Finished reading Left in the Dark by Gynn & Wright.
Having finished reading it, I'm very disappointed. It's not fit to shine Jaynes's boot buckle; while Jaynes's theory has serious problems explaining where bicameralism went, worldwide, and other chronological problems, it at least was an elegant theory that fit a great many facts.

Wright and his co-author, on the other hand, is chock-full of anecdotes (better ping-pong playing and relaxation playing with your left hand? really?); data seems misrepresented (I did not recognize his description of the peg data in the sleep deprivation experiment with the actual graph); dismissal of possibilities as 'implausible' which are perfectly plausible (the claim that testosterone can't damage one hemisphere and help the other comes to mind, as does the claim that there are no plausible evolutionary theories for evolving handedness - actually, there's a very elegant competition explanation which anyone who has done a head-to-head sport like ping-pong or fencing could appreciate); fully general counter-arguments like the claim that not appreciating the theory is evidence of being damaged as the theory predicts; excuse-making for the absence of forest fossils supporting theory theory; blatantly false claims about bipedalism mixed in with distraction about the aquatic ape theory; claims about agricultural longevity which are surely the elementary mistake of assuming that infant mortality-dominated average lifespans say much about how adults actually lived; invocation of pseudoscience like photoreading or Carlos Castaneda or 140-year olds in distant Third World countries (seriously? seriously?!) or Alzheimers and other diseases being caused by dehydration; blatant confirmation bias* (who, interested in people who do not sleep, would mention a Vietnamese woman and not mention fatal familial insomnia?); and of course, vitamin C megadoses must appear in any work by fruitarians, as does the claim that cooking reduces the nutritional value of food (which would come as news to anthropologists, who regard the introduction of fire as possibly the key breakthrough to enabling large expensive brains - except that right, the authors believe that fruit is what enabled large brains, hm, I wonder why they might not discuss the caloric value of cooking food... perhaps it's because cooked food doesn't 'raise micro-electric potentials throughout the body').

* which becomes ever more important in data-rich noisy fields like psychology; I actually pointed this out for dual n-back recently on Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4204653

The use of autists, idiot savants, and TMS is an interesting topic in its own right, but inadvertently sabotages the thesis. There's a legal saying, 'hard cases make bad law'; in neuroscience, damaged patients make bad theories. The brain is Turing-complete and can exhibit arbitrarily complex problems: these patients tend to be fairly unique, and how are you going to build any kind of theory on them? To the extent we can infer anything, it's that there is a common trait among those with access to low-level processing: they are not smart. Their abilities seem to come at the expense of all other abilities or higher-level processing: Kim Peek may have memorized thousands of books, but what sort of understanding did this man with an IQ of 89 exhibit of them? Very little. The child prodigy artist may be able to render remarkably detailed artwork, but a camera is more accurate and just as artistic as I've ever heard him be. This does not bode well for any exaltation of the right hemisphere...

The crowning piece of nonsense is probably the 'loop' between fruits, steroids, and DNA. This idea, lovingly illustrated in multiple graphs, is fractal nonsense: the more you look at each piece, the worse it gets. It's as if someone told you that car evolution was steered by gas stations: you see, a human drives the car to a gas station, the car is filled up with gas, the gas changes the car, changing how it drives to the next gas station and how it reacts to the next fillup. This may initially seem plausible until you look at step 3, which reads basically like the old Far Side strip - 'And then a miracle happens'. How exactly do steroids rewrite the DNA? A steroid is not a little computer or nanobot which can go into a sperm or egg - and notice the quiet eliding of the difference between somatic and germ-line cells, it's perfectly possible for any genetic or epigenetic changes to not be passed on - and rewrite the DNA as it wishes. If variations in circulating levels of some chemical affect DNA, it must do so via receptors and proteins set up in advance by gradual evolution to do specific things - eg. think of how alligators or crocodiles vary the sex ratio of their offspring in response to ambient temperatures, this is set up in advance because it's useful, the temperature doesn't 'just cause' the sex ratio to vary in some magical way because boy alligators are fiery and analogous to hot weather while female crocodiles are chillier and aloof. (I'm reminded of the genie of the lamp: "I wish everyone was happy!" Well, OK, but what does that actually mean and how should the genie do it?) They are, naturally, as sure of this evolutionary loop as one can be in the complete absence of all evidence.

While we're on DNA, I was deeply amused that they could propose this system as their primary explanation, and then throughout the rest of the book dismiss any further adaptation because a few hundred thousand years was not enough! I really think that we can adapt to eating meat in a few hundred thousand years, especially when our primate ancestors and surviving lineages often do eat meat... It was especially funny to read "It is highly unlikely that the DNA selection process could have achieved this rapid result (certainly not on the savannah where hominids would be subjected to hard and stressful environmental conditions)"; hard and stressful conditions are exactly the kind of selection pressure that might drive large increases in any organ or body part, and allometric scaling in general is one of the easier things for evolution to change if it's fitness-increasing. (Changing size is a lot easier than developing an organ from scratch, that's for sure. Size is a tweak.)

These are only my notes for the first 80 pages. After that, I gave up and read on in a sort of stunned state. At least it does deign to include some sort of references (although it doesn't link specific claims to specific papers, seems kind of skimpy, and is very heavy on books - which aren't very useful in the sense that now you have an entire book to read just to check a few claims).

It helps that I've read up on many of the same topics for entirely different reasons, so I have a good idea of the general framework of various fields and where they're making huge extrapolations or passing over contrary evidence. 'What is good in it is not original, and what is original is not good.'

The disturbing thing for me is that so many of the references and facts are familiar, and it's written fairly well. I'm reminded of Anatole France:

> What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation.