Evolution Psychology

Short, sassy, and bold, Mean Genes reveals that our struggles for self-improvement are, in fact, battles against our own genes - genes that helped our distant ancestors flourish, but are selfish and out of place in the modern world.

With its three-hour-long contests, 162-game seasons, and countless measurable variables, baseball is a sport which lends itself to self-reflection and obsessive analysis. It's a thinking game. It's also a shifting game. Nowhere is this more evident than in the statistical revolution which has swept through the pastime in recent years, bringing metrics like WAR, OPS, and BABIP into front offices and living rooms alike.

Deeply researched and a delight to listen to, The Sacred Chain provides clarity in our uncertain times, revealing a bigger picture of our world and our place within it. It is a panorama consistent with the scientific findings about who we are and where we come from that can actually bolster our faith as it engages our curiosity about ourselves, our universe, and the nature of existence itself.

"It's the animal in us," we often hear when we've been bad. But why not when we're good? Primates and Philosophers tackles this question by exploring the biological foundations of one of humanity's most valued traits: morality.In this provocative book, primatologist Frans de Waal argues that modern-day evolutionary biology takes far too dim a view of the natural world, emphasizing our "selfish" genes.

We live in a world ridden with conflict. Everyone knows about it and only a select few have any motivation to do anything about it. In general, people stick to their point of view believing that everyone else is wrong and most never stop to consider that each individual acts upon their "right way", that is, their individual values. This misunderstanding in society of the way we think, not what we think, or how we think, leads to conflict which manifests in personal relationships, business relationships, community struggle, and even conflicts at the global level.

For all that science knows about the living world, notes David P. Barash, there are even more things we don't know, genuine evolutionary mysteries that perplex the best minds in biology. Paradoxically, many of these mysteries are very close to home, involving some of the most personal aspects of being human. Homo Mysterious examines a number of these evolutionary mysteries, exploring things we don't yet know about ourselves, laying out the best current hypotheses, and pointing toward insights that scientists are just beginning to glimpse.

Denial presents a radical new theory on the origins of our species. It was not, the authors argue, a biological leap that set humanity apart from other species, but a psychological one: namely, the uniquely human ability to deny reality in the face of inarguable evidence - including the willful ignorance of our own inevitable deaths.

We have learned how to suppress our pain and deny its presence, but when we fight against our internal turmoil, glimmers of peace are short-lived. Rejecting our suffering is not a sustainable solution because trauma is held in the body. In this book, Nityda Gessel invites listeners on a journey toward lasting freedom, with insights and experiential practices that marry the wisdom of Buddhist psychology, yogic teachings, and Indigenous understanding with somatic psychotherapy and neuroscience.

In A Story of Us, they present this rich narrative and explain how the evolution of our genes relates to the evolution of our cultures. Newson and Richerson take listeners through seven stages of human evolution, beginning seven million years ago with the apes that were the ancestors of humans and today's chimps and bonobos. The story ends in the present day and offers a glimpse into the future.

In this book, E. Fuller Torrey draws on cutting-edge neuroscience research to propose a startling answer to the ultimate question. Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods locates the origin of gods within the human brain, arguing that religious belief is a by-product of evolution. Based on an idea originally proposed by Charles Darwin, Torrey marshals evidence that the emergence of gods was an incidental consequence of several evolutionary factors.

Sex, Time, and Power offers a tantalizing answer to an age-old question: Why did big-brained Homo sapiens suddenly emerge some 150,000 years ago? The key, according to Shlain, is female sexuality. Drawing on an awesome breadth of research, he shows how, long ago, the narrowness of the newly bipedal human female's pelvis and the increasing size of infants' heads precipitated a crisis for the species. Natural selection allowed for reconfiguration of hormonal cycles, entraining women with the periodicity of the moon - and imbuing women with the concept of time.

With acuity, humor, and respect for human diversity, The Shortest History of Sex reveals where the many facets of our sexuality—chemical, anatomical, behavioral, social—come from. Chasing down our evolutionary family tree, from the first aquatic creatures to primate societies, David Baker sheds light on our baffling array of passions, impulses, and fetishes, and guides us toward a clear understanding of one of the deepest, most abiding forces of human nature.

Dive into Evolutionary History, a mesmerizing journey through time, tracing the origins and development of all living beings. From the earliest single-celled organisms to the rise of Homo sapiens, this audiobook unravels the intricate tapestry of evolution with clarity and passion. Explore the wonders of life’s evolution across geological epochs, uncovering the secrets of adaptation, survival, and the remarkable journey of our ancestors.

How did human minds become so different from those of other animals? What accounts for our capacity to understand the way the physical world works, to think ourselves into the minds of others, to gossip, read, tell stories about the past, and imagine the future? These questions are not new: they have been debated by philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, evolutionists, and neurobiologists over the course of centuries. One explanation widely accepted today is that humans have special cognitive instincts.

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 the consciousness of perhaps the strangest animal of all—the human being.

Nicolelis undertakes the first attempt to explain the entirety of human history, culture, and civilization based on a series of recently uncovered key principles of brain function. This new cosmology is centered around three fundamental properties of the human brain: its insurmountable malleability to adapt and learn; its exquisite ability to allow multiple individuals to synchronize their minds around a task, goal, or belief; and its incomparable capacity for abstraction.

In this book, evolutionary psychologist Dennis Krebs explains how virtuous behaviors such as altruism, justice, honesty, loyalty, self-control, purity, and respect for authority, have evolved in humans and other species. He argues that the key to solving puzzles of morality—such as what it is, how we acquire moral traits, why we sometimes behave badly, and how we make moral decisions—lies in figuring out what adaptive functions moral traits served in early human environments and how they are influenced by social learning, culture, and strategic social interactions in the modern world.

Ouspensky describes how a man must work simultaneously on his knowledge and his being to find inner unity and why although his development depends on his own efforts, this is very difficult to achieve without guidance from a "School."

Why are we the way we are? Why do some of us find it impossible to calm a quick temper or to shake anxiety? The debate has always been divided between nature and nurture, but as psychology professor Daniel P. Keating demonstrates in Born Anxious, new DNA science points to a third factor that allows us to inherit both the nature and the nurture of previous generations - with significant consequences.

Why do three out of four professional football players go bankrupt? How can illiterate jungle dwellers pass a test that tricks Harvard philosophers? And why do billionaires work so hard - only to give their hard-earned money away? When it comes to making decisions, the classic view is that humans are eminently rational. But growing evidence suggests instead that our choices are often irrational, biased, and occasionally even moronic. Which view is right - or is there another possibility?