The best books on grand, unifying ideas about how the world works

When our descendants look back and ask, “Which scientist’s work changed the way we think, around the year 2000?”, I am prepared to bet that Judea Pearl will be top of the list. Before Pearl, statisticians refused to allow any model of the world into their analysis, thinking it wise to say “correlation does not imply causation,” while remaining scrupulously blind to the reasonableness of some models over others. But the fact that cockerels crow at dawn really is evidence that sunrise causes crowing, and does not constitute any kind of evidence that crowing causes sunrise.

By including such background knowledge in a systematic, graph based manner, Pearl has developed an operational definition of “causation”. This helps to clarify what big data can and cannot deliver, and provides a methodology for establishing the strength of causal connections where we cannot conduct blind trials (like with smoking, or exercise). A very readable, popular science guide to an epoch-defining set of insights.

It is hard to look at human history without concluding that people will always angrily shout, “How dare they consider themselves the good guys!” Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes with admirable clarity about the empirical evidence for similarity and difference between the moral judgments of various groups, and if you are interested in understanding why certain comments or behaviors are so thoroughly enraging, I highly recommend this book. In particular, it does a great job of showing why it is a terrible idea to assume that something is only “truly immoral” if “actually does harm”: a philosophical stance that totally ignores the fact that human judgment is and always will be deeply symbolic. 

Moffett is a leading specialist on social insects, and the core of his penetrating insight is that we ought to clearly distinguish between collective behavior and social behavior. Our ability to see that one stranger belongs to our society, while another stranger does not, is utterly crucial, and Moffett speaks with authority when he claims that humans are the only animals where different societies merge over time. In particular, he correctly notes that time and time again there has been a fusion between human societies under the heel of a conquering force. By carefully considering our bee-like nature, as well as our chimp-like nature, The Human Swarm reveals how mankind has created sprawling civilizations of unrivalled complexity and provides some valuable insights into what it will take to sustain them.

Surprisingly enough, our planet has been home to horse-shoe crabs for longer than it has had fire. After all, you cannot have fire without atmospheric oxygen (a product of photosynthesis), and until the evolution of land plants, there was no fuel for lightning sparks to ignite. As Stephen J. Pyne eloquently describes, humanity’s exceptional relationship to fire has literally shaped our world, from the development of small guts and big heads through cooking food, to climbing the food chain by cooking landscapes, to harnessing the world-changing fire-power of fossil fuels. This insightful overview of human history puts forward the compelling idea that human actions (including prehistoric actions) have moved our planet from an ice age to a fire age.

It is easy to imagine that in the Stone Age, stone tools were the critical thing, that in the Bronze Age, bronze tools were the critical thing, and so on. The truth is that right up until very recent times, most of our technology was made from wood. Even before modern humans evolved, we were deeply shaped by the physical realities of wood, and the challenges and opportunities it provides. Large animals that live in trees need big brains and spatial awareness to avoid falling to their death, and the habitations of early humans were surely closely related to the nests made by non-human primates. Stone tools enabled improvements in wood handling and wood tools, bronze-enabled wooden wheels, and many of the long-term trends in human history make a lot more sense from a wood-centric perspective.

In short, this charming and unique history of humanity casts a familiar and often overlooked material in a deeply revealing new light.