Download or read book The Book of Humans written by Adam Rutherford and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. This book was released on 2018-09-06 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Around 45,000 years ago, something happened. We dragged ourselves away from our origins by creating culture, with tools and art and abstract thought and our newly minted minds. The cognitive revolution gave us a sense that we are special, and specially created, distanced from nature. Writers, scientists, philosophers and religions have marvelled at our brilliance for millennia. Yet we are apes, wedded to the rest of creation by genes, anatomy, and physiology, all rooted in a shared evolution. All species are unique, but are we moreunique than other animals?This question is at the root of who we are. Things we once lorded as uniquely human are not. We are not the only species that communicates, makes tools, solves puzzles, has fashions, plans for the future, regrets past decisions, goes to war, grieves for lost lives, farms, uses manipulative mind control, and has sex for reasons other than to make new versions of ourselves. We arethe only ones who do all of these things.The Book of Humansis a guidebook to this paradox: what sets us apart from nature, but places us within it. Darwin began the process of inching us back into the natural world but in this dazzling new book, Adam Rutherford will look at how we occupy an exceptional place within the animal kingdom, demystify the complex behaviours we once thought just belonged to us and, in turn, enrich our understanding of what it means to be human.
Download or read book The Vital Question written by Nick Lane and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A game-changing book on the origins of life, called the most important scientific discovery 'since the Copernican revolution' in The Observer.
Download or read book Glued to the Set written by Steven D. Stark and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Call it literate fun. Ranging from the 1940's to the 1990's and focusing on 60 programs that will surprise you, Stark comments on TV history in a smart, pithy voice and reveals how as a nation we've moved from Lucy and Ricky to Roseanne and Dan; from Howdy Doody to Sesame Street -- and what that says about us.You may think you know television -- but when Steven Stark is finished pushing your buttons with fighting words and brilliant insights, you'll see what television has done to us as a nation in a whole new way. From Beaver to Roseanne, Ed Sullivan to Oprah, Monday Night Football to MTV, Stark takes us on a guided tour of the tube, providing startling revelations about the power of its sixty most important shows and events in the history of television. He catches in bright focus a hilarious, strange, and compelling image of ourselves as reflected on the small screen, and he shows us, with striking logic, the awesome power of television over our future and our fate.
Download or read book Pleased to Meet Me written by Bill Sullivan and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why are you attracted to a certain "type?" Why are you a morning person? Why do you vote the way you do? From a witty new voice in popular science comes a clever, life-changing look at what makes you you. "I can't believe I just said that." "What possessed me to do that?" "What's wrong with me?" We're constantly seeking answers to these fundamental human questions, and now, science has the answers. The foods we enjoy, the people we love, the emotions we feel, and the beliefs we hold can all be traced back to our DNA, germs, and environment. This witty, colloquial book is popular science at its best, describing in everyday language how genetics, epigenetics, microbiology, and psychology work together to influence our personality and actions. Mixing cutting-edge research and relatable humor, Pleased to Meet Me is filled with fascinating insights that shine a light on who we really are--and how we might become our best selves.
Download or read book A Short History of Humanity written by Johannes Krause and published by Random House. This book was released on 2021-04-08 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humanity has often found itself on the precipice. We've survived and thrived because we've never stopped moving... 'Stops you dead in your tracks ... An absolute revelation' Sue Black, bestselling author of All That Remains In this eye-opening book, Johannes Krause, Chair of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Humanity, offers a new way of understanding our past, present and future. Marshalling unique insights from archaeogenetics, an emerging new discipline that allows us to read our ancestors' DNA like journals chronicling personal stories of migration, Krause charts two millennia of adaption, movement and survival, culminating in the triumph of Homo Sapiens as we swept through Europe and beyond in successive waves of migration - developing everything from language, the patriarchy, disease, art and a love of pets as we did so. We also meet our ancestors, from those many of us have heard of - such as Homo Erectus and the Neanderthals - to the wildly unfamiliar but no less real: the recently discovered Denisovans, who ranged across Asia and, like humans, interbred with Neanderthals; the Aurignacians, skilled artists who, 40,000 years ago, brought about an extraordinary transformation in what our species could invent and create; the Varna, who buried their loved ones with gold long before the Pharaohs of Egypt did; and the Gravettians, big game hunters who were Europe's most successful early settlers until they perished in the face of the toughest opponent humanity had ever faced: the ice age. As well as being a radical new telling of our shared story, this book is a reminder that the global problems that keep us awake at night - climate catastrophe; the sudden emergence of deadly epidemics; refugee crises; ethnic conflict; over-population - are all things we've faced, and overcome, before.
Download or read book How We Got to Now written by Steven Johnson and published by Riverhead Books. This book was released on 2015-09-22 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a celebration of ideas: how they happen and their sometimes unintended results. Johnson shows how simple scientific breakthroughs have driven other discoveries through the network of ideas and innovations that made each finding possible. He traces important inventions through ancient and contemporary history, unlocking tales of unsung heroes and radical revolutions that changed the world and the way we live in it
Download or read book What Are We Doing Here written by Marilynne Robinson and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2018-02-20 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New essays on theological, political, and contemporary themes, by the Pulitzer Prize winner Marilynne Robinson has plumbed the human spirit in her renowned novels, including Lila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Gilead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America like Emerson and Tocqueville inform our political consciousness or discussing the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson’s peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display. What Are We Doing Here? is a call for Americans to continue the tradition of those great thinkers and to remake American political and cultural life as “deeply impressed by obligation [and as] a great theater of heroic generosity, which, despite all, is sometimes palpable still.”
Download or read book Enlightenment Now written by Steven Pinker and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-02-13 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR "My new favorite book of all time." --Bill Gates If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science. By the author of the new book, Rationality. Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing. Far from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against currents of human nature--tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking--which demagogues are all too willing to exploit. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation. With intellectual depth and literary flair, Enlightenment Now makes the case for reason, science, and humanism: the ideals we need to confront our problems and continue our progress.
Download or read book Blueprint written by Robert Plomin and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-07-16 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A top behavioral geneticist argues DNA inherited from our parents at conception can predict our psychological strengths and weaknesses. This “modern classic” on genetics and nature vs. nurture is “one of the most direct and unapologetic takes on the topic ever written” (Boston Review). In Blueprint, behavioral geneticist Robert Plomin describes how the DNA revolution has made DNA personal by giving us the power to predict our psychological strengths and weaknesses from birth. A century of genetic research shows that DNA differences inherited from our parents are the consistent lifelong sources of our psychological individuality—the blueprint that makes us who we are. Plomin reports that genetics explains more about the psychological differences among people than all other factors combined. Nature, not nurture, is what makes us who we are. Plomin explores the implications of these findings, drawing some provocative conclusions—among them that parenting styles don't really affect children's outcomes once genetics is taken into effect. This book offers readers a unique insider’s view of the exciting synergies that came from combining genetics and psychology.
Download or read book The Biological Mind written by Alan Jasanoff and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pioneering neuroscientist argues that we are more than our brains To many, the brain is the seat of personal identity and autonomy. But the way we talk about the brain is often rooted more in mystical conceptions of the soul than in scientific fact. This blinds us to the physical realities of mental function. We ignore bodily influences on our psychology, from chemicals in the blood to bacteria in the gut, and overlook the ways that the environment affects our behavior, via factors varying from subconscious sights and sounds to the weather. As a result, we alternately overestimate our capacity for free will or equate brains to inorganic machines like computers. But a brain is neither a soul nor an electrical network: it is a bodily organ, and it cannot be separated from its surroundings. Our selves aren't just inside our heads -- they're spread throughout our bodies and beyond. Only once we come to terms with this can we grasp the true nature of our humanity.
Download or read book The Rational Animal written by Douglas T Kenrick and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2013-09-10 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do three out of four professional football players go bankrupt? How can illiterate jungle dwellers pass a test that tricks Harvard philosophers? And why do billionaires work so hard -- only to give their hard-earned money away? When it comes to making decisions, the classic view is that humans are eminently rational. But growing evidence suggests instead that our choices are often irrational, biased, and occasionally even moronic. Which view is right -- or is there another possibility? In this animated tour of the inner workings of the mind, psychologist Douglas T. Kenrick and business professor Vladas Griskevicius challenge the prevailing views of decision making, and present a new alternative grounded in evolutionary science. By connecting our modern behaviors to their ancestral roots, they reveal that underneath our seemingly foolish tendencies is an exceptionally wise system of decision making. From investing money to choosing a job, from buying a car to choosing a romantic partner, our choices are driven by deep-seated evolutionary goals. Because each of us has multiple evolutionary goals, though, new research reveals something radical -- there's more than one "you" making decisions. Although it feels as if there is just one single "self" inside your head, your mind actually contains several different subselves, each one steering you in a different direction when it takes its turn at the controls. The Rational Animal will transform the way you think about decision making. And along the way, you'll discover the intimate connections between ovulating strippers, Wall Street financiers, testosterone-crazed skateboarders, Steve Jobs, Elvis Presley, and you.
Download or read book Creation written by Adam Rutherford and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-05-27 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today’s scientists are radically exceeding the boundaries of evolution and engineering entirely novel creatures. Cutting edge “synthetic biology” may lead to solutions to some of the world’s most pressing crises and pave the way for inventions once relegated to science fiction. Meanwhile, these advances are shedding new light on the biggest mystery of all—how did life begin? As we come closer and closer to understanding the ancient root that connects all living things, Adam Rutherford shows how we may finally be able to achieve the creation of new life where none existed before.
Download or read book Blueprint written by Lucy Maddox and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2020-09-10 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The best book I've read this year ... It's written in such a beautiful way' - Dr Suzi Gage, Book Shamblespodcast This is an excellent book for anyone who wants to understand the psychology and the science behind what makes them them! - Professor Tanya Byron 'This book walks the line between being absolutely fascinating yet accessible. It made me look at how we are raising our kids, as well as my own upbringing, but did so in a totally judgement free way. Loved it' - Clemmie Telford From birth to adulthood, Blueprint tells you what you need to know about how you became who you are Have you ever wondered how your early life shaped you? From beginning to say simple words like 'mama' and learning how to walk around unaided, to the first day of school and forming new friendships, everyone has been a child. The roots of our adult selves go right back to our first experiences. How we think, act and interact is influenced by our early years, yet most people don't know the key findings from the juiciest child development studies that can give us insight into our adult selves. Weaving together cutting edge research, everyday experience and clinical examples, Dr Lucy Maddox explains how we develop from an unconscious bundle of cells floating about in the dark of the in uterine environment to to a fully grown complex adult, revealing fascinating insights about our personality, relationships and daily lives along the way.
Download or read book What s Mine Is Yours written by Rachel Botsman and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2010-09-14 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Amidst a thousand tirades against the excesses and waste of consumer society, What’s Mine Is Yours offers us something genuinely new and invigorating: a way out.” —Steven Johnson, author of The Invention of Air and The Ghost Map A groundbreaking and original book, What’s Mine is Yours articulates for the first time the roots of "collaborative consumption," Rachel Botsman and Roo Roger's timely new coinage for the technology-based peer communities that are transforming the traditional landscape of business, consumerism, and the way we live. Readers captivated by Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, Van Jones’ The Green Collar Economy or Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point will be wowed by this landmark contribution to the evolving ecology of commerce and sustainability.
Download or read book Who We Are and How We Got Here written by David Reich and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-29 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The past few years have seen a revolution in our ability to map whole genome DNA from ancient humans. With the ancient DNA revolution, combined with rapid genome mapping of present human populations, has come remarkable insights into our past. This important new data has clarified and added to our knowledge from archaeology and anthropology, helped resolve long-existing controversies, challenged long-held views, and thrown up some remarkable surprises. The emerging picture is one of many waves of ancient human migrations, so that all populations existing today are mixes of ancient ones, as well as in many cases carrying a genetic component from Neanderthals, and, in some populations, Denisovans. David Reich, whose team has been at the forefront of these discoveries, explains what the genetics is telling us about ourselves and our complex and often surprising ancestry. Gone are old ideas of any kind of racial 'purity', or even deep and ancient divides between peoples. Instead, we are finding a rich variety of mixtures. Reich describes the cutting-edge findings from the past few years, and also considers the sensitivities involved in tracing ancestry, with science sometimes jostling with politics and tradition. He brings an important wider message: that we should celebrate our rich diversity, and recognize that every one of us is the result of a long history of migration and intermixing of ancient peoples, which we carry as ghosts in our DNA. What will we discover next?
Download or read book Homo Prospectus written by Martin E. P. Seligman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-14 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our species is misnamed. Though sapiens defines human beings as "wise" what humans do especially well is to prospect the future. We are homo prospectus. In this book, Martin E. P. Seligman, Peter Railton, Roy F. Baumeister, and Chandra Sripada argue it is anticipating and evaluating future possibilities for the guidance of thought and action that is the cornerstone of human success. Much of the history of psychology has been dominated by a framework in which people's behavior is driven by past history (memory) and present circumstances (perception and motivation). Homo Prospectus reassesses this idea, pushing focus to the future front and center and opening discussion of a new field of Psychology and Neuroscience. The authors delve into four modes in which prospection operates: the implicit mind, deliberate thought, mind-wandering, and collective (social) imagination. They then explore prospection's role in some of life's most enduring questions: Why do people think about the future? Do we have free will? What is the nature of intuition, and how might it function in ethics? How does emotion function in human psychology? Is there a common causal process in different psychopathologies? Does our creativity change with age? In this remarkable convergence of research in philosophy, statistics, decision theory, psychology, and neuroscience, Homo Prospectus shows how human prospection fundamentally reshapes our understanding of key cognitive processes, thereby improving individual and social functioning. It aims to galvanize interest in this new science from scholars in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy, as well as an educated public curious about what makes humanity what it is.
Download or read book The Words That Made Us written by Akhil Reed Amar and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 816 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of the American Constitution's formative decades from a preeminent legal scholar When the US Constitution won popular approval in 1788, it was the culmination of thirty years of passionate argument over the nature of government. But ratification hardly ended the conversation. For the next half century, ordinary Americans and statesmen alike continued to wrestle with weighty questions in the halls of government and in the pages of newspapers. Should the nation's borders be expanded? Should America allow slavery to spread westward? What rights should Indian nations hold? What was the proper role of the judicial branch? In The Words that Made Us, Akhil Reed Amar unites history and law in a vivid narrative of the biggest constitutional questions early Americans confronted, and he expertly assesses the answers they offered. His account of the document's origins and consolidation is a guide for anyone seeking to properly understand America's Constitution today.
