- Bregman, Rutger. 2020. Humankind: A Hopeful History. Little, Brown. –
Notes forthcoming
Coyne, Jerry A.. 2009. Why Evolution is True. Viking. *****
Coyne outlines the multivarious lines of evidence for the fact of evolution, in the context of the continual social battles and resistance to the idea, especially in the US. He discusses the modern theory of evolution and its six components, including the fact of biological evolution (through all the evidence), the idea of natural selection, and so on, the kinds of predictions it can make as a theory, and how growing evidence over 150 years has repeatedly confirmed those predictions. The lines evidence boil down to 1) the evidence of the fossil record; 2) the evidence of vestiges and atavisms in current biological features that were once useful but are now useless or even harmful; 3) how the distribution of species around the world, on different islands and continents, reflects geological changes over millions of years; 4) how the appearance of “design” is explained by natural selection, an idea that still shocks people; 5) how sex drives evolution, the differing mating strategies of the two sexes prioritizing different kinds of health; 6) how species — populations that don’t interbreed with other groups — arise via reproductive barriers, e.g. separated by mountain ranges, continental drift, etc.; analogous to how languages evolve; and 7) How evidence for human evolution, once only a speculation by Darwin, has been elaborated and compounded. And finally he addresses how evolution entails notions of purpose, morality, and meaning, thus alarming conservatives; but genes aren’t destiny, and we make our own purposes through work, family, avocation, contemplating the universe. (post)
Dawkins, Richard. 2022. Flights of Fancy: Defying Gravity by Design & Evolution. Head of Zeus. ***
Rather lightweight, for Dawkins, this is a natural history aimed at younger readers, and profusely illustrated, about the ways both nature and humans have made things that fly. Still, Dawkins take opportunities to discuss evolution and natural selection, with a running theme of how things can look intentionally designed but have actually evolved. In one chapter he focuses on the creationist canard “what is the use of half a wing?” The final chapter invokes what he calls “the outward urge,” reasons why humanity might want to, in effect, spread its seeds into outer space, the way dandelions do theirs on the wind. Dawkins read science fiction as a young man and mentions examples in his books, though none since the 1950s. (post)
Dawkins, Richard. 2009. The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. Free Press. ****
Another excellent book that, like Coyne’s, spells out in great detail the evidence for the fact of evolution. Some points overlap Coyne’s; others provide distinct perspectives. Dawkins in particular offers evidence to challenges the misconceptions of creationists. He begins by emphasizing what the words “theory” and “fact” mean in scientific contexts. Then evolution: why the idea took so long to occur, though the idea of “artificial selection” e.g. breeding of dogs was well-known for centuries; how we date the past; how evolution can occur quickly (e.g. elephants’ tusks); how the idea of “missing links” is a misconception; how a human can arise from a single cell not in a billion years but in nine months; how DNA is not a “blueprint” but rather a set of instructions, like origami; how geographical barriers create new species and explain the distribution of different species around the globe; how our bodies show evidence of vestigal and “unintelligently” designed features; how the ecosystem is terribly designed considered as a whole, and how would creationists explain that?; and finally how Darwin’s worldview, our four kinds of memory, the 2nd law of thermodynamics, and our very existence validates the apparent rarity of life in the cosmos. With an appendix examining acceptance of evolution in various countries — highest in northern Europe, dismal in the US. (post)
Dawkins, Richard. 1986. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design. Norton. *** 1/2
The meaning of our own existence has been solved. The apparent problem of complexity is explained by slow, gradual, cumulative natural selection. Our “design” is an illusion; those who reject that are arguing from “personal incredulity,” or from ignorance, or due to the misfiring of our intuitions over large timescales. The eye is not like a watch (or a 747) on the beach; the eye can plausibly have evolved over 10,000 or more steps, each of some increasing benefit. DNA is instructions (not a blueprint) with an extremely low error rate. Other topics: how genes interact with their environments; arms races; the debate between “gradualists” and those who prefer “punctuated equilibria”; how evolutionary relationships exhibit a cladistic taxonomy–once branches split, they never merge again. And alternate explanations to evolution (Lamarckism; creationism) cannot explain life. (post)
Dawkins, Richard. 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford. ****
Dawkins’ first book and a classic nonfiction book about how natural selection is best understood at the level of the gene, with discussion of replicators and how bodies are “survival machines.” He challenges notions of group selection as expressed in that era, contrasts the survival strategies of plants and animals, describes how kin selection explains aggression, altruism, competition between siblings, and differing strategies of fathers and mothers. How “evolutionary stable strategies” develop to understand how proportions of populations evolve into stability. Finally this book introduces the now common idea of the “meme,” a replicator that’s a unit of culture, that spreads through brains because it serves a cultural function or provides psychological appeal (e.g. the idea of god; patriotism). Genes can disperse in a few generations, while memes, a person’s contribution to culture, can last millennia. (A follow-up post discusses Wilson and group selection.) (post)
Hidalgo, Cesar. 2015. Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies. Basic Books. ***
This book ties thematically with both Harari’s later NEXUS, in its concept of what information is, and Greene’s UNTIL THE END OF TIME, with the idea that information can grow just as order can despite the second law of thermodynamics, because both are temporary in the long run. The universe is made of energy, matter, and information, and the last grows by virtue of three facets of the universe: out-of-equilibrium systems (he recalls ideas from Ilya Prigogine; the obvious example is the Earth and Sun, which will remain out of equilibrium for billions of years, allowing life to evolve in Earth), the accumulation of information in solids (crystals; DNA), and the ability of matter to compute (how we can perform actions without “knowing” how to do them, an ability he calls “knowhow.”) Technically, information is measured by the number of bits needed to communicate an arrangement, so that, ironically, random sets of bits contain more information than well-ordered one. That’s a quarter of the book; the remainder explores ideas about how the growth of information drives economies, about social interactions and social networks, how large networks are a reflection of a society’s level of trust. (post)
Kolbert, Elizabeth. 2021. Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future. Crown. ***
A sequel of sorts to the author’s The Sixth Extinction, this is also about ecologies and species that have been affected by human activity, and the messes that often resulted. Chapters consist of the author visiting remote places and interviewing key people. The prime example is what happened when the Chicago River was reversed in 1887, to send waste water west to the Mississippi River rather than into Lake Michigan; other examples include the disappearing peninsulas of Louisiana, volcanoes, Greenland ice. The conclusion is that humans shouldn’t stop meddling in nature, but to be smarter about it. And not to be afraid of GMOs: “The strongest argument for gene editing cane toads, house mice, and ship rats is also the simplest: what’s the alternative? Rejecting such technologies as unnatural isn’t going to bring nature back. The choice is not between what was and what is, but between what is and what will be, which, often enough, is nothing.” (post)
Kolbert, Elizabeth. 2014. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. Henry Holt. ****
Evidence that the expansion of the human race across the planet, over the past couple hundred thousand years, but especially over the past century (with the advent of air travel), is causing a world-wide mass extinction comparable to the five previous such extinctions evident in the fossil record. Each chapter focuses on a particular species, with vivid narratives about the American mastodon (and the very idea of extinction), historical debates about catastrophes vs uniform change over Earth’s history, and climate change and the deaths of coral reefs. As humanity spread across the globe following the last ice age, 10,000 years ago, it killed off the large mammals in Australia and the Americas. Now, with air travel, we’re bringing previously isolated species into contact daily, with sometimes disastrous results. We’re now living not in the Holocene, as traditional geological time-scales name our time, but in the Anthropocene — the era of humanity’s impact on the geological history of Earth. (post)
- Lynch, Aaron. 1996. Thought Contagion. Basic. –
Notes forthcoming
Pinker, Steven. 2002. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Viking. *****
Another big Pinker book summarizing and extending themes considered in his own earlier books and in books by Minsky, Wilson, Sagan/Druyan, Haidt, and Greene. The book actually addresses not one but three misapprehensions about the human mind: that it’s a “blank slate,” that there is such a thing as a “noble savage,” and that there is a “ghost in the machine,” i.e. a noncorporeal force, like a homunculus or a soul, riding in our brain and making our decisions for us. The first notion, with its implication that human nature is a product of education and environment, does not even bear close examination. Our instincts, and our ability to learn, indicate something already present in the mind (rather like firmware or the operating system in a computer) at birth. This understanding has replaced earlier ideas of associationalism and behaviorism of 20th century psychology, just as cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology have undermined notions of the savage and the ghost. By page 101 Pinker closes his case that the mind is not a blank slate; the remainder of the book explains why the idea is resisted (fears of inequality, nihilism), and explores aspects of human nature: how we perceive reality, how our intuitions go wrong, why we suffer, our moral sensibilities. With special attention to politics, violence, gender, children, and the arts. Running themes include how these ideas challenge both liberal and conservative presumptions, and how the expansion of experience and knowledge over human history necessarily requires a transition from a monocultural morality to a multicultural one. Another vast book by Pinker that provides insight to virtually everything. The link here is to the 10th post summarizing the book, with links to the earlier nine. (post)
Pinker, Steven. 1997. How the Mind Works. Norton. *****
Pinker’s second big book after THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994), this one covers many additional topics about the mind. The first part covers evolution and natural selection, and how the mind interprets and understands reality. The second half covers what’s come to be called evolutionary psychology, how interactions between people with minds provides insight into aspects of human cultures. (This part resembles Wilson’s earlier CONSILIENCE.) Key theme: “The mind is a system of organs of computation, designed by natural selection to solve the kinds of problems are ancestors faced in their foraging way of life, in particular, understanding and outmaneuvering objects, animals, plants, and other people.” The mind is what the brain does. Its complex design is genetic. Nature vs nurture is so simplistic as to be not even wrong. Behaviors we think evolutionarily maladaptive (like homosexuality or celibacy) don’t need to be “explained”; they are expressions of minds that formed in our ancestral environment; humans didn’t evolve to spread their genes, they evolved to enjoy behaviors that spread genes. Old notions of souls or force fields have given way to the Computational Theory of the Mind. Evidence for natural selection is overwhelming, despite people desperately wanting it to be wrong. Humans rule over the other animals due to our big brains. There are chapters about how vision works, human reasoning, emotions (common across all cultures), family values (the evolutionary logic of relationships between parents and children, brothers and sisters, men and women, etc.), and a final chapter about “The Meaning of Life,” covering the arts, humor, religion, free will, morality. Perhaps our evolved cognitive equipment, suitable for unconscious survival, is insufficient to understand deep issues. A book both vast and deep, like Wilson’s, it summarizes the modern scientific understandings of almost everything. (Post 1; Post 2; Post 3; Post 4; with a final Post 5 compiling several long quotes from the book.)
Sacks, Oliver. 1987. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: and Other Clinical Tales. Perennial. *** 1/2
First published in 1985, this is a collection of essays by a clinical neurologist describing the effects of various kinds of neurological disorders. The gist is that these disorders are associated with specific parts of the brain; recourse to demons or souls had been abandoned by the 1960s and ’70s. The famous title essay is about a musician who has trouble recognizing faces, who sometimes perceives faces that aren’t there, and who, searching for his hat as he prepares to leave, grasps his wife’s head instead. Sacks doesn’t always diagnose; often he speculates on how people live with such disorders, even whether they might not be disadvantages or disabilities. Other cases include a man who’s lost his memory of everything after 1945; a medical student who experiences enhanced senses of color and smell but only for three days; Hildegard, whose migraines she saw as visions from God; twins in a mental hospital who can name the day of the week for any date, but who can’t do simple arithmetic; and an autistic man with no interest in the abstract, only the concrete. (This last came before the current understanding of the “spectrum” of autism.) Sacks concludes that the brain is both a machine and a computer, while our mental processes also involve judging and feeling, without which we are computer-like. (post)
- Sagan, Carl, & Druyan, Anne. 1992. Shadows Of Forgotten Ancestors. Random. –
Notes forthcoming
Sagan, Carl. 1977. The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence. Random House. ***
Sagan, admittedly a little-off topic from his primary concerns, speculates on the evolution of the human brain — how evolution increased complexity, how the brain evolved layers (reptilian, limbic, neocortex), and how the development of early human skills (walking, tools) and of human society (ritualistic, resisting change), reflect the development and current state of the brain. The conclusion is that understanding the brain better will help us resolve certain ethical issues (the definition of death, abortion), and the future is about a partnership between human intelligence and machine intelligence. Secondarily, he speculates that extraterrestrial brains would develop similarly, and that contact with them would validate the idea that intelligence can survive the development of advanced technologies. But the biggest takeaway is Sagan’s “Cosmic Calendar,” his notion of reducing cosmic history to the scale of a single year, an idea vividly displayed in his 1980 TV series Cosmos. (post)
Shermer, Michael. 2006. Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design. Times Books. ***
Shermer addresses evidence for evolution and against intelligent design (ID) in the context of his having grown up as a creationist himself, before escaping his bubble: “The scales fell from my eyes! It turned out that the creationist literature I was reading presented a Darwinian cardboard cutout that a child could knock down.” Beyond the various lines of evidence for evolution, his key point is that all these lines of evidence converge to same idea. He confronts the creationists’ 10 best arguments for ID and rebuts them. More broadly, he examines the creationists’ motivations: they are explicitly religious, and creationists think than can prevail over science by winning court cases, not by doing legitimate science. Finally he offers reasons why conservative and Christians *should* accept evolution: it explains families and social harmony [the evolutionary psychology ideas of Wilson and others] and it justifies the free market. (post)
Wilson, Edward O.. 2019. Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies. Liveright. ** 1/2
Human evolution is all that’s needed to explain the human condition, individuals as well as societies. Societies form via the same principles of selection and survival that create individual human nature. The book extends the idea of “eusociality,” the dynamic between individual and group selection, that he addressed in The Societ Conquest of Earth, now with the claim that recent mathematical results have undermined earlier ideas of kin selection. The key to human intelligence has not been, as long thought, tool-use, but rather has been social bonding. (post)
Wilson, Edward O.. 2017. The Origins of Creativity. Liveright. ** 1/2
Wilson expands on themes of earlier books with ideas about creativity as the quest for originality, drawing from the “consilience” of the humanities and science, both grounded in human evolution. The synergy between those two will be a “Third Enlightenment,” if we avoid succumbing to the creation stories of organized religion. Curious asides: a short chapter about the song “Send in the Clowns”; another about archetypes and their appearance in popular stories and movies, many of them that he cites science fiction. (post)
Wilson, Edward O.. 2012. The Social Conquest of Earth. Norton/Liveright. ****
One of Wilson’s four best books, in my estimation, this summarizes areas of his thinking from across his career to explain where humans came from, what we are, and where we are going. These are ideas of human “eusociality” and “multilevel selection,” a combination of individual selection and group selection, represented by selfishness vs. altruism. Consequences include our preference for being part of groups, followed by how culture developed, then language, morality, religion, and the creative arts. Now, we are responsible for the planet and must find a new enlightenment; religion is part of the problem, not the solution. Replete with beautiful writing and arresting passages to quote. (long summary, with several quotes)
Wilson, Edward O.. 1978. On Human Nature. Harvard. *****
Wilson’s most famous book, controversial in its time for challenging conventional wisdom that the human mind was a “blank slate,” completely molded by environment, education, and society. (Or conversely, the religious view that humans are dark angels in need of redemption.) Rather, the human brain and mind are entirely biological in origin, and the result of evolution by natural selection, and can be understood especially in the context of other social species. Human behavior is genetically determined; evidence (examples) is decisive, including the famous 1945 list of characteristics that have been recorded in every known culture, far different that those on a similar list for, say, insect societies. The explanation of human social patterns by evolution is called sociobiology. The remainder of the book applies sociobiological interpretations to a variety of human behaviors. E.g. the incest taboo, and hypergamy (where females seek to marry men of equal or greater wealth). It begins with discussions of infant development and the development of the brain over millions of years. Then chapters on specific topics: aggression (yes, humans are innately aggressive, but we can recognize its rules are obsolete and try to overcome them); sex (humans are moderately polygynous; there are innate differences between the sexes; sexual bonds transcend reproductive activity; natural-law theories of Judaism and Christianity are wrong, e.g. concerning homosexuals, common in all cultures, and how kin-selection explains this); altruism (operating at different levels with different motivations, the ideas of individual and group selection, about the range of ethical behaviors); and religion (likely ineradicable–“most people would rather believe than know”, how there is a cultural Darwinism among religions, how religions coexist with cultures, how scientific materialism has defeated traditional religion, with new explanations for the origin of the universe all the way to the explanation of religion itself). Finally, Wilson returns to his two spiritual dilemmas: that humanity has no external purpose, that once we understand the origins of morality, what decisions do we make? With ideas about morality based on reason and evidence, and the synchronicity between disciplines. Many good quotes: Wilson was, and is, an elegant, provocative writer. (post)
