my mind on books

The Evolved Apprentice: How Evolution Made Humans Unique (Jean Nicod Lectures) by Kim Sterelny (MIT Press, 2012)

(kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk)

Product description from the publisher:

Over the last three million years or so, our lineage has diverged sharply from those of our great ape relatives. Change has been rapid (in evolutionary terms) and pervasive. Morphology, life history, social life, sexual behavior, and foraging patterns have all shifted sharply away from other great apes. No other great ape lineage–including those of chimpanzees and gorillas–seems to have undergone such a profound transformation. In The Evolved Apprentice, Kim Sterelny argues that the divergence stems from the fact that humans gradually came to enrich the learning environment of the next generation. Humans came to cooperate in sharing information, and to cooperate ecologically and reproductively as well, and these changes initiated positive feedback loops that drove us further from other great apes. Sterelny develops a new theory of the evolution of human cognition and human social life that emphasizes the gradual evolution of information sharing practices across generations and how information sharing transformed human minds and social lives. Sterelny proposes that humans developed a new form of ecological interaction with their environment, cooperative foraging, which led to positive feedback linking ecological cooperation, cultural learning, and environmental change. The ability to cope with the immense variety of human ancestral environments and social forms, he argues, depended not just on adapted minds but also on adapted developmental environments.

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See also: “The Evolved Apprentice” at On the Human (onthehuman.org)

Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive by Bruce Schneier (Wiley, 2012)

(kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk – 8 Mar 2012)

Product description from the publisher:

How does society function when you can’t trust everyone?

When we think about trust, we naturally think about personal relationships or bank vaults. That’s too narrow. Trust is much broader, and much more important. Nothing in society works without trust. It’s the foundation of communities, commerce, democracy—everything.

In this insightful and entertaining book, Schneier weaves together ideas from across the social and biological sciences to explain how society induces trust. He shows how trust works and fails in social settings, communities, organizations, countries, and the world.

In today’s hyper-connected society, understanding the mechanisms of trust is as important as understanding electricity was a century ago. Issues of trust and security are critical to solving problems as diverse as corporate responsibility, global warming, and our moribund political system. After reading Liars and Outliers, you’ll think about social problems, large and small, differently.

Google books preview:

See also: Author’s website