Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a scientist at the University of Cambridge who’s worked on environmental research topics such as jet streams and the Antarctic ozone hole. I’ve also worked on solar physics and musical acoustics. And other branches of science have always interested me. Toward the end of my career, I became fascinated by cutting-edge issues in biological evolution and natural selection. Evolution is far richer and more complex than you’d think from its popular description in terms of ‘selfish genes’. The complexities are central to understanding deep connections between the sciences, the arts, and human nature in general, and the profound differences between human intelligence and artificial intelligence.


I wrote

Science, Music, and Mathematics: The Deepest Connections

By Michael Edgeworth McIntyre,

Book cover of Science, Music, and Mathematics: The Deepest Connections

What is my book about?

It’s about connections that are ‘deep’ in the sense of being deep in our nature, and evolutionarily ancient. Despite that,…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of The Runaway Brain: The Evolution of Human Uniqueness

Michael Edgeworth McIntyre Why did I love this book?

I was blown away by the vistas it opened across classic work on genetics and palaeoanthropology, and the implications for understanding how our ancestors evolved.

It also showed how the politics of so-called ‘sociobiology’ impeded that understanding, through acrimonious disputes that later turned out to be pointless. Those disputes were very much examples of what I call ‘dichotomization’, the unconscious assumption that an issue is binary, an either-or question, when in reality it is far more complex with many different aspects.

By Christopher Wills,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Runaway Brain as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

You might not suspect it, but we are currently living through a revolution in scientific knowledge. What we know about the human brain's workings and about the earliest history of our distant humanoid ancestors changes almost weekly. A new view of humanity is being forged - new theories appear all the time, splinter, are revised and adandoned. Scientists from different fields of research are finally co-operating and sharing their insights in order to map out a new view of the human brain. Paleaoanthropologists digging in Kenya, neuropyschologists building organic robots in their labs and geneticists unearthing the secret in all…


Book cover of The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World

Michael Edgeworth McIntyre Why did I love this book?

It achieves an important and unusual cross-fertilization between two very different kinds of expertise. Both authors are highly innovative, and creative, thinkers, Cohen in biology and Stewart in mathematics.

Cohen is a biologist fascinated by the complexity observed in the living world, and Stewart is an expert on the mathematics of chaos and complexity. The result is a profound and multifaceted view of many natural phenomena, and of evolution in particular. It becomes very clear how selfish-gene theory fails to take account of important evolutionary mechanisms.

By Jack Cohen, Ian Stewart,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Collapse of Chaos as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Moving on from his books on chaos ("Does God Play Dice?") and symmetry ("Fearful Symmetry"), the author of this book deals with the wider field of complexity theory. The book tackles the question of how complexity arises in nature, of how life overcomes chaos and entropy to create developing order. Co-written with biologist Jack Cohen, the book will range across the central areas of modern science, from quantum mechanics and cosmology to evolution and intelligence, looking at the central questions of order, chaos, reductionism and complexity.


Book cover of The Music of Life: Biology Beyond Genes

Michael Edgeworth McIntyre Why did I love this book?

This short and lucid book by an eminent molecular biologist shows how our DNA and its genes do not act as a blueprint that dictates everything, as assumed by selfish-gene theory.

Rather, there’s a fascinating ‘systems biology’ of the DNA and its surrounding biomolecular ‘circuits’, which act like electronic circuits in many ways. Different parts influence each other. So there are influences on the DNA as well as from the DNA. Noble likens the DNA to a musical recording, which can influence our mood but not dictate it.

By Denis Noble,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Music of Life as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

What is Life? Decades of research have resulted in the full mapping of the human genome - three billion pairs of code whose functions are only now being understood. The gene's eye view of life, advocated by evolutionary biology, sees living bodies as mere vehicles for the replication of the genetic codes.

But for a physiologist, working with the living organism, the view is a very different one. Denis Noble is a world renowned physiologist, and sets out an alternative view to the question - one that becomes deeply significant in terms of the living, breathing organism. The genome is…


Book cover of The Arrival of the Fittest: Solving Evolution's Greatest Puzzle

Michael Edgeworth McIntyre Why did I love this book?

It’s a powerful update on Noble’s book, zooming in on the workings of the biomolecular circuits surrounding the DNA.

Some of the circuits are studied in great detail, looking closely at how they work, and at how they evolve in response to mutations in the DNA. A disadvantageous mutation is eliminated by natural selection. But as well as advantageous mutations it turns out that ‘neutral’ mutations, conferring no immediate advantage, are important and indeed crucial. That resolved one of the dichotomized disputes noted in Wills’ book.

By Andreas Wagner,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Arrival of the Fittest as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The power of Darwin's theory of natural selection is beyond doubt, it explains how useful adaptations are preserved over generations. But evolution's biggest mystery eluded Darwin: how those adaptations arise in the first place. Can random mutations over a 3.8 billion years be solely responsible for wings, eyeballs, knees, photosynthesis, and the rest of nature's creative marvels? And by calling these mutations 'random', are we not just admitting our own ignorance? What if we could now uncover the wellspring of all biological innovation?

Renowned evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner presents the missing piece in Darwin's theory. Using cutting-edge experimental and computational…


Book cover of The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

Michael Edgeworth McIntyre Why did I love this book?

An early book, it’s one of Pinker’s best. Though Pinker later argued for selfish-gene theory, here he avoids the issue, focusing instead on showing that our language ability is instinctive, for which there is powerful evidence.

Genetic memory is crucial. All that I’ve added in my own book is to emphasize that genetic memory is less like a blueprint and more like a set of self-assembling building blocks, responsive to environmental influences, and that for language those building blocks must have come from a multi-timescale process – genome–culture co-evolution – over millions of years. All this is invisible to selfish-gene theory.

By Steven Pinker,

Why should I read it?

6 authors picked The Language Instinct as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'Dazzling... Pinker's big idea is that language is an instinct...as innate to us as flying is to geese... Words can hardly do justice to the superlative range and liveliness of Pinker's investigations'
- Independent

'A marvellously readable book... illuminates every facet of human language: its biological origin, its uniqueness to humanity, it acquisition by children, its grammatical structure, the production and perception of speech, the pathology of language disorders and the unstoppable evolution of languages and dialects' - Nature


Explore my book 😀

Science, Music, and Mathematics: The Deepest Connections

By Michael Edgeworth McIntyre,

Book cover of Science, Music, and Mathematics: The Deepest Connections

What is my book about?

It’s about connections that are ‘deep’ in the sense of being deep in our nature, and evolutionarily ancient. Despite that, they’re understandable in simpler ways than you might think. And to see how evolution and natural selection gave rise to them it’s essential to see past the limitations of selfish-gene theory, including its tendency to think that competition between individuals, ‘winner versus loser’, is all that matters. The deep connections include connections between our music instinct and our unconscious mathematics. Among the practical spinoffs are ways to encourage diversity of thought in problem-solving, to improve our communication skills, and to better understand what science can and can’t tell us about the climate crisis.

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Uniting the States of America: A Self-Care Plan for a Wounded Nation

By Lyle Greenfield,

Book cover of Uniting the States of America: A Self-Care Plan for a Wounded Nation

Lyle Greenfield Author Of Uniting the States of America: A Self-Care Plan for a Wounded Nation

New book alert!

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve always been fascinated by group dynamics, large and small. Why things functioned well, why they didn’t. It’s possible my ability to empathize and use humor as a consensus-builder is the reason I was elected president of a homeowners association, a music production association, and even an agricultural group. Books were not particularly involved in this fascination! But in recent years, experiencing the breakdown of civility and trust in our political and cultural discourse, I’ve taken a more analytical view of the dynamics. These books, in their very different ways, have taught me lessons about life, understanding those with different beliefs, and finding ways to connect and move forward. 

Lyle's book list on restoring your belief in human possibility

What is my book about?

We’ve all experienced the overwhelming level of political and social divisiveness in our country. This invisible “virus” of negativity is, in part, the result of the name-calling and heated rhetoric that has become commonplace among commentators and elected leaders alike. 

My book provides a clear perspective on the historical and modern-day causes of our nation's divisive state. It then proposes easy-to-understand solutions—an action plan for our elected leaders and citizens as well. Rather than a scholarly treatment of a complex topic, the book challenges us to take the obvious steps required of those living in a free democracy. And it…

Uniting the States of America: A Self-Care Plan for a Wounded Nation

By Lyle Greenfield,

What is this book about?

Lyle Greenfield's "Uniting the States of America―A Self-Care Plan for a Wounded Nation" is a work of nonfiction and opinion. Incorporating the lessons of history and the ideas and wisdom of many, it is intended as both an educational resource and a call-to-action for citizens concerned about the politically and culturally divided state of our Union. A situation that has raised alarm for the very future of our democracy.

First, the book clearly identifies the causes of what has become a national crisis of belief in and love for our country. How the divisiveness and hostility rampant in our political…


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