This is an interesting article, though it would be helpful if you could supply some comments of your own about what you think the main point is, or your opinion of it.

I read The Guardian. I like it. It's a liberal UK newspaper (bet you didn't want to hear that).

I've never heard of this particular scientist, and I'd have to research these ideas he's presented before I could comment knowledgeable on much of this. I question why he thinks we can't sure about which species walked upright and which dragged their knuckles. The morphology of a skeleton, and the way it is put together, can tell us a lot about that. For example, a gorilla's head has the neck projecting out of it at almost a 90 degree angle because it's walking on all-fours most of the time. Our heads are perched almost directly on top of our necks because we are bipedal. The hip-bones tell a similar story.

What he says about the evolution of cognition is interesting. Most scientists are reductionists; they think that if we break everything down and study its smallest components, we will figure out how it works. They think that consciousness must be a function of parts of our brain. I've spoken to people who refuse to entertain any alternative notion, even though there's increasing evidence that this is simply wrong.

Like I said, what I see is that evolution happened and is happening still; and that natural selection happens. How these things happen is not completely understood, and I rather suspect that we know less than we think. There might even be some food for thought here for people who think that evolution is an exclusively random process of mutation and natural selection. That's a possibility but my gut feeling is there's more to it than that. There certainly is, if Lipton is right about how organisms respond to their environments, and if Sheldrake is right about the existence of morphic fields.

I'll have to look up Professor Lewontin and find out more about what he's actually saying and what his evidence is. If he's into consciousness research then he's probably familiar with Lipton and Sheldrake too.