The Evolution of Everything

Author: Matt Ridley
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062296027
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 279

Book Description
“Mr. Ridley’s best and most important work to date…there is something profoundly democratic and egalitarian—even anti-elitist—in this bottom-up approach: Everyone can have a role in bringing about change.” —Wall Street Journal The New York Times bestselling author of The Rational Optimist and Genome returns with a fascinating argument for evolution that definitively dispels a dangerous, widespread myth: that we can command and control our world Human society evolves. Change in technology, language, morality, and society is incremental, inexorable, gradual, and spontaneous. It follows a narrative, going from one stage to the next, and it largely happens by trial and error—a version of natural selection. Much of the human world is the result of human action but not of human design: it emerges from the interactions of millions, not from the plans of a few. Drawing on fascinating evidence from science, economics, history, politics, and philosophy, Matt Ridley demolishes conventional assumptions that the great events and trends of our day are dictated by those on high. On the contrary, our most important achievements develop from the bottom up. The Industrial Revolution, cell phones, the rise of Asia, and the Internet were never planned; they happened. Languages emerged and evolved by a form of natural selection, as did common law. Torture, racism, slavery, and pedophilia—all once widely regarded as acceptable—are now seen as immoral despite the decline of religion in recent decades. In this wide-ranging, erudite book, Ridley brilliantly makes the case for evolution, rather than design, as the force that has shaped much of our culture, our technology, our minds, and that even now is shaping our future.

The Physics of Life

Author: Adrian Bejan
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250078822
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
An empowering new view of the nature of physics and the constant evolution of our physical and social world

The Dawn of Everything

Author: David Graeber
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374721106
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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

The Evolution of Everything by Matt Ridley (Summary)

Author: QuickRead
Publisher: QuickRead.com
ISBN:
Category : Study Aids
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
Do you want more free book summaries like this? Download our app for free at https://www.QuickRead.com/App and get access to hundreds of free book and audiobook summaries. How New Ideas Emerge. One of the biggest, most dangerous myths that we believe today is that we have full command and control of our world. But have you ever considered that our world goes through evolution? Or that our world evolves on its own? In fact, evolution doesn’t apply just to biology anymore, there is an evolution of everything. The changes we experience in technology, language, morality, and society are gradual, incremental, and even spontaneous. The changes follow a narrative, going from one stage to the next without an end goal in mind. You see, we traditionally believe that many of the greatest achievements in the world started from the top-down, that is, changes came from great leaders and minds who aimed to make a difference. But that is not necessarily true. Instead, our world has evolved from the bottom-up and achievements such as the Industrial Revolution, cell phones, and the creation of the Internet were never planned, they simply happened. Through The Evolution of Everything, Author Matt Ridley argues that evolution can explain just about every change we have experienced in society. As you read, you’ll learn how DNA and language are similar, how money became monopolized by the government, and how our traditional views on education should no longer be accepted.

The History of Everything in 32 Pages

Author: Anna Claybourne
Publisher: Laurence King
ISBN: 9781786276841
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 32

Book Description
From the Big Bang and the creation of the stars, through the evolution of plants and animals, the dawn of the dinosaurs, and on toward the first humans, early civilizations, empires, and technology, this incredible book will take you through the history of, well, everything! Fourteen exciting double-page spreads draw the reader into a world of discovery. Each fascinating scene depicts a key development in life on earth, illustrated in a colorful and engaging way and packed with interesting facts and figures.

Origin Story

Author: David Christian
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
ISBN: 0316392022
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
This New York Times bestseller "elegantly weaves evidence and insights . . . into a single, accessible historical narrative" (Bill Gates) and presents a captivating history of the universe -- from the Big Bang to dinosaurs to mass globalization and beyond. Most historians study the smallest slivers of time, emphasizing specific dates, individuals, and documents. But what would it look like to study the whole of history, from the big bang through the present day -- and even into the remote future? How would looking at the full span of time change the way we perceive the universe, the earth, and our very existence? These were the questions David Christian set out to answer when he created the field of "Big History," the most exciting new approach to understanding where we have been, where we are, and where we are going. In Origin Story, Christian takes readers on a wild ride through the entire 13.8 billion years we've come to know as "history." By focusing on defining events (thresholds), major trends, and profound questions about our origins, Christian exposes the hidden threads that tie everything together -- from the creation of the planet to the advent of agriculture, nuclear war, and beyond. With stunning insights into the origin of the universe, the beginning of life, the emergence of humans, and what the future might bring, Origin Story boldly reframes our place in the cosmos.

The Evolution of Morality

Author: Richard Joyce
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262263254
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 285

Book Description
Moral thinking pervades our practical lives, but where did this way of thinking come from, and what purpose does it serve? Is it to be explained by environmental pressures on our ancestors a million years ago, or is it a cultural invention of more recent origin? In The Evolution of Morality, Richard Joyce takes up these controversial questions, finding that the evidence supports an innate basis to human morality. As a moral philosopher, Joyce is interested in whether any implications follow from this hypothesis. Might the fact that the human brain has been biologically prepared by natural selection to engage in moral judgment serve in some sense to vindicate this way of thinking—staving off the threat of moral skepticism, or even undergirding some version of moral realism? Or if morality has an adaptive explanation in genetic terms—if it is, as Joyce writes, "just something that helped our ancestors make more babies"—might such an explanation actually undermine morality's central role in our lives? He carefully examines both the evolutionary "vindication of morality" and the evolutionary "debunking of morality," considering the skeptical view more seriously than have others who have treated the subject. Interdisciplinary and combining the latest results from the empirical sciences with philosophical discussion, The Evolution of Morality is one of the few books in this area written from the perspective of moral philosophy. Concise and without technical jargon, the arguments are rigorous but accessible to readers from different academic backgrounds. Joyce discusses complex issues in plain language while advocating subtle and sometimes radical views. The Evolution of Morality lays the philosophical foundations for further research into the biological understanding of human morality.

The Evolution of Beauty

Author: Richard O. Prum
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385537220
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 436

Book Description
A FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, SMITHSONIAN, AND WALL STREET JOURNAL A major reimagining of how evolutionary forces work, revealing how mating preferences—what Darwin termed "the taste for the beautiful"—create the extraordinary range of ornament in the animal world. In the great halls of science, dogma holds that Darwin's theory of natural selection explains every branch on the tree of life: which species thrive, which wither away to extinction, and what features each evolves. But can adaptation by natural selection really account for everything we see in nature? Yale University ornithologist Richard Prum—reviving Darwin's own views—thinks not. Deep in tropical jungles around the world are birds with a dizzying array of appearances and mating displays: Club-winged Manakins who sing with their wings, Great Argus Pheasants who dazzle prospective mates with a four-foot-wide cone of feathers covered in golden 3D spheres, Red-capped Manakins who moonwalk. In thirty years of fieldwork, Prum has seen numerous display traits that seem disconnected from, if not outright contrary to, selection for individual survival. To explain this, he dusts off Darwin's long-neglected theory of sexual selection in which the act of choosing a mate for purely aesthetic reasons—for the mere pleasure of it—is an independent engine of evolutionary change. Mate choice can drive ornamental traits from the constraints of adaptive evolution, allowing them to grow ever more elaborate. It also sets the stakes for sexual conflict, in which the sexual autonomy of the female evolves in response to male sexual control. Most crucially, this framework provides important insights into the evolution of human sexuality, particularly the ways in which female preferences have changed male bodies, and even maleness itself, through evolutionary time. The Evolution of Beauty presents a unique scientific vision for how nature's splendor contributes to a more complete understanding of evolution and of ourselves.

A Brief History of Everything

Author: Ken Wilber
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
ISBN: 1590304500
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 578

Book Description
Told in an accessible and entertaining question-and-answer format, this account examines the course of evolution as the unfolding manifestation of Spirit, from matter to life to mind, including the higher stages of spiritual development where Spirit becomes conscious of itself.

The Evolution of Life

Author: Graham Bell
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 019871257X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 495

Book Description
The Evolution of Life stands alone amongst the major textbooks by focusing on key principles to offer a truly accessible, unintimidating treatment of evolutionary biology.