As I was hinting with Buss, we might have evolved language for one really important reason—communicating or telling people where the prey were—then once you’ve got these language skills, they come in useful for sweet talk and other more specialised things. If you and I are throwing rocks at each other, and let’s say it takes on average five minutes of rock-throwing for one of us to kill the other, it’s still 50/50. So that creates a sort of arms race, and maybe that explains why there’s such a gulf between us and other animals. And this deals with a question that maybe we’ve moved on from: that learning and innateness aren’t opposites. Previously he taught at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, at Cardiff University, at the University of Glamorgan (now the University of South Wales), and The University of York, where he completed his DPhil in 1994.

This book, filled with a broad array of fascinating topics, is bound to further whet the appetite of a growing number of students who have been inspired by this provocative, yet eminently testable approach to human behavior. The original edition was published almost 40 years ago and remains a classic in evolutionary thought.Diamond evenhandedly reviews human history on every continent since the Ice Age at a rate that emphasizes only the broadest movements of peoples and ideas. In a series of illuminating, often surprising experiments, MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. Sapolsky's storytelling concept is delightful but it also has a powerful intrinsic logic: he starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time from there, in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its evolutionary legacy.

He then migrated to the University of Michigan, where he taught for 11 years before accepting his current position at the University of Texas at Austin. In his sensational international bestseller, the preeminent scientist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins delivers a hard-hitting, impassioned, but humorous, rebuttal of religious belief. I already know: I talk to tell you stuff, I talk to get things I want…’ You’ve got to break that down first.It came out in 1994—I’d just become a teenager then, and was getting into all sorts of popular science, from Richard Dawkins to Stephen Hawking. I think science is the better way of coming to truth, but it always leaves you frustrated at the end. Somewhere in Africa, more than a million years ago, a line of apes began to rear their young differently than their Great Ape ancestors. Referring to Lewis Carroll's Red Queen from Through the Looking-Glass, a character who has to keep running to stay in the same place, Matt Ridley demonstrates why sex is humanity's best strategy for outwitting its constantly mutating internal predators. In Why Buddhism is True, Wright leads readers on a journey through psychology, philosophy, and a great many silent retreats to show how and why meditation can serve as the foundation for a spiritual life in a secular age.

And when we started being able to speak—there are changes in the bones of the throat, which they can time quite well. The right half of the brain—so, left arm choosing from pictures in the left field—chose a shovel, which makes sense to go with the snow scene. We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview. She charts the rise of the Extrovert Ideal throughout the twentieth century and explores how deeply it has come to permeate our culture. Sex at Dawn irrefutably shows that what is obvious—that human beings, both male and female, are lustful—is true, and has always been so….It is our groupishness, he explains, that leads to our greatest joys, our religious divisions, and our political affiliations.