*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.

This book focuses on the personalities in the history of medicine.

Already the subject of considerable pre-publication discussion, this magisterial work by one of the nation's leading neuroscientists presents a radically new view of the function of the brain and nervous system. Its central idea is that the nervous system in each individual operates as a selective system resembling natural selection in evolution, but operating by different mechanisms. By providing a fundamental neural basis for categorization of the things of this world it unifies perception, action, and learning. The theory also completely revises our view of memory, which it considers to be a dynamic process of recategorization rather than a replicative store of attributes. This has deep implications for the interpretation of various psychological states from attention to dreaming. Neural Darwinism ranges over many disciplines, focusing on key problems in developmental and evolutionary biology, anatomy, physiology, ethology, and psychology. This book should therefore prove indispensable to advanced undergraduate and graduate students in these fields, to students of medicine, and to those in the social sciences concerned with the relation of behavior to biology. Beyond that, this far-ranging theory of brain function is bound to stimulate renewed discussions of such philosophical issues as the mind-body problem, the origins of knowledge, and the perceptual basis of language.

The Advances in Cancer Research series provides invaluable information on the exciting and fast-moving field of cancer research. This volume presents outstanding and original reviews on a variety of topics.

"François Jacob is one of the world's leading scientists, a professor of the Collège de France and the Institut Pasteur, and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine (with André Lwoff and Jacques Monod). He has written an extraordinarily thought-provoking and far-ranging book on evolution which, as he states in his preface, "deals with genes and men, with sex, aging, and molecules. Above all, it deals with the theory of evolution, its status as well as its content. For if the theory of evolution provides a framework without which there is little hope to understand where we come from and why we are as we are, it is important to define the limits beyond which it is used no longer as a scientific theory, but as a myth.""--Back cover.