Here are 100 books that War and Peace and War fans have personally recommended if you like
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Conformism, religiosity, and tribalism pose an increasingly serious threat to democracy, equality, liberty, and the world order. Many public intellectuals, therefore, argue that we should try to tamp down or eliminate these tendencies. I argue the opposite. Based on decades of collaborative research with psychologists, evolutionary scientists, historians, and archaeologists, I show that the human propensities to copy, believe, and belong are here to stay, and our best hope for the future is to draw on our rich inheritance of biological and cultural evolution to harness and manage these core features of human nature more sustainably, peacefully, and consensually.
What I love about this book is its ambition to tell the history of humankind in a way that attends both to our evolutionary origins over millions of years and our cultural accomplishments over thousands of years–and to consider the implications of both for our present and future. Very few books attempt to do such a thing. All the other books I have listed among my favorites are exceptionally ambitious in other ways, but they only attempt to bring together a part of the human story rather than integrating the whole.
Sapiens helped me to realize that there was an eager audience for bigger-picture books about our evolutionary inheritance and its implications–from the viewpoint of both natural and cultural selection–and spurred me to write my own.
100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations and human rights; to trust money, books and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come?
In Sapiens, Dr Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the…
Conformism, religiosity, and tribalism pose an increasingly serious threat to democracy, equality, liberty, and the world order. Many public intellectuals, therefore, argue that we should try to tamp down or eliminate these tendencies. I argue the opposite. Based on decades of collaborative research with psychologists, evolutionary scientists, historians, and archaeologists, I show that the human propensities to copy, believe, and belong are here to stay, and our best hope for the future is to draw on our rich inheritance of biological and cultural evolution to harness and manage these core features of human nature more sustainably, peacefully, and consensually.
This classic work in economic anthropology inspired me to go to live for two years in the rainforest of Papua New Guinea in hopes of understanding better how systems of production, consumption, and exchange shape the kinds of societies we live in.
Although many of questions remained when I got back home, the ideas in Sahlins’ book helped set me on a course to find answers that have continued to haunt me through life and have helped me to understand better why capitalism is neither natural nor even necessarily inevitable.
Since its first publication over forty years ago Marshall Sahlins's Stone Age Economics has established itself as a classic of modern anthropology and arguably one of the founding works of anthropological economics. Ambitiously tackling the nature of economic life and how to study it comparatively, Sahlins radically revises traditional views of the hunter-gatherer and so-called primitive societies, revealing them to be the original "affluent society."
Sahlins examines notions of production, distribution and exchange in early communities and examines the link between economics and cultural and social factors. A radical study of tribal economies, domestic production for livelihood, and of the…
Conformism, religiosity, and tribalism pose an increasingly serious threat to democracy, equality, liberty, and the world order. Many public intellectuals, therefore, argue that we should try to tamp down or eliminate these tendencies. I argue the opposite. Based on decades of collaborative research with psychologists, evolutionary scientists, historians, and archaeologists, I show that the human propensities to copy, believe, and belong are here to stay, and our best hope for the future is to draw on our rich inheritance of biological and cultural evolution to harness and manage these core features of human nature more sustainably, peacefully, and consensually.
Some people are sticklers for following norms and conventions, while others take a more relaxed approach. The same goes for entire cultures, which vary on a continuum from very tight (think Singapore or the military) to very loose (think Amsterdam or hippy communes). This book brings together a wealth of experimental data showing that societal norms tighten or loosen in response to perceptions of threat.
Even though the specific nature of those threats inevitably varies and the cultural systems of the scores of societies in which Gelfand has gathered data are diverse, the same underlying patterns are discernible everywhere. Gelfand’s work explores the profound ramifications of this discovery both for our understanding of history and of the world we live in today.
'A groundbreaking analysis of what used to be an impenetrable mystery: how and why do cultures differ? ... Anyone interested in our cultural divides will find tremendous insight in Rule Makers, Rule Breakers' - Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of Enlightenment Now
Why are clocks in Germany always correct, while those in Brazil are frequently wrong? Why are Singaporeans jailed for selling gum? Why do women in New Zealand have three times the sex of females worldwide? Why was the Daimler-Chrysler merger ill-fated from the start? And why does each generation of Americans give their…
Conformism, religiosity, and tribalism pose an increasingly serious threat to democracy, equality, liberty, and the world order. Many public intellectuals, therefore, argue that we should try to tamp down or eliminate these tendencies. I argue the opposite. Based on decades of collaborative research with psychologists, evolutionary scientists, historians, and archaeologists, I show that the human propensities to copy, believe, and belong are here to stay, and our best hope for the future is to draw on our rich inheritance of biological and cultural evolution to harness and manage these core features of human nature more sustainably, peacefully, and consensually.
Why do humans everywhere imagine themselves to share the world with supernatural agents of various kinds? Many scholars have pointed out the usefulness of supernatural agent concepts in providing reassurance, political legitimacy, a rationale for suffering, or a theory of our collective origins or destinies. But this does not explain why we come up with those specific types of constructs in the first place.
Pascal Boyer proposes a surprising and compelling solution. The reason we entertain particular kinds of ideas about supernatural agents, he argues, is because of the way our cognitive systems evolved.
Many of our questions about religion, says renowned anthropologist Pascal Boyer, are no longer mysteries. We are beginning to know how to answer questions such as "Why do people have religion?" Using findings from anthropology, cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary biology, Religion Explained shows how this aspect of human consciousness is increasingly admissible to coherent, naturalistic explanation. This brilliant and controversial book gives readers the first scientific explanation for what religious feeling is really about, what it consists of, and where it comes from.
I’m a systems thinker (Senior Fellow at an environmental think tank, author of 14 books and hundreds of essays) who’s addicted to trying to understand the world. After a few decades, the following is my state of understanding. Power is everywhere and determines everything in our lives. Whether due to the physical power of energy channeled through technology, or the social power of organizations and money, we’re enabled or disabled daily. During the last century, fossil-fueled humanity has overpowered planetary systems, as evidenced by climate change, species extinctions, and resource depletion. Few think critically about power. Unless we start doing so, we may be inviting the ultimate disempowerment—extinction.
Turchin’s book is one of the best sources I found for understanding the development of human social power during the past 11,000 years. As he succinctly puts it, “competition within groups destroys cooperation; cooperation between groups creates cooperation.” Societies grew bigger to compete more successfully for resources, but doing so required that they become more internally cooperative. Necessity was the mother of social innovation, and the result was kingdoms, then empires. Turchin is one of the foremost proponents of group (or multi-level) selection, still a controversial idea in biology, but, in my view, an essential frame for understanding human evolution.
Cooperation is powerful. There aren’t many highly cooperative species—but they nearly cover the planet. Ants alone account for a quarter of all animal matter. Yet the human capacity to work together leaves every other species standing. We organize ourselves into communities of hundreds of millions of individuals, inhabit every continent, and send people into space. Human beings are nature’s greatest team players. And the truly astounding thing is, we only started our steep climb to the top of the rankings—overtaking wasps, bees, termites and ants—in the last 10,000 years. Genetic evolution can’t explain this anomaly. Something else is going on.…
I am fascinated with the relationship between our individual behaviors and the social structures and institutions in which we live—and how these influence each over time. I think this sort of understanding is important if we want to consider the kind of world we want to live in, and how we might get there from where we are. I take insights from many disciplines, from physics and biology to the cognitive and social sciences, from philosophy and art to mathematics and engineering. I am currently a professor of cognitive and information sciences at the University of California, Merced, and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute.
Peter Turchin has gotten famous recently for predicting the US political upheaval of 2020 way back in 2012.
This book represents the first landmark of Turchin’s attempt to understand the ebbs and flows of history using dynamical models. The book’s centerpiece is a formalization of a theory about how empires rise and fall, first conceived by the 14th century (!) Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun.
The book inspired me to replicate the computational model it presents, and it was remarkably illuminating to watch empires grow, fight, and collapse on my computer screen.
Many historical processes are dynamic. Populations grow and decline. Empires expand and collapse. Religions spread and wither. Natural scientists have made great strides in understanding dynamical processes in the physical and biological worlds using a synthetic approach that combines mathematical modeling with statistical analyses. Taking up the problem of territorial dynamics--why some polities at certain times expand and at other times contract--this book shows that a similar research program can advance our understanding of dynamical processes in history. Peter Turchin develops hypotheses from a wide range of social, political, economic, and demographic factors: geopolitics, factors affecting collective solidarity, dynamics of…
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.
The traditional neo-Darwinian view of evolution understands inheritance in genetic terms, as the transmission of DNA from parents to offspring. Jablonka and Lamb argue convincingly that in addition to genetic inheritance, there exist three other inheritance systems in nature – epigenetic, symbolic, and behavioural – all of which play an important role in evolution. The book is not a work of philosophy in the strict sense, but rather a fascinating and conceptually-rich synthesis of a diverse body of empirical findings which, the authors argue, can only be accommodated by going beyond a purely geno-centric view of evolution.
Ideas about heredity and evolution are undergoing a revolutionary change. New findings in molecular biology challenge the gene-centered version of Darwinian theory according to which adaptation occurs only through natural selection of chance DNA variations. In Evolution in Four Dimensions, Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb argue that there is more to heredity than genes. They trace four "dimensions" in evolution -- four inheritance systems that play a role in evolution: genetic, epigenetic (or non-DNA cellular transmission of traits), behavioral, and symbolic (transmission through language and other forms of symbolic communication). These systems, they argue, can all provide variations on which…
I have been intrigued by the stranger, lesser-known parts of the natural world for as long as I can remember and have been continuing to explore those themes in my own work. I love that humans haven’t learned all there is to know about the natural forces that have ruled this planet for longer than we’ve been here. I enjoy books that peel back a layer into these mysteries by writers who have an appreciation for their existence, their ingenuity, and their importance. I have dedicated much of my career to synthesizing big topics into accessible, engaging, and fun information that creates curiosity and a desire to understand the world around us.
This book revolves around the term “umwelt,” which refers (in biology) to a creature’s sense of the world around it based on the information that it can perceive; while reading this book, I found my own personal understanding of the way we, as humans, see and categorize our surroundings grow and deepen.
I loved learning and thinking about eons of humans being independently and collectively stumped about the origins of some species and yet often all coming to a similar way of organizing the world around us. The natural world has unfolded in beautiful and bizarre ways, and I enjoy knowing how we came to a (mostly) shared understanding of the winding path to get here.
Biologist Carol Kaesuk Yoon explores the historical tension between evolutionary biology and taxonomy. Carl Linnaeus struggled in the eighteenth century to define species in light of their mutability while still relying on intuitive, visual judgments. As taxonomy modernized, it moved into labs, yielding results counterintuitive to humanity's innate predisposition to order the world. By conceding scientific authority to taxonomists, Yoon argues, we've contributed to our own alienation from nature.
Jean Halley is a professor of sociology at the Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island of the City University of New York (CUNY). She earned her doctorate in sociology at the Graduate Center of CUNY, and her master’s degree in theology at Harvard University. Halley's book with the University of Georgia Press about girls who love horses, Horse Crazy: Girls and the Lives of Horses, came out in 2019. She and her horse grew up in the Rocky Mountains. Today she lives in New York City.
In this fascinating book, Meg Daley Olmert explores the biological element of human relationships with other animals, and in particular the role of the hormone, oxytocin. Oxytocin helps humans and other animals feel calmer, allowing us to be more curious and friendly. Oxytocin lowers one’s heart rate and reduces stress hormones. Humans who live with or regularly spend time with nonhuman animals live longer and stay healthier. Further, contact with animals can elicit oxytocin in both of those involved, human and nonhuman.
Nothing turns a baby's head more quickly from nursing or playing than the sight of a dog or any animal. Made for Each Other lays out both sides of this deep mutual connection and the way it has evolved since prehistoric times. Drawing on the fascinating work of scientists in many fields, from neuroscience to zoology and anthropology, as well as her own investigations, Meg Daley Olmert shows the roots of this age-old bond and its great importance to our well being.
Life really is stranger than fiction, and some of the stuff served up by evolution is outrageously bizarre. There are one-celled creatures that make rats want to cozy up to cats, a parasitic worm that turns snails into “disco zombies” and an ape that communicates across continents by pushing keys to create rows and columns of pixels. I’m fascinated by all of these creatures and love writing books for children about evolutionary biology, especially the evolution of intelligence. Besides authoring How to Build a Human, I’ve written about the evolution of intelligence in dolphins (The Dolphins of Shark Bay) and crows (Crow Smarts: Inside the Brain of the World’s Brightest Bird).
I love the simple, evocative way this story is told through a visit to the beach and the sketching in the sand of creatures representing various stages in evolution, from the first cells to human beings, reminding us of what we share with these long-lost ancestors and what divides us from earlier life forms. This picture book for children aged 4 to 7 distills a complex subject with verve and imagination and deserves a place on your child’s bookshelf.
All of us are part of an old, old family. The roots of our family tree reach back millions of years to the beginning of life on earth. Open this family album and embark on an amazing journey. You'll meet some of our oldest relatives--from both the land and the sea--and discover what we inherited from each of them along the many steps of our wondrous past. Complete with an illustrated timeline and glossary, here is the story of human evolution as it's never been told before.
