100 Books Like The Artificial Ape

Okay, this one could surely be part of a list of books on artificial intelligence, but it's more than that: it's about the effects of networks of information—both real and fabricated, hallucinated, or intentionally-distorted —and their evolution and spread over the history of human culture, and secondarily, perhaps, about AI and its growing role as part of those information networks.

Despite a few flaws I found maddening (a brief section early in the book argues that genes don’t carry information), it is a very thoughtful and provocative work.

Is it American History? Counterculture? Something else? To be sure what it is is a very engaging, detailed chronicle of the California Institute at Big Sur and its residents and visitors.

The book provides coverage of a profound and influential interlude of American culture in which drugs, folk-rock, psychology, transhumanism, and other philosophies intermixed with one another.

As a psychologist, I was interested in hearing about Aldous Huxley and Abraham Maslow’s visits; more generally, who knew that Joan Baez and Hunter S. Thompson both lived on the property before the institute was established! 

This unusual book deserves to be included in some list or another; to that end, I have included it here.

It views cities, from their urban high rises to McDonald’s roadside eateries, from the standpoint of a burglar (with an architect’s eye), examining how to break in, steal, and make a clean getaway. Although I’ve never broken into a home (other than my own after locking myself out), I found the book eye-opening.

Don’t put it down until you get to the description of the movie Die Hard, which rethinks the skyscraper as one of the key characters of the movie. Okay, I admit it may not be central to who we are, but it is different!

Looking for a literary alternative to some of my doctoral work in psychology, I signed up for a specialty exam with Professor Robert Plank.

As part of the experience, I read his work, “The emotional significance of imaginary beings,” which was accessible and delightful. A beautifully written and somewhat dreamy review of imaginary beings from Shakespeare’s characters in The Tempest to alien abduction stories circulating in the 1950s and 60s, and including analyses of various science fiction movies, it built a vivid and poetic sense of why we seek such creatures. 

Shortly after its publication, the work was panned by psychoanalysts, who may have been disappointed in the work's focus on people’s everyday hopes, fears, and dreams; the reviewers might have preferred more in-depth analyses following then-current psychoanalytic theory. But the book is an insightful and accessible tour through many literary and film masterpieces (Forbidden Planet among them), as… show more.

I like this book so much because it tells us that we are the last twig in a bush of human species.

Until a few tens of millennia ago, five different human species lived on our planet, that’s amazing! Only recently, thanks to the surge of symbolic intelligence, have we become a marvel of creativity and invasiveness, an ambivalent species.

I’m usually underwhelmed by massively popular series books, which tend to “phone it in,” but this entry in the long-running Magic School Bus series impressed me. It kicks off with a student who wants to fill out his “family tree” and gets more than he bargained for, with a speedy dash through all the major stages of evolution as well as visits to a string of early human ancestors. The fantasy story frame will appeal to many children, while others will gravitate toward the jam-packed facts. There’s plenty of everything in this one for children aged 6 to 9.

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.

If you’re reading my book recommendations, it’s almost certainly because you read the book Dan Lieberman and I wrote about dopamine. In that case, you’ll want to read the book that inspired us to write our book, Fred Previc’s seminal explanation of the technical aspects of dopamine and psychology. If you were hoping for a deeper diver on certain points, Previc’s text is the only way to go – and we remain grateful to him for his groundbreaking work.

I loved this book because it clarified a fundamental concept about how our minds evolved through sexual selection. This idea is strongly connected to my own research, which aims to understand the evolutionary basis of religious and spiritual experiences and how they are connected to sexuality.

By understanding how sexual selection works, we can explore the intricate relationship between sexuality and spirituality.

A raw and bloody gem of a book, which plunges the reader into the cold and dirty world of our deep past, not just seen but experienced by its multi-talented author.

A philosophical hankering to know what it means to be human – and what we have inherited from our evolutionary past -leads this trained veterinarian, barrister, and writer to go back to nature in a Derbyshire wood. He and his long-suffering son experience the freezing, claw-red, and skin-tearing nature of the wild, as they seek to live similarly to our prehistoric ancestors.

Drawing inspiration from the 40,000 years of the Upper Palaeolithic, in an environment similar to the Mesolithic, Foster paints a blistering, spraining, and chilling account of the demands of a more primitive life. Essential reading from the comfort of my couch.