Preface xv
Prologue: Why on Earth …? 1
Part 1 Our Place in Nature
Chapter 1 Deep Roots 9
Chapter 2 The Tree of Life 13
Chapter 3 Kingdoms Come 17
Chapter 4 Common Ancestry 20
Chapter 5 It's a Livin' Thing 24
Part 2 Survival and Behavior
Chapter 6 The Behavior of Organisms 29
Chapter 7 Beyond Animal Behavior 35
Chapter 8 The Earliest Survivors 39
Chapter 9 Survival Strategies and Tactics 44
Chapter 10 Rethinking Behavior 48
Part 3 Microbial Life
Chapter 11 In the Beginning 53
Chapter 12 Life Itself 57
Chapter 13 Survival Machines 63
Chapter 14 The Arrival of Organelles 68
Chapter 15 The Marriage of LUCA's Children 71
Chapter 16 Breathing New Life into Old 74
Part 4 The Transition to Complexity
Chapter 17 Size Matters 79
Chapter 18 The Sexual Revolution 82
Chapter 19 Mitochondrial Eve, Jesse James, and the Origin of Sex 88
Chapter 20 Colonial Times 91
Chapter 21 The Selection Two-Step 95
Chapter 22 Flagellating Through the Bottleneck 100
Part 5 … And Then Animals Invented Neurons
Chapter 23 What Is an Animal? 107
Chapter 24 A Humble Beginning 115
Chapter 25 Animals Take Shape 119
Chapter 26 The Magic of Neurons 124
Chapter 27 How Neurons and Nervous Systems Happened 127
Part 6 Metazoan Bread Crumbs in the Oceans
Chapter 28 Facing Forward 137
Chapter 29 Tissue Issues 141
Chapter 30 Oral or Anal? 145
Chapter 31 Deep-Sea Deuterostomes Link Us to Our Past 148
Chapter 32 A Tale of Two Chords 151
Part 7 The Vertebrates Arrive
Chapter 33 Bauplan Vertebrata 157
Chapter 34 The Life Aquatic 161
Chapter 35 On the Surface 165
Chapter 36 The Milk Trail 171
Part 8 Ladders and Trees in the Vertebrate Brain
Chapter 37 Neuro-Bauplan Vertebrata 179
Chapter 38 Ludwig's Ladder 183
Chapter 39 The Triune Temptress 188
Chapter 40 Darwin's Muddled Emotional Psychology 192
Chapter 41 How Basic Are Basic Emotions? 195
Part 9 The Beginning of Cognition
Chapter 42 Cogitation 203
Chapter 43 Finding Cognition in the Behaviorist Bailiwick 208
Chapter 44 The Evolution of Behavioral Flexibility 216
Part 10 Surviving (and Thriving) by Thinking
Chapter 45 Deliberation 225
Chapter 46 The Engine of Deliberative Cognition 228
Chapter 47 Schmoozing 234
Part 11 Cognitive Hardware
Chapter 48 Perception and Memory Share Circuitry 243
Chapter 49 The Cognitive Coalition 249
Chapter 50 Rewired and Running Hot 255
Part 12 Subjectivity
Chapter 51 Being There 263
Chapter 52 What Is It Like to Be Conscious? 269
Chapter 53 I Want to Take You Higher 277
Chapter 54 Higher Awareness in the Brain 281
Part 13 Consciousness Through the Looking Glass of Memory
Chapter 55 The Invention of Experience 289
Chapter 56 Ah, Memory 294
Chapter 57 Putting Memories in Their Places 300
Chapter 58 Higher-Order Awareness Through the Lens of Memory 305
Part 14 The Shallows
Chapter 59 The Tricky Problem of Other Minds 315
Chapter 60 Creeping Up on Consciousness 324
Chapter 61 Kinds of Minds 329
Part 15 Emotional Subjectivity
Chapter 62 The Slippery Slopes of Emotional Semantics 337
Chapter 63 Can Survival Circuits Save the Day? 344
Chapter 64 Thoughtful Feelings 350
Chapter 65 Emotional Brains Run HOT 359
Chapter 66 Survival Is Deep, but Our Emotions Are Shallow 368
Epilogue: Can We Survive Our Self-Conscious Selves? 372
Appendix 381
Bibliographic Key 383
Illustration Credits 401
Index 403