Amazon.com
Explaining what William McNeill called The Rise of the West has become the central problem in the study of global history. In Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond presents the biologist's answer: geography, demography, and ecological happenstance. 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. Yet his survey is binocular: one eye has the rather distant vision of the evolutionary biologist, while the other eye--and his heart--belongs to the people of New Guinea, where he has done field work for more than 30 years.
Book Description
With a new chapter. The phenomenal bestseller—over 1.5 million copies sold—is now a major PBS special.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs, and Steel is a brilliant work answering the question of why the peoples of certain continents succeeded in invading other continents and conquering or displacing their peoples. This edition includes a new chapter on Japan and all-new illustrations drawn from the television series.
Until around 11,000 BC, all peoples were still Stone Age hunter/gatherers. At that point, a great divide occurred in the rates that human societies evolved. In Eurasia, parts of the Americas, and Africa, farming became the prevailing mode of existence when indigenous wild plants and animals were domesticated by prehistoric planters and herders. As Jared Diamond vividly reveals, the very people who gained a head start in producing food would collide with preliterate cultures, shaping the modern world through conquest, displacement, and genocide.
The paths that lead from scattered centers of food to broad bands of settlement had a great deal to do with climate and geography. But how did differences in societies arise? Why weren't native Australians, Americans, or Africans the ones to colonize Europe? Diamond dismantles pernicious racial theories tracing societal differences to biological differences.
He assembles convincing evidence linking germs to domestication of animals, germs that Eurasians then spread in epidemic proportions in their voyages of discovery. In its sweep, Guns, Germs and Steel encompasses the rise of agriculture, technology, writing, government, and religion, providing a unifying theory of human history as intriguing as the histories of dinosaurs and glaciers. 32 illustrations.
Customer Reviews:
Very insightful, a worth while read.......2007-10-06
I highly recommend reading this book. Diamond provides compelling evidence for the disparity between civilizations. Any fan of history or just anyone curious about the rise of our current state will find a great read in Guns, Germs, and Steel.
guns,germs and steel.......2007-10-05
great perspective other than what we in western cultures traditionally have in in our relations with 3rd world countries
Dimly Focused.......2007-09-25
Though erudite and crammed with information, some of it a bit arcane, "Guns, Germs, and Steel"suffers somewhat from a blunted point of view. Is the author trying to tell us that some of our assumptions concerning the rise of cultural norms are over simplified? If so, he might have done so more forcefully with fewer words, more carefully selected facts, and perhaps a more lucid writing style. Do some societies prevail because their native tongue is more efficient and expressive than those employed by other cultures? Following that theme might have made for a more intriguing book. Are there some determinisms at work in every culture which inhibit the fulfillment of its destiny? Maybe the author thinks so, but the massive brush used to paint such a scenario causes the entire work to shimmy through a mass of frequently fascinating material without conclusions. The book's excessive length detracts from its compelling points: we live, some of the time, at the mercy of gigantic forces we do not control. Do genetics control our formation, or climate, or enormous economic systems? And who can give us convincing answers? Anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists of course come to mind. But what of poets, seers, artists, and theologians? Maybe Jared Diamond knows, but by the time he finishes inundating us with facts, some slightly pretentious, it's hard to tell for sure. I had hoped this book's scope and claim would give convincing guidance. But because it lacks definite focus, it did not.
Guns Germs and Steel review.......2007-09-24
This is an excellent book, the hypothesis is very compelling and interesting. I watched the DVD in addition to the book and I was not disappointed at all. Worth the read!
A modern, scientific "just so" story.......2007-09-23
One of the most important books of our time; it single-handedly wipes out every justification for racism, and gets to the roots of why humans groups are where they are presently. An amazing synthesis of disciplines into one very readable explanation of how it came to pass that Europeans happened to be the ones that colonized the rest of the planet instead of some other group. The most clear example I've ever seen of why archaeology, and all the social sciences are not only important but vital to modern people. The better our understanding of the past the more likely we are to be able to let go of the emotionality that keeps us at each other's throats. A modern "just so" story.
Book Description
Read it.
You're already living it.
Was diabetes evolution's response to the last Ice Age? Did a deadly genetic disease help our ancestors survive the bubonic plagues of Europe? Will a visit to the tanning salon help lower your cholesterol? Why do we age? Why are some people immune to HIV? Can your genes be turned on -- or off?
Joining the ranks of modern myth busters, Dr. Sharon Moalem turns our current understanding of illness on its head and challenges us to fundamentally change the way we think about our bodies, our health, and our relationship to just about every other living thing on earth, from plants and animals to insects and bacteria.
Through a fresh and engaging examination of our evolutionary history, Dr. Moalem reveals how many of the conditions that are diseases today actually gave our ancestors a leg up in the survival sweepstakes. When the option is a long life with a disease or a short one without it, evolution opts for disease almost every time.
Everything from the climate our ancestors lived in to the crops they planted and ate to their beverage of choice can be seen in our genetic inheritance. But Survival of the Sickest doesn't stop there. It goes on to demonstrate just how little modern medicine really understands about human health, and offers a new way of thinking that can help all of us live longer, healthier lives.
Survival of the Sickest is filled with fascinating insights and cutting-edge research, presented in a way that is both accessible and utterly absorbing. This is a book about the interconnectedness of all life on earth -- and, especially, what that means for us.
Customer Reviews:
Very,very, interesting.......2007-09-21
This is one of those books that is a delightful read, educating, interesting, and entertaining. The author puts forth his theories that many modern diseases are variations of evolutionary traits that were held by our ancestors that enabled them to survive the ice age and bubonic plague. He goes on to describe how viruses cause certain behavior in their carriers to help the viruses survival. The common cold leaves you well enough to stay moving and go to work so you can spread the virus to others, while the parasitic malaria wants you immobile and in bed because mosquitos can continue to carry it even better with you immobile.
The author also presents a case currently making head way in evolutionary science that is challenging the savannah theory. He proposes that we are evolved form aquatic apes as opposed to grassland dwellers, which would explain our hairlessness like other aquatic mammals and being bipedal. We also have fat stored at the skin like water dwellers and our infants have swimming instincts at birth that have been proven by water birthing that is very successful.
And finally I was really fascinated by the finding that what scientists have believed were "junk DNA" is slowly being shown to actually be a creative force that causes mutations in DNA for the benefit of survival of the species. I have always had trouble believing in the evolutionary theory because no mechanism could be created with causing it outside of God, and God would not need it. I also believed that the key was in DNA. Now I have a cause, the DNA itself creates and casues beneficial mutations.
I really can not do this book justice in a review with out making it far to long so buy the book if the above sounds interesting. The book presents an excellent case and has made me a believer.
Evolution in a way you never knew!.......2007-09-08
Everything out there is influencing the evolution of everything else. The bacteria and viruses and parasites that cause disease in us have affected our evolution as we have adapted in ways to cope with their effects. In response they have evolved in turn, and keep on doing so.
There are many dietary diseases that have had an evolutionary advantage in our ancestors but that today do more harm than good. In a person with hemochromatosis, for example, the body always thinks that it doesn't have enough iron and continues to absorb iron unabated. The excess iron can lead to liver failure, heart failure, diabetes, and even cancer.
Why would a disease so deadly be bred into our genetic code? Remember how natural selection works. If a given genetic trait makes you stronger--especially if it makes you stronger before you have children--then you're more likely to survive, reproduce, and pass that trait on. People with hemochromatosis have therefore an evolutionary advantage--protection against the bubonic plague!
On one set of experiments, macrophages from people who had hemochromatosis and macrophages from people who did not were matched against bacteria in separate dishes to test their killing ability. The hemochromatic macrophages crushed the bacteria. They are thought to be significantly better at combating bacteria by limiting the availability of iron than the nonhemochromatic macrophages. So though hemochromatosis will kill those inflicted with it decades later, they are much more likely than people without hemochromatosis to survive plagues, reproduce, and pass the mutation on to their children.
Diabetes also provided an evolutionary advantage to our ancestors by providing superior ability to withstand the cold by eliminating water and driving up sugar levels (like alcohol, sugar is a natural antifreeze). As a theory, it's hotly controversial, but diabetes may have helped our European ancestors survive the sudden cold, including the ice-age.
Malaria is an infectious disease that infects as many as 500 million people every year, killing more than 1 million of them. But not everyone who gets bit by malaria-carrying mosquitoes gets infected. And not everybody who gets infected dies. So what's helping the malaria survivors? People with a genetic tendency for sickle-cell anemia, another inherited blood disorder, had better natural resistance to malaria.
As you've seen with hemochromatosis, diabetes, and sickle-cell anemia, one generation's evolutionary solution is another generation's evolutionary problem.
At the end of the day, every living thing shares two hardwired imperatives: Survive. Reproduce. To achieve this, some organisms have inherited ingenious techniques to manipulate their hosts--the phenomenon that occurs when a parasite provokes its host to behave in a way that helps the parasite to survive and reproduce.
Orb weavers are a family of spiders that experience host manipulation. A wasp bites the spider, temporarily paralyzing it, then deposits its egg in its abdomen. The spider then goes on with his life oblivious to the egg in him. The egg then hatches, and the larva slowly feeds off the blood of the spider. When it is ready to cocoon, it injects chemicals into the spider's bloodstream to manipulate the spider into building a special web for it--instead of building circular webs, it goes back and forth building a rectangular web. Once the web is completed, the larva kills the spider by sucking off all its blood, and then throwing its carcass to the jungle floor below. It then uses the specially built web for it to cocoon by hanging on it.
A worm that infects ants is a classic example of another host manipulator. As the worms being carried by the ant develop, one of them makes its way to the ant's brain where it manipulates the ant's nervous system. Suddenly, the ant behaves in completely uncharacteristic fashion. At night, it leaves its colony and hangs on the tip of a grass, waiting to be eaten by a sheep. If it does not, it returns to its colony only to resume again its journey at night to the tip of a grass waiting to be eaten. Once eaten by a sheep, the worm would have succeeded in its manipulation, and would grow inside the sheep's stomach, its intended host.
The rabies Virus is another interesting host manipulator. It manipulates its host into becoming aggressive, which will make its host bite others and thus also infecting others.
Here is one amazing example of host manipulation: One researcher has discovered that women infected with T. gondii spend more money on clothes and are consistently rated as beings more attractive than women without the infection. Infected women were more easy-going, more warm-hearted, had more friends, and cared more about how they looked. However, they were also less trustworthy and had more relationships with men. Infected men, on the other hand, were less well groomed, more likely to be loners, and more willing to fight. They were also more likely to be suspicious and jealous and less willing to follow rules.
A normal sneeze occurs when the body's self-defense system senses a foreign invader trying to get in through your nasal passages and acts to repel the invasion by expelling it with a sneeze. But sneezing when you've got a cold? There's obviously no way to expel the cold virus which is already lodged in you. The cold virus has learned this reflex so it can infect your colleagues, family and your friends. Your body is actually being manipulated by the virus into sneezing!
The herpes virus may heighten sexual feeling, which will increase the probability of transmission. In other words, sometimes the herpes virus may want you to get some action in order for it to spread to other hosts.
So what if we made it easier for a given type of bacteria to survive in a healthy human than to survive in a sick human? Would this create evolutionary pressure against behavior that harms us? In fact there is an evolutionary advantage for the malaria parasite to push its hosts toward the brink of death. The more parasites swarming through our blood, the more parasites the mosquito is likely to ingest; the more parasites the mosquito ingests, the more likely it will cause an infection when it bites someone else. Cholera is similar--it doesn't need us moving around to find new hosts, so there's no reason for the bacteria to select against virulence. The bottom line is that if an infectious client has allies (such as mosquitoes) or good delivery systems (such as unprotected water supplies), peaceful coexistence with its host becomes a lot less important. In those cases evolution is likely to favor versions of the parasite that best exploit its host's resources, allowing the parasite to multiply as much as possible. Some researchers believe that we can use this understanding to influence the evolution of parasites away from virulence. The basic theory is this: shut down the modes of transmission that don't require human participation and suddenly all the evolutionary pressure is directed at allowing the human host to get up and get out. According to this theory, the virulence of a cholera outbreak in a given population should be directly related to the quality and safety of that population's water supply. If sewage flows easily into rivers that people wash in or drink from, then the cholera strain would evolve toward virulence--it can multiply freely, essentially using up its hosts, relying on its access to the water supply for transmission. But if the water supply is well protected, the organism should evolve away from virulence--the longer it remains in a more mobile host, the better its chance of transmission.
A series of cholera outbreaks that began in Peru in 1991 and spread across South and Central America over the next few years provide compelling evidence that this theory might actually work. The water supply systems from country to country ranged from relatively advanced to seriously rudimentary. Sure enough, when the bacteria invaded nations with poorly protected water supplies, such as Ecuador, the virus became more harmful as it spread. But in countries with safe water supplies, such as Chile, the bacteria evolved downward in virulence and killed fewer people. The implications of this are huge. Instead of challenging bacteria to become stronger and more dangerous through an antibiotic arms race (which we are currently losing), we could essentially challenge them to get along. If mosquitoes didn't have access to bedridden malaria patients, the microbe would be under evolutionary pressure to evolve in a way that allowed the infected person to remain mobile, increasing the opportunity for it to spread.
A series of groundbreaking research has shown that certain compounds can attach themselves to specific genes and suppress their expression. Let's take a look at a few examples. Depending upon the time of year the vole (a type of mouse) is due to give birth, baby voles are born with either a thick coat or a thin coat. The gene for a thick coat is always there--it's just turned on or off depending on the level of light the mother senses in her environment around the time of conception.
One species of lizard is born with a long tail and large body or a small tail and small body depending on one thing only--whether their mother smelled a lizard-eating snake while pregnant. When her babies are entering a snake-filled world, they are born with a long tail and big body, making them less likely to be snake food.
This is a fascinating book and I highly recommend it. I truly enjoyed reading it and I have learnt things I never imagined! Now that's what I call precious reading!
Understanding genetic disease from an evolutionary point of view.......2007-09-01
We really don't "need" disease. This is a bit misleading. It just so happens that some genetic disorders, such as sickle-cell anemia, favism, diabetes, hemochromatosis, the tendency to obesity, etc., confer on the afflicted compensatory advantages. Thus a predilection for getting fat is adaptive if a drought or a long winter beckons, or a person with a genetic tendency toward sickle-cell anemia is less likely to get malaria, and so on. Note that it is only diseases caused by genetic mutations that Dr. Moalem is talking about.
One of the techniques our bodies use when fighting infection is to reduce the amount of iron available to the invaders. Bacteria need iron to reproduce. If there is a lot of it available their numbers can grow quickly. Without iron they can't reproduce at all. Iron is a limiting factor for many kinds of life. Vast stretches of ocean support little in the way of life because the microorganisms that begin the food chain can't grow where there is so little iron. As Dr. Moalem reports in this wide-ranging and eyebrow-lifting book, sprinkle some iron onto those patches of ocean and they will quickly turn green with microorganisms.
So it is a bit of an irony that people who have hemochromatosis, a genetic disorder that causes them to retain large amounts of iron in their bodies, are able to survival infections like the plague. This is because they starve the invading microbes through "iron locking." They have a lot of iron in their bodies, but they keep it away from the bacteria. Other people who have low levels of iron in their bodies are able to withstand bacterial attacks because they also keep what little iron they have away from the germs. In fact, one of the body's initial responses to microbial invasion is to limit the amount of free iron in the system.
Genetic coding for levels of iron in the body is an example of evolutionary adaptation, part of the ongoing arms race between us and the microbes that live in and on our bodies. This is just one of several interesting and new ideas coming from the growing science of evolutionary medicine that I found in Survival of the Sickest. Incidentally, one way to manage hemochromatosis is through donating blood on a regular basis, which explains in part why physicians of old were sometimes successful when they bled their patients.
This got me to thinking about "only women bleed" which led me to think about hemorrhoids (which prove that it isn't only women who bleed). Perhaps bleeding instead of retaining blood, which seems like the more natural thing for our bodies to do, has adaptive value in some people in some environments.
Another interesting idea is this from page 58: "ACHOO syndrome--its full name is autosomal dominant compelling heliopthalmic outburst syndrome." It is a "disorder that causes uncontrolled sneezing when someone is exposed to bright light, usually sunlight, after being in the dark." Dr. Moalem suggests that "way back when our ancestors spent more time in caves, this reflex helped them to clear out any molds or microbes that might have lodged in their noses or upper respiratory tract." Now this may sound a bit far fetched, but I have suffered from low grade allergies all my life, and used to have asthmatic attacks. I came to believe that the buildup in my lungs and the sneezing were signals to me to move on! Of course now I clean and vacuum like a germaphobe, but the idea is the same. My symptoms were adaptive. They more or less forced me to reduce the level of potential irritants and microbes in my environment.
But there is more. I noticed long ago that sometimes the sun in the morning would cause me to sneeze. I never figured out why until I read the above from Dr. Moalem. I am just the kind of person who would need to sneeze those molds out.
Later on in the book Moalem returns to an evolutionary idea that has been kicking around for decades. Beginning with the work of Elaine Morgan from the 1970s the public became aware of the notion that we humans had an aquatic past. She got the idea from marine biologist Alister Hardy. Through such books as The Descent of Woman (1972) and The Aquatic Ape: A Theory of Human Evolution (1982) Morgan argued that some of our unusual adaptations came about because we had an aquatic past. Taking up the idea, Moalem writes, "Every hairless mammal is aquatic or at least plays in the mud--think of hippos, elephants and the African warthog. But there aren't any hairless primates." (p. 198) Furthermore we have fat directly under our skin to help keep us warm just as aquatic mammals do. Also, Moalem notes, "the ability to survive on land and sea" gives us adaptive flexibility. If "chased by a leopard, the semiaquatic ape could dive into the water; chased by a crocodile, it could run into the forest." (p. 199)
These ideas are familiar but what I didn't know was that an aquatic past could have figured in our evolution toward bipedalism. "[S]tanding upright in water allowed...[aquatic apes] to venture into deeper water and still breathe, and the water helped to support their upper bodies, making it easier to support them on two feet." (p. 199)
This is an easy to read book, aimed at a general readership. An earlier, slightly more technical book that covers some of the same territory is Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine (1994) by Randolph M. Nesse and George C. Williams, which I also recommend.
Razzle dazzle them.......2007-08-27
This book embodies much of what I dislike in popular cience books, while having few of the qualities I admire in such books. It relies more on sleigh of the hand and razzle dazzle, you-wouldn't-have-thought-of-it than on throughly thought out, well substantiated lines of thought.
Let's start with the subtitle: "A medical maverick discovers why we need disease". That is a clear case of fiction: nowhere in the book does the author "discover" anything; he merely retells the study of others. This, of course, is not a demerit, as many interesting scientists have difficulties in explaining their work in clear terms, acessible to the layman. However, the author must be hyped as the "discoverer", as the center figure in the tale.
Since James Burke's "Connections", it seems that popular science must explore all the crossroads, no matter how irrelevant. So Moalem goes on long tangents that have little to do with the theory he is trying to substantiate. In order to show how diabetes works to protect the body against cold, the reader is taken through the mechanism of an ice age, how ice core samples are removed and so on. If one were to remove all this "extra" material, this book would be thin indeed.
The book seems to revolve around this material and the author's use of jokes. Unfortunately, his sense of humour tends more towards ha-ha than funny, which helped to further fray my patience towards this book.
All of this is indeed a pity, as the subject is very interesting. If more pages had been dedicated to developing a central line of thought and substantiation and to showing the debate behind all these ideas (in a real light, instead of "the thickheaded traditionalists who won't accept new ideas"), it would be well worth the read.
Somewhat difficult subject matter for those lacking a background in science or medicine.........2007-07-08
From time to time I pick up a book on a subject I know virtually nothing about. Ordinarily I devour books about history or politics or current events. These are topics I am well versed in and comfortable with.
Dr. Sharon Moalem's "The Survival of the Sickest: sounded like a fascinating departure from my ordinary fare. So I thought I would give it a whirl. Unfortunately for me the results were somewhat mixed. Although Dr. Moalem and her co-author have written this book in fairly simple language that most should be able to follow pretty easily I found myself overwhelmed at times by the number of terms I was simply not familiar with at all. I'm afraid my lack of education in the sciences was showing. Blame me not the good doctor. Yet in spite of these difficulties I was still able to glean some important information from this book. I now have a somewhat better understanding of the whole business of why disease exists in the first place. I also discovered the important role viruses play in our ability to survive and reproduce. I also found out that the development of diabetes in human beings probably emerged as natures response to people having to cope with conditions in regions with extremely cold temperatures. This makes perfect sense and was interesting to me because a number of people in my family have battled this disease. Perhaps the most fascinating thing I learned in "Survival of the Sickest" is that exposure to the sunshine actually helps to convert the cholestorol in our bodies into the vitamin D we all need to ensure strong bones and help avoid osteoperosis. I had never heard this before and found this revelation to be quite interesting indeed!
For me, attempting to read "Survival of the Sickest" was a little like visiting a foreign country and not knowing the language. I was simply unprepared to get the most out of this book. As you can see, other reviewers continue to heap praise on Dr. Sharon Moalem for her book. I suspect their evaluation of this book is right on the money. In the end I found that reading "Survival of the Sickest" was time well spent anyway. After all, it is impossible to expand your horizons if you never make the attempt.
Average customer rating:
- Easy Read
- Great Way to Lose Weight -- Best for Type O
- Eat Right 4 Your Type
- diet
- Blood Type Diet is No More Than Silly Mumbo-Jumbo
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Eat Right 4 Your Type: The Individualized Diet Solution to Staying Healthy, Living Longer & Achieving Your Ideal Weight
Peter J. D'Adamo
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Amazon.com
If you've ever wondered why the latest fad diet doesn't work for you... well, there are lots of reasons, mostly the fact that it's a fad diet. But it could also be that you're the wrong blood type for the kinds of foods the diet recommends. Peter D'Adamo makes a persuasive argument that your blood type is an evolutionary marker that tells you which foods you'll process best, and which will be useless calories. He covers the entire range for each of the four blood types, from entrées to condiments and seasonings, and also makes type-specific exercise and lifestyle recommendations.
Amazon.com Audiobook Review
This abridged audiobook introduces Dr. Peter J. D'Adamo's revolutionary approach to dieting based on the connection between blood type and health. Read by audio pro Polly Adams, D'Adamo's bestseller details how different foods affect specific blood types both positively and negatively. We learn that "pastas made from buckwheat are better tolerated for Type Os," and that type As should eliminate all meat from their diet to reduce the risk of heart disease and cancer. Adams blends an efficient, no-nonsense delivery and warm tones that may remind some of a favorite talk-radio personality. And considering the important subject matter, listeners will appreciate all of these qualities. While some dieters may find the suggestions too progressive--it's recommended that women with a history of breast cancer in their family introduce snails into their diet--this is a beneficial three-hour investment for dieters seeking alternative nutritional plans. (Running time: three hours, two cassettes) --Cate Bick
Book Description
New York Times best seller
âI found the information in Eat Right For Your Type absolutely fascinating.â
- Christiane Northrup, M.D., author of Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom
FINALLY, A DIET THAT'S JUST YOUR TYPE!
Noted naturopathic physician Dr. Peter J. D'Adamo introduces a revolutionary new way to eat - and to live. In Eat Right For Your Type, he explains his groundbreaking diet plan based upon blood type. Our blood type is a roadmap to our inner chemistry - and each blood type processes food, handles stress, and fights disease differently. Find out what you should be eating, and how you should be exercising in accord with your own type. For instance,
For Type O:Focus on higher protein, eliminate grains, and perform energetic aerobic exercise
For Type A:Go vegetarian, exercise more mildly, and ease tension through meditation
For Type B:Vary your diet with a diversity of food groups (including dairy), and exercise moderately by swimming or walking
For Type AB:You have most of the benefits and intolerances of Types A and B. Utilize relaxation exercises
From A to O, Eating Right For Your Type is as simple as A, B, C!
Read by Polly Adams.
Customer Reviews:
Easy Read.......2007-09-05
I found this book to be a very easy read. It gives very simple straight forward explanations and rationale for the diet and it's theories. It further reads like an instruction manual and very clearly explains what foods are beneficial, neutral, or an avoid. Pretty straight forward, if it's beneficial eat it, if it's an avoid, avoid it. And if it's a neutral it has little significance either way, so you can eat it but don't make it a diet staple.
Great Way to Lose Weight -- Best for Type O.......2007-08-24
I have followed the guidelines in this book loosely for 2 weeks and have lost over 8 pounds. Which is a 20% of the weight I want to lose by December. I am type O which is the best type to be on this diet because it allows for a larger range of foods. Type O's should definately try this diet, and its not hard to follow. The Other blood types should try this as well, but food options are more restricted. So if you have a hard time avoiding certain foods this may not be for you.
Eat Right 4 Your Type.......2007-08-11
Eat Right 4 Your Type: The Individualized Diet Solution to Staying Healthy, Living Longer & Achieving Your Ideal Weight
by Peter J. D'Adamo
I have gotten 5 or 6 of this book for friends, and have one in my libary.
I have found it to be the most moving and inlighting book I have read.
Having Diabetes I was not happy with my body, I did not like shots.
Now all I do is watch what I eat and when NO shots or Pills just diet.
I feal better then I ever have and my Doctor is amazed.
You have to try it it works.
diet .......2007-08-01
product in great shape and on time. content did not help, made worse. would recommend seller but not the book
Blood Type Diet is No More Than Silly Mumbo-Jumbo.......2007-07-30
In John Robbins new book, "Healthy At 100", he studies the Abkhasians of the Caucasus Mountains, the Vilcabambans of Ecuador and the Hunzans of Pakistan. These are probably the three healthiest populations in the world. None of them prepare special foods for different people of different blood types. Yet they are almost universally healthy and happy.
Weston Price traveled the world back in the 1930s and examined the healthiest tribes of people to be found. None of them prepared different foods for people of different blood types.
To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a single scientific study demonstrating that people of different blood types have different nutritional needs.
Blood type diets are nothing more than silly mumbo-jumbo. Why do people embrace this kind of dietary cult? I'm not sure. Maybe because people feel a need to be segmented and divided in some way. This is MY special blood type diet! I eat this and you shouldn't. Maybe people embrace this stuff because it helps rationalize decisions that they have already made.
Book Description
For over three decades, Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines, he argued that computers would soon rival the full range of human intelligence at its best. Now he examines the next step in this inexorable evolutionary process: the union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our creations.
Customer Reviews:
Fantastic insight into a possible, plauible future of humans and the universe.......2007-10-07
This is one the the favorite books I have ever read. It is not an easy read for a non-scientist, but absolutely rewarding. It is surprisingly accessible, despite the technical and intellectual scope. The logical and insightful nature of Kurzweil's arguments make it a compelling and inspirational read. The book has had a huge impact on my thinking and introduced me to the whole subject of futurism. It is affecting my investment and career decisions. There were numerous mind-bending, mind-expanding moments during reading this as the gravity of the concepts sank in. Garreau's book, Radical Evolution, is a great follow-up read, comparing and contrasting Kurzweil's optimism with the pessimism of others. It is a joy and luxury to be exposed to the visions such "big thinkers".
Look-out future here we come.......2007-09-10
I read this book with such optimism for our future. I only hope to live long enough to see some of the exciting events in our future on this planet. Just when you think you have seen it all, you "ain't seen nutt'n yet". Come on world let's work together and solves some of the mysteries that are tearing us apart.
hold onto your hat.......2007-08-29
the future is going to be wild.
ray kurzweil is the leading guru of the not so far off world where key technologies merge to allow us to turn ourselves into non biological humans.
no crack pot he. when kurzweil presented his thesis at MIT the arguments centered on the when, not the if of kurzweils predictions
Not for non geeks!.......2007-07-26
Although the reading is tedious for someone who is not that scientifically or computer oriented, the concepts and ideas the book presents are fascinating and a bit scary!
Most important book of the next 50 yrs.......2007-07-25
At some point I hope that people will stop paying attention to Paris Hilton and read this book. Our species is at a crossroads and we have some very important decisions to make in the next few decades. This book more than any other will prepare us to make the right choices. Read it now, or be devoured by a swarm of nanobots in 2029 when Skynet takes over.
Book Description
Composed of cutting-edge reasearch and featuring an engaging writing style, the author offers compelling scientific answers to the profound human questions regarding love and work.
Beginning with a historial introduction, the text logically progresses by discussing adaptive problems humans face and ends with a chapter showing how the new field of evolutionary psychology encompasses all branches of psychology. Each chapter is alive with the subjects that most occupy our minds: sex, mating, getting along, getting ahead, friends, enemies, and social hierarchies. Why is child abuse 40 times more prevalent among step-families than biologically intact families? Why, according to one study, did 75% of men but 0% of women consent to have sex with a complete stranger? Buss explores these intriguing quandaries with his vision of psychology in the new millenium as a new science of the mind.
Anyone with an interest in the biological facets of human psychology will find this a fascinating read.
Customer Reviews:
high on appeal, low on rigor.......2005-06-24
I used this book as a text book for a course I taught on Evolutionary Psychology. On the whole, the students really enjoyed the text and they found Buss's writing style to be very engaging and easy to read. I would agree.
Nevertheless, I feel this book--like the whole field of Evolutionary Psychology--requires a far more rigorous scientific framework before it can be considered a field that can substantively explain human behavior from an evolutionary perspective. Don't get me wrong: evolutionary hypotheses can provide a lot of insight into particular human behaviors. However, I would have liked to see much more discussion on what is science, what constitutes a scientifically valid argument, how do we falsify a particular hypothesis, etc. These issues could be covered in a few pages or so, and I think they could help flesh out or perhaps even justify some of the arguments put forth in the text. As it stands now, the book reads more like an apologetic and as I skim the pages, I get the same feeling that I do when I've been pamphleted by evangelicals. Buss's arguments are fraught with generalizations: studies on college kids are extrapolated to the whole human species, studies on plumage color in birds are used to argue for handicaps in humans, and on and on it goes. There are sentences that make pretty extraordinarly claims that go unreferenced and there are sentences that make trivial points that are tailed by six references.
Professor Buss does a good job in conveying the basics of natural selection, but then uses some of the most tenuous definitions of fitness in trying to make an adaptive argument: questionaires, age, symmetry, and even intuition are all stand-ins for fitness. This is a shame because in order to know when selection will operate, we need to know how phenotypic (including behavioral) variation covaries with fitness. Because his fitness proxies are so weak, I have a hard time buying many of the arguments advanced in the book. Other evolutionary forces are rarely discussed; such lapses are unfortunate since it is likely that drift has played some (if not a major) role in getting populations to cross adaptive valleys, as well as affecting the evolutionary dynamics of frequency-dependent selection. But I digress...
I hope future editions (and I'm sure they're on their way) will include a chapter on scientific and evolutionary epistemology. That is, I would like to see a chapter address the question: what steps do evolutionary biologists proceed through when they make an adaptive argument. This would be a timely and useful contribution given that intelligent-design folks are trying to loosen up and poke holes in the definition of science. One chapter starts down this road but never critically discusses how hypotheses are tested (and rejected!), it focuses more on how hypotheses are developed--and believe me, evolutionary psychologists are good at coming up with hypotheses. Professor Buss's book, with its profligate use of unfalsifiable hypotheses, does not help the cause in this respect. Sure, evolutionary psychologists can always hide behind Lakatos as they denigrate Popper for being too severe, or, like Dunbar et al., they can actually learn some math, some scientific epistemology, and help bring evolutionary psychology into a more rigorous, more reputable position. Buss's book does too much of the former and not enough of the latter.
HUMAN CIVILIZATION FROM THE PRESENT: WHY WE ACT THIS WAY.......2004-03-27
Each day for twenty-something years I woke up to see reality as it was presented to me. I noticed many patterns in life that are hard not to notice -- such as the difference between men and women in how they approach sexual opportunities. Men will readily say yes, women firmly no. Why?
Evolution is such an intriguing and elegant theory on its approach to our current behavior. Boss's contention is that the present behaviors we see today in our modern era -- fear of snakes, high male sexual drive -- arose from our ancestors. Those who did not have such characteristics did not become our ancestors. Thus, over time, certain characteristics were more likely to be successful in the mating process, and those are the same characteristics we see today. Boss's insight required a lot of keen intellectual insight into many different hypothesis.
Some of these hypothesis seemed far-fetched at first. Who would think that there would be statistical differences in how maternal grandparents v. paternal grandparents relate to their grandchildren. There are, however. Maternal grandmothers have less risk in investing in a grandchild who is not biologically related since she is confident that her daughter is biologically hers, and she can be certain that her daughter's child is biologically related, too. The hypothesis that paternal grandfathers would be most distant -- since they have the most to lose -- turned out to be true. (Paternal grandfathers cannot be 100% certain that they fathered their son or daughter, and thus, they cannot be sure that that child's son or daughter is biologically related).
This is perhaps one of the most important contributions in scientific literature since Watson and Clark's published report on their findings of DNA.
Michael Gordon
A thorough, rigorous, and illuminating book........2002-06-01
David Buss, author of The Evolution of Desire and The Dangerous Passion, brings his formidable intellect, research experience, knowledge, and writing talent to bear in this impressive introduction to the field of Evolutionary Psychology. It is obvious from reading the book that it was painstakingly researched. An impressive breadth of research studies in evolutionary psychology and relevant work from other disciplines, including anthropology, biology, and sociology are clearly explained and their implications discussed. Alternative hypotheses and interpretations of research, where alternatives have been explicitly proposed, are even-handedly explored. The chapters of the book are organized by the kinds of problems of survival and reproduction faced by our ancestors. This organization makes the broad range of specific research covered in the book easy to understand and integrate into a coherent understanding of the evolutionary origins of human cognition and behavior. Thought-provoking, absorbing, and exceptionally well written: Dr. Buss's Evolutionary Psychology text is an absolute joy to read. It is a must-have for psychologists, biologists, and any student of human nature.
Procede with Caution.......2001-01-13
I have not read the text book. I am a former student of Dr. Buss' and suspect that it will be as vacant in theory as his previous literary attempts. Evolutionary Psychology is an extremely interesting field, but as with any field must be considered in an interdisciplanary manner. The reviewers that make blanket statements about Evolutionary Psychology being the only world view might benefit from reading some philosophy without prejudging it as merely a coping mechanism. For those of you who considering purchasing this book, the last time I spoke with Dr. Buss, he had only very superficial knowledge of the more detailed and sophisticated theories in this field of study and this will probably be reflected in the text book. To be fair, his writing is often enjoyable and as others have said, does read like a novel, but do not mistake this for depth of knowledge.
A Great Introduction to Evolutionary Psychology.......2000-07-12
In "Evolutionary Psychology -- The New Science of Mind," David M. Buss delivers a comprehensive, well-detailed, and illustrative presentation of evolved psychological mechanisms that have become universal across the human species while detailing the biology necessary to understand evolutionary theory and how it applies to human psychology. Organizationally-sound, the textbook reads like a novel, clearly providing theoretical and empirical information requisite for a fundamental understanding of Evolutionary Psychology. Buss' volume is essential reading for students of Evolutionary Psychology and very suitable reading for those of us interested in why we are the way we are. For more advanced readers, "The Adapted Mind," edited by Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby is an ideal choice.
Book Description
Marc Hauser's eminently readable and comprehensive book Moral Minds is revolutionary. He argues that humans have evolved a universal moral instinct, unconsciously propelling us to deliver judgments of right and wrong independent of gender, education, and religion. Experience tunes up our moral actions, guiding what we do as opposed to how we deliver our moral verdicts.
For hundreds of years, scholars have argued that moral judgments arise from rational and voluntary deliberations about what ought to be. The common belief today is that we reach moral decisions by consciously reasoning from principled explanations of what society determines is right or wrong. This perspective has generated the further belief that our moral psychology is founded entirely on experience and education, developing slowly and subject to considerable variation across cultures. In his groundbreaking book, Hauser shows that this dominant view is illusory.
Combining his own cutting-edge research with findings in cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, economics, and anthropology, he examines the implications of his theory for issues of bioethics, religion, law, and our everyday lives.
Customer Reviews:
Natural Morality.......2007-09-17
Over the last decade the study of the human brain has moved out of the leafy halls of academia into many different fields, including ethics and the law. If socially unacceptable behavior is being driven by some wiring problem in the brain, is a person legally liable? Or is the brain just one part of the chain of causes with learning and experience playing a larger part? The lion's share of the evidence indicates that genes and the brain determine how we interact with the environment rather than determining how we behave, but there is still a great deal of research that needs to be done.
This book has been getting a lot of attention and for a very good reason: not only is it a well-written account by someone who is an exceptionally clear thinker, but the implications of his book stretch far beyond simple academic discussions: they have implications not only for neuroscience, but for ethics, spirituality and the law.
Marc Hauser is a biologist at Harvard and in this book he argues that the human moral sense is inbuilt and the product of evolution, much like our capacity for language. He suggests that the structure of our minds - or at least our brains - reflect our egalitarian hunter-gatherer past and reveals "left over circuitry from the cavemen."
Hauser begins by contrasting three approaches to moral thinking:
The first was espoused by the philosopher Immanuel Kant in the late eighteenth century, who proposed that we follow a categorical imperative. In Kant's view, we could and should live by the Golden Rule, treating others as we would have them treat us, and never using people merely as a means to something else.
The second approach was proposed by the eighteen century Scottish philosopher David Hume, who came to the conclusion that reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions. So if we do something because we are frustrated or angry, we should be castigated and punished because we failed to express out true nature.
The third approach is that of the political philosopher John Rawls. Rawls - like the Harvard linguist Noam Chomsky - proposed that there are deep similarities between language and morality. Chomsky believes that we are hardwired to understand and produce language, while Rawls believes that we all have an innate moral faculty. What that means is that we are all born with an ability to form moral judgments, and that we do not simply embrace the views of our family, tribe or church. The rub is this: because it is an innate ability bred of countless millennia of evolution, we often have no idea why we hold the views they we do.
The parallels between our innate morality and language are explored in this book.
When a twenty-nine year old Chomsky produced his first book in 1957 it created a firestorm of protest as well as some enthusiastic acceptance. We know that people the world over utter grammatical sentences in their own language, but it had been assumed that it began as simple mimicry: children copied the language, syntax and grammar of their parents and others. But Chomsky proposed that the ability is hardwired into the structure of the brain, and that is why we have little or no insight into how grammar works. By analogy, Hauser proposes that children and adults construct moral codes and make judgments without any insight into their reasons for doing so.
Hauser is an acclaimed academic, and it is no surprise that he supports his hypothesis with an array of thought-provoking examples, some better known than others.
One of the better known has been used in psychology and philosophy classes for years. It is the Trolley Problem, taken from a classic set of moral dilemmas proposed by the philosopher Phillipa Foot. The story goes like this. A bystander named Denise is a passenger on an out-of-control railway trolley, which is speeding down the track with an incapacitated driver. The vehicle is heading directly toward five people on the track ahead, bringing with it certain death. Denise can flip a switch that would turn the trolley onto a sidetrack with just one person on it. That one person will die, saving the other five. Should she flip the switch? Hauser's own intuition is that she should, and he marshals various moral arguments to support him.
But now comes the second part. Consider another bystander named Frank. He is on a footbridge over the same railway trolley with the same five endangered people. On the bridge is a large man whom Frank can push off the bridge and so stop the trolley and save the five. Should he do so? Should he sacrifice one man to save five?
Here Hauser's view is that he should not. But exactly why not? Is it because of Denise and Frank's intentions? Is it because Frank would be using the man as a means? In each case the result is the same, one person is killed and five are saved. This is interesting, not as an academic exercise, but because most people come up with similar responses to the dilemma.
Here is another example: what if a surgeon can save the lives of five dying people by taking organs from one perfectly healthy person? Almost no one says that this action is justified, but why not? In fact when such a thing was actually done during the Holocaust, the prosecutors at Nuremberg considered it to be one of the most egregious of all the crimes committed. The utter breakdown of agreed moral norms during those dark years and continuing depravity in some parts of the world remains a challenge for philosophers and scientists to this day; including the author of this book.
Hauser is evidently a good teacher, and he constructs a number of variations of these themes to show us that, with the kinds of exceptions that I just mentioned, the intuitions of very different people are usually much the same. Second. He shows how difficult it is to provide logical justifications for those intuitions. Like all good teachers he includes some personal disclosures, and tells an amusing tale about his own father, who, despite being an intelligent and well-educated physicist, became confused and frustrated when he tried to find logical justifications for his immediate responses.
Hauser reviews evidence from different cultures and from his own research using an online Moral Sense Test, to show how little judgments vary between people of different backgrounds and cultures.
This leads to another important similarity between language and morality. Languages are not chaotic: they follow certain constraints. All known languages follow a set of universal principles. But there are also a set of variable parameters that include the order of words, different ways of making plurals, gender attributions and all those other nuances that can frustrate anyone trying to master a foreign language. Hauser argues that it is the same with morality: there are universal principles and culture-bound parameters. He continues the parallels to point out that as with a language, once people acquire their specific moral grammar, other grammars may seem as incomprehensible as does Japanese to a native English speaker.
He illustrates his thesis with valuable discussions about murder and manslaughter, the treatment of women in different cultures, attitudes to abortion, euthanasia, pedophilia and incest, together with notions of fairness and punishment.
The book is illustrated by some delightful little drawings that do an excellent job of breaking up the narrative.
Marc Hauser if a very good writer and the book is not a difficult read, despite weighing in at over 400 closely reasoned pages. He makes many points that need to be heard. Not only by his colleagues and by people curious to understand more about themselves and those around them, but also by politicians, lawyers and ethicists.
Highly recommended.
Richard G. Petty, MD, author of Healing, Meaning and Purpose: The Magical Power of the Emerging Laws of Life
A poor collection of sophomoric philosophy.......2007-04-01
In a grand way Marc Hauser represents centuries of philosophy intermingled with anecdotes from psychological, anthropological, and economic research. Unfortunately, what he doesn't do is provide a scientific grounding for understanding moral choice.
To understand why people call things right and wrong you need to start with the biology of learning, expectation, and cognition. Given that we are just barely now scratching the surface of these topics Hauser's attempt was bound to fail. His own morals pervade the book and act as logical starting points for his arguments, but rarely does he act as a scientist and dismiss his own morality to seek out the real question which is, "How does the brain create a sense of right and wrong, and is there any definitive proof that there is a universal biological morality?"
Neuroscience tells us that there are very few things we are hardwired to do that we cannot unlearn or adapt to deal with our environments. Hauser spectacularly fails to convince that any moral code is anything other than a learned societal norm.
great idea, poor execution.......2007-03-31
I agree with Rick: great idea, poor execution. Various moral and social systems have long tried to codify and explain away through religious and other naratives what is only natural to us. Kudos to Mark Hauser for bringing our innate "moral organ" to broad attention.
His writing however is another matter. I suggest, read his introductory chapter "What Is Wrong?" and then cherry-pick from the rest of the book as much of the following material is highly repetitive. This is topic waiting to be tackled again by another, stronger writer.
Placing morals into the biological realm where they belong.......2007-03-23
This book affirms something that I have thought true for some time now - that morality is governed by instinctual paradigms in healthy individuals. Hearing from birth and from right-wing sources on the news daily that our morality can only be saved by a reversion to "biblical" mores, I had always wondered why the statistics do not back this "moral majority" up. For instance, in countries like Sweden and Iceland and many other European nations where secularism is high, they have much lower rates of crime and their citizens are just as happy if not more so than the average Sunday-bible-toting-American who thinks they have a "higher" version of morality than the "godless heathen."
Hauser cites empirical data that shows that morality is often operating at an unconscious level in human beings as evidenced by tests where subjects make a moral choice but then can offer only incoherent justifications. Hauser's parallel to our "Language Instinct" here is spot on, given that most native speakers can form perfectly grammatical sentences, but if asked about detailed grammatical structures and relationships, they fail miserably. This, I think, is one reason that religion enjoys its ascendant status (at least in America) in regards to morality. Religion is an overt manifestation of moral principles, something people otherwise have little or no conscious access to. It doesn't matter how outdated or ridiculous religious "morals" are, people will cling to them because in their minds it is the only available source of a description of morality. The faster that science can describe these principles, the better off humanity will be.
Taking in relevant topics from moral philosophy, economics, psychology, and of course, the meat of his argument, socio-biological findings from our primate and animal cousins, Hauser shows that the precursors of human morality, at least in rudimentary form, are present in many other animals. This presence gives science a strong foothold in the arena of ethics. These findings must be to the chagrin of such writers as Francis Collins who invoked the god of the gaps in "The Language of God" to explain that human morality must be due to divine fiat. Indeed it is not.
It's just not written well.......2007-03-21
I got this book after hearing Hauser give a very illluminating and fascinating interview on NPR. Sadly his book is not as nearly interesting as his interview technique is. He repeats his thesis into the ground many times. His clever examples are sometimes not so clever. The book is too long and wordy. Being a lover of philosophy, I of all people never thought I would say that about a book. That can be a good thing in capable hands, but Hauser is definitely a scientist and not a writer. Some better editing and tightening of the text would've made this book a real winner. Finally, the link to linguistics, a main theme of the book, is a turn off for me personally as the linguistics field in no way interests me. However, one refreshing aspect is that he amdits its a theory. Sometimes I feel contemporary science books are too ready to start claiming themselves to be fact. Only get it if you can find it cheap, and hopefully Hausers honesty, enthusiasm and knowledge will get you past the poor writing, sadly it wasn't the case for me.
Book Description
Written by one of the leading archaeological writers in the world—in a simple, jargon-free narrative style—this brief, well-illustrated account of the major developments in the human past (from the origins of humanity to the origins of literate civilization) makes world prehistory uniquely accessible to complete beginners. Up-to-date and state-of-the-art in content and perspective, it covers the entire world (not just the Americas or Europe), placing major emphasis on both theories and the latest archaeological and multidisciplinary approaches. The main focus is on four major developments—the origins of humanity; the appearance and spread of modern humans before and during the late Ice Age, including the first settlement of the Americas; the beginnings of food production; and the rise of the first civilizations. For individuals who want to get acquainted with anthropology.
Customer Reviews:
Man's origins and developments for the general reader.......2003-04-02
Man's innate curiosity with their past has given birth to sciences that attempt to satisfy such curiosity. Brian Fagan, an archaeologist himself, outlines brilliantly the major developments of humankind in prehistory, from that scientific perspective. Sophisticated theories and tools from disciplines such archaeology, biology, ecology, geology and even genetics and psychology are elaborated for the general reader. Utilising such diversity of disciplines, World Prehistory introduces to the reader, the developments of humankind- the origins, exodus and migration of man, food production and state formation- from the earliest times especially before written records were available.
Even before Fagan gets into details, he outlines the scope of the book and distinguishes the discipline of archaeology insofar as it is scientific, rigorous and it utilises tools and expertise from other disciplines. Throughout the book, there are scientific archaeological explanations in the form of theories, data and methodologies and at the very onset, the author derides the "romantic world of high adventure and exciting discovery" connected to pseudoarcheaology, which to him belongs to the "realms of religious faith and science fiction".
The book is divided into 4 parts in a generally chronological arrangement. The first part introduces to the reader the study of human prehistory with succinct explanations of the concepts of history, culture, space and time. Part 2 outlines scientific approaches to explain the origins of mankind and his relationships with other primates. The author draws evidence from geology, genetics and most importantly, paleoanthropology (the specialized study of human bone remains). Part 2 also presents one of the most controversial questions in anthropology, that is the path of migration of modern man. The author favours the "African exodus Theory"" and describes it in detail. Part 3 is a discussion of the birth of the modern world with special emphasis on the origins of food production, one of the hallmarks of ancient civilisations. The book culminates in Part 4, with very broad discussions on ancient civilisations in Western Asia, Africa, South, Southeast and East Asia and the Americas.
As an introductory book to world prehistory, it lacks detailed study of other aspects of prehistoric mankind's developments especially in the fields of language, religion and a new, exciting and only recently explored field of psychological archaeology, dealing with the minds and thinking of the earliest humans. The latter, the author concedes, must go beyond material remains and develop new ways to explore the minds of the earliest humans and understand why they developed the way they did.
However, as with most introductory books, World Prehistory can only describe its subject matter at surface level. However, after reading the book, I have obtained a general sense of the methods and theories that attempt to explain with the period of human history which was not recorded in writing. With so many theories, methods and even non-scientific explanations of mankind's ancient past, World Prehistory is a good book to introduce a reader to the latest and most widely accepted tools, methodologies and theories.
A very decent book.......2000-04-30
This book is not designed for the hardcore anthropology student as it doesn't delve into the extreme details of the subject, but it does give a very broad overview of the millions of years of human prehistory. Most of the time is spent talking about the journey from ape-like ancestors to the origin of food production and the large state-run societies that we have today. Therefore, when Fagan talks about specific cultures and societies he just gives an overview, he chooses to put most details to use describing why and how humans got to where they are today. Very good book is you want an effective and interesting introduction to human origins, but this isn't something that would be used for a 300 or 400 level class.
Amazon.com
Why do fools fall in love? Why does a man's annual salary, on average, increase $600 with each inch of his height? When a crack dealer guns down a rival, how is he just like Alexander Hamilton, whose face is on the ten-dollar bill? How do optical illusions function as windows on the human soul? Cheerful, cheeky, occasionally outrageous MIT psychologist Steven Pinker answers all of the above and more in his marvelously fun, awesomely informative survey of modern brain science. Pinker argues that Darwin plus canny computer programs are the key to understanding ourselves--but he also throws in apt references to Star Trek, Star Wars, The Far Side, history, literature, W. C. Fields, Mozart, Marilyn Monroe, surrealism, experimental psychology, and Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty and his 888 children. If How the Mind Works were a rock show, tickets would be scalped for $100. This book deserved its spot as Number One on bestseller lists. It belongs on a short shelf alongside such classics as Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, by Daniel C. Dennett, and The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology, by Robert Wright. Pinker's startling ideas pop out as dramatically as those hidden pictures in a Magic Eye 3D stereogram poster, which he also explains in brilliantly lucid prose.
Book Description
In this extraordinary bestseller, Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading cognitive scientists, does for the rest of the mind what he did for language in his 1994 book, The Language Instinct. He explains what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and ponder the mysteries of life. And he does it with the wit that prompted Mark Ridley to write in the New York Times Book Review, "No other science writer makes me laugh so much. . . . [Pinker] deserves the superlatives that are lavished on him." The arguments in the book are as bold as its title. Pinker rehabilitates some unfashionable ideas, such as that the mind is a computer and that human nature was shaped by natural selection, and challenges fashionable ones, such as that passionate emotions are irrational, that parents socialize their children, and that nature is good and modern society corrupting.
Customer Reviews:
That Is The Point.......2007-10-09
The use of the word mind has been and continues to be an albatross for the human understanding of the science of the human brain. I think Pinker uses the word mind to help people relieve their mystical understanding of this word and allow them to see the material reality of the incredible organ we call a brain and some still refer to as a mind. I think that is great. Of course the misunderstanding will continue, one review even pointed to Noam Chomsky as a hero, while he champions ignorance and the so called mysteries of the mind. Personally mention of his name causes a reflexive response that makes me vomit. Excuse me. Nim Chimpsky is the antithesis to human understanding of the brain and mentioning him in the same light as people with insight is indefensible, but enlightening in that it shows how important this book is to help bridge the gap between illusion and fact. Nim is the perfect example of the ignorance that is not only accepted, but respected in our society. He says something similar to: We can't understand the mind it will forever be mysterious. The idiot of course wrote a scathing criticism of B.F. Skinner(a true personal hero). Skinner provided actual scientific evidence to allow us to understand the way the brain works and allow us to understand human behavior. Nim Chimpsky of course continues to stand by his worldview. The mind is incomprehensible and so is human behavior. He even provided a plethora of irrational arguments that reinforce his worldview and make sure evidence will not ruin the mysteries of his world, arguments that only a conditioned brain could formulate. Irony. He even made groundbreaking contributions to linguistics a science anagolous to alchemey. The man is a cancer, but enough of that. The idea is to show the importance of this book. It providies actual evidence of it's finding in an entertaining manner. It avoids the ignorant rhetorical devices of unfairly respected members of pseudo-science like Nim Chimpsky. I recommend this book to anyone that prefers understanding things to living in mystery.
You'd best have some background knowledge.......2007-08-29
I first read sections of this book a year ago and was initially somewhat disappointed that it did not focus on how the mind works via the neurobiological or the physiological approach. This book rarely mentions specific brain structures or neurotransmitters. Rather, it is a look at the brain via the computational theory of mind - via the perspective that the brain is an informational processing organ that is best analyzed via the selection pressures that influenced the reactions that the brain makes to stimuli. For those who are more interested in specific neurobiological approaches, one is advised to read "Synaptic Self" (LeDoux) or "The Quest for Consciousness : A Neurobiological Approach." However, I recently re-read it a week ago and finally appreciated its significance.
Pinker's book is very rewarding for the person who likes to analyze complex adaptive systems via means of general principles rather than of specific facts. As a result, he comments a lot on comparisons between the human mind and both animal minds and "computer minds." This approach is an excellent approach for generating hypotheses and explanations for human behavior, even though it does not analyze the specific neurological processes that are intermediate between stimuli and response. His approach is especially relevant when it comes to the study of family values and sex, when it comes to the chapter on family values, since it helps explain the idiosyncrasies associated with complex adaptive systems that must replicate by means of sex.
Pinker's book does go off numerous off tangents. He has commentary on the "Standard Social Science Model", he goes off into hypotheses into the reasons why biological organisms have sex, and he touches on implications of cognitive science. Those are interesting, although they do add to the length of the book.
The book isn't exactly perfect from my perspective. It would be nice if he wrote a little about the parts of the brain that underly mental representations and mental images.
By the way - as for those who are unfamiliar with the definition of a "complex adaptive system" - read Murray Gell-Mann's "Quark and the Jaguar."
Enjoyable Science.......2007-04-11
Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works" is the best science book that I have read in my life (aging boomer). He has an excellent command of the available research in the field and is able to present it in an engaging style. The scientific understanding of the mind has progressed significantly in the last 30 years and this books serves as an excellent summary of and guide to the understanding of these developments. I learned a lot by reading it and I enjoyed it too. What more can one expect from a book or say about it? Buy it, read it, enjoy it and learn!
Could have/should have been much better.......2007-01-26
This is a book by a noted expert in a fascinating area which both could have and should have been much better.
Generally, reading Steven Pinker at one the same time reminds one both of Josephus, the First Century Jewish historian and the comedian Dennis Miller. Pinker is like Josephus because like Josephus Pinker is unnecessarily discursive and Pinker is like Dennis Miller because one comes away from the experience of listening to him thinking that the guy was more interested in showing you that he knew of lot of stuff rather than actually trying to inform you about a lot of stuff.
Here are a couple of for instances:
In discussing intelligence generally, Pinker segues into a long discussion about Frank Drake and the famous Drake equation for positing the existence of intelligent life off the planet. In praising Congress for zero funding the Search for Intelligence Life (SETI), Pinker noted that Drake's equation unnecessary factored in the inevitable quality of the emergence of intelligent life. Not only was Pinker's observance an incorrect rendition of Drake's formula but it was also quite to the point of why Congress zero funded the program.
Congress zero funded the program (like the Supercolliding Superconductor) because Congress was too sheepish to go to its constituents and tell them that like military prowess, scientific research runs to the heart of a nation's strength. In other words, Congress thought like the midevil Chinese when they dismantled the Emporer's fleet.
In discussing family values, Pinker noted the old saw that people were more at risk of homocide from their relatives than strangers. Then, when he went on to try and prove his point, he did so by semantically re-categorizing spouses and significant others as "non blood relations." Throughout his discussion, it seemed as if Pinker was more intent on seeming clever than providing actual, on the ground analysis.
And indeed, these limitations aren't necessarily critical because Josephus is great history reading and Dennis Miller at least has the potential to be entertaining. Even Pinker himself, writing in this same, style, produced a great book when he wrote "The Blank Slate."
But Josephus and Miller and Blank Slate are different because in this book, a book which purports to describe the actual workings of the human mind, there is a need for the author to be clear, cogent and to the point.
How DOES the mind work? How did it evolutionarily come to be? What are its evolutionary objectives? What systems does it use to carry out those objectives? Are there ways in which it can be decieved? How? Why?
Like the articulation of a scientific theory is improved by it's elegance, books expositing on scientific matters must needs themselves be elegant.
And so, for those truly interested in this topic, I would recommend the following list of books:
1) "The Selfish Gene" -- Richard Dawkins' 1976 book remains a classic exposition on contemporary gene theory and it's implications for human life;
2) "The Red Queen" -- Matt Ridley produced a wonderful, up to the date book detailing sexual mating and its implications;
3) "Before the Dawn" -- Nicholas Wade's 2006 book likewise provides up to the date research and insight not only the fact of human evolution but the fact that human evolution is still continuing apace even today and how;
4) "Phantoms in the Brain" -- V.S. Ramashandran has produced a wonderful, highly readable book about the different ways in which human cognition can falter;
5) "A Brief Introduction to Consciousness" -- Again, V.S. Ramashandran plums the depths of human consciousness and in so doing produced a highly readable and eloquent survey of the mind;
6) "Consciousness Explained" -- Dan Dennett's exposition on the workings of the brain easily rivals and exceeds that presented by Pinker. True, Dennett may ultimately be proved to be wrong but at least he presents a cohesive and credible theory of cognition;
7) "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" -- Again, Dan Dennett is wonderful at bringing complicated concepts to life with his unique brand of brilliant insight;
8) "How We Love" -- Helen Fisher's book on human attraction and mating practices places an appropriate literary focus on humanity's actual genetic focus, namely: reproduction;
9) "The Origins of Virtue" -- Again Matt Ridley has tackled a significant topic rendering it both accessible and relevant. Why do people cooperate? Because it's in their self interest to do so and Ridley's book shows one how; and finally
10) "Religion Explained" -- Pascal Boyer takes a nettlesome problem and uses actual scientific method to arrive at a solution. Like Dennett, Boyer's findings may ultimately be either wrong or just incomplete but again like good science is supposed to it provides an explanation and not just mere pedantic puffery.
By no means should this review be construed as a screed against Pinker. As stated, his Blank Slate was a remarkable master work and underscored the importance of academic tolerance. However, it's because Pinker is capable of such quality that he can legitimately be expected to have produced better.
In other words, an eagle is most striking in flight among the clouds...not standing on the ground in a field of turkeys.
Get to the point!.......2006-11-09
This was another Pinker book I couldn't finish. If he was a taxi-driver he would take you from Brooklyn to New York via San Francisco. Sometimes even his asides have asides! Perhaps like pulp fiction writers he gets paid by the word.
Amazon.com
Many of us pursue fitness because we want to remain attractive to partners and potential partners, and we stay healthy so we can continue to have sex with those partners. But why do people care so much about sex? This book, written by an evolutionary biologist, explains how all the weird quirks of human sexuality came to be: sex with no intention of procreation, invisible fertility, sex acts pursued in private--all common to us, but very different from most other species. Why Is Sex Fun? asks us to look at ourselves in a brand-new way, and richly rewards us for doing so.
Book Description
In Why is Sex Fun? Jared Diamond argues that, in our evolutionary history, humans' strange sex lives were as crucial to our rise to human status as our upright posture and large brain. He explores questions such as, `Why are humans one of the few species to have sex in private? Why do human have sex any day of the month or year? Why are human females one of the only mammals to go through the menopause?' Diamond concludes that, by the standards of the world's 4,300 species, we are the ones that are bizarre.
Why is Sex Fun? is a delightfully entertaining and enlightening account of the evolutionary forces that have shaped our sex lives: of the book Diane Ackerman writes that it offers `fascinating reading for anyone curious about why lovers do what they do'.
Customer Reviews:
Get this book to finally understand the opposite sex.......2007-09-12
Are men and women basically alike, save the obvious physical differences? Absolutely not! This quick read explores the different evolutionary pressures that shape human sexuality. The "Battle of the Sexes" has evolutionary roots millions of years old. Diamond explains how each gender of a given species seeks to leave as many off-spring as possible, and how biological gender differences lead to different strategies and behavior. Diamond convincing promotes an evolutionary paradigm of human sexuality that goes quite far in explaining why men and women act the way they do. Witty and concise throughout, this book is enjoyable and illuminating.
Very good overall.......2007-07-05
There is a bit of overlap in this book with "The Third Chimpanzee," and this is to be expected. (Many of us have noticed that authors tend to cover the same points again and again.) On account of this, it loses one star.
On the good side, this book is very concise and light to read. There are almost no graphs in the book (for maximum simplicity).
The best points:
1. There wwas a good discussion of the process of going about testing a theory/ hypothesis, and though this may need to be read several times to be understood it is something that is interesting to know.
2. There were lots of neat little factoids about animals (such as elephants having 5 sets of teeth over the course of a life).
3. The questions surrouding the function of concealed ovulation were dealt with in a very easy-to-understand way that didn't bog the reader down with excessive technical details.
4. Diamond's beginnings into analyzing the male/ female division of labor were, by far, the best part of the whole book. It was sufficiently quantitative to be believable, but not so much as to be boring.
A misleading title written solely for advertising purposes.......2007-06-24
The book is a blend of "Animal Planet" and Maxim, so at times many of its theories sound more like folk tales than well researched data and at the end you feel that it lacks a clear conclusion. There are many generalizations such as: Women tend to be more responsible with their off spring because they have invested more time and resources on their creation, (ii) That there is a war of the sexes going on, as the reproductive interest of women and males is often at crossroads, as we are more promiscuous and they prefer the company of a single by very well endowed male who could provide security. That ovulation in females is hidden and they are sexually available 24/7 so that their partners will be more inclined to keep them company and not run away looking for sex somewhere else, leaving them abandoned and at peril. Each one of them could be true but at the same time is possible to point out to certain facts which could prove that the premise is wrong. For more interesting observations and analysis buy a book of Desmond Morris.
By they way the book never really tell you why sex is fun (I mean outside the fact that we all know that is fun) and why we humans like to keep it private in practically every society.
Oh, GOD! This is the most stupid book EVER........2007-04-09
How does this man actually get his work published? He is an absolute idiot. This is the most nauseating drivel, I just can't believe anyone can take this guy seriously. He should retire from writing and someone should hide his laptop just incase. Perfectly pointless.
Laughable and Questionable.......2006-10-02
Diamond spends twenty one laughable pages on male lactation. What's next? How about implanting a uterus? After all, men are stronger and could probably carry babies better.
Big game hunting by the males of indigenous tribes was probably more effective when there was more game. But, for Diamond, it leaves the question open as to "What are men good for?"
My question is "What is Jared Diamond good for?"
Book Description
"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. Science has thus exacerbated our reciprocal habits of blaming nature when we act badly and labeling the good things we do as "humane." Seeking the origin of human morality not in evolution but in human culture, science insists that we are moral by choice, not by nature.
Citing remarkable evidence based on his extensive research of primate behavior, de Waal attacks "Veneer Theory," which posits morality as a thin overlay on an otherwise nasty nature. He explains how we evolved from a long line of animals that care for the weak and build cooperation with reciprocal transactions. Drawing on both Darwin and recent scientific advances, de Waal demonstrates a strong continuity between human and animal behavior. In the process, he also probes issues such as anthropomorphism and human responsibilities toward animals.
Based on the Tanner Lectures de Waal delivered at Princeton University's Center for Human Values in 2004, Primates and Philosophers includes responses by the philosophers Peter Singer, Christine M. Korsgaard, and Philip Kitcher and the science writer Robert Wright. They press de Waal to clarify the differences between humans and other animals, yielding a lively debate that will fascinate all those who wonder about the origins and reach of human goodness.
Customer Reviews:
Plausible.......2007-09-19
This is a very short book. The main essay has just about over 50 pages. The rest is introduction, some responses, and a closing statement.
Who says that important books need to be long? Possibly it is not all that important, but the main idea is new to me, therefore I am glad that I picked it up, after a recommendation in Der Spiegel.
Let me also say, I don't find the main hypothesis really compelling, in the sense of thoroughly thought through and explained. But I think it is plausible, and as I had been used to think in different directions and categories, this is a new paradigm for me.
Simply put, FdW challenges the conventional view that morality is part of civilization, that morality is a 'veneer' over our animal core, which is generally assumed to be selfish and immoral. He rejects the view that mankind developed as individuals and then became socialites, requiring rules for co-existence. Rather, homo evolved as a social animal and started his career on Earth with a set of rules for social life. I.o.w., the whole question how a human society without a creator can have morality, is superfluous, baseless, a waste of energy.
On the way to this hypothesis, FdW gets into arguments with the 'selfish gene' theory and with the Dawkins direction of neo-Darwinism. My suspicion is, that this conflict is as useless as a goitre (as we say in German). I don't think that Dawkins really meant the gene to be literally 'selfish', hence let's drop this linguistic bickering. (However I am too lazy to look it up in Dawkins.)
Only 4 stars, not because it is not important, but because it remains below its potential. The discussion part is not always to the point.
I am tempted to give an extra star for the foto of Georgia admiring her own reflection in the camera lens. But maybe an Oscar is more appropriate?
Welcome new perspectives on moral theorizing.......2007-09-06
This book is an interesting confrontation between primate research and professional moral philosophers. The aim is to discuss De Waal's attack on `veneer theory', the idea that moral behaviour is not really grounded in our nature but just a thin cultural overlay, but the discussion quickly becomes way more general.
In fact, we quickly see familiar dividing lines appear. Some, like Korsgaard, see morality as based on reason alone, and therefore purely human. Others, like De Waal, see it as primarily based on inborn capacities like empathy, and maintain that we share a lot of our morality with primates.
The truth is probably somewhere in between. Actually almost all the contributors confirm this in some way, but this is obscured by the fact that the authors do not seem to be able to agree on the meaning on the word`morality'.
Semantic confusion and untenable extremes: Nothing new in the world of discussions of morality then? What does make this book interesting, is that this time the discussions are informed by empirical evolutionary research, which means that even the philosophers have to keep their feet on the ground. Apart from the ape-stories being interesting to read, the result is a welcome new perspective on existing moral theories.
Critically Important Research.......2007-08-25
Teleologically oriented theologians and pompous philosophers need to read this book. New empirical research offers dramatic insights as to the how's and why's of the bilogoical origins of human values and morality. The more this book is read and digested, the faster the phony televangelists will disappear from popular and uninformed culture.
Excellent .......2007-07-29
I do not have the required background knowledge to really make a judgment as to the fundamental claim here i.e. that moral behavior, including decision-making is not an exclusively human prerogative but in fact is the natural condition of a wide variety of species for whom cooperatrive and and altruistic behavior can be collectively advantageous. De Waal's critique of what he calls 'veneer theory' the idea that human morality is a thin layer which comes over and above our fundamentally aggressive, selfish nature is I believe, even when one considers humans in isolation, quite convincing.
He brings certain evidence and examples to show that other species' outside the human, including such stereotypically cruel and mean creatures as wolves engage in mutually advantageous group behavior. The question however of the degree of conscious decision involved in this is one not really solved here. Clearly the human capacity for language- use and symbolic - communication extends not only modes of cooperation, but complexities in consciousness. One feels that deliberation and decision in human action work in ways other animals cannot come close to.
Our hertitage deepens.......2007-06-10
Succinct, quotable, accessible and scholarly ( in the best sense!)- Dr De Waal never disappoints.
Books:
- Handbook of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience (Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
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- How to Prepare for the AP Biology with CD-ROM (Barrons How to Prepare for the Ap Biology. Advanced Placement Examination (Book & CD-Rom))
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- In Defense of Animals: The Second Wave
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The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (P.S.)
Guns, Germs, and Steel
![Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything](http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/0061234001.01.THUMBZZZ.jpg)
Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Why Is Sex Fun?: The Evolution of Human Sexuality (Science Masters)
