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Society We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators. --Richard Dawkins Learning from the Past / Looking to the Future Carl Sagan In looking at humanity's gradual adoption of science as a way of understanding the world, Sagan reviews the horrors we humans have inflicted on ourselves across the ages and reminds me how easily we slip back into superstitious ways of thinking. The Demon-Haunted World Allison Jolly A primatologist working with lemurs in Madagascar, Jolly uses evolutionary biology to develop an understanding of why gender and sex exist and how these two meta-traits influence human behavior. Lucy's Legacy: Sex and Intelligence in Human Evoluation Jared Diamond These texts follow Diamond's evolving view of societal dynamics, starting from his understanding of bird evolution and physiology and expanding into the interplay between geography and human history. Along the way, he, rather tidily in my opinion, demolishes the typically racist explanations for why some meta-populations dominate others ... and offers his view of the defining challenge for the third chimpanzee over the next few decades. The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed Elie Wiesel For me, Wiesel describes the consequences of human kind-sight overlaid with right/wrong thinking and a reminder of just how high the stakes are. Night Philip Zimbardo Zimbardo argues that both dispositional (character) factors and situational (environmental) factors influence human behavior -- on the surface, a hard-to-disput stance, and an insight which has shifted me away from looking purely at character for the source of my understanding for how we behave as we do. On top of this, he layers a systems model for how humans create situational influences. I'm unconvinced that these models map to anything measureable in the biology of the human brain and therefore wary of incorporating this way of looking at human culture into my world view. On the other hand, the data and insights packed into his recounting of the Stanford Prison Experiment along with the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib require explanation, to my way of thinking. Zimbardo not only makes an effort at explaining these events but is also trying to do something about them. The Lucifer Effect How the Brain's Limitations Influence Our Perceptions I hope that understanding the compromises our brains make as they interpret what our senses give them, and understanding our psychological biases, helps me resist the more toxic consequences of these limits. Daniel Gilbert Gilbert studies how the limits of our biology reduce the accuracy with which we perceive ourselves and others. Gary Marcus A psychologist at NYU, Marcus offers a model of the brain which integrates, however roughly, an older, quicker, simpler, more reactive core working in tandem with a more sophisticated, but far slower, set of modules -- the result being a pastiche of results, amazing in its entirety but dismayingly flawed in its particulars. Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind Cordelia Fine Fine integrates psychology and neuroscience to offer a view into how the brain edits reality to deliver its skewed result to consciousness. A Mind of Its Own: How your brain distorts and deceives David Livingstone Smith A philosopher at the University of New England and director of the New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology, Smith looks at the evolutionary roots of deception and self-deception, war, and incest avoidance. He suggests that we deceive ourselves in order to better deceive others and speculates that humans in small groups, particularly in the presence of dominant figures, communicate covertly, hiding the content of these communications even from our conscious selves. Why We Lie Robert Burton A neurologist at UCSF, Burton describes how a sense of certainty is merely a sensation, induceable via electrodes and poorly correlated to reality. On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not Despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of "knowing what we know" arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason. --Robert Burton Robert Cialdini Cialdini applies his psychology work to understanding business settings, from advertising and marketing to media campaigns and strategic communication ... and along the way, helps me to armor myself against the array of manipulative tactics employed in these efforts. Influence: Science and Practice Neal Roese Roese starts from social psychology to illustrate how the brain's skill at regret can lead to improvement or to paralysis -- and in any case, to distorting our perception of reality. When reality contradicts our perception, human brains will first push to change the situation -- practice harder in order to win the game next time, to take one example. But if that fails, brains employ their 'psychological immune system' to change their perception, to decide, or example, that winning this game is no longer important. This 'immune system' delivers tangible benefits, boosting our self-perception; brains which malfunction in this regard become depressed. If Only: How to Turn Regret into Opportunity Causation is the Excalibur sword of science ... any person armed with an understanding of causation has the power to change, alter, repair, and control. Causal knowledge is the essential tool for changing the world for the better. -- Neal Roese Andrew Newberg and Mark Waldman Newberg and Waldman describe how groups traverse a path toward teaching themselves how to hate others, extracted here from their book Why We Believe What We Believe. Sharon Weinberger Weinberger focuses on the intersection between science and war and how participants in this space lose themselves in self-deception, illustrating how human thinking derails. Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon's Scientific Underworld Steven Pinker Faculty in the psychology department at Harvard, Pinker looks at the intersection between evolution, language, and the structure of the brain. How The Mind Works Faith These authors explicate the cost, and suffering, humans inflict on themselves and others through their weakness for faith, meaning belief without evidence. Daniel Dennett A professor of philosophy at Tufts University, Dennett's research interests include cognitive studies. He describes why we humans tend to think 'magically' so much of the time and offers a programme for quantifying the damage and suffering that such thinking incurs upon us. Breaking the Spell: Religion as Natural Phenomena Sam Harris A neuroscientist, Harris explores the links between our skill in faith and our skill at violence, arguing for shifting our mind-set from relying on authority to tell us what is right and wrong to determining this for ourselves, based on a willingness to consider evidence. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason Letter to a Christian Nation Richard Dawkins An evolutionary biologist, Dawkins translates science into lay terms. He suggests that memes, encapsulating ideas and other cultural phenomena, compete for survival in human minds in ways similar to how genes compete in human bodies, that faith is a highly successful meme which leads to a range of toxic behavior. The God Delusion A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love Cognition and Evoluation These authors combine anthropology, cognitive psychology, and evolutionary analysis to better understand the engineering trade-offs in the brain and its susceptibility to various errors. Pascal Boyer A cognitive psychologist and anthropologist at Washington University, Boyer looks at the structure and strategies of the human mind to better understand the strengths and limitations of how we think, for what seems obvious to us and what tends to escape our notice. In his model, much of our cognitive functioning occurs in the basement, such that the executive function has trouble even noticing the premises handed up from the diligent efforts of the subsystems operating beneath it. The result describes how religion, along with many other oddities of human thought, arises inevitabily from the techniques which the brain uses to produce thought. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought Scott Atran I don't have the background to grasp many of Atran's points, but I list his work here because he has pushed my understanding of how the flaws in the brain's design interlock with the requirements of social living to create our predilection for supernatural thinking. In Gods We Trust: The Evoluationary Landscape of Religion This book began with a rough-and-ready characterization of religion as a community's costly and hard-to-fake commitment to a counterintuitive world of supernatural causes and beings. The criterion of cost commitment appears to rule out purely cognitive theories of religion as sufficient. Such theores are motiveless. In principle, they can't distinguish cartoon fantasy from religious belief. The criterion of belief in the supernatural rules out commitment theories of religion as sufficient. Such theories are mindblind, in that they ignore the cognitive structures of the mind and its causal role. In principle, such theores can't distinguish strong secular ideologies form reglious belief. All human socities pay a price for religion's material, emotional, and cognitive commitments to unintuitive, factually impossible worlds. From an evoluationary standpoint, it's odd that natural selection wouldn't have forestalled the emergence of such an expensive ensemble of brain and body behaviors ... Such explanations of religion are not wrong; however, none predicts the cognitive peculiarities of religion that this book attempts to account for. These include the predominance of agent concepts in religion, the cultural universality of supernatural agent concepts; why some supernatural agent concepts are more easily conceived, remembered, and transmitted than others; how it's possible to validate the truth about supernatural agent concepts when they can't be factually confirmed or logically scrutinized; and how it's possible to block people from simply denying and defecting from religion's moral authority or to prevent them from merely feigning acceptance through deception.