*A New York Times Editors' Choice Pick* An "ambitious work" ( Washington Post ) tracing the links between autism and ingenuity Is the ability to invent things unique to humans? In The Pattern Seekers , Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen argues that it is, and proposes that autistic people have played a key role in human progress for seventy to one hundred thousand years, from the first complex tools like the bow and arrow and the first musical instrument to the digital revolution. He presents the science that the same genes that contribute to autism enable a special kind of pattern seeking that is essential to our species' inventiveness. However, these abilities come at a cost for autistic people, including social and neurological challenges. Baron-Cohen calls on us to support and celebrate autistic people in both their disabilities and their talents. Ultimately, The Pattern Seekers isn't just a new theory of human evolution, but a call to reconsider how society treats those who think differently.

Human sexuality seems normal to us, but it is bizarre by the standards of other animals. Diamond arues that our strange sex lives were as crucial to our rise to human status as our large brains. Among the aspects of human sexuality discussed are female menopause, our having sex in private, our often having sex for fum rather than procreation and the expansion of women's breasts even before use in lactation, and the battle of the sexes over parental care. These features might seem too natural to require explaination, but on reflection they prove surprisingly difficult to account for.

"Titillating and provocative essays from one of the freshest voices in science today -- Why do testicles hang the way they do? Is there an adaptive function to the female orgasm? What does it feel like to want to kill yourself? Does "free will" really exist? And why is the penis shaped like that anyway? In Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?, the research psychologist and award-winning columnist Jesse Bering features more than thirty of his most popular essays from Scientific American and Slate, as well as two new pieces, that take readers on a bold and captivating journey through some of the most taboo issues related to evolution and human behavior. Exploring the history of cannibalism, the neurology of people who are sexually attracted to animals, the evolution of human body fluids, the science of homosexuality, and serious questions about life and death, Bering astutely covers a generous expanse of our kaleidoscope of quirks and origins. With his characteristic irreverence and trademark cheekiness, Bering leaves no topic unturned or curiosity unexamined, and he does it all with an audaciously original voice. Whether you are interested in the psychological history behind the many facets of sexual desire or the evolutionary patterns that have dictated our current mystique and phallic physique, Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That? is bound to create lively discussion and debate for years to come"--

The great board game revolution is here-- What do these games tell us about our society, our relationships, and ourselves? "Games, Jonathan Kay and Joan Moriarity show in this lively and insightful book, are not just fun and games: they allow us to explore the complexities of the world, from evolution to war to climate." - STEVEN PINKER, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress "Kay and Moriarity are both skilled writers and elucidators, and their voices are distinct enough to provide the book with a pleasing yin and yang. It's a far more perceptive and intriguing book than it appears at first blush, particularly for those readers who have never thought of games as an artistic medium - at least not one that comments on society." - KIRKUS REVIEWS Board games are among our most ancient and beloved art forms. During the rise of digital media, they fell from prominence for a decade or two but today they are in a new golden age. They're ingeniously designed, beautiful to look at, and exhilarating to play. Games are reclaiming their place in our culture, as entertainment, social activity, and intellectual workout equipment. Alone among all art forms, games require their audience (called "players") to participate. If nobody's playing, there is no game. As a result, games can tell far more about us than our TV shows, movies or music ever could. How does The Game of Life illustrate our changing attitudes about virtue? How does a World War II conflict simulation game explain the shortcomings of a failed novelist? Each chapter of Your Move examines one game, and what it reveals about our culture, history, society, and relationships. The book's two co-authors bring the perspectives of a writer who plays, and a player who writes. Before Jonathan Kay began his distinguished career as an author and commentator, he had a passion for games, and in recent years he has rediscovered them. Meanwhile, Joan Moriarity's career has been spent designing, developing, distributing, art directing, recommending and teaching board games and, recently, writing about them for a wider audience. With its short, punchy essays, and beautiful photographs of the games themselves, every chapter will be a worthwhile read in itself, and the book overall will leave you inspired to discover the truths of your own inner and outer world through play -- whether you're a seasoned veteran or a total newcomer.

About 80 millennia ago, out of one major exodus by migratory human ancestors from Africa—from Eritrea to Yemen (then to India and Australia, and eventually to Europe)—was the entire non-African world in all its racial and cultural diversity ultimately peopled; and to one prehistoric woman in Africa 150,000 years ago, all the peoples of the world can trace their genetic origin. So argues Stephen Oppenheimer in a groundbreaking volume that has stirred heated controversy among authorities in geology, linguistics, archaeology, and anthropology. Thoroughly researched and meticulously reasoned, with dramatic evidence garnered from recent advances in the field of genetics through DNA analysis, The Real Eve traces the evolution of modern humankind out of a common African ancestry—for again and again, Oppenheimer's extensive genealogical research, based on our gender-specific so-called Adam and Eve genes, has led him straight back to Africa. His conclusions have placed him in direct opposition to multiregionalists, who maintain that archaic human populations evolved locally, and have unsettled many long-established anthropological assumptions and cultural prejudices to provide a fresh perspective on the nature of the human destiny that all of us on planet Earth share. Color photographs are featured in this fascinating story of our human beginnings.

Recent years have seen a growing impetus to explain social life almost exclusively in biological and mechanistic terms, and to dismiss cultural meaning and difference. Daily we read assertions that everything from disease to morality—not to mention the presumed characteristics of race, gender, and sexuality—can be explained by reference primarily to genetics and our evolutionary past. Complexities mobilizes experts from several fields of anthropology—cultural , archaeological, linguistic, and biological—to offer a compelling challenge to the resurgence of reductive theories of human biological and social life. This book presents evidence to contest such theories and to provide a multifaceted account of the complexity and variability of the human condition. Charting a course that moves beyond any simple opposition between nature and nurture, Complexities argues that a nonreductive perspective has important implications for how we understand and develop human potential.

The first full-scale account of Joseph Stalin's personal vendetta against Soviet Jews. Drawing on newly opened archives and on his own experiences in the USSR of the early 1950s, the investigative journalist-lawyer Arkady Vaksberg reveals the genesis and evolution of the Communist leader's malevolent campaign - and the extraordinary cunning and shrewdness of his tactics. He shows us Stalin prosecuting prominent Jews in the notorious trials of the 1930s while appointing Jews as commanders of eleven out of twelve Gulags. We see the "Man of Steel" awarding the Order of Lenin to a celebrated Jew every time he launches a new anti-Semitic assault - and choosing a Jew, the infinitely hypocritical and sadistic Lazar Kaganovich, as his protege and chief hatchet-man. All this, while thousands of innocent Jewish men and women across the Soviet Union are being stripped of their jobs and property . . . arbitrarily arrested . . . summarily shot. Vaksberg also tells of the trumped-up trial of Soviet Jewish diplomats that was ultimately abandoned after Hitler's invasion; the curious life, and death, of the Jewish Antifascist Committee; the state-ordered murder of the great actor-director Solomon Mikhoels; the plan to deport the entire Soviet Jewish population to Siberia; how Ilya Ehrenburg finally abandoned his role as a "house Jew" and dared to criticize Stalin's policies; and the infamous "Doctor's Plot" just before the dictator's death. A fascinating, richly documented, and profoundly shocking work of twentieth-century history.

'Daring, learned and humane... A revelatory restoration of wonder' Stephen Greenblatt. We no longer think, like the ancient Chinese did, that the world was hatched from an egg, or, like the Maori, that it came from the tearing-apart of a love embrace. The Greeks told of a tempestuous Hera and a cunning Zeus, but we now use genes and natural selection to explain fear and desire, and physics to demystify the workings of the universe. Science is an astounding achievement, but are we really any wiser than the ancients? Has science revealed the secrets of fate and immortality? Has it provided protection from jealousy or love? There are those who believe that science has replaced faith, but must it also be a death knell for mythology? Evolutions brings to life the latest scientific thinking on the birth of the universe and the solar system, the journey from a single cell all the way to our human minds. Reawakening our sense of wonder and terror at the world around us and within us, Oren Harman uses modern science to create new and original mythologies. Here are the Earth and the Moon presenting a cosmological view of motherhood, a panicking Mitochondrion introducing sex and death to the world, the loneliness of consciousness emerging from the memory of an octopus, and the birth of language in evolution summoning humankind's struggle with truth. Science may not solve our existential puzzles, but like the age-old legends, its magical discoveries can help us continue the never-ending search.

This is the most rigorous, comprehensive treatment of race differences ever published. Philosopher Michael Levin's classic work first appeared in 1997 but quickly went out of print. Used copies sold for as much as $500.00. New Century Foundation has now published a completely reset, corrected edition, with a foreword by Jared Taylor. Anyone with an interest in race and the courage to follow the scientific data wherever they lead will find a goldmine of information, analysis, and wisdom in this classic treatment of one of the most profoundly important—and taboo—subjects of our time. Experts in the field have lavished praise on Why Race Matters: Professor Michael Levin's analytical tour de force, remarkably engrossing, often exciting, differs uniquely from other books dealing with racial differences. Levin views the various complex arguments regarding the reality and nature of race and race differences, not from any of the typical specialized viewpoints of anthropology, education, evolution, genetics, psychology, or sociology, or from any social or political ideology, but from the sweeping vantage point of the philosophy of science, his specialty as a well-recognized professor of philosophy. Levin's impressive technical mastery of the vast empirical subject matter is evinced in his book's amazingly broad and detailed scope and analytical depth. But what I consider the most valuable and exciting feature of Levin's treatment of every facet of the race issue is the consistent critical stance his incisive intellect brings to every aspect, based entirely on his keen understanding of the philosophy of science. It is definitely a "must read" for all serious students of this subject. — Arthur R. Jensen, U.C. Berkeley Philosopher Michael Levin has delivered one of the most authoritative and incisive treatises ever written on the importance of race. Why Race Matters is must reading for anyone interested in race, IQ, crime, welfare, affirmative action, and multiculturalism. Levin analyzes statistics, psychological test scores, and behavioral genetics data, brilliantly illuminating the logical pitfalls in so much of what is written about race. His powerful logic digs deep and his courageous inferences vault forward. With panache and occasional humor, Levin seems to be always on target. — J. Philippe Rushton, University of Western Ontario Why Race Matters does everything the title promises—it removes all illusions about the insignificance of race, and explains what racial differences mean for a multiracial society. It is a thorough, overwhelmingly convincing treatment of America's most serious and least understood problem. — Jared Taylor, Editor, American Renaissance About the author

Greater Ethiopia combines history, anthropology, and sociology to answer two major questions. Why did Ethiopia remain independent under the onslaught of European expansionism while other African political entities were colonized? And why must Ethiopia be considered a single cultural region despite its political, religious, and linguistic diversity? Donald Levine's interdisciplinary study makes a substantial contribution both to Ethiopian interpretive history and to sociological analysis. In his new preface, Levine examines Ethiopia since the overthrow of the monarchy in the 1970s. "Ethiopian scholarship is in Professor Levine's debt. . . . He has performed an important task with panache, urbanity, and learning."--Edward Ullendorff, Times Literary Supplement "Upon rereading this book, it strikes the reader how broad in scope, how innovative in approach, and how stimulating in arguments this book was when it came out. . . . In the past twenty years it has inspired anthropological and historical research, stimulated theoretical debate about Ethiopia's cultural and historical development, and given the impetus to modern political thinking about the complexities and challenges of Ethiopia as a country. The text thus easily remains an absolute must for any Ethiopianist scholar to read and digest."-J. Abbink, Journal of Modern African Studies

The third volume in a projected four-part series on the evolution of human intelligence, a series acknowledged by opponents and supporters alike as one of the most important recent investigations into the sources and nature of human intelligence. Professor Itzkoff first sets forth the evolutionary facts as a beacon to illuminate his biological theory of variable intelligence. Filling out the evidence from the psychological and brain sciences presented in THE FORM OF MAN and TRIUMPH OF THE INTELLIGENT, he here develops a full-scale model of the mind that more fully explains the relationship between I.Q. and the broader expressions of human intelligence as experienced in daily life. (His model of variable intelligence further delves into the historical consequences of our ancient biological and psychoneurological heritage. Issues such as gender, race, and ethnic variability are treated factually and responsibly, taking into account the full range of empirical evidence available to scholars.) The result is a theory having three complementary bodies of evidence - evolutionary, psychoneurological, and historical - building into a perspective on the factual «why» of human intellectual differences. These differences can best be observed in the richness and diversity of individual personality as well as in the cultures of our world. Itzkoff here takes the first tentative steps toward a biological explanation of the nature and structure of culture. WHY HUMANS VARY IN INTELLIGENCE is an appeal for the rational study of human nature, a plea to allow for further nonideological research into this most crucial area of contemporary concern.

The Form of Man presents a new interpretation, consonant with Darwinian evolutionary theory, recent evidence of human evolution, and the realities of cultural life. The exploration begins with the study of the form of life, traversing the tentative gropings of intelligent organic matter in its long struggle to establish itself as life's major adaptation. Seymour Itzkoff explains how intelligence as an adaptation is the slowest and most complex of life's vehicles to escape the degradation of energy predicted by the second law of thermodynamics. Dr. Itzkoff proposes that two evolutionary processes were keys to shaping human nature along its own particular path. Paedomorphosis (infantilization) explains many of man's unique anthropoid features. Orthoselection (evolution in a straight line) allows us to complete a picture of mankind's rapid catapult in brain size expansion almost into our own day. Both concepts reveal how man could have escaped the close selective honing that would have made him a far more practical creature. The final dramatic moment came with the sudden icy extrusion of a super sapient, Homo sapiens sapiens, sometime after 100,000 B.P. It ransformed the structure of all existing transitional hominids and created the conditions for both the growth of civilization and the paradoxical dilemmas and tragedies in our present polyglot humanity.

Contrary to common perception and belief, most island societies of the Pacific were not isolated, but were connected to other island societies by relations of kinship and marriage, trade and tribute, language and history. Using network models from graph theory the authors analyze the formation of island empires, dialect groups, economic and political centers; the evolution and devolution of social stratification; and the development of kinship terminologies, marriage systems and descent groups.