Why read The Runaway Brain?

Book cover of The Runaway Brain: The Evolution of Human Uniqueness

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You might not suspect it, but we are currently living through a revolution in scientific knowledge. What we know about the human brain's workings and about the earliest history of our distant humanoid ancestors changes almost weekly. A new view of humanity is being forged - new theories appear all…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Runaway Brain as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Michael Edgeworth McIntyre

Author

I was blown away by the vistas it opened across classic work on genetics and palaeoanthropology, and the implications for understanding how our ancestors evolved.

It also showed how the politics of so-called ‘sociobiology’ impeded that understanding, through acrimonious disputes that later turned out to be pointless. Those disputes were very much examples of what I call ‘dichotomization’, the unconscious assumption that an issue is binary, an either-or question, when in reality it is far more complex with many different aspects.

From Michael's list on The best books to get you past selfish-gene theory.