(* must reads)
ART AND SCIENCE
Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was A Neuroscientist, Houghton Mifflin, 2007 *
Stephen Wilson, Information Arts, Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology, Leonardo Books, 2000
Priya Hemenway, Divine Proportion, PHI in Art, Nature, and Science, 2000
Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind, The Cognitive Origins of Art and Science, Thames and Hudson, 1996
SPACE AND TIME
Brian Greene, Hidden Reality, Vintage Press, 2010
Lisa Randall, Warped Passages, Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions, HarperCollins, 2005
(Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos, Vintage Press, 2004 *)
Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics, Shambhala Press, 2000
Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar, Adventures in the Simple and the Complex, W. H. Freeman, 1994
Allan Savage, The Hubble Atlas of Galaxies (2 Vols.), Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1994
John Holland, Time (2nd Ed.), American Sound Press, 1995
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, Bantam Books, 1988
Eames/Morrison, Powers of Ten, Scientific American Library, 1982 *
Guy Murchie, Music of the Spheres (2 Vols.), Houghton Mifflin, 1968
LIGHT AND SOUND
(Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos, Vintage Press, 2004 *)
Joao Magueijo, Faster Than the Speed of Light, Perseus, 2003
John Emsley, Nature’s Building Blocks, Oxford U. Press, 2001
P. W. Atkins, The Periodic Kingdom, Basic Books, 1995
John Holland, Sound Waves And their Properties in the Surrounding Media, American Sound Press, 1987 *
John Gribbon, In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat, Quantum Physics and Reality, Bantam Books, 1985
Richard Feynman, QED, The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Princeton U. Press, 1985
EVOLUTION AND CHANGE
Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire, How Cooking Made Us Human, Basic Books, 2009 *
Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale, Houghton Mifflin, 2004 *
Stephen J. Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, Harvard U. Press, 2002
Lynn Margulis, Dorian Sagan, Acquiring Genomes, A Theory of the Origins Species, Basic Books, 2002 *
Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is, Basic Books, 2001
Colin Tudge, The Variety of Life, A Survey and a Celebration of All the Creatures that Have Ever Lived, Oxford U. Press, 2000
Ian Tattersall, Becoming Human, Harcourt, Brace, 1998
George C. Williams, The Pony Fish’s Glow And Other Clues to Plan and Purpose in Nature, Basic Books, 1997
Colin Tudge, The Time Before History, Scribner, 1996
Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable, W. W. Norton, 1996
Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden, Basic Books, 1995
Richard Leakey, The Origin of Humankind, Basic Books, 1994
Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life, Harvard U. Press, 1992
Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance, Harvard U. Press, 1985
Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature, Harvard U. Press, 1978 *
Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology, Harvard U. Press, 1975 (Anniversary Ed. 2000)
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New Edition), OXford U. Press, 1989 *
Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype, Oxford U. Press, 1982
D’Arcy Thompson, On Growth and Form, Dover, 1942
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, Princeton U. Press, 1871
Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Oxford U. Press, 1872
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, Oxford U. Press, 1859
LIFE AND DEATH
Aubrey deGrey, Ending Ageing, St. Martin’s Press, 2007
Frank Ryan, Darwin’s Blind Spot, Evolution Beyond Natural Selection, Houghton Mifflin, 2002
Lynn Margulis, Dorian Sagan, A Symbiotic Planet, Basic Books, 2000 *
Stuart Kaufman, Investigations, Oxford U. Press, 2000
Richard Lewontin, The Triple Helix, Gene, Organism, and Environment, Harvard U. Press, 2000
Colin Tudge, The Engineer in the Garden, Genes and Genetics, Hill and Wang, 1993
Lynn Margulis, Dorian Sagan, What is Life?, U. of Cal. Press, 1995
Martin Olomucki, The Chemistry of Life, McGraw-Hill, 1991 *
Lynn Margulis, Karlene V. Swartz, Five Kingdoms, An Illustrated Guide to the Phyla of Life on Earth, W. H. Freeman, 1982
Lynn Margulis, Dorion Sagan, Microcosmos, Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution, U. of California Press, 1986 *
Erwin Schrodinger, What is Life?, Cambridge U. Press, 1944
SEX AND REPRODUCTION
Marlene Zuk, Sex on Six Legs, Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt, 2011
Joan Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People, U. of California Press, 2004
W. D. Hamilton, Narrow Roads of Geneland, Vol. 2: Evolution of Sex, Oxford U. Press, 2001
Lynn Margulis, Dorian Sagan, What is Sex?, U. of Cal. Press, 1998 *
Jared Diamond, Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality, Basic Books, 1997
Love and Emotion
Jerome Kagan, What is Emotion, Yale University Press, 2007
Helen Fisher, Why We Love, The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love, Henry Holt, 2005 *
Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, Bantam Books, 1995
MEMORY AND CONSCIOUSNESS
Sebastian Seung, Connectome, How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are, Houghton Mifflin, 2012 *
Malcolm Gladwell, Blink, The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Little Brown, 2005
Gerald Edelman, Wider Than the Sky, The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness, Yale U. Press, 2004
Susan Blackmore, Consciousness, Oxford U. Press, 2004 *
John Holland, Amy Robinson, Epochs of Consciousness, American Sound Press, 2000
Larry Squire, Eric Kandel, Memory, From Mind to Molecules, Scientific American Library, 1999
Daniel Dennett, Kinds of Minds, Toward an Understanding of Consciousness, Basic Books, 1996 *
John Eccles, Evolution of the Brain, Routledge, 1989
Robert Ornstein, Richard Thompson, David Maccaulay, The Amazing Brain, Houghton Mifflin, 1984 *
Charles J. Lumsden, E. O. Wilson, Promethean Fire Reflections on the Origin of Mind, Harvard U. Press 1983
(Sleep and Dreams)
J. Allan Hobson, The Chemistry of Conscious States, Little Brown, 1994 *
J. Allen Hobson, The Dreaming Brain, Basic Books, 1988
Carl Jung, Dreams, Princeton U. Press, 1974
Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Vintage Books, 1965
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, Avon (1965) 1900
Language and Syntax
Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, Viking, 2007
Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid, Harper, 2007
William Calvin, and Derek Bikerton, Lingua Ex Machina, M.I.T. Press, 2000
William Calvin, How Brains Think, Basic Books, 1996 *
Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct, How the Mind Creates Language, HarperCollins, 1994 *
Society and Culture
Jeffrey D. Sachs, The End of Poverty, Economic Possibilities for Our Time, Penguin, 2005 *
Jared Diamond, Collapse, Viking Press, 2005
Robert Trivers, Natural Selection and Social Theory, Selected Papers of Robert Trivers, Oxford U. Press, 2002 *
Steve Olson, Mapping Human History, Discovering the Past Through Our Genes, Houghton Mifflin, 2002
Bryan Sykes, The Seven Daughters of Eve, W. W. Norton, 2001
Robert Wright, Non-Zero, The Logic of Human Destiny, Pantheon Books, 2000 *
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, W. W. Norton, 1999 *
Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine, Oxford U. Press, 1999 *
Stephan Molnar, Human Variation, Races, Types, and Ethnic Groups, Prentice-Hall, 1998
W. D. Hamilton, Narrow Roads of Geneland, Vol 1: Evolution of Social Behavior, W. H. Freeman, 1996
Knowledge and Information
David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity, Explanations that Transform the World, Viking Press, 2011 *
Pier Forni, The Thinking Life: How to Thrive in an Age of Distraction, St. Martin’s Press, 2011 *
Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Viking Press, 2000
Edward O. Wilson, Consilience, The Unity of Knowledge, Knopf, 1998
Miscellaneous
W. D. Hamilton, Narrow Roads of Geneland, Vol. 3: Last Words, Oxford U. Press, 2005
Margot Kelley, Local Treasures, Geocaching Across America, Center Books on American Places, 2005
Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics, HarperCollins, 2005
Harold Morswitz, The Emergence of Everything, How the World Became Complex, Oxford U. Press, 2002
Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire, Random House, 2001
Connie Barlow, The Ghosts of Evolution, Basic Books, 2000
Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point, Little Brown, 2000
Natalie Angier, Woman, An Intimate Geography, Houghton Mifflin, 1999
John McPhee, Annals of the Former World, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1998
Stuart Kaufman, At Home in the Universe, Oxford U. Press, 1995 *
Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis, The Scientific Search for the Soul, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994
Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, Back Bay Books, 1991
Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses, Vintage Books, 1990
Carl Jung, Synchronicity, Princeton U. Press, 1973
Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us, Oxford U. Press, 1950 *
Henry David Thoreau, Faith in a Seed, The Dispersion of Seeds, Island Press, (1860) 1993
Henry David Thoreau, Wild Fruits, W. W. Norton, (1861) 2000
(* must reads)
