Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind

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Your right half of the brain tends to control your left visual field, your left arm, and vice versa. I think science is the better way of coming to truth, but it always leaves you frustrated at the end.

Beyond Bad: How Obsolete Morals Are Holding Us Back is out now; The Bookseller described it as "doing for morals what Dawkins did for God.That’s something you might think is obvious—if you’ve read the Grimm Fairy Tales, there’s always an evil stepmother. That’s one way of explaining the evidence that Wegner pulled together, that we have this illusion of conscious will and we infer the causes of our action, not because we actually need to do this to work out why we did what we did— our brain probably doesn’t need that information and it could collect it from its own modules—but because in the way I’m building a model of your mind, reading your mind, it’s helpful for me to have some sense of what you’re thinking about me. Anyway, it's written in a relatively easy to read style, organised and presented well, and deep in content. Right, it’s like we edit our memories, inserting or remembering different motivations to what we recorded at the time.

Evolutionary psychology is very good at proposing hypotheses for how humans might behave on a large basis and testing those; and also for explaining some of the narrower questions, why there are particular quirks in our brain, or why we behave in a particular way. Haidt shows us how these intuitions differ across cultures, including the cultures of the political left and right. He has a polymathic command of subjects ranging from cognitive science to business to probability theory. When you put it in computer terms, people accept all these other things that we can add on to that analogy.I thought it must be quite obscure, so I was almost disappointed to find that lots of evolutionary psychologists love this book. Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. In her pocket, Annabeth carries a gift from her mother that came with an unnerving command: Follow the Mark of Athena. Secondly, if you’re seeking a connection between why these different books excite me so much is when we predict how other people are going to behave and whether to punish them, we infer minds in them.