Book Group: Past books

On Being Certain: Believing you are Right Even When You're Not by Robert Burton (2008): challenges conventional ideas about "knowledge" and "belief," using findings and frameworks from recent research about how humans actually reason and the structure of the brain. Should change readers' answers to the question "how do we know what we know?" Gives us more tools for being more skeptical about some of our own cherished "knowledge" and some new ways of thinking about our own biases and heuristics.

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland (2013). We know that income inequality is increasing in America, but how much? How rich are these new super-rich? How do they justify their privilege? Do they spend their money creating jobs, or perhaps making charitable contributions? What is their politics? Why do they profess to experience so much stress? Should we by sympathetic? Apathetic? Or what?

The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, by Denis Dutton (2009) argues that human proclivities for art are evolutionary traits, shaped by natural selection--inborn and in some ways universal. This approach to art challenges purely cultural explanations of human variety in artistic expression, and takes issue with many familiar aesthetic arguments over such questions as "what is art?" and the role of interpretation. Dutton incorporates scholarship from a variety of disciplines, and is readable for general audiences.

Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist, is the author of Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind (2012). He argues that humans have an innate propensity to contribute and conform to the culture of our birth that not only enabled human survival and progress in the past, but continues to influence our behavior today.