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Minds Make Societies
- How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 13 hrs and 4 mins
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Publisher's summary
A watershed book that masterfully integrates insights from evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, economics, and more to explore the development and workings of human societies
“There is no good reason why human societies should not be described and explained with the same precision and success as the rest of nature.” Thus argues evolutionary psychologist Pascal Boyer in this uniquely innovative book.
Integrating recent insights from evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, economics, and other fields, Boyer offers precise models of why humans engage in social behaviors such as forming families, tribes, and nations, or creating gender roles. In fascinating, thought-provoking passages, he explores questions such as: Why is there conflict between groups? Why do people believe low-value information such as rumors? Why are there religions? What is social justice? What explains morality? Boyer provides a new picture of cultural transmission that draws on the pragmatics of human communication, the constructive nature of memory in human brains, and human motivation for group formation and cooperation.
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- How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
- By: Joseph Henrich
- Narrated by: Korey Jackson
- Length: 19 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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In The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich draws on cutting-edge research in anthropology, psychology, economics, and evolutionary biology to explore these questions and more. He illuminates the origins and evolution of family structures, marriage, and religion, and the profound impact these cultural transformations had on human psychology. Mapping these shifts through ancient history and late antiquity, Henrich reveals that the most fundamental institutions of kinship and marriage changed dramatically under pressure from the Roman Catholic Church.
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Lots of mispronounced words
- By Phillip Falk on 10-24-20
By: Joseph Henrich
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The Faith Instinct
- How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures
- By: Nicholas Wade
- Narrated by: Alan Sklar
- Length: 12 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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For at least the last fifty thousand years, and probably much longer, people have practiced religion. Yet little attention has been given, either by believers or atheists, to the question of whether this universal human behavior might have an evolutionary basis. Did religion evolve, in other words, because it helped people in early societies survive?
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If you're religious or into religion read this
- By Adam on 08-16-10
By: Nicholas Wade
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Our Political Nature
- The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us
- By: Avi Tuschman
- Narrated by: Jay Snyder
- Length: 17 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Our Political Nature is the first book to reveal the hidden roots of our most deeply held moral values. It shows how political orientations across space and time arise from three clusters of measurable personality traits. These clusters entail opposing attitudes toward tribalism, inequality, and differing perceptions of human nature. Together, these traits are by far the most powerful cause of left-right voting, even leading people to regularly vote against their economic interests.
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A Trivial Version of Haidt's "The Righteous Mind"
- By Curt Doolittle on 10-29-13
By: Avi Tuschman
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The Blank Slate
- The Modern Denial of Human Nature
- By: Steven Pinker
- Narrated by: Victor Bevine
- Length: 22 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading experts on language and the mind, explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. With characteristic wit, lucidity, and insight, Pinker argues that the dogma that the mind has no innate traits, denies our common humanity and our individual preferences, replaces objective analyses of social problems with feel-good slogans, and distorts our understanding of politics, violence, parenting, and the arts.
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Don't bother. Outdated science & poor logic...
- By ejf211 on 03-31-10
By: Steven Pinker
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Breaking the Spell
- Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
- By: Daniel C. Dennett
- Narrated by: Dennis Holland
- Length: 12 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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For all the thousands of books that have been written about religion, few until this one have attempted to examine it scientifically: to ask why - and how - it has shaped so many lives so strongly. Is religion a product of blind evolutionary instinct or rational choice? Is it truly the best way to live a moral life? Ranging through biology, history, and psychology, Daniel C. Dennett charts religion’s evolution from “wild” folk belief to “domesticated” dogma.
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Great Reader Actually Enhances A Great Book!
- By Don Caliente on 07-14-14
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Moral Tribes
- Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them
- By: Joshua Greene
- Narrated by: Mel Foster
- Length: 14 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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A pathbreaking neuroscientist reveals how our social instincts turn Me into Us, but turn Us against Them - and what we can do about it. The great dilemma of our shrinking world is simple: never before have those we disagree with been so present in our lives. The more globalization dissolves national borders, the more clearly we see that human beings are deeply divided on moral lines - about everything from tax codes to sexual practices to energy consumption - and that, when we really disagree, our emotions turn positively tribal.
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Good Science, Bad Philosophy
- By Jacob on 10-27-16
By: Joshua Greene
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The Mind of the Market
- Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics
- By: Michael Shermer
- Narrated by: Michael Shermer
- Length: 5 hrs and 26 mins
- Abridged
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The Mind of the Market will change the way we think about the economics of everyday life. Drawing on research from neuroeconomics, Michael Shermer explores what brain scans reveal about bargaining, snap purchases, and how trust is established in business. Utilizing experiments in behavioral economics, Shermer shows why people hang on to losing stocks and failing companies, why business negotiations often disintegrate into emotional tit-for-tat disputes, and why money does not make us happy.
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Good ideas overshadowed by obnoxious polemics
- By Philo on 09-15-13
By: Michael Shermer
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The Human Swarm
- How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall
- By: Mark W. Moffett
- Narrated by: Sean Patrick Hopkins
- Length: 15 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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In this paradigm-shattering book, biologist Mark W. Moffett draws on findings in psychology, sociology, and anthropology to explain the social adaptations that bind societies. He explores how the tension between identity and anonymity defines how societies develop, function, and fail. Surpassing Guns, Germs, and Steel and Sapiens, The Human Swarm reveals how mankind created sprawling civilizations of unrivaled complexity - and what it will take to sustain them.
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Worthless
- By Richard on 11-24-19
By: Mark W. Moffett
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What Love Is
- And What It Could Be
- By: Carrie Jenkins
- Narrated by: Carrie Jenkins
- Length: 5 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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What is love? Aside from being the title of many a popular love song, this is one of life's perennial questions. In What Love Is, philosopher Carrie Jenkins offers a bold new theory on the nature of romantic love that reconciles its humanistic and scientific components.
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What Philosophy Is and What It Could Be
- By Amazon Customer on 03-09-17
By: Carrie Jenkins
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Moral Politics
- How Liberals and Conservatives Think, 3rd Edition
- By: George Lakoff
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
- Length: 13 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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When Moral Politics was first published two decades ago, it redefined how Americans think and talk about politics through the lens of cognitive political psychology. Today, George Lakoff's classic text has become all the more relevant, as liberals and conservatives have come to hold even more vigorously opposed views of the world, with the underlying assumptions of their respective worldviews at the level of basic morality.
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extremely insightful. awful to get through.
- By Dave on 05-09-18
By: George Lakoff
What listeners say about Minds Make Societies
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- Rene De Paula Jr.
- 08-06-19
illuminating!
I am really impressed by the explanatory power of the evolutionary laws, it really opened my mind to our human nature and also to popular misunderstandings about natural selection.
mankind is all about collaboration, not individual competitions
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- Trebla
- 07-24-19
A Great Idea- Obscured with too many words
The progressively common practice of combining fields of competence and finding new ground or better tools to understand, is a great idea. Boyer takes the idea of evolutionary biology & applies it to sociology to help understand the reason and purpose of many of the acts we do on a daily basis and ultimately to form societies unlike any before us. But he spends so many words describing minutia that the central thread gets foggy if not completely lost. He also intermixes constructs based on reliable data with his conjectures- his best guess- with little distinction between the two.
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- Lan
- 06-30-23
Incredible Book!
The author did I lot of research to offer all his knowledge for us.
This book worth all the time and price, absolutely it is clear, full of knowledge for who's love learning from the intellectual people.
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- Stanley Lippman
- 07-01-20
Paradoxical Evolutionary Psychology?
I loved Dr. Boyer’s Religion Explained. He is anthropologist and he lived with indigenous peoples. It’s a fascinating work. In this book, some 20 years later, he attempts to extend his work to us, invoking evolutionary psychology as a framework.
However, evolutionary psychology is a paradox. It claims to overthrow non-evolutionary thinking on human behavior, but it limits itself only to human culture, and then applies Darwinian principles to that culture.
However, that doesn’t work. The modern synthesis is genetic. Multicellular animals are behaviorial, and that is a second degree of freedom. We can see that in the clownfish, in which every fish is born male, the first one into the territory becomes She, and the second becomes the sole reproductive male. Every other male that arrives is stunted and has zero sexual capacity, and lives a hellish life of a pecking order. This isn’t Darwin, this is neuroendo programming and it is evo-devo, not Darwinian.
Dr. Boyer doesn’t grok that, and his treatment of family is in my opinion so wrong and ignorant of zoology and the synaptic organization of nervous systems as to make it as guilty as the work of earlier anthropologists that he dismisses.
These humanist educated folks are not willing to do the real math and science, and when they start talking about how you and i should behave, then it’s more than Mumbo Jumbo, it skinnerism, Freudianism, and Chomskyism — that is, academic tryanny that destroys ordinary lives. this is not the real story.
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7 people found this helpful