I’m a scientist who studies the evolutionary tussle between cooperation and conflict that makes sex so infernally complicated. I started out by studying small animals, but the last decade or so have seen an increasing focus on humans. At the same time I’ve been intent on sharing what I learn with curious audiences on television, radio, and in print. I lead a program at my university that introduced me to some amazing technology researchers, from engineers in AI and robotics to lawyers who work on privacy. That’s when I realized the value of evolutionary knowledge in understating the fast-paced technological revolution we are currently living through.
I wrote
Artificial Intimacy: Virtual Friends, Digital Lovers, and Algorithmic Matchmakers
Status is suddenly the hot topic in social psychology and the evolutionary study of human behaviour. Will Storr's new book both capitalizes on this trend and gives it new momentum. He places the drive for status at the centre of human social behaviour and shows how that drive has shaped all of human creativity, achievement, and violence.
As a researcher on evolution and behaviour, familiar with the excellent work on status, I found in this book a fresh and dynamic new package. Reading Storr’s book revealed to me where the evolutionary researchers have been constrained by their own ways of thinking. Likewise, other fields’ obsessions with race, sex, gender, power, and identity – while important – are really a case of staring at the trees without acknowledging the all-encompassing forest.
This is my new favourite popular book on human behaviour, and it is already reshaping my own research program.
'Will Storr is one of our best journalists of ideas ... The Status Game might be his best yet' James Marriott, Books of the Year, The Times
What drives our political and moral beliefs? What makes us like some things and dislike others? What shapes how we behave, and misbehave, in groups? What makes you, you?
For centuries, philosophers and scholars have described human behaviour in terms of sex, power and money. In The Status Game, bestselling author Will Storr radically turns this thinking on its head by arguing that it is our irrepressible craving for status that ultimately defines…
This begins as an exceptional introduction to genetics and the very latest technological and statistical methods. What sets this book apart, however, is the understanding of what genetics and inheritance mean, which took my breath away.
For more than a century, the crusty old nature-nurture false dichotomy has dominated human understanding of inheritance and - especially - the genetics of behavior. Despite many valiant attempts, genetics has seldom managed to escape the legacy of eugenics and the towering figures of Galton, Pearson and Fisher. Harden provides a refreshing, coherent, powerful case that liberates genetic knowledge from eugenics, and places a modern understanding of genetics and what she calls ‘genetic luck’ at the centre of any program to improve society and achieve equality.
Both geneticists and those who think that only environmental (nurture-based) or technological solutions can improve societies have a lot to learn from this book. Hopefully, it will finally break the wall between biological and social understandings of human behaviour, achievement, and potential.
A provocative and timely case for how the science of genetics can help create a more just and equal society
In recent years, scientists like Kathryn Paige Harden have shown that DNA makes us different, in our personalities and in our health-and in ways that matter for educational and economic success in our current society.
In The Genetic Lottery, Harden introduces readers to the latest genetic science, dismantling dangerous ideas about racial superiority and challenging us to grapple with what equality really means in a world where people are born different. Weaving together personal stories with scientific evidence, Harden shows…
Kate Devlin is an expert in both the robotic/computer and social dimensions of human-technology interaction. This is a witty, insightful, and very humane tour of the fast-moving world of sex technology. Provides a clear view of the potential downsides, likely upsides, and the importance of not being constrained by the imaginations of a small and homogeneous subset of developers and technologists. This is the sex robot book, but it is about much more than robots.
'Illuminating, witty and written with a wide open mind' Sunday Times
The idea of the seductive sex robot is the stuff of myth, legend and science fiction. From the myth of Laodamia in Ancient Greece to twenty-first century shows such as Westworld, robots in human form have captured our imagination, our hopes and our fears. But beyond the fantasies there are real and fundamental questions about our relationship with technology as it moves into the realm of robotics.
Turned On explores how the emerging and future development of sexual companion robots might affect us and the society in which we…
I wanted to dislike this book – a historian writing about human pre-history and evolution? And selling millions of copies? Scandalous! But when I got over myself, downloaded the audiobook, and set off on a long run, I was as enthralled as so many other readers. This very long audiobook motivated me to run and really got my training miles going in the right direction.
In areas I know a lot about, I found myself irritated by the quick and glossy treatment. But then I appreciated that in areas I knew less about the level of detail was just enough to keep me interested and learning without getting sidetracked. If you’re going to read one big “how did we get here” book, then Sapiens might well be the one to go for.
Harari’s second bestseller, Homo Deus, is actually a better fit for the topic of this list, as it is about the future and technology. But I found that despite so many fascinating nuggets it never delivered on the promised grand synthesis of what will happen when biotechnology and AI really get going on changing humanity. My fifth pick, below, does a much better job on that front…
100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations and human rights; to trust money, books and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come?
In Sapiens, Dr Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the…
This one is brand new! My publisher also published Elise Bohan’s debut, so I got to read it ahead of publication. I was blown away. Future Superhuman is an intelligent, funny, and engaging take on technology, and the likely transhuman future in which humans are enhanced by tech. This is an area full of speculation, and no small amount of made-up nonsense, but Future Superhuman is anchored in exceptional research from a dozen or more fields, setting it apart. Elise is an author to watch. Not only does she have an endless supply of smart things to say, but her writing is funny, her expression original, and her style appealing to a very wide audience. Reading this book reminded me how much fun good non-fiction can be.
In breathtakingly original prose, Elise Bohan argues that we're hurtling towards a superhuman future - or, if we blunder, extinction. The only way out of our existential crises, from global warming to the risks posed by nuclear weapons, novel and bioengineered pathogens and unaligned AI, is up. We'll need more technology to safeguard our future - and we're going to invent (and perhaps even merge with) some of that technology.
What does that mean for our 20th century life-scripts? Are the robots coming for our jobs? How will human relationships change when AI knows us inside out?…
In Artificial Intimacy, evolutionary biologist Rob Brooks takes us from the origins of human behaviour to the latest in artificially intelligent technologies, providing a fresh and original view of the near future of human relationships.
Sex robots, social media, dating apps, and AI ‘friends’ are finding their way into our lives. Apps can sense when users are falling in love, when they are fighting, and when they are likely to break up. These machines, the ‘artificial intimacies,’ already learn how to exploit human social needs. And they are getting better and faster at what they do. This book isn’t just about the technology. It’s ultimately concerned with how humanity’s future will unfold as our ancient, evolved minds and old-fashioned cultures collide with twenty-first-century technology?
I am a Harvard- and MIT-trained physician-scientist, and I am drawn to research problems that bridge the basic and the practical – how a better understanding of cells and tissues can inform new therapies for cancer and other diseases. As children, we are all scientists – mini-hypothesis generators trying to make sense of the world. I suppose I never outgrew that curiosity. My list of best science books credits writers who bring to life the excitement that comes from looking at the natural world in a new way, a spirit that I try to emulate in my own writing. I hope you enjoy these books as much as I have!
Everybody knows that all animals—bats, bears, sharks, ponies, and people—start out as a single cell: the fertilized egg. But how does something no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence give rise to the remarkable complexity of each of these creatures?
FROM ONE CELL is a dive inside the cell and its evolutionary prerogatives to explain how these "endless forms most beautiful," as Charles Darwin called them, come about. Along the way, we learn about the scientific process, filled as it is with serendipity, as the story is told through the eyes of the scientists who informed…
From One Cell: A Journey into Life's Origins and the Future of Medicine
Every animal on Earth begins life as a single cell. From this humble origin, the nascent creature embarks on a risky journey fraught with opportunities for disaster-yet with astounding regularity, it reaches its destination intact. From One Cell illuminates this epic transformation-still one of nature's most mysterious feats-to show where we all come from and where we're going.
Through the eyes of the scientists unraveling the secrets of development, we see how all the information needed to build a human fits into a fertilised egg, and how the trillions of cells that emerge know what to become and where to…
