I am a scientist and inventor, who has always been drawn to grand, overarching narratives, and unifying ideas. I have degrees in Mathematics and Architecture, a PhD in Biophysics, and spent 11 years studying fungal networks at the University of Oxford. I am currently working with the award-winning architect Ben Allen, to commercialize a patent for making POMB (poly-organic mycelium blend): a light-transmitting, thermally insulating, carbon-negative building material.
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.
'Wonderful ... illuminating and fun to read' - Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow
'"Pearl's accomplishments over the last 30 years have provided the theoretical basis for progress in artificial intelligence and have redefined the term "thinking machine"' - Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist, Google, Inc.
The influential book in how causality revolutionized science and the world, by the pioneer of artificial intelligence
'Correlation does not imply causation.' This mantra was invoked by scientists for decades in order to avoid taking positions as to whether one thing caused another, such as smoking…
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.
'A landmark contribution to humanity's understanding of itself' The New York Times
Why can it sometimes feel as though half the population is living in a different moral universe? Why do ideas such as 'fairness' and 'freedom' mean such different things to different people? Why is it so hard to see things from another viewpoint? Why do we come to blows over politics and religion?
Jonathan Haidt reveals that we often find it hard to get along because our minds are hardwired to be moralistic, judgemental and self-righteous. He explores how morality evolved to enable us to form communities, and…
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.
A specialist on social insects writes about the origins and implications of our own vast social organisation, and the ways in which our ethnic and national distinctions mirror those of other animals.
In this paradigm-shattering book, biologist Mark W. Moffett draws on findings in psychology, sociology and anthropology to explain the social adaptations that bind societies. He explores how the tension between identity and anonymity defines how societies develop, function, and fail. In the vein of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Sapiens, The Human Swarm reveals how mankind created sprawling civilizations of unrivalled complexity - and what it will take…
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.
A provocative rethinking of how humans and fire have evolved together over time-and our responsibility to reorient this relationship before it's too late.
The Pyrocene tells the story of what happened when a fire-wielding species, humanity, met an especially fire-receptive time in Earth's history. Since terrestrial life first appeared, flames have flourished. Over the past two million years, however, one genus gained the ability to manipulate fire, swiftly remaking both itself and eventually the world. We developed small guts and big heads by cooking food; we climbed the food chain by cooking landscapes; and now we have become a geologic…
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.
A “smart and surprising” (Booklist) “expansive history” (Publishers Weekly) detailing the role that wood and trees have played in our global ecosystem—including human evolution and the rise and fall of empires—in the bestselling tradition of Yuval Harari’s Sapiens and Mark Kurlansky’s Salt.
As the dominant species on Earth, humans have made astonishing progress since our ancestors came down from the trees. But how did the descendants of small primates manage to walk upright, become top predators, and populate the world? How were humans able to develop civilizations and produce a globalized economy? Now, in The Age of Wood, Roland Ennos…
A Brief History of Mathematical Thought, by Luke Heaton, is concerned with the big transitions in mathematical thinking, and the connection between developments in mathematics and the broader reality of human experience, from pre-historic rituals to the age of computation.
The great edifice of mathematical theorems has a crystalline perfection, and it can seem far removed from the messy and contingent realities of our daily lives. Nevertheless, mathematics is a product of human culture, which has co-evolved with our attempts to comprehend the world. Rather than picturing mathematics as the study of pre-existing ‘abstract’ objects, we can describe it as a poetry of patterns, in which our language brings about the truth that it proclaims: a world of inter-related symbols, that we can put to work.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
