'Gaining control' tells the story of how human behavioral capacities evolved from those of other animal species. Exploring what is known about the psychological capacities of other groups of animals, the authors reconstruct a fascinating history of our own mental evolution. In the book, the authors see mental evolution as a series of steps in which new mechanisms for controlling behavior develop in different species - starting with early representatives of this kingdom, and leading to a sp...

From biology to culture to the new new economy, the buzzword on everyone's lips is "meme." How do animals learn things? How does human culture evolve? How does viral marketing work? The answer to these disparate questions and even to what is the nature of thought itself is, simply, the meme. For decades researchers have been convinced that memes were The Next Big Thing for the understanding of society and ourselves. But no one has so far been able to define what they are. ...

Many of us would like to change one or more of our own behaviors, or those of others. Governments and public health officials frequently initiate programs to promote behavior change on a broad scale. But behavior change is difficult, and success frequently eludes us. Reset: An Introduction to Behavior Centered Design presents a new framework for achieving behavior change that draws on recent advances in neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and ecological psychology. Behavior Center...

More Than 1.5 Million Copies Sold!Now Revised and Updated to Include the Latest Scientific Information and Even More Success StoriesFor almost forty years, How to Choose the Sex of Your Baby has been the standard reference for couples trying to increase their chances of having the son or daughter they hope for. In this new edition of their classic book, Dr. Shettles and David Rorvik provide authoritative scientific studies and compelling anecdotal ...

Voyage of the Beagle chronicles Charles Darwin's five years as a naturalist on board the H.M.S. Beagle. The notes and observations that he recorded in his diary included Chile, Argentina and Galapagos Islands and encompasses the ecology, geology and anthropology of the places he visits. A fascinating travel memoir the ideas that were later to evolve into Darwin's theory of natural selection find their naissance in Voyage of the Beagle .

**“A bizarre collection of evolution tales . . . the weirder, the better.” —Entertainment WeeklyA fascinating exploration of the awe-inspiring, unsettling ingenuity of evolution from Wired writer Matt Simon, author of Plight of the Living Dead (coming soon from Penguin Books)**On a barren seafloor, the pearlfish swims into the safety of a sea cucumber’s anus. To find a meal, the female bolas spider releases pheromones that mimic a female moth, lur...

Why do dogs behave in the ways that they do? Why did our ancestors tame wolves? How have we ended up with so many breeds of dog, and how can we understand their role in contemporary human society? Explore the answers to these questions and many more in this study of the domestic dog. Building on the strengths of the first edition, this much-anticipated update incorporates two decades of new evidence and discoveries on dog evolution, behavior, training, and human interaction. It includes se...

The mysterious and remarkable ways that animals navigateWe know that animals cross miles of water, land, and sky with pinpoint precision on a daily basis. But it is only in recent years that scientists have learned how these astounding feats of navigation are actually accomplished. With colorful and thorough detail, Nature's Compass explores the remarkable methods by which animals find their way both near home and around the globe. Noted biologist James Gou...

Despite the widespread belief that natural is better when it comes to sex, pregnancy, and parenting, most of us have no idea what "natural" really means; the origins of our reproductive lives remain a mystery. Why are a quarter of a billion sperm cells needed to fertilize one egg? Are women really fertile for only a few days each month? How long should babies be breast-fed?In How We Do It, primatologist Robert Martin draws on forty years of research to locate the roots of ...

Now that so many ecosystems face rapid and major environmental change, the ability of species to respond to these changes by dispersing or moving between different patches of habitat can be crucial to ensuring their survival. Understanding dispersal has become key to understanding how populations may persist. Dispersal Ecology and Evolution provides a timely and wide-ranging overview of the fast expanding field of dispersal ecology, incorporating the very latest research. The caus...

Who Am I? Why Am I Here? What Is Reality Really All About? Throughout mankind's history our perceptive reality has led us to question who what and why we are here. What is this universe we perceive around us? These questions have been the driving force of our survival and have contributed to the evolution and proliferation of man's existence. While there have been many disciplines of thought which have attempted to answer these questions the truth seems to elude us thereby indicating a lac...

This book develops and tests an ecological and evolutionary theory of the causes of human values—the core beliefs that guide people’s cognition and behavior—and their variation across time and space around the world. We call this theory the parasite-stress theory of values or the parasite-stress theory of sociality. The evidence we present in our book indicates that both a wide span of human affairs and major aspects of human cultural diversity can be understood in light of variable parasi...