100 books like Cognitive Gadgets

By Cecilia Heyes,

Here are 100 books that Cognitive Gadgets fans have personally recommended if you like Cognitive Gadgets. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter

Michael Muthukrishna Author Of A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going

From my list on changing how you see the world.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a professor of economic psychology at the London School of Economics with affiliations in developmental economics and data science. Before that, I was at Harvard in Human Evolutionary Biology. During my PhD, I took graduate courses in psychology, economics, evolutionary biology, and statistics. I have undergraduate degrees in engineering and in psychology and took courses in everything from economics and biology to philosophy and political science. As a child, I witnessed the civil war in Sri Lanka; a violent coup in Papua New Guinea; the end of apartheid in South Africa, living in neighboring Botswana; and London’s 7/7 bomb attacks. I’ve also lived in Australia, Canada, USA, and UK.

Michael's book list on changing how you see the world

Michael Muthukrishna Why did Michael love this book?

Henrich is a frequent collaborator and was my PhD advisor, so I’m somewhat biased, but in my opinion, this remains the best book showcasing the evidence for cultural evolution and dual inheritance theory.

I use it as a second textbook for my undergraduates learning about the foundations of psychological science. 

By Joseph Henrich,

Why should I read it?

8 authors picked The Secret of Our Success as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Humans are a puzzling species. On the one hand, we struggle to survive on our own in the wild, often failing to overcome even basic challenges, like obtaining food, building shelters, or avoiding predators. On the other hand, human groups have produced ingenious technologies, sophisticated languages, and complex institutions that have permitted us to successfully expand into a vast range of diverse environments. What has enabled us to dominate the globe, more than any other species, while remaining virtually helpless as lone individuals? This book shows that the secret of our success lies not in our innate intelligence, but in…


Book cover of On the Origin of Tepees: The Evolution of Ideas (and Ourselves)

Alex Mesoudi Author Of Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences

From my list on cultural evolution.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am Professor of Cultural Evolution at the University of Exeter, UK. In my research I use lab experiments and theoretical models to understand how human culture evolves. Since my undergraduate psychology degree I have always been attracted to big ideas about how evolution has shaped human minds. Yet evolutionary psychology, with its stone age brains frozen in time, seemed unsatisfying. This led me to cultural evolution, with its grand idea that the same evolutionary process underlies both genetic and cultural change. Humans are not just products of countless generations of genetic evolution, but also of cultural evolution. This view of humanity is grander than any other I’ve come across.

Alex's book list on cultural evolution

Alex Mesoudi Why did Alex love this book?

This is probably the best pop-science book on cultural evolution that I have read. It’s written by Johnnie Hughes, a nature documentary maker who has since worked on series such as Netflix’s Our Planet. It’s half science book, half travelogue, telling the story of Hughes and his brother’s road trip across the USA, like a mini Voyage of the Beagle. As they go, they explore how the design of teepees has evolved over time to take the varied forms that are currently seen in Native American communities. This is a really entertaining way of introducing the idea that ideas evolve.

By Jonnie Hughes,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked On the Origin of Tepees as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Why do some ideas spread, while others die off? Does human culture have its very own “survival of the fittest”? And if so, does that explain why our species is so different from the rest of life on Earth?

Throughout history, we humans have prided ourselves on our capacity to have ideas, but perhaps this pride is misplaced. Perhaps ideas have us. After all, ideas do appear to have a life of their own. And it is they, not us, that benefit most when they are spread. Many biologists have already come to the opinion that our genes are selfish…


Book cover of The Meme Machine

Mordecai George Sheftall Author Of Blossoms In The Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze

From my list on how culture makes us do self-destructive things.

Why am I passionate about this?

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I woke up expecting to spend that day – and the rest of my academic career – leisurely studying the interplay of culture and individual temperament in second language acquisition. As the rest of that terrible day unfolded, however, my research up to that point suddenly seemed very small and almost decadently privileged. Recruiting the rudimentary cultural anthropology toolbox I had already amassed, I took a deep breath and plunged into the rabbit hole of studying the role of culture in human conflict. Twenty-two years later, using my Japan base and relevant language skills, my research has focused on the Japanese experience in World War II.

Mordecai's book list on how culture makes us do self-destructive things

Mordecai George Sheftall Why did Mordecai love this book?

In his seminal The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins suggested that humans (and all other living organisms) exist to further the evolutionary fitness of the self-replicating information packets (“genes”) carried in our DNA – not the other way around.

In the closing section of his book, Dawkins theorized that a similar dynamic might hold true in cultural evolution, playing out through another type of self-replicating information packet, which he termed “memes”.

Some twenty years later, as the dawn of the Internet Age was giving new relevance to this idea, scholar Susan Blackmore took it up and ran with it, essentially singlehandedly creating the new academic field of “memetics” with the publication of The Meme Machine in 1999.

By Susan Blackmore,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked The Meme Machine as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Humans are extraordinary creatures, with the unique ability among animals to imitate and so copy from one another ideas, habits, skills, behaviours, inventions, songs, and stories. These are all memes, a term first coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 in his book The Selfish Gene. Memes, like genes, are replicators, and this enthralling book is an investigation of whether this link between genes and memes can lead to important discoveries about the nature of
the inner self. Confronting the deepest questions about our inner selves, with all our emotions, memories, beliefs, and decisions, Susan Blackmore makes a compelling case for…


Book cover of A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy

Alex Mesoudi Author Of Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences

From my list on cultural evolution.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am Professor of Cultural Evolution at the University of Exeter, UK. In my research I use lab experiments and theoretical models to understand how human culture evolves. Since my undergraduate psychology degree I have always been attracted to big ideas about how evolution has shaped human minds. Yet evolutionary psychology, with its stone age brains frozen in time, seemed unsatisfying. This led me to cultural evolution, with its grand idea that the same evolutionary process underlies both genetic and cultural change. Humans are not just products of countless generations of genetic evolution, but also of cultural evolution. This view of humanity is grander than any other I’ve come across.

Alex's book list on cultural evolution

Alex Mesoudi Why did Alex love this book?

I’ve included this book to illustrate how the perspective of cultural evolution is spreading to disciplines and problems far beyond its origins in biology and anthropology. In this case the discipline is economic history and the problem is explaining why the Enlightenment, which paved the way for the rapid technological and economic transformations brought about by the subsequent Industrial Revolution, occurred when it did (1500-1700) and where it did (Western Europe). Mokyr’s answer draws on cultural evolutionary concepts to argue that a culturally transmitted mindset of innovation and progress, as well as the intense competition of ideas within a politically fragmented Europe, led to rapid scientific advances. Essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of the modern world.

By Joel Mokyr,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A Culture of Growth as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Why Enlightenment culture sparked the Industrial Revolution

During the late eighteenth century, innovations in Europe triggered the Industrial Revolution and the sustained economic progress that spread across the globe. While much has been made of the details of the Industrial Revolution, what remains a mystery is why it took place at all. Why did this revolution begin in the West and not elsewhere, and why did it continue, leading to today's unprecedented prosperity? In this groundbreaking book, celebrated economic historian Joel Mokyr argues that a culture of growth specific to early modern Europe and the European Enlightenment laid the foundations…


Book cover of The Whisperings Within

Howard Bloom Author Of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History

From my list on on changing the way you think.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV and the next Stephen Hawking by Gear Magazine. My passion is flying over all the sciences, all of history, and a chunk of the arts and pulling it all together in a new big picture. I’ve called this approach Omnology, the aspiration to omniscience. Sounds crazy, right? But I’ve published scientific papers or lectured at scholarly conferences in twelve different scientific disciplines, from quantum physics and cosmology to evolutionary biology, psychology, information science, and astronautics. And I’ve been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, and many more.

Howard's book list on on changing the way you think

Howard Bloom Why did Howard love this book?

In an easy, breezy style, Barash introduces you to sociobiology, the most mind-blowing perceptual lens since Charles Darwin’s 1857 introduction of evolution. Like Hawkins and Thomas, Barash reveals everything from the operation of genes to the culture of the Inuit in the impossible wastes of the arctic.  And he shows you, once again, how the findings of widely separated sciences fit into a spectacular big picture.

By David P. Barash,

Why should I read it?

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

What is this book about?

The whisperings within [Hardcover]


Book cover of Good Enough: The Tolerance for Mediocrity in Nature and Society

Daniel Graham Author Of An Internet in Your Head: A New Paradigm for How the Brain Works

From my list on challenging everything you know about the brain.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am trained in physics but moved over to psychology and neuroscience partway through graduate school at Cornell University because I became fascinated with the stupefying complexity of brains. I found that a lot of the main ideas and approaches in these fields seemed flawed and limited—things like defining something to study such as “emotion” or “perception” without specifying what measurable quantities are necessary and sufficient to understand those things. Luckily, I was (and continue to be) mentored by independent thinkers like neuroanatomist Barbara Finlay and computational neuroscientist David Field, who instilled in me their spirit of free and deeply informed inquiry. Today, more and more brain researchers are rethinking established ideas.

Daniel's book list on challenging everything you know about the brain

Daniel Graham Why did Daniel love this book?

No idea in psychology is more attractive than the notion that we have evolved to be super-amazing in terms of certain traits: our logic, mating strategies, food gathering techniques, emotional reactions, are all the best that they can be because evolution settles for nothing less. Daniel Milo, a philosopher of biology, shows instead that evolution almost always settles for “good enough” rather than what is optimal. From the size of our kidneys to our procreative abilities, what matters is what is workable, not what is best. This idea is widely supported, but still unorthodox in evolutionary psychology—and even in parts of evolutionary biology. Breaking out of rigid beliefs that the way things are is the best of all possible worlds is a liberating experience, and one well articulated by Milo.

By Daniel S. Milo,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Good Enough as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In this spirited and irreverent critique of Darwin's long hold over our imagination, a distinguished philosopher of science makes the case that, in culture as well as nature, not only the fittest survive: the world is full of the "good enough" that persist too.

Why is the genome of a salamander forty times larger than that of a human? Why does the avocado tree produce a million flowers and only a hundred fruits? Why, in short, is there so much waste in nature? In this lively and wide-ranging meditation on the curious accidents and unexpected detours on the path of…


Book cover of The Philosophy of Social Evolution

Samir Okasha Author Of Philosophy of Biology: A Very Short Introduction

From my list on the philosophy of evolution.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Bristol. I am interested in most areas of contemporary philosophy, in particular the interplay between philosophy and the natural and social sciences. Much of my recent work has focused on evolutionary biology, a science that is replete with implications for traditional philosophical debates about human nature, knowledge, and our place in the world.

Samir's book list on the philosophy of evolution

Samir Okasha Why did Samir love this book?

The study of how natural selection shapes social behaviour is an important sub-branch of evolutionary biology, but one that has been mired in controversy. Much of this controversy concerns "altruistic’’ behaviours, that is, behaviours that are costly for an organism to perform but benefit others, such as defending one’s colony from attack. Birch’s book offers a deft analysis of the seemingly intractable debates over social evolution, bringing considerable conceptual clarity. Topics discussed include the status of kin selection theory, Hamilton’s rule, cultural evolution, and the idea that a multicelled organism is itself a social group composed of cells.

By Jonathan Birch,

Why should I read it?

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

What is this book about?

From mitochondria to meerkats, the natural world is full of spectacular examples of social behaviour. In the early 1960s Bill Hamilton changed the way we think about how such behaviour evolves. He introduced three key innovations - now known as Hamilton's rule, kin selection, and inclusive fitness - which have been enormously influential, but which remain the subject of fierce controversy.

Hamilton's pioneering work kick-started a research program now known as social evolution theory. This is a book about the philosophical foundations and future prospects of that program. Part I, "Foundations", is a careful exposition and defence of Hamilton's ideas,…


Book cover of The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World

Dimitris Xygalatas Author Of Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living

From my list on the things that make us human.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am an anthropologist and cognitive scientist who studies some of the things that make us human—but not the obvious ones. I am mostly interested in those things that may appear puzzling or pointless, but fill our lives with meaning and purpose. Growing up in Greece, I read National Geographic Magazine and reveled in the documentaries of Jane Goodall, David Attenborough, and Jacques Cousteau, which sparked in me a passion for exploration through the combined lenses of personal experience and scientific scrutiny. In my own research, I have spent two decades studying ritual by conducting several years of ethnographic research and bringing scientific measurements into real-life settings.

Dimitris' book list on the things that make us human

Dimitris Xygalatas Why did Dimitris love this book?

Why do we cooperate? To a highly cooperative species like ourselves, it might seem obvious that we do, but from a rational perspective, individuals benefit more from pursuing their own narrow interests. To answer this question, this book takes a step back, or rather a few million steps, evolutionarily speaking. From the level of the cell to that of complex societies, it examines cooperation as a driving force in nature, allowing us to see ourselves as part of a much bigger story.

By Nichola Raihani,

Why should I read it?

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

What is this book about?

Why cooperate? This may be the most important scientific question we have ever, and will ever, face.

The science of cooperation tells us not only how we got here, but also where we might end up. Cooperation explains how strands of DNA gave rise to modern-day nation states. It defines our extraordinary ecological success as well as many of the most surprising features of what make us human: not only why we live in families, why we have grandmothers and why women experience the menopause, but also why we become paranoid and jealous, and why we cheat.

Nichola Raihani also…


Book cover of The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future

Esther Hertzog Author Of Patrons of Women: Literacy Projects and Gender Development in Rural Nepal

From my list on bureaucracy and state power.

Why am I passionate about this?

My interest in bureaucratic power and its pervasive control grew out of my social and feminist activity no less than from my critical thinking about State institutions. Combining field research as a social anthropologist with my activism exposed me to the harmful implications of bureaucratic power. I delved into social and gender power relations in contexts like absorption centers with immigrants from Ethiopia, women's empowerment projects in "developing" countries, threatened motherhood in the welfare state, and others. My personal experience as an involved participant enabled me to better understand the ethnocentric and exploiting nature of international development projects, of Israeli "absorbing" agencies, and of child care policies. 

Esther's book list on bureaucracy and state power

Esther Hertzog Why did Esther love this book?

I think that Riane Eisler's book is a must-read piece for feminists, historians, and social activists working for justice and equality.

The book offered me an original outlook on male dominance in human society over the ages. Learning that women had an immense impact on the emergence of the major religions was exhilarating. The historical descriptions of the evolution of patriarchy demonstrated how it was constructed through the marginalization and exclusion of women from leading positions and by the use of violence.

My work on the sex industry, indicating how the exploitation of women's sexuality served in establishing males' dominance was significantly influenced by this book. 

By Riane Eisler,

Why should I read it?

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

What is this book about?

Now with an updated epilogue celebrating the 30th anniversary of this groundbreaking and increasingly relevant book.

"May be the most significant work published in all our lifetimes." – LA Weekly

The Chalice and the Blade tells a new story of our cultural origins. It shows that warfare and the war of the sexes are neither divinely nor biologically ordained. It provides verification that a better future is possible—and is in fact firmly rooted in the haunting dramas of what happened in our past.


Book cover of War, Peace, and Human Nature: The Convergence of Evolutionary and Cultural Views

Michael Ruse Author Of A Philosopher Looks at Human Beings

From my list on human evolution and the human story.

Why am I passionate about this?

Our discovery that we are modified monkeys rather than modified mud is a human achievement on a par with a Mozart opera or a Vermeer painting. As a historian and philosopher of science, my lifelong mission has been to see how this knowledge transcends earlier myths about divine creation and opens the way to a far richer and more optimistic vision of human nature, our achievements, and our future possibilities. New knowledge can be terrifying. It can also be exciting and liberating. It is an obligation, a privilege, and a joy to be able to express our full humanity. The authors I shall introduce exemplify this so very much.

Michael's book list on human evolution and the human story

Michael Ruse Why did Michael love this book?

From anthropology and archeology, Douglas Fry and his co-contributors tell us that our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, in small bands, on a five-million-year camping trip around the globe. We had to have adaptations for harmonious communal living. Wary of strangers, we would realize that wanting to fight them was stupid. Man the “killer ape” is fiction. Then, 10,000 years ago, came agriculture, with a population explosion producing abundant goods that others would covet. The consequence was war and prejudice and other vile beliefs and behaviors. Ex-Quaker as I am, I have written a book, Why We Hate: The Roots of Human Conflict, appearing in Spring 2021, arguing that, by making the appropriate cultural moves, we can again attain our natural state of cooperation and peaceful living.

By Douglas P. Fry,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked War, Peace, and Human Nature as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Have humans always waged war? Is warring an ancient evolutionary adaptation or a relatively recent behavior-and what does that tell us about human nature? In War, Peace, and Human Nature, editor Douglas P. Fry brings together leading experts in such fields as evolutionary biology, archaeology, anthropology, and primatology to answer fundamental questions about peace, conflict, and human nature in an evolutionary context. The chapters in this book
demonstrate that humans clearly have the capacity to make war, but since war is absent in some cultures, it cannot be viewed as a human universal. And counter to frequent presumption the actual…


Book cover of The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter
Book cover of On the Origin of Tepees: The Evolution of Ideas (and Ourselves)
Book cover of The Meme Machine

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Interested in social evolution, nature versus nurture, and evolutionary psychology?

Social Evolution 15 books