Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind

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Yet his survey is binocular: one eye has the rather distant vision of the evolutionary biologist, while the other eye--and his heart--belongs to the people of New Guinea, where he has done field work for more than 30 years. This book, filled with a broad array of fascinating topics, is bound to further whet the appetite of a growing number of students who have been inspired by this provocative, yet eminently testable approach to human behavior. So if you do something with your left brain, using your right side, it’s easy to explain why you did it. So when we look at much earlier stages—what makes you angry or, who you fancy, or whatever, it’s not necessarily clear that they lead directly to behaviours that influence your gene success. Alison Gopnik She makes the very interesting argument that our particular evolutionary niche is such that we can’t just depend on mothers to provide care.

David Brooks An argument against the old view that there is no such thing as human nature, that we’re all culturally determined. His starting point is moral intuition—the nearly instantaneous perceptions we all have about other people and the things they do. They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking; who innovate and create but dislike self-promotion; who favor working on their own over working in teams. But I think it was Daly and Wilson who first actually collected the data, and proved that this was so.Esther Perel takes on tough questions, grappling with the obstacles and anxieties that arise when our quest for secure love conflicts with our pursuit of passion. This must read looks at the concepts of the blank slate, the noble savage, and the ghost in the machine in an exploration of morals, emotions, and politics. So that creates a sort of arms race, and maybe that explains why there’s such a gulf between us and other animals. Brilliantly written, The Red Queen offers an extraordinary new way of interpreting the human condition and how it has evolved.

Your right half of the brain tends to control your left visual field, your left arm, and vice versa. Sapolsky keeps going: How was that behavior influenced by structural changes in the nervous system over the preceding months, by that person's adolescence, childhood, fetal life, and then back to his or her genetic makeup? Diamond evenhandedly reviews human history on every continent since the Ice Age at a rate that emphasizes only the broadest movements of peoples and ideas. In Sapiens, Dr Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the. Yet The Origin of Species (1859) is also a humane and inspirational vision of ecological interrelatedness, revealing the complex mutual interdependencies between animal and plant life, climate and physical environment, and—by implication—within the human world.Neil Shubin, a leading paleontologist and professor of anatomy who discovered Tiktaalik-the "missing link" that made headlines around the world in April 2006-tells the story of evolution by tracing the organs of the human body back millions of years, long before the first creatures walked the earth. Hamilton Book Award (2000) for the first edition of Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind.

Other academics have done some of the numerical simulations and, again, show what he predicted from that basic premise.He also introduced the concept of self-reproducing ideas, or memes, which (seemingly) use humans exclusively for their propagation. It’s just as messy as I imagined physics was in the past, with different experiments and theories being thrown out all over the place. Each chapter is alive with the subjects that most occupy our minds: sex, mating, getting along, getting ahead, friends, enemies, and social hierarchies. Instead it’s, ‘Here are some experimental results, and here are four different ways of trying to explain those experimental results.