How we think
To get your bearings and a feel for neuroscience, try two books by Yale University Press. First is by David Linden at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. He asked 40 researchers, including Miguel Nicolelis at the Walk Again Project and Cynthia Moss at the Amboseli Trust for Elephants, which idea about brain function they would most like to explain to the world. The ideas and scope range from love and sex to personality and perception 鈥� and how individual experiences radically change the make-up of the brain.
What all this means is explored in by Pascal Boyer, which is fuelled by his professorships in collective and individual memory, and in anthropology and psychology. In it, he argues there is no good reason why human societies 鈥渟hould not be described and explained with the same precision and success as the rest of nature鈥�. The basis is cultural transmission, drawing on human communication, the nature of memory in our brains and the motivation underpinning group formation and cooperation.
The role of culture in shaping human minds and societies is also at the heart of by Cecilia Heyes (Harvard University Press). The title only sounds like those 1990s books about hard-wired instincts: for Heyes, our impressive cognitive equipment is shaped by cultural rather than genetic evolution. At birth, she argues, babies are only subtly different from newborn chimps. But expose babies to the deep culture of human environment and amazing effects occur.
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鈥淪urface is everything: we are characters of our own creation, creating and improvising our behaviour鈥�
Ironically, and like no other creature (probably), these effects let us think about thinking. How else would we have come up with the novel theories about causality and the brain in by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie (Basic Books), which may have implications for artificial intelligence? Or worked out why we defend what we believe even when it is wrong, as James Alcock explains in Belief (Prometheus Books)?
Perhaps the ultimate takedown of such overreaching tendencies is The Mind Is Flat by Nick Chater (Allen Lane). This is a total assault on all lingering psychiatric and psychoanalytic notions of mental depths to be plumbed. For Chater, surface is everything: we are all characters of our own creation, busily creating and improvising our behaviour based on experience. Light the touchpaper and stand well back鈥�
Humans evolving
Think human evolution, think toothache. Our crooked, crowded teeth are a dismal evolutionary consequence of our need for cooked food. Craniofacial specialist Sandra Kahn and biologist Paul Ehrlich get to the root of the matter in (Stanford University Press).
Meanwhile, Sang-hee Lee鈥檚 (W. W. Norton) offers additional vistas on our unique plight, including how comparisons of skull and pelvic fossils chart our development as a social species.
In (Yale University Press), Chris Herzfeld, an artist and historian specialising in primatology, offers illustrated insights about our perceptions of apes, as well as of the boundary between 鈥渉uman鈥� and 鈥渁pe鈥�.
What boundary, you might well ask. We have recently discovered that our evolutionary cousins, the chimpanzees, plot coups, wage territorial wars, pass on traditions and scheme for resources. In (Harvard University Press), Craig Stanford lets apes guide our idea of what it means to be human.
Universal truths
Cosmology is an overlong chicken-and-egg joke. For our theories to work, the laws of nature have to be constant, and this means the universe cannot have generated them. Three new books wriggle around this puzzle.
In (Oxford University Press), Peter Atkins considers the minimum effort needed to equip the universe with laws, and explains how they can spring from very little 鈥� or even nothing.
Roy Gould goes further: (Harvard University Press) revives the anthropic principle to explain why the universe seems to be becoming more ordered, rather than the other way around.
The fact we are here to observe our universe is significant in another way, too, as Californian physicist A. Zee reveals. Though (Princeton University Press) begins its tour of Einstein鈥檚 general theory of relativity with the discovery of gravitational waves, and lands the reader deep in the mysteries of dark matter and energy, Zee never forgets that, in the end, humans perceive the universe with the only instruments they can ever truly rely on (rightly or wrongly): their senses.
Origins of everything
David Reich puts a determined stamp on present and past in his book (Oxford University Press). Whole genome mapping hasn鈥檛 just revolutionised our world, it has helped us rethink our past, revealing waves of migrations, with or without Neanderthal or Denisovan genetic components. Naturally, all of this creates societal sensitivities, as with racial identity or deep divides between peoples.
Among the many mysteries that could be solved by genetics and DNA research is the history of the Celts. It will be interesting to see what this does for Barry Cunliffe鈥檚 seminal , which has a reworked new edition (Oxford University Press).
A decent origins story also needs input from other disciplines. Jack Hartnell鈥檚 (Profile Books) is a novel take on the way medieval people explored and experienced their physical beings. Art, cultural and social history come together with painful accounts of medieval medicine. And then there is Mary Beard鈥檚 (Profile Books), which asks why most cultures have invested heavily in images of the body 鈥� and why a 2500-year-old style of representation still determines how we look at the human form today.
By selection
For a century or so, people have wrestled over whether genes alone transmitted biological information across generations and provide the raw material for natural selection. Books like by Russell Bonduriansky and Troy Day (Princeton University Press) show how far the mainstream has shifted to include epigenetic forces alongside genes as drivers of who and what we are.
Other parts of the genetics story are fascinating but scary. by Theodore M. Porter (Princeton University Press) uses data collection in psychiatric hospitals to show the stakes when research straddles subjectivity and science.
Firmly back in the objective camp is by Stephanie Elizabeth Mohr (Harvard University Press). This run through of research using the fly Drosophila shows why the tiny insect has been of such value to gene research. A very short life, prolific reproduction and easy-to-spot mutant phenotypes are the secrets of its success.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淭he ideas driving 2018鈥�
