What makes us social animals? Why do we behave the way we do? How does the brain influence our behaviour? The brain may have initially evolved to cope with a threatening world of beasts, limited food and adverse weather, but we now use it to navigate an equally unpredictable social landscape. In The Domesticated Brain, renowned psychologist Bruce Hood explores the relationship between the brain and social behaviour, looking for clues as to origins and operations of the mechanisms that keep us bound together. How do our brains enable us to live together, to raise children, and to learn and pass on information and culture? Combining social psychology with neuroscience, Hood provides an essential introduction to the hidden operations of the brain, and explores what makes us who we are.

Most of us believe that we are unique and coherent individuals, but are we? The idea of a "self" has existed ever since humans began to live in groups and become sociable. Those who embrace the self as an individual in the West, or a member of the group in the East, feel fulfilled and purposeful. This experience seems incredibly real but a wealth of recent scientific evidence reveals that this notion of the independent, coherent self is an illusion - it is not what it seems. Reality as we perceive it is not something that objectively exists, but something that our brains construct from moment to moment, interpreting, summarizing, and substituting information along the way. Like a science fiction movie, we are living in a matrix that is our mind. In The Self Illusion, Dr. Bruce Hood reveals how the self emerges during childhood and how the architecture of the developing brain enables us to become social animals dependent on each other. He explains that self is the product of our relationships and interactions with others, and it exists only in our brains. The author argues, however, that though the self is an illusion, it is one that humans cannot live without. But things are changing as our technology develops and shapes society. The social bonds and relationships that used to take time and effort to form are now undergoing a revolution as we start to put our self online. Social networking activities such as blogging, Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter threaten to change the way we behave. Social networking is fast becoming socialization on steroids. The speed and ease at which we can form alliances and relationships is outstripping the same selection processes that shaped our self prior to the internet era. This book ventures into unchartered territory to explain how the idea of the self will never be the same again in the online social world.

Without domestication, civilization as we know it would not exist. Since that fateful day when the first wolf decided to stay close to human hunters, humans and their various animal companions have thrived far beyond nearly all wild species on earth. Tameness is the key trait in the domestication of cats, dogs, horses, cows, and other mammals, from rats to reindeer. Surprisingly, with selection for tameness comes a suite of seemingly unrelated alterations, including floppy ears, skeletal and coloration changes, and sex differences. It’s a package deal known as the domestication syndrome, elements of which are also found in humans. Our highly social nature—one of the keys to our evolutionary success—is due to our own tameness. In Domesticated, Richard C. Francis weaves history and anthropology with cutting-edge ideas in genomics and evo devo to tell the story of how we domesticated the world, and ourselves in the process.

The Domestication of Humans explains the alternative to the African Eve model by attributing human modernity, not to a speciation event in Africa, but to the unintended self-domestication of humans. This alternative account of human origins provides the reader with a comprehensive explanation of all features defining our species that is consistent with all the available evidence. These traits include, but are not limited to, massive neotenisation, numerous somatic changes, susceptibility to almost countless detrimental conditions and maladaptations, brain atrophy, loss of oestrus and thousands of genetic impairments. The teleological fantasy of replacement by a ‘superior’ species that has dominated the topic of modern human origins has never explained any of the many features that distinguish us from our robust ancestors. This book explains all of them in one consistent, elegant theory. It presents the most revolutionary proposal of human origins since Darwin. Although primarily intended for the academic market, this book is perfectly suitable for anyone interested in how and why we became the species that we are today.

"A work of enormous breadth, likely to pleasantly surprise both general readers and experts."—New York Times Book Review This revolutionary book provides fresh answers to long-standing questions of human origins and consciousness. Drawing on his breakthrough research in comparative neuroscience, Terrence Deacon offers a wealth of insights into the significance of symbolic thinking: from the co-evolutionary exchange between language and brains over two million years of hominid evolution to the ethical repercussions that followed man's newfound access to other people's thoughts and emotions. Informing these insights is a new understanding of how Darwinian processes underlie the brain's development and function as well as its evolution. In contrast to much contemporary neuroscience that treats the brain as no more or less than a computer, Deacon provides a new clarity of vision into the mechanism of mind. It injects a renewed sense of adventure into the experience of being human.

In evolutionary biology, "intelligence" must be defined in terms of traits that are subject to the major forces of organic evolution. Accordingly, this volume is concerned with the substantive questions that are relevant to the evolutionary problem. Comparisons of learning abilities are highlighted by a detailed report on similarities between honeybees and higher vertebrates. Several chapters are concerned with the evolution of cerebral lateralization and the control of language, and recent analyses of the evolution of encephalization and neocorticalization, including a review of effects of domestication on brain size are presented. The relationship between brain size and intelligence is debated vigorously. Most unusual, however, is the persistent concern with analytic and philosophical issues that arise in the study of this topic, from the applications of new developments on artificial intelligence as a source of cognitive theory, to the recognition of the evolutionary process itself as a theory of knowledge in "evolutionary epistemology".

Development of brain and behaviour before hatching; Environmental influences on development of the embryo; Early learning after hatching; Brain development after hatching; Behavioural transitions in early posthatching life; Comparison with development in other species; Can a brain be domesticated?.

You may not believe it, but there is a link between our current political instability and your childhood attachment to teddy bears. There's also a reason why children in Asia are more likely to share than their western counterparts and why the poor spend more of their income on luxury goods than the rich. Or why your mother is more likely to leave her money to you than your father. What connects these things? The answer is our need for ownership. Award-winning psychologist Bruce Hood draws on research from his own lab and others around the world to explain why this uniquely human preoccupation governs our behaviour from the cradle to the grave, even when it is often irrational, and destructive. What motivates us to buy more than we need? Is it innate, or cultural? How does our urge to acquire control our behaviour, even the way we vote? And what can we do about it? Timely, engaging and persuasive, Possessed is the first book to explore how ownership has us enthralled in relentless pursuit of a false happiness, with damaging consequences for society and the planet - and how we can stop buying into it.

A powerful new theory of human nature suggests that our secret to success as a species is our unique friendliness “Brilliant, eye-opening, and absolutely inspiring—and a riveting read. Hare and Woods have written the perfect book for our time.”—Cass R. Sunstein, author of How Change Happens and co-author of Nudge For most of the approximately 300,000 years that Homo sapiens have existed, we have shared the planet with at least four other types of humans. All of these were smart, strong, and inventive. But around 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens made a cognitive leap that gave us an edge over other species. What happened? Since Charles Darwin wrote about “evolutionary fitness,” the idea of fitness has been confused with physical strength, tactical brilliance, and aggression. In fact, what made us evolutionarily fit was a remarkable kind of friendliness, a virtuosic ability to coordinate and communicate with others that allowed us to achieve all the cultural and technical marvels in human history. Advancing what they call the “self-domestication theory,” Brian Hare, professor in the department of evolutionary anthropology and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University and his wife, Vanessa Woods, a research scientist and award-winning journalist, shed light on the mysterious leap in human cognition that allowed Homo sapiens to thrive. But this gift for friendliness came at a cost. Just as a mother bear is most dangerous around her cubs, we are at our most dangerous when someone we love is threatened by an “outsider.” The threatening outsider is demoted to sub-human, fair game for our worst instincts. Hare’s groundbreaking research, developed in close coordination with Richard Wrangham and Michael Tomasello, giants in the field of cognitive evolution, reveals that the same traits that make us the most tolerant species on the planet also make us the cruelest. Survival of the Friendliest offers us a new way to look at our cultural as well as cognitive evolution and sends a clear message: In order to survive and even to flourish, we need to expand our definition of who belongs.

The first modern scholarly synthesis of animal domestication Across the globe and at different times in the past millennia, the evolutionary history of domesticated animals has been greatly affected by the myriad, complex, and diverse interactions humans have had with the animals closest to them. The Process of Animal Domestication presents a broad synthesis of this subject, from the rich biology behind the initial stages of domestication to how the creation of breeds reflects cultural and societal transformations that have impacted the biosphere. Marcelo Sánchez-Villagra draws from a wide range of fields, including evolutionary biology, zooarchaeology, ethnology, genetics, developmental biology, and evolutionary morphology to provide a fresh perspective to this classic topic. Relying on various conceptual and technical tools, he examines the natural history of phenotypes and their developmental origins. He presents case studies involving mammals, birds, fish, and insect species, and he highlights the importance of domestication for the comprehension of evolution, anatomy, ontogeny, and dozens of fundamental biological processes. Bringing together the most current developments, The Process of Animal Domestication will interest a wide range of readers, from evolutionary biologists, developmental biologists, and geneticists to anthropologists and archaeologists.