Fans pick 100 books like The Pyrocene

Best recent book examining human morality from a scientific, psychological point of view.

Darwinians used to think humans had to be selfish and immoral. Contemporary evolution argues the opposite, that humans evolved moral limits on our selfishness in order to live together. Haidt’s is the best book presenting this new evolutionary psychology.

But it goes further to connect those scientific issues with contemporary politics, explaining why people from “red” and “blue” states cannot understand each other: they each embody a short list of human moral values, but different ones. This is a great book for thinking carefully about human morality and contemporary politics. Students love it, and so do I. 

In the ongoing debates over artificial general intelligence (AGI), Judea Pearl is taking a firm stand: He argues that an intelligent robot should be able to reason about causality and that the currently fashionable approaches to AI miss this aspect.

A celebrated AI researcher and a Turing Prize laureate, Pearl has developed an amazingly original approach to this problem. This book is a high-end popular exposition of his approach.

But it’s so much more than that. It’s a history of statistics and its conflicted attitude to causality. It’s a story of heroes (or villains?) in this history. And it’s a scientific autobiography that describes Pearl’s journey. Pearl likes picking fights with the AI community, statisticians, or economists. He’s boastful, provocative, extremely intelligent, and knows how to tell a story.

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.

This book changed my perspective on human history. Ennos mixes history and science to tell a sweeping tale about how our relationship with wood enormously influenced civilization. 

I love the way Ennos takes readers all over the world—to its forests and cities—to trace this fascinating true story. He goes all that way back to our origins to show that discovering how to use wood propelled us forward. This is a wonderful book that serves as a reminder of just how critical materials are to humanity and how learning how to best employ them has propelled us forward.  

Ice ice ice. The Arctic region of the world is heating much faster than the rest of the planet. That means that ice is melting fast and radically changing this delicate polar region. Going through a history of ice on the planet, the cycle of ice ages, the impacts of greenhouse gases, and the consequence of rapidly melting ice, Wadhams warns us of the looming death spiral of climate change from methane gas release from permafrost and from self-reinforcing feedback loops that take us deeper and deeper into climate collapse. This is a must-read if you are a climate activist, a scientist focusing on climate change, or if you simply want to learn about how climate change is completely destabilizing our planetary ecosystem. He ends with a list of actions that we can take to slow this process down and stabilize our climate.

We've all heard about climate change by now—but does constantly talking about it make a difference? Or does it matter more how you talk about it? Stoknes gives comprehensive explanations about the messaging that's most effective to get through to people about climate change from a psychological and marketing point of view.

A must-read for anyone who wants to talk about global warming, whether you're creating large-scale marketing plans or just trying to talk to family and friends.

When we think of climate change many of us feel despair. But this is where Katherine Hayhoe is so important as the book is all about hope – hope in people and hope in the future.

Katherine is a wonderful colleague she is a Canadian climate scientist living and working in Texas. She has one golden rule talk about climate change to anyone and everyone. Because as her book shows when we actively engage with people and realise we all have shared values then we can move forward with collective action to look after our amazing planet.

This is not another doomsday book about the end of the world but one about the power of people to change the world.

I’ve loved Glen Cook’s work since reading The Black Company back in the eighties. Tyranny of the Night begins The Instrumentalities of the Night. Yes, the series isn’t finished. No, that doesn’t matter; each book might be part of a larger history but each is a satisfying story on its own, so read them anyway. A world of realistically complex late-medieval politics and mostly unpleasant gods with their own agendas that have little to do with the desires of their human worshippers. It’s a secondary world, but the fastest way to describe the main character, Else/Piper, is to say he’s a Janissary sent back undercover to the people from whom he was stolen as a boy, living as a double, or maybe a triple agent—but it gets more complex than that, as you’d expect from a) Glen Cook and b) a hero who begins his story by using artillery against… show more.

In this thought-provoking book, environmental science expert and professor Frank R. Spellman, PhD, gives a clear-eyed and concise overview of climate change—explaining what is really happening to our planet, why it is happening, and what can be done about it. Emphasizing scientific data and climate change indicators, Spellman gives a sober (but not panicked) assessment of the problems (natural and human-made) that we face and looks at possible mitigating factors and solutions. Understanding Climate Change: A Practical Guide is an invaluable resource to the student, policy maker, and others facing this crisis, which is to say near all of us except, perhaps, the die-hards who reject essential science. An extensive glossary demystifies much of the jargon employed in the public arena. Given the standards set in the market, however, $89.32 is steep for a paperback book.

I love Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide, by Bill McGuire, Professor Emeritus of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College London, because he is very good at combining a sterling knowledge of science with activism. This is exactly what I have been doing in several books on the world climate crisis during the last 25 years. While I have trouble with some of the connections he is that he is trying to make (does global warming really have a tie to vulcanism?), I really love McGuire’s easy-to-read style. The fact that he works both with the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and as an author of books, as well as work several U.K. and U.S. newspapers and magazines such as The Guardian, The [London] Times, The Observer, New Scientist, Focus, and Prospect, means that his work speaks to several audiences at once. I… show more.