I’ve always been interested—a vast understatement to anyone who knows me—in what makes people tick. I’ve focused on analyzing business actors – bankers, lawyers, investors, executives, shareholders, and others. What do they want? Some combination of money, power, or prestige? How does loving to win fit in? How about hating to lose? When is enough (money/power/prestige) enough? What do they think is ok to do to get what they want? What do they think is not ok? Amazingly, as a law professor, I can pursue that interest as part of my job, and – I think and hope – do so in a way that might help lawmakers, regulators, and policymakers do better.
No, this book is not by John Coates the corporate law professor. It's by another John Coates, who was a Wall Street trader and became a neuroscientist (!).
The descriptions of the physiology of risk-taking are not only fascinating in their own right but also deeply intuitive, and should be of enormous help to regulators trying to address banker misbehavior. They give the lie to the idea that simple stories—people are good or bad! It’s all about incentives!—can do a good job in explaining what happened.
This book makes clear that we have to understand the role of biology as well. People can’t just turn their risk-taking tendencies and reactions on and off at will. We’ve seen what happens when banks and regulators don’t take that into account.
As scandal and the aftershocks of the crash rock the financial world, former Wall Street trader John Coates investigates why our financiers are driven to take risks.
Now shortlisted for the 2012 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award and the Wellcome Trust Book Prize, this startling and unconventional book sees neuroscientist and former Wall Street trader John Coates explain something we have long suspected: that we think with our body as well as our brain. And this only intensifies when we take risks; at work, in sport and on the financial markets. Making and losing…
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’ve been teaching physics applied to biology for decades. When working at the National Institutes of Health, I realized that most biologists don’t know physics. While I appreciate the complexity that evolution generates, I find the simplicity and generality of physics in explaining life to be amazing and captivating. When I taught biological physics to undergraduates at Oakland University, I strived to find elementary “toy” models that the students could analyze and that provided valuable insight. The books on this list all adopt a similar point of view: physics provides unity to the diversity of life.
Philip Nelson is a giant in the field of biological physics. I’ve never seen anyone combine words, pictures, mathematical formulas, and computer code so seamlessly into physical models of living systems.
His book might not be as relaxing a read as some others—you really have to do the problems and assignments to get the most out of it—but I can think of no other text that will better teach you how to do science at the interface between physics and biology.
Award-winning prof brings you from first-year classes to the frontiers of systems and synthetic biology, epidemic modeling, and imaging. Physical Models of Living Systems is a university textbook that integrates those cutting-edge topics with classic results in statistical inference, control theory, biophysical chemistry and mechanobiology, immunology, and neuroscience, as well as guiding you to create your own stochastic simulations. Instead of offering a huge pile of facts, the discovery-style exposition frequently asks you to reflect on "How could anything like that happen at all?" and then shows how scientists have incrementally peeled back the layers of mystery surrounding these beautiful…
I love to hear stories about how people solve problems, and I have been curious about how science works since I was 12 years old. A decade later, when I was 22 years old, some of my friends joked that I "spoke DNA," and it’s true that I have been obsessed with trying to understand the physical structures of DNA for more than four decades now. I live my life vicariously through my students and help them to learn to tinker, troubleshoot, and recover from their failures.
I love François Jacob’s book. One of my favorite quotes from this is, "Evolution is a tinkerer."
I think that this is a great insight from one of the founders in the field, who shared the Nobel prize in 1965, for showing how genetic information flows from DNA to RNA to protein and that the control or regulation of this could come from proteins binding to regions of DNA upstream from genes.
"The most remarkable history of biology that has ever been written."-Michel Foucault
Nobel Prize-winning scientist Francois Jacob's The Logic of Life is a landmark book in the history of biology and science. Focusing on heredity, which Jacob considers the fundamental feature of living things, he shows how, since the sixteenth century, the scientific understanding of inherited traits has moved not in a linear, progressive way, from error to truth, but instead through a series of frameworks. He reveals how these successive interpretive approaches-focusing on visible structures, internal structures (especially cells), evolution, genes, and DNA and other molecules-each have their own…
I am an award-winning children’s author who has always been fascinated by the natural world. My many published children’s books include ones about animals and ocean life. Scholastic Book Clubs and the Children’s Book of the Month Club have featured my work, and translations of my fiction and nonfiction titles can be found in several languages, including Spanish, Japanese, and Hebrew. My National Geographic title Ocean Counting was named an Outstanding Science Trade Book by the National Science Teachers Association and Walrus Song has been named a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection.
In a Magic-School-Bus sort of way, Gail Gibbons presents a ton of information in this book about beavers and their families. The main storyline text is supplemented by multiple “factoid” insets and side-view illustrations. The sum total is a book that matches this mammal’s personality—busy and fascinating! We see beavers and their world, above and below the waterline of the ponds they inhabit and the streams they dam up to create them. I learned exactly how a beaver den is constructed, and what the cozy inside of one looks like (thanks to a great cross-section illustration).
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Beavers are fascinating animals. They build their own homes and live in family groups. They keep busy with their sharp teeth, powerful tails, and big webbed feet. Their work helps to preserve wetlands. Gibbons explores where they live, what they eat, how they raise their young, and much more.
People, including me, can be so uptight about their bodies. Early on in my career, I found that writing about my shame (chin hair!) or embarrassment (dogs sniffing my crotch!) helped the stigma go away. Researching and learning about how amazing our bodies are helped empower me to feel confident and comfortable being fully myself. I think it can do the same for others, too. My takeaway: There is greatness in our grossness.
This book exploded my beliefs about breasts – all that they are and all that they’ve been through and where they are headed next. Williams is a fabulous guide, taking the reader on an adventure as she uncovers the anatomy and evolution of the breast, and even the pollutants found inside her own breastmilk. Knowing the vulnerabilities – and history! – of my rack made me appreciate it all the more.
Did you know that breast milk contains substances similar to cannabis? Or that it's sold on the Internet for 262 times the price of oil? Feted and fetishized, the breast is an evolutionary masterpiece. But in the modern world, the breast is changing. Breasts are getting bigger, arriving earlier, and attracting newfangled chemicals. Increasingly, the odds are stacked against us in the struggle with breast cancer, even among men. What makes breasts so mercurial-and so vulnerable?
In this informative and highly entertaining account, intrepid science reporter Florence Williams sets out to uncover the latest scientific findings from the fields of…
Sarah Hrdy is a biological anthropologist best known for her discovery that male monkeys sometimes promote their own reproductive success by killing infants sired by rival predecessors, and for her subsequent scholarly syntheses of knowledge about the care and protection of young children by mothers and "others" which mainly means their grandmothers and other female kin. As a result of witnessing caring young fathers in her own family, Hrdy now says she's experienced a sort of epiphany. She was formerly convinced that people, like many other mammals, had been equipped by evolution with profound sex differences in parental motives and emotions. She no longer believes that, and now seeks to explain why women and men are more equipotential than she thought. You needn't be convinced that she's sorted it all out (neither is she) in order to enjoy her skillful blending of autobiography, history, primatology, and neuroscience.
A sweeping account of male nurturing, explaining how and why men are biologically transformed when they care for babies
It has long seemed self-evident that women care for babies and men do other things. Hasn't it always been so? When evolutionary science came along, it rubber-stamped this venerable division of labor: mammalian males evolved to compete for status and mates, while females were purpose-built to gestate, suckle, and otherwise nurture the victors' offspring. But come the twenty-first century, increasing numbers of men are tending babies, sometimes right from birth. How can this be happening? Puzzled and dazzled by the tender…
My formative immersion in nature during eleven summers at a girls’ camp in the Hocking Hills of southeastern Ohio showed me that everything in the physical world, including humans, is dynamically interrelated at subtle levels. As an adult, I’ve followed post-mechanistic sciences that explore this invisible truth, a theme that runs through several books I have written. Since the early 2000s, a new wave of discoveries, this time in human biology, reveals that we are composed entirely of dynamic interrelationships, in and around us, which affect us continuously from conception to our last breath. These discoveries are quickly being applied in many areas. I call this new awareness the Relational Shift.
You may have noticed that patients’ rooms in new or recently remodeled hospitals often feature nature motifs in the drapery, a picture of a mountain scene across from the bed, nature videos on the television, and a window facing trees or landscaping. Why? Because of numerous recent discoveries that healing proceeds faster and better when a patient connects with nature, even via a photograph! In The Biophilia Effect,Clemens Arvay presents surprising results of many relevant biological studies, and he also suggests methods of boosting our mental and physical healing through specific immersions in nature. These suggestions are set in venues such as long walks in a forest or gardening. He discusses the powerful healing effects of recognizing ecopsychosomatics with regard to various diseases and conditions.
Did you know that spending time in a forest activates the vagus nerve, which is responsible for inducing calm and regeneration? Or that spending just one single day in a wooded area increases the number of natural killer cells in the blood by almost 40 percent on average?
We've all had an intuitive sense of the healing power of nature. Clemens G. Arvay's new book brings us the science to verify this power, sharing fascinating research along with teachings and tools for accessing the therapeutic properties of the forest and natural world. Already a bestseller in Germany, The Biophilia Effect…
“Bold and intriguing.”—Wall Street Journal • “Penetrating. . . . Provocative and profound.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) • “Offers plenty of food for thought.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Ball’s marvelous book is both wide-ranging and deep. . . . I could not put it down.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Song of the Cell and the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Emperor of All Maladies
A new, cutting-edge vision of biology that revises our understanding of what life itself is, how to enhance it, and what possibilities it offers.
Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how…
I love learning about how the world we know came to be the way it is. That’s another way of saying I love history. But not the dry, boring history we all remember from school. I want to know more about the entrepreneurial risk-takers, eccentric inventors, and strange circumstances that somehow shaped the world we know today. I want to be fascinated. What’s more, I want to laugh and be entertained while I’m reading and learning. I want every page to reward my attention with some amazing fact or a hearty laugh. That’s what the books on my list do. I hope you love them as much as I have!
Roach does for science what Bryson does for travel and history. She brings her subjects to life with a unique blend of humor, history, and good old-fashioned firsthand detective work. To provide readers a (ahem!) deeper understanding of the physiology of human intercourse for this intriguing look into the science of sex, Roach even talks her hesitant husband into doing the deed while researchers monitor the proceedings via a magnetic imaging scanner!
I may not be ready to go that far for my readers but I appreciate Roach’s gumption to do it for hers. Between Roach’s courage to probe every aspect of her subject and deft ability to relate her findings with wit and insight, I found Bonk to be nearly as enjoyable as the topic it explores.
In Bonk, the best-selling author of Stiff turns her outrageous curiosity and insight on the most alluring scientific subject of all: sex. Can a person think herself to orgasm? Why doesn't Viagra help women-or, for that matter, pandas? Can a dead man get an erection? Is vaginal orgasm a myth? Mary Roach shows us how and why sexual arousal and orgasm-two of the most complex, delightful, and amazing scientific phenomena on earth-can be so hard to achieve and what science is doing to make the bedroom a more satisfying place.
