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The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life
Robert Trivers · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology
Robert Wright · 496 pages
The Meme Machine
Susan Blackmore · 264 pages
After Richard Dawkins' *The Selfish Gene*, Susan Blackmore drive us deeply into the theory of the meme, social and cultural "replicators", trying to explain the human unique ability to imitate. Altruism, ideas, human behaviours, sex, poetry, music... seems to be simply the result of such as memetic selection... > Even our inner conscious self and our sense of free will are illlusion created by
The Evolution Of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating
David M. Buss · 267 pages
How we choose - and lose - our mates has always been a source of fascination. This controversial book is the first to present a unified theory of human mating behavior. The Evolution of Desire is based on the most massive study of human mating ever undertaken, encompassing more than 10,000 people of all ages from thirty-seven cultures worldwide. If we all want love, why is there so much conflict
How the Mind Works
Steven Pinker · 661 pages
"Presented with extraordinary lucidity, cogency and panache...Powerful and gripping...To have read [the book] is to have consulted a first draft of the structural plan of the human psyche...a glittering tour de force" - Spectator "Why do memories fade? Why do we lose our tempers? Why do fools fall in love? Pinker's objective in this erudite account is to explore the nature and history of the human
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
Robert M. Sapolsky · 790 pages
Why do we do the things we do? Over a decade in the making, this game-changing book is Robert Sapolsky's genre-shattering attempt to answer that question as fully as perhaps only he could, looking at it from every angle. Sapolsky's storytelling concept is delightful but it also has a powerful intrinsic logic: he starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise mo
Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind
Gary F. Marcus · 224 pages
Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique
Michael S. Gazzaniga · 352 pages
One of the world's leading neuroscientists explores how best to understand the human condition by examining the biological, psychological, and highly social nature of our species within the social context of our lives.What happened along the evolutionary trail that made humans so unique? In his widely accessible style, Michael Gazzaniga looks to a broad range of studies to pinpoint the change that
The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature
Geoffrey Miller · 533 pages
"Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller shows the evolutionary power of sexual choice and the reasons why our ancestors became attracted not only to pretty faces and healthy bodies, but to minds that were witty, articulate, generous, and conscious. The richness and subtlety of modern psychology help to reveal how the human mind evolved, like the peacock's tail and the elk's antlers for courtshi
Mean Genes: From Sex to Money to Food: Taming Our Primal Instincts
Terry Burnham, Jay Phelan · 272 pages
Why is the Penis Shaped Like That?: And Other Reflections on Being Human
Jesse Bering · 352 pages
"Titillating and provocative essays from one of the freshest voices in science today -- Why do testicles hang the way they do? Is there an adaptive function to the female orgasm? What does it feel like to want to kill yourself? Does "free will" really exist? And why is the penis shaped like that anyway? In Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?, the research psychologist and award-winning columnist Je
Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life: A Psychologist Investigates How Evolution, Cognition, and Complexity are Revolutionizing our View of Human Nature
Douglas T. Kenrick · 248 pages
From the book flap: In Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life, social psychologist Douglas Kenrick exposes the selfish animalistic underside of human nature, and shows how it is intimately connected to our greatest and most selfless achievements. Masterfully integrating cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, and complexity theory, this intriguing book paints a comprehensive picture of the p
The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature
Daniel J. Levitin · 354 pages
The author of the New York Times bestseller and Los Angeles Times Book Award Finalist This Is Your Brain on Music tunes us in to six evolutionary musical forms that brought about the evolution of human culture.An unprecedented blend of science and art, Daniel Levitin's debut, This Is Your Brain on Music, delighted readers with an exuberant guide to the neural impulses behind those songs that make
The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human
Jonathan Gottschall · 271 pages
The Seven Daughters of Eve: The Science That Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry
Bryan Sykes · 319 pages
"In 1994 Professor Bryan Sykes, a leading world authority on DNA and human evolution, was called in to examine the frozen remains of a man trapped in glacial ice in northern Italy. News of the discovery of the Ice Man and his age, which was put at over five thousand years, fascinated the world. But what made the story particularly extraordinary was that Professor Sykes was also able to track down
The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates
Frans de Waal · 304 pages
A renowned primatologist argues that ethical behavior witnessed in animals is the evolutionary and biological origin of human fairness and explains that morality has more to do with natural instincts than with religion.
Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin
Stephen Jay Gould · 250 pages
In Full House, Gould corrects the prevalent, anthropocentric view of the world with an eloquent argument for a new paradigm of progress in which variety - not complexity - is the true measure of excellence. In the process, Full House teaches us how to read trends as changes in variation within full systems, rather than as "things moving somehwere".
The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived
Clive Finlayson · 273 pages
"We have all heard the account of how our clever ancestors spread From Africa and ousted the primitive Neanderthals, driving them to extinction. But was that really how it happened?" "'History is typically the story of victors over vanquished and prehistory is no different', says Clive Finlayson. He presents an altogether more humbling view: there is nothing to suggest that our ancestors were inhe
Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution
Richard Fortey · 302 pages
"With Fortey's expert guidance, we begin to understand how trilobites reveal the pattern and mechanism of evolution through their fossil legacy in the rocks. Through the eyes of trilobites, he allows us glimpses of former worlds as foreign in their geography as in their life forms. Altogether, he provides a unique picture of our geological past, which in turn provides us - scientist and layperson
A Devil's Chaplain
Richard Dawkins · 272 pages
'Moet u zich eens voorstellen wat voor boek een kapelaan van de duivel zou kunnen schrijven over de onhandige, verspillende, blunderende en gruwelijk gemene werken van de natuur.' Dit schreef Darwin in 1856 aan een vriend. Maar, hoe gruwelijk en onhandig ook, willekeurig zijn de evolutionaire processen allerminst, zo laat Richard Dawkins zien in zijn even nuchtere als helder onderbouwde werk. Ka
Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease
Sharon Moalem · 279 pages
Survival of the Sickest: The Surprising Connections Between Disease and Longevity is a 2007 New York Times Bestselling science book by Sharon Moalem, an evolutionary biologist and neurogeneticist, and Jonathan Prince, senior advisor and speechwriter for the Clinton administration. It was originally titled, Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease.
Origins: 14 Bllion Years of Cosmic Evolution
Neil deGrasse Tyson, Donald Goldsmith · 336 pages
"Drawing on the current cross-pollination among geology, biology, astrophysics, and cosmology, Origins explains the soul-stirring leaps in our understanding of the universe while capturing the importance of such extraordinary events as the first image of a galaxy being born and the exploration of Martian frontiers by Spirit Rover. Distilling complex science into clear and lively prose, coauthors N
The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor
Colin Tudge, Josh Young · 267 pages
For more than a century, scientists have raced to unravel the human family tree and have grappled with its complications. Now, with an astonishing new discovery, everything we thought we knew about primate origins could change. Lying inside a high-security vault, deep within the heart of one of the world's leading natural history museums, is the scientific find of a lifetime - a perfectly fossiliz
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Yuval Noah Harari · 456 pages
From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity’s creation and evolution—a #1 international bestseller—that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be “human.” One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one—homo sapiens. What hap