Understanding Human History
Author : Michael H. Hart
Publisher :
Page : 483 pages
File Size : 19,59 MB
Release : 2007
Category : Civilization
ISBN : 9781593680275
A History of the Human Brain
Author : Bret Stetka
Publisher : Timber Press
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 50,35 MB
Release : 2021-03-16
Category : Science
ISBN : 1604699884
Book Description
“A History of the Human Brain is a unique, enlightening, and provocative account of the most significant question we can ask about ourselves.” —Richard Wrangham, author of The Goodness Paradox Just 125,000 years ago, humanity was on a path to extinction, until a dramatic shift occurred. We used our mental abilities to navigate new terrain and changing climates. We hunted, foraged, tracked tides, shucked oysters—anything we could do to survive. Before long, our species had pulled itself back from the brink and was on more stable ground. What saved us? The human brain—and its evolutionary journey is unlike any other. In A History of the Human Brain, Bret Stetka takes us on this far-reaching journey, explaining exactly how our most mysterious organ developed. From the brain’s improbable, watery beginnings to the marvel that sits in the head of Home sapiens today, Stetka covers an astonishing progression, even tackling future brainy frontiers such as epigenetics and CRISPR. Clearly and expertly told, this intriguing account is the story of who we are. By examining the history of the brain, we can begin to piece together what it truly means to be human.
Understanding Human Evolution: And the Nine Human Endeavors - Reveals the Purpose and Meaning of Life
Author : Richard Colter
Publisher : Universal Paradigms
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 31,78 MB
Release : 2019-09-06
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9781733197700
Book Description
For the first time, the age-old questions of how and why humans evolved are explored from the perspectives of evolution, psychology, economics, and the Enneagram. The answers that emerge from this multidisciplinary approach provide new insights into the human condition, including the Nine Factors of Extinction, which were the behaviors responsible for multiple early human extinctions. And the Nine Human Virtues, which are the incumbent principles of modern human behavior. The answers to how and why humans evolved can be found in the depiction of each Enneatype. These depictions account for the Nine Human Endeavors (see front cover), which reveal how every human being is specifically adapted to eradicate one of the Nine Factors of Extinction, along with the specializations, functional adaptations, and general characteristics for each type. This information is indispensable for diagnosing the personality type of any human being. Perhaps most important is the discussion of the evolutionary purpose of every human being, and how that knowledge can be used for personal growth, in ways that are resolute, decisive, and transformative. When this knowledge is used constructively, the actuated potential of the individual is realized, along with the deeply personal meaning of life.
The Dawn of Everything
Author : David Graeber
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 384 pages
File Size : 36,52 MB
Release : 2021-11-09
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0374721106
Book Description
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action. Includes Black-and-White Illustrations
God
Author : Reza Aslan
Publisher : Random House
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 49,77 MB
Release : 2017-11-07
Category : Religion
ISBN : 0553394738
Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The bestselling author of Zealot and host of Believer explores humanity’s quest to make sense of the divine in this concise and fascinating history of our understanding of God. In Zealot, Reza Aslan replaced the staid, well-worn portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth with a startling new image of the man in all his contradictions. In his new book, Aslan takes on a subject even more immense: God, writ large. In layered prose and with thoughtful, accessible scholarship, Aslan narrates the history of religion as a remarkably cohesive attempt to understand the divine by giving it human traits and emotions. According to Aslan, this innate desire to humanize God is hardwired in our brains, making it a central feature of nearly every religious tradition. As Aslan writes, “Whether we are aware of it or not, and regardless of whether we’re believers or not, what the vast majority of us think about when we think about God is a divine version of ourselves.” But this projection is not without consequences. We bestow upon God not just all that is good in human nature—our compassion, our thirst for justice—but all that is bad in it: our greed, our bigotry, our penchant for violence. All these qualities inform our religions, cultures, and governments. More than just a history of our understanding of God, this book is an attempt to get to the root of this humanizing impulse in order to develop a more universal spirituality. Whether you believe in one God, many gods, or no god at all, God: A Human History will challenge the way you think about the divine and its role in our everyday lives. Praise for God “Timely, riveting, enlightening and necessary.”—HuffPost “Tantalizing . . . Driven by [Reza] Aslan’s grace and curiosity, God . . . helps us pan out from our troubled times, while asking us to consider a more expansive view of the divine in contemporary life.”—The Seattle Times “A fascinating exploration of the interaction of our humanity and God.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette “[Aslan’s] slim, yet ambitious book [is] the story of how humans have created God with a capital G, and it’s thoroughly mind-blowing.”—Los Angeles Review of Books “Aslan is a born storyteller, and there is much to enjoy in this intelligent survey.”—San Francisco Chronicle
Understanding Climate's Influence on Human Evolution
Author : National Research Council
Publisher : National Academies Press
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 19,41 MB
Release : 2010-04-17
Category : Science
ISBN : 0309148383
Book Description
The hominin fossil record documents a history of critical evolutionary events that have ultimately shaped and defined what it means to be human, including the origins of bipedalism; the emergence of our genus Homo; the first use of stone tools; increases in brain size; and the emergence of Homo sapiens, tools, and culture. The Earth's geological record suggests that some evolutionary events were coincident with substantial changes in African and Eurasian climate, raising the possibility that critical junctures in human evolution and behavioral development may have been affected by the environmental characteristics of the areas where hominins evolved. Understanding Climate's Change on Human Evolution explores the opportunities of using scientific research to improve our understanding of how climate may have helped shape our species. Improved climate records for specific regions will be required before it is possible to evaluate how critical resources for hominins, especially water and vegetation, would have been distributed on the landscape during key intervals of hominin history. Existing records contain substantial temporal gaps. The book's initiatives are presented in two major research themes: first, determining the impacts of climate change and climate variability on human evolution and dispersal; and second, integrating climate modeling, environmental records, and biotic responses. Understanding Climate's Change on Human Evolution suggests a new scientific program for international climate and human evolution studies that involve an exploration initiative to locate new fossil sites and to broaden the geographic and temporal sampling of the fossil and archeological record; a comprehensive and integrative scientific drilling program in lakes, lake bed outcrops, and ocean basins surrounding the regions where hominins evolved and a major investment in climate modeling experiments for key time intervals and regions that are critical to understanding human evolution.
Understanding Evolution
Author : Kostas Kampourakis
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 275 pages
File Size : 46,22 MB
Release : 2014-04-03
Category : Science
ISBN : 1107034914
Book Description
Bringing together conceptual obstacles and core concepts of evolutionary theory, this book presents evolution as straightforward and intuitive.
A Pocket History of Human Evolution: How We Became Sapiens
Author : Silvana Condemi
Publisher : The Experiment, LLC
Page : 156 pages
File Size : 48,48 MB
Release : 2019-11-01
Category : Science
ISBN : 1615196056
Book Description
Why aren’t we more like other apes? How did we win the evolutionary race? Find out how “wise” Homo sapiens really are. Prehistory has never been more exciting: New discoveries are overturning long-held theories left and right. Stone tools in Australia date back 65,000 years—a time when, we once thought, the first Sapiens had barely left Africa. DNA sequencing has unearthed a new hominid group—the Denisovans—and confirmed that crossbreeding with them (and Neanderthals) made Homo sapiens who we are today. A Pocket History of Human Evolution brings us up-to-date on the exploits of all our ancient relatives. Paleoanthropologist Silvana Condemi and science journalist François Savatier consider what accelerated our evolution: Was it tools, our “large” brains, language, empathy, or something else entirely? And why are we the sole survivors among many early bipedal humans? Their conclusions reveal the various ways ancient humans live on today—from gossip as modern “grooming” to our gendered division of labor—and what the future might hold for our strange and unique species.
A View from the Year 3000
Author : Michael H. Hart
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 41,12 MB
Release : 1999
Category : Biographical fiction, American
ISBN : 9780967107714
Book Description
When We Cease to Understand the World
Author : Benjamin Labatut
Publisher : New York Review of Books
Page : 193 pages
File Size : 25,51 MB
Release : 2021-09-28
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1681375664
Book Description
One of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2021 Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize and the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature A fictional examination of the lives of real-life scientists and thinkers whose discoveries resulted in moral consequences beyond their imagining. When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger—these are some of luminaries into whose troubled lives Benjamín Labatut thrusts the reader, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, alienate friends and lovers, descend into isolation and insanity. Some of their discoveries reshape human life for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear. At a breakneck pace and with a wealth of disturbing detail, Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to tell the stories of the scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.
