to e-readers, or whatever we eventually end up with, change the evolutionary side-road that books may have put us on?

Or maybe, as William Gibson would have it, “…the bison will be there, waiting for us” and the specific technology of Gutenberg is less important than us book lovers would like to hope.