A bit like language, it’s one of those things where you’d say it seems really odd to say it evolved. And I think that, coupled with this evolutionary slant, which I think can really pull together some of these bits of social psychology, it just seems like the most fascinating bit of science that’s going on at the moment.

He argues that human beings have deeply entrenched moral intuitions which guide their assessment of reality. In a series of illuminating, often surprising experiments, MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. Each dogma carries a moral burden, so their defenders have engaged in desperate tactics to discredit the scientists who are now challenging them. In his sensational international bestseller, the preeminent scientist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins delivers a hard-hitting, impassioned, but humorous, rebuttal of religious belief.At long last, a readable, accessible, user friendly introduction to evolutionary psychology written by a rising star in the field. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. I worked for a bit in a bank, and then spent three years sitting in a room in the countryside, reading lots and learning lots and talking to people and sort of getting into it. So if you do something with your left brain, using your right side, it’s easy to explain why you did it.

The third edition, containing a major update involving nearly 400 new references, continues this legacy. Sapolsky builds on this understanding to wrestle with some of our deepest and thorniest questions relating to tribalism and xenophobia, hierarchy and competition, morality and free will, and war and peace. As Annabeth and her friends Jason, Piper, and Leo fly in on the Argo II, she can't blame the Roman demigods for thinking the ship is a Greek weapon. He has a polymathic command of subjects ranging from cognitive science to business to probability theory. In some ways, I included it as a correction to some of the bias in my list, which is obviously jumping to the bits of evolutionary psychology that excite me most personally.For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives. Also, there are pictures, charts, boxes and sidebars; all items that make the reading much more intuitive than in traditional books. This is a bit like what we were saying about whether the true motives for murder are explicitly understood by the murderer.