Mark Williams is a keynote speaker, author, and international campaigner. In 2004 he himself experienced depression and suffered in silence for years until he entered community mental health services.
He founded International Fathers Mental Health Day and #Howareyoudad campaign to make sure all parents are having support for the whole family. In 2020 Mark published the report called "Fathers Reaching Out - Why Dads Matter" to explain the importance of paternal mental health which has far better outcomes for the whole family and the development of the child when we include fathers.
Mark is also an ambassador for Mothers For Mothers Charity.
Dr Machin draws on her research and the latest findings in genetics, neuroscience and psychology to tell the story of fatherhood. She will show the extraordinary physiological changes a man undergoes when he becomes a father, investigate how a man’s genes can influence what sort of father he will be, and will show how a dad makes a unique contribution to his child’s life, helping to foster independence of mind and spirit.
THE STORY OF FATHERHOOD AND WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A FATHER TODAY, BASED ON A DECADE-LONG STUDY OF NEW AND EXPECTANT FATHERS.
Becoming a father is one of most common but also one of the most profoundly life-altering experiences a man can have. It is up there with puberty, falling in love and experiencing your first loss. Fifty years ago a father's role was assumed to be clear: he went to work; he provided the pay cheque; and he acted as a disciplinarian when he got home. But today a father's role is much more fluid and complex.
When I was younger, I got into a lot of trouble. Many good-hearted people helped me. In part, this inspired me to become a clinical psychologist. When I was in graduate school at Harvard, I became disillusioned with clinical psychology and inspired to figure out why people are motivated to help others. During this process, a lecturer from the Biology Department, Robert Trivers, approached me and we exchanged drafts of papers we were writing. Trivers’ ideas caused me to see altruism and morality in an entirely different, and much more valid, way. In Survival of the Virtuous I demonstrate how psychological findings on altruism and morality can be gainfully interpreted from an evolutionary perspective.
As an award-winning journalist and science writer, Robert Wright, the author of The Moral Animal, presents a lively, thought-provoking presentation of the theoretical framework of evolutionary psychology interwoven with tidbits about Charles Darwin’s life.
I was impressed by his ability to provide compelling explanations for how moral sentiments and other important aspects of human psychology such as marriage, family, friendship, racism, deception, and self-deception evolved.
THE MORAL ANIMAL examines the significance of this extraordinary shift in our perception of morality and what it means to be human.
Taking the life of Charles Darwin as his context, Robert Wright brilliantly demonstrates how Darwin's ideas have stood the test of time, drawing startling conclusions about the structure of some of our most basic preoccupations. Why do we commit adultery, express suicidal tendencies and have the capacity for self-deception? Wright not only provides the answers to such fundamental moral questions from the perspective of evolutionary psychology but challenges us to see ourselves anew through the clarifying lens of…
My interest in how music makes sense was first piqued when, as a music student at the Royal Academy of Music in London, I met a blind child who, despite having learning difficulties, could reproduce the most complex music on the piano just by listening. Put simply, he had a better musical ear than I did, as a prize-winning student at a top conservatoire. Since that early experience, I have devoted my life to exploring just how music works (without the need for conceptual understanding) and how teachers can use the universality of music to promote social inclusion.
This is one of those rare textbooks that will make you smile with its delightful anecdotes that lighten what could so easily have become a dense academic treatise.
Huron writes in a warm, engaging way, producing an eminently readable book. He effortlessly shows how academic research findings affect the musical experience of ordinary listeners.
Sweet Anticipation serves as a great introduction to this important topic of how music makes sense and continues to move us, even after many repeated hearings of the same piece.
The psychological theory of expectation that David Huron proposes in Sweet Anticipation grew out of the author's experimental efforts to understand how music evokes emotions. These efforts evolved into a general theory of expectation that will prove informative to readers interested in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology as well as those interested in music. The book describes a set of psychological mechanisms and illustrates how these mechanisms work in the case of music. All examples of notated music can be heard on the Web.
Huron proposes that emotions evoked by expectation involve five functionally distinct response systems: reaction responses (which…
I lived in New York City for a number of years, and my female friends would constantly buy dating advice books and then complain about how bad these books were. One night at dinner, I suggested that there must be some legitimate scientifically-based advice that would actually be helpful, and I was laughed out of the room. Decoding Love was born in that moment. What I found overturned almost all of my preconceptions about dating and relationships. I hope it will overturn some of your preconceptions as well.
Although we like to think that we are idiosyncratic individuals pursuing our perfect match, the truth is that evolution has hardwired into us many preferences and dislikes. This book is a really good introduction to the often surprising role evolution plays in shaping desire. Buss has undertaken a massive study of thousands of people and dozens of cultures to present a unified theory of human mating behavior. While I don't think we need to simply give in to evolution, it is an enormous help to have a sense of what role evolution plays.
If we all want love, why is there so much conflict in our most cherished relationships? To answer this question we must look into our evolutionary past, argues prominent psychologist David M. Buss. Based one of the largest studies of human mating ever undertaken, encompassing more than 10,000 people of all ages from thirty-seven cultures worldwide, The Evolution of Desire is the first work to present a unified theory of human mating behaviour. Drawing on a wide range of examples of mating behaviour,from lovebugs to elephant seals, from the Yanomamoe tribe of Venezuela to online dating apps,Buss reveals what women…
Between us, we’ve been in the interreligious relations business for a combined 50 years. We started working together when Jerry was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under President Barack Obama. In 2015, we were both invited by Prince Ghazi of Jordan to join other interreligious leaders to advance a UN resolution defining and taking a stand against religicide. That resolution never made it to the Security Council. But we joined forces to sound the alarm about religicide. We wrote our book in the hope of inspiring an international campaign to end this killing in the name of God – or being killed because of your God.
The late Rabbi Sacks served as the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth. This was one of the last books he wrote before his death. He makes the case that religion is not only the cause of violence but also part of the solution to violence. In each chapter, he deeply analyzes a different religious text and evinces eye-opening interpretations. Perhaps most prescient are his notions of “altruistic evil” and “pathological dualism.” Pathological dualism operates in three ways: first, it dehumanizes and demonizes your enemies; second, it portrays the perpetrator as the victim; and third, it leads the perpetrator to commit altruistic evil—killing others as a perceived favor to humanity. As Sacks so movingly asserts, “When religion turns men into murderers, God weeps.”
Despite predictions of continuing secularisation, the twenty-first century has witnessed a surge of religious extremism and violence in the name of God.
In this powerful and timely book, Jonathan Sacks explores the roots of violence and its relationship to religion, focusing on the historic tensions between the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Drawing on arguments from evolutionary psychology, game theory, history, philosophy, ethics and theology, Sacks shows how a tendency to violence can subvert even the most compassionate of religions. Through a close reading of key biblical texts at the heart of the Abrahamic faiths, Sacks then challenges…
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.
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.
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…
As a licensed mental health professional, I once had a client claiming to be demonically possessed, and requested that I get an exorcist to drive the evil spirits out of her body. Instead, I utilized a therapeutic approach to challenge “irrational” beliefs. The problem was gone. I realized that people were prone to strange beliefs and started to read and listen to “experts” who were skeptical in nature. To my surprise, I saw Carl Sagan distinguishing astrology (pseudoscience) from astronomy (science). His talk was clear, convincing, and logical. I was hooked.
David Buss combines the fields and research provided by both psychology and biology to examine human behavior from an evolutionary vantage point. And he makes a compelling case. Critical thinking questions and case studies are included in the book. He explains human behavior from an evolutionary perspective, based on what is “adaptive.”
What are the mechanisms of mind that define what it means to be a human being?
Evolutionary psychology is a revolutionary new science, a true synthesis of modern principles of psychology and evolutionary biology. Since the publication of the award-winning first edition of Evolutionary Psychology, there has been an explosion of research within the field. In this book, David M. Buss examines human behavior from an evolutionary perspective, providing students with the conceptual tools needed to study evolutionary psychology and apply them to empirical research on the…
I'm an experimental social psychologist and Scientia Professor at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. I grew up in Hungary, and after an adventurous escape I ended up in Sydney. I received my DPhil and DSc degrees from the University of Oxford, and I spent various periods working at Oxford, Stanford, Heidelberg, and Giessen. For my work I received the Order of Australia, as well as the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, the Alexander von Humboldt Prize, and a Rockefeller Fellowship. As somebody who experienced totalitarian communism firsthand, I am very interested in the reasons for the recent spread of totalitarian, tribal ideologies, potentially undermining Western liberalism, undoubtedly the most successful civilization in human history.
Bill is an accomplished evolutionary psychologist and a good friend of mine.
In this book he offers an evolutionary account of how human beings came to survive and become the dominant species on the planet largely because of our unparalleled ability to cooperate and form successful groups.
The evolution of consciousness, a unique mental ability to imagine, represent, predict, and model the behavior of others played a crucial role in our evolutionary success, and the book offers a lucid, readable, and highly entertaining overview of our evolutionary history, focusing on the development and functions of our psychological habits and abilities in particular.
In the compelling popular science tradition of Sapiens and Guns, Germs, and Steel, a groundbreaking and eye-opening exploration that applies evolutionary science to provide a new perspective on human psychology, revealing how major challenges from our past have shaped some of the most fundamental aspects of our being.
The most fundamental aspects of our lives-from leadership and innovation to aggression and happiness-were permanently altered by the "social leap" our ancestors made from the rainforest to the savannah. Their struggle to survive on the open grasslands required a shift from individualism to a new form of collectivism, which forever altered the…
I went to university wanting to become a Roman specialist, but ended up going backwards in time until I landed with a bump on the hard flints of the Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age). I research aspects of the behaviour of the Pleistocene (Ice Age) indigenous Europeans – the Neanderthals – and the origins and evolution of our own species, Homo sapiens. I undertake fieldwork across Europe, and I’m particularly interested in the origins and early development of art – both on portable objects and cave walls – and the long-term evolution of our treatment of the dead. My scientific love is how we can try to get inside the mind of our most remote ancestors.
A raw and bloody gem of a book, which plunges the reader into the cold and dirty world of our deep past, not just seen but experienced by its multi-talented author.
A philosophical hankering to know what it means to be human – and what we have inherited from our evolutionary past -leads this trained veterinarian, barrister, and writer to go back to nature in a Derbyshire wood. He and his long-suffering son experience the freezing, claw-red, and skin-tearing nature of the wild, as they seek to live similarly to our prehistoric ancestors.
Drawing inspiration from the 40,000 years of the Upper Palaeolithic, in an environment similar to the Mesolithic, Foster paints a blistering, spraining, and chilling account of the demands of a more primitive life. Essential reading from the comfort of my couch.
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE ATLANTIC, KIRKUS REVIEWS, AND NEW STATESMAN
A radically immersive exploration of three pivotal moments in the evolution of human consciousness, asking what kinds of creatures humans were, are, and might yet be
How did humans come to be who we are? In his marvelous, eccentric, and widely lauded book Being a Beast, legal scholar, veterinary surgeon, and naturalist extraordinaire Charles Foster set out to understand the consciousness of animal species by living as a badger, otter, fox, deer, and swift. Now, he inhabits three crucial periods of human development to understand…
I
like works of history that make a compelling point by carefully analyzing the
past. Wright shows how the religious beliefs that characterize much of the
world–Christianity, Islam, Judaism–emerged slowly over the course of
millennia.
They tended to reflect realities on Earth: strong empires encouraged
a belief in one all-powerful god. Gods tended to be vengeful in times of war
but tolerant in times of peace. Differences across the three religions thus
reflect the times and places in which their religious doctrines were codified.
In this sweeping narrative that takes us from the Stone Age to the Information Age, Robert Wright unveils an astonishing discovery: there is a hidden pattern that the great monotheistic faiths have followed as they have evolved. Through the prisms of archaeology, theology, and evolutionary psychology, Wright's findings overturn basic assumptions about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and are sure to cause controversy. He explains why spirituality has a role today, and why science, contrary to conventional wisdom, affirms the validity of the religious quest. And this previously unrecognized evolutionary logic points not toward continued religious extremism, but future harmony.
