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The Throwing Madonna
These essays on the brain leap from the philosophical to the comical, from the scientific theory to mundane events of everyday life. The Throwing Madonna provides a window through which the average person can peer into the elusive world of neurobiology and find greater understanding of the human race.
253 pages, Hardcover
First published July 1, 1983
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47 people want to read
About the author
William H. Calvin
33 books35 followersWilliam H. Calvin, Ph.D., is a theoretical neurobiologist, Affiliate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is the author of a dozen books, mostly for general readers, about brains and evolution.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
March 7, 2013
This book reminds me of Goldy Locks and the Three Bears, because the first part is too cold, the second part is too hot, while the third part is Just Right. Well, substituting "simplistic" for "cold" and "complex and technical" for "hot," it works, anyway.
The book is a series of essays written for general readers by a noted neurophysiologist, which is a somewhat bold move, and is perhaps understandably uneven. The first section is on “Ethology and Evolution” and includes the title essay. What is a throwing Madonna, you may well ask (at least two people asked me, when they saw the cover). Well, this is based on Calvin’s rather original speculative insight into brain specialization and human evolution, which he articulated in two papers for scientific journals prior to this book (they are included as appendices). Basically, he suggests that handedness could have developed because mothers tend to cradle their infants on the left side (nearer the heartbeat) and that mothers, developing the skill of throwing rocks to kill game, might have thrived or died based on their ability to throw with the right hand, which led to people with more complex and stratified brain function surviving and producing more such (mostly right-handed) offspring. Hence, his iconic image of a mother is a “throwing Madonna,” hurling a rock at a rabbit.
Now, I’ve included this, which may be Calvin’s signal effort in the “too cold” section of the book. Basically, in the essays in this section he dumbs things down more than he needed to (for me at least). The journal articles at the back of the book were better organized and more convincing, and included much clearer evidence. But this was far from the worst essay in the section. The next essay, on “The Lovable Cat” is probable the dumbest in the book (and even admits at the end that it is a cheap ploy to get the book to sell better. Here, he suggests that cats became pets for humans because they learned to “mimic” the behaviors of human infants. What behaviors, he doesn’t specify. I guess “cats are cute, babies are cute” was about as much as he expected people to understand.
The second section is titled “Neurophysiology,” which is Calvin’s specialty, and here he went all-out in presenting evidence and details. I’ll admit (and I’m a fairly smart guy with three Master’s degrees) that I didn’t understand even the basic argument of at least half of the essays in this section. I kind of get that he wants me to understand that the brain is more complex in its function than a computer, but don’t ask me to explain why. There’s also an essay on the year he spent researching in Israel, which reminded me from a political science perspective of how much better things were there in the 1980s, although we all thought things couldn’t get any worse. The final essay in this section is called “Left Brain, Right Brain, Science or the New Phrenology?” and is essentially a negative review of a book Calvin didn’t bother to read. For that reason, Calvin could not have understood why Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain would remain one of the most popular art instruction books more than forty years after its first publication, although he concedes that people have told him “it’s even a good drawing book.” He assumes that its success is because people are dumb about science, but actually it’s because the book has nothing to do with science and everything to do with seeing. We all know that the left/right brain divide is oversimplified, but from an artistic perspective, it’s a useful metaphor, not an example of some primitive lapse into superstition.
I was close to giving up on the book, but there were finally some much better pieces in “When Things Go Wrong,” and especially in “Neurolinguistics.” Here we started getting some interesting details about current research into the brain and some of the results of that research, boiled down to a much more readable level without being dumb. I think the big success for me was “Probing the Language Cortex” which went into specifics of studies of people with epiliepsy whose brains are stimulated while they try to solve various problems, to see which areas affect which motor or linguistic skills. In light of the President’s recent call to finalize the map of the brain, I’d like to believe that such research has proceeded apace since this book was written, and that we are coming reasonably close to a realistic assessment of the brains actual (not phrenological) division.
Because this is such an old book, I did a little research to see whether Calvin’s work was still being cited as relevant. To my surprise, I found a few scientific articles that actually cited this general-audience book, not just his research. Apparently his idea about throwing being the trigger that developed handedness and possibly linguistic skills is still being seriously researched today. At least one of his assertions, that humans are the only animals that throw one-handed has been discounted (as anyone who has seen monkeys in the zoo fling poo knows), but this just means that studies of chimpanzees throwing things has become a new area of neurological research. As recently as a few years ago, this was still being looked at seriously, and may remain one of Calvin’s great contributions to science.
The book is a series of essays written for general readers by a noted neurophysiologist, which is a somewhat bold move, and is perhaps understandably uneven. The first section is on “Ethology and Evolution” and includes the title essay. What is a throwing Madonna, you may well ask (at least two people asked me, when they saw the cover). Well, this is based on Calvin’s rather original speculative insight into brain specialization and human evolution, which he articulated in two papers for scientific journals prior to this book (they are included as appendices). Basically, he suggests that handedness could have developed because mothers tend to cradle their infants on the left side (nearer the heartbeat) and that mothers, developing the skill of throwing rocks to kill game, might have thrived or died based on their ability to throw with the right hand, which led to people with more complex and stratified brain function surviving and producing more such (mostly right-handed) offspring. Hence, his iconic image of a mother is a “throwing Madonna,” hurling a rock at a rabbit.
Now, I’ve included this, which may be Calvin’s signal effort in the “too cold” section of the book. Basically, in the essays in this section he dumbs things down more than he needed to (for me at least). The journal articles at the back of the book were better organized and more convincing, and included much clearer evidence. But this was far from the worst essay in the section. The next essay, on “The Lovable Cat” is probable the dumbest in the book (and even admits at the end that it is a cheap ploy to get the book to sell better. Here, he suggests that cats became pets for humans because they learned to “mimic” the behaviors of human infants. What behaviors, he doesn’t specify. I guess “cats are cute, babies are cute” was about as much as he expected people to understand.
The second section is titled “Neurophysiology,” which is Calvin’s specialty, and here he went all-out in presenting evidence and details. I’ll admit (and I’m a fairly smart guy with three Master’s degrees) that I didn’t understand even the basic argument of at least half of the essays in this section. I kind of get that he wants me to understand that the brain is more complex in its function than a computer, but don’t ask me to explain why. There’s also an essay on the year he spent researching in Israel, which reminded me from a political science perspective of how much better things were there in the 1980s, although we all thought things couldn’t get any worse. The final essay in this section is called “Left Brain, Right Brain, Science or the New Phrenology?” and is essentially a negative review of a book Calvin didn’t bother to read. For that reason, Calvin could not have understood why Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain would remain one of the most popular art instruction books more than forty years after its first publication, although he concedes that people have told him “it’s even a good drawing book.” He assumes that its success is because people are dumb about science, but actually it’s because the book has nothing to do with science and everything to do with seeing. We all know that the left/right brain divide is oversimplified, but from an artistic perspective, it’s a useful metaphor, not an example of some primitive lapse into superstition.
I was close to giving up on the book, but there were finally some much better pieces in “When Things Go Wrong,” and especially in “Neurolinguistics.” Here we started getting some interesting details about current research into the brain and some of the results of that research, boiled down to a much more readable level without being dumb. I think the big success for me was “Probing the Language Cortex” which went into specifics of studies of people with epiliepsy whose brains are stimulated while they try to solve various problems, to see which areas affect which motor or linguistic skills. In light of the President’s recent call to finalize the map of the brain, I’d like to believe that such research has proceeded apace since this book was written, and that we are coming reasonably close to a realistic assessment of the brains actual (not phrenological) division.
Because this is such an old book, I did a little research to see whether Calvin’s work was still being cited as relevant. To my surprise, I found a few scientific articles that actually cited this general-audience book, not just his research. Apparently his idea about throwing being the trigger that developed handedness and possibly linguistic skills is still being seriously researched today. At least one of his assertions, that humans are the only animals that throw one-handed has been discounted (as anyone who has seen monkeys in the zoo fling poo knows), but this just means that studies of chimpanzees throwing things has become a new area of neurological research. As recently as a few years ago, this was still being looked at seriously, and may remain one of Calvin’s great contributions to science.
June 24, 2024
Interesting essay collection from 1983. (Small update in 1991). I happened upon it as I chased a rabbit down a hole while gathering references that debunk the left-/right-brain myths, which Calvin calls out in his chapter titled "Left Brain, Right Brain: Science or the New Phrenology?" Certainly not rigorous in his critiques, Calvin posits educated opinions...which in the case of the split-brain hypothesis perpetrated by Roger Sperry and his followers seems to be mostly incorrect. Recent fMRI studies (unavailable to Sperry, or Calvin at the time of writing) reveal that while creativity seems to originate in the right brain, the left brain appears to be more involved in the results.
One rabbit hole checked. Three more uncovered. It never ends.
One rabbit hole checked. Three more uncovered. It never ends.
August 25, 2008
Not as good as "The River that Flows Uphill," but with very interesting speculations and thoughts.
January 3, 2009
Calvin is the Lucretius of the brain.
Amazing, killer, revolutionary.
Amazing, killer, revolutionary.
March 30, 2009
A good book. Very interesting reading. I thought he superceded this one with "The River that Flows Uphill," however, which is a truly wonderful work.
May 6, 2010
Not up to date, boring, very basic and mediocre. Probably a high-school read.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews