Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind

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You'll learn the six universal principles, how to use them to become a skilled persuader—and how to defend yourself against them. The right half of the brain—so, left arm choosing from pictures in the left field—chose a shovel, which makes sense to go with the snow scene. These intuitions feel like self-evident truths, making us righteously certain that those who see things differently are wrong. If you give a chimp a rock to throw, he’s going to miss the target most of the time, he’s terrible at it.

But rather than arguing that we are innately altruistic, he makes a more subtle claim—that we are fundamentally groupish. You can argue about whether somebody is abused or whether somebody is angry, or whether somebody is lying to you.In his sensational international bestseller, the preeminent scientist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins delivers a hard-hitting, impassioned, but humorous, rebuttal of religious belief.

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. For example, looking at mating strategies, they might interview 1,000 men and show them pairs of pictures and say: ‘which of these images do you prefer? This edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since The Language Instinct was first published. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives. One of the reasons for reading The God Delusion is that it will disabuse you of the idea – which is a common stereotype of atheists – that they are utterly humourless.So it’s very important that you don’t do things which cause other people to punish you, and that you choose the right side to be on when you’re ganging up with your rocks to punish someone else. The Illusion of Conscious Will is ostensibly a social psychology book, as opposed to an evolutionary psychology book. 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 moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time from there, in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its evolutionary legacy. I think science is the better way of coming to truth, but it always leaves you frustrated at the end. A controversial, idea-driven book that challenges everything you (think you) know about sex, monogamy, marriage, and family.