Books like The Language Instinct

01

How the Mind Works

Steven Pinker · Science

How the Mind Works is Steven Pinker's synthesis of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, built around a central thesis: the mind is a computational system — a neural computer — shaped by natural selection to solve the adaptive problems that faced our ancestors on the Pleistocene savanna.

Both dig into cognition.

02

The Better Angels of Our Nature

Steven Pinker · Science

The Better Angels of Our Nature is Steven Pinker's argument, supported by extensive historical and statistical data, that human violence has declined dramatically over long time periods and that this decline is real, not an artifact of reporting or perception.

A kindred science read.

03

The Dragons of Eden

Carl Sagan · Science

The Dragons of Eden, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1978, is Carl Sagan's exploration of the evolution and nature of human intelligence.

Both dig into cognition.

04

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Robert M. Sapolsky · Science

Behave is Robert Sapolsky's attempt to explain why humans do what they do — the violence, the altruism, the tribalism, the heroism — by working through every layer of biology that contributes to a single act.

Both dig into evolution.

05

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari · History

Sapiens traces the full arc of human history from the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa roughly 70,000 years ago to the present.

Shares evolution and cognition with The Language Instinct.

06

Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human

Matt Ridley · Science

Matt Ridley's central argument is that the nature versus nurture debate has been framed wrong for over a century.

Shares evolution and human nature with The Language Instinct.

07

The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation

Matt Ridley · Science

The Origins of Virtue begins from a puzzle: humans cooperate extensively with non-relatives, a behavior that seems to contradict the logic of natural selection, which predicts that organisms should act in the interests of their genes and close kin.

Shares evolution and human nature with The Language Instinct.

08

The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

Matt Ridley · Science

The Red Queen takes its title from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, where the Red Queen tells Alice she must keep running just to stay in the same place.

Shares evolution and human nature with The Language Instinct.

09

Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain

Lisa Feldman Barrett · Psychology

Lisa Feldman Barrett wrote this short book — genuinely short at under thirty thousand words — as an accessible introduction to seven core findings of modern neuroscience, each presented as a lesson that overturns something most people believe.

Shares evolution and human nature with The Language Instinct.

10

A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution

Jennifer A. Doudna and Samuel H. Sternberg · Science

A Crack in Creation is Jennifer Doudna and Samuel Sternberg's account of how CRISPR-Cas9 works, what it can do, and why its possibilities should give everyone pause.

Both dig into evolution.

11

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Bill Bryson · Science

A Short History of Nearly Everything is Bill Bryson's attempt to understand the scientific story of everything — from the Big Bang to the emergence of modern humans — by spending three years talking to scientists and reading science history.

Both dig into evolution.

12

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

Frans de Waal · Science

Frans de Waal's central argument is that we've spent most of the last century asking the wrong questions about animal intelligence.

Both dig into evolution.