100 Books Like Who We Are and How We Got Here

Alexander von Humboldt’s name is synonymous with scientific discovery today–the Humboldt Current, the Humboldt Redwoods State Park, and countless species named for him. Humboldt revolutionized our modern understanding of the natural sciences–geology, biology, meteorology, and much else–with his epic five-year voyage that set off in 1799 and brought him through the Amazon, the Caribbean, and North and South America. 

Like Malaspina before him, Humboldt studied not only the flora and fauna of these regions but also their peoples and the political turmoil that was building towards revolution. He met with the leaders of the time–Thomas Jefferson and Simón Bolívar among them–and opened their eyes to the richness of their lands. Unlike Malaspina, Humboldt’s works were published to wide acclaim and established the idea that all nature, including human nature, is interconnected. 

Published in 2002, this is the book that pushed the pendulum back from the canard that we are entirely shaped by our environmental circumstances. Pinker confronts the reality that we are biological creatures, but far from painting a cold, deterministic view of human behavior, this book is ultimately a defense of social progress.

Pinker shows that understanding our innate tendencies does not justify discrimination or fatalism but rather empowers us to build better societies by working with, rather than against, human nature. Few books changed the way I see the world, but this is one of them. 

After reading it, I was inspired to go back to school and study biology—in order to merge it with social science—to get a complete picture of what makes us tick.

I’ve always wondered why history turned out the way it did—why some societies enjoy wealth and security and others live in dire poverty. I didn’t know that where we physically live on the planet had such a critical impact on our societies until I read this book. This is literally the history of the world going back to before the Neolithic Revolution. 

The environments we take for granted—for example, whether there are domesticateable large mammals in our midst or whether there is coal near the surface of the ground—have incredible consequences for the inequalities in the world today. I was blown away by reading this book, which explained the world as we know it to me.

I loved this book because it’s the granddaddy of time travel stories that use a machine method of transportation to the past or future. The protagonist creates a machine capable of moving through time without actually moving through space.

I easily suspended my 21st-century pragmatic understanding of time travel and was immersed in Wells's plot for a world of the future, one with a socialist propensity. For a book that would be considered a Novella, this has a ‘big story’ feeling—for me anyway.

This book gave me a profound realization: humans aren’t rational decision-makers—we’re copiers. We survive by inheriting “packages of expertise” passed down through generations, but over time, those packages lose their rationale. When circumstances change, blindly following tradition can become a liability.

My work is about helping people use AI, data, and collaboration to think through the consequences of their actions. This book explains why that’s so difficult—reasoning isn’t what got us here. We memorize and repeat what worked before, even when the world shifts beneath us.

In an increasingly volatile world, that strategy is failing, and this book makes it clear why new approaches to decision-making are needed. If you’ve ever wondered why people resist logic and innovation, this book will change how you see human behavior.

Understanding human nature – nice and nasty – demands that we dig into the past, and this brings us at once to evolution. What are we and why are we? The powerful conceptual tool that we use for explanations is Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection. The Descent of Man is about human evolution. At times it reads very much like something out of the nineteenth century – Charles Darwin’s discussion of women makes your hair stand on end (and, if it doesn’t, it should). But the central doctrine of evolution through natural selection brought on by the struggle for existence is right there and once you grasp that, you have grasped the key to unlocking the main issues.

If you can read only one book on human evolution, this is it. “Lucy,” a fossil Australopithecus afarensis, discovered in Ethiopia in 1974, is the proverbial “missing link.” About three million years old, she had a chimpanzee-size brain, about 400cc (as opposed to modern humans, about 1200cc), and yet walked upright. Told by Don Johanson, one of the team who discovered her, and science writer Martin Edey, the book is informative, serious, and yet at the same time written with a light touch that makes the tale akin to a thriller like Stephen King. It is a thriller. Our great great grandma was not Eve, eating illicit apples, but a modified monkey roaming the plains of Africa.

From anthropology and archeology, Douglas Fry and his co-contributors tell us that our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, in small bands, on a five-million-year camping trip around the globe. We had to have adaptations for harmonious communal living. Wary of strangers, we would realize that wanting to fight them was stupid. Man the “killer ape” is fiction. Then, 10,000 years ago, came agriculture, with a population explosion producing abundant goods that others would covet. The consequence was war and prejudice and other vile beliefs and behaviors. Ex-Quaker as I am, I have written a book, Why We Hate: The Roots of Human Conflict, appearing in Spring 2021, arguing that, by making the appropriate cultural moves, we can again attain our natural state of cooperation and peaceful living.

At a time when pessimism prevails, reading this book cheered me up, arguing we humans share a goodness that is deeply rooted in our evolutionary history. From shipwreck survivors forming micro-societies (unlike Lord of the Flies) to genetic influences on friendship, Christakis illustrates how the foundations of a good society are embedded in our biology.

This book reminds me that our evolutionary inheritance equips us to build a more connected, cooperative world. I felt uplifted and hopeful about the future after reading it, especially in a time of conflict and polarization.

As a microbial ecologist, I didn’t need to be convinced that microbes make all life on Earth possible. I knew that Falkowski, a preeminent biological oceanographer, would be a trustworthy guide in the microbial world. What makes this book so much fun to read is how Falkowski mixes science with snippets of history, both his own and of early scientists.  

Yet, the science is the main story here and is fascinating. Microbes, specifically cyanobacteria, are the engines that first put oxygen in the atmosphere around 2.4 billion years ago, which set the stage for the evolution of more complicated lifeforms, including, eventually, Homo sapiens.  Microbes are also the ancestral source of what Falkowski calls nanomachines, which continue to power all organisms today. Falkowski convincingly argues that microbes are what make life on Earth possible.