Books That Will Make You Think Differently About Yourself

The concept behind this site is fairly simple. Our genes are controlling us a lot more than we think they are, but this is not a bad news story. We can, if we understand what our genes are up to, take control and live according to our rationally conceived objectives in life. This is not an idea that I have come up with on my own (though I may be one of its most ardent proponents). I've just grabbed onto it because I think it is the key to getting the most out of our time here. If we know that emotions are the brain's rapid response system, and we know that they evolved to react in certain ways to certain situations (social situations, in particular), then we have a leg up in the quest to think when circumstances require thought more than emotion. That, alone, I am convinced, would elevate the general happiness to levels that have never before been seen in mankind's history. To that end, I'd like to propose the creation of a book list, an enlightened caveman curriculum, if you will.

Let me first draw some lines in the sand. There are countless books that can be said to enlighten humanity - the dictionary comes to mind - so we need some criteria for books that will fit properly into this. The first is this: a book on this list must deal directly with human nature. It may be based in science, such as genetics, or any other field of study that is represented on accredited college campuses. Anthropologists and archaeologists have learned a great deal about who we are as a species, so it makes sense to include their efforts in our pursuit of enlightenment.

Second, the book must invoke concepts about human nature in a prescriptive way. That is to say, it isn't good enough to say that genes are selfish, which means our elaborate lives are the happenstance result of replicators replicating. (So The Selfish Gene , great as it is, is out.) The book has to say what the science and/or anthropology and/or archaeology prescribes for those of us looking for direction in life. We need to be able to practically apply what the academics have discovered.

I'll start by adding three books that have been particularly meaningful to me, and I'd ask that suggestions to the list adhere to the same general format - tell what the background information is, and then tell what is prescribed, and how it benefits mankind. Over time, hopefully, we'll have a nice list of books that all add credence and weight to the theme of this site. Of course, in the spirit of intellectual rigor, I'd welcome any recommendations of books that contradict the enlightened caveman concept.

These books are listed in no particular order.

1. Mean Genes : From Sex to Money to Food: Taming Our Primal Instincts
by Terry Burnham, Jay Phelan .

From the introduction:
Our brains have been designed by genetic evolution. Once we understand that design, it is no longer surprising that we experience tensions in our marriages, that our waistlines are bigger than we'd like, and that Big Macs are tastier than brown rice. To understand ourselves and our world, we need to look not to Sigmund Freud but rather to Charles Darwin.

The authors then go on to address the following list of topics: debt, getting fat, drugs, taking risks, greed, gender differences, beauty, infidelity, family, friends, and foes. In each case, they detail the ancient genetic strategies that are manifesting themselves in behavior and social phenomena today, and then they explain what shifts in thought are implied by the information if we are to improve our lives.

I must admit that I was in a pretty solid state of panic when I read the introduction to this book. I was thinking that these guys had basically beat me to the punch. Fortunately, as I read on, I realized that there really isn't very much overlap between my book and theirs. Yes, we're both working off the same general premise. However, my book is far less tactical. I'm focused on changing the way we think from the inside out - by starting with how we think of ourselves and what matters in life and then moving on to how we think about our fellow man - all for the sole purpose of bringing happiness to our lives. Burnham and Phelan, however, call their book a manual for the mind, and I have to agree with them.

For example, they explain that in ancestral times, it made sense to eat when food was available. Therefore, we are now a species that eats far more than it needs when food is plentiful (as it is in first-world countries). That means we have to consciously endeavor to control our intake of food. If we do not, we'll routinely find ourselves letting our belts out. Think of how many people in this country don't know this. The mass awareness of little tidbits like this could prolong and improve the lives of countless people. There are many, many others in this book.

2. Consilience : The Unity of Knowledge
by Edward O. Wilson.

From Chapter 6: The Mind
All that has been learned empirically about evolution in general and mental processes in particular suggests that the brain is a machine assembled not to understand itself, but to survive. Because these two ends are basically different, the mind unaided by factual knowledge from science sees the world only in little pieces. It throws a spotlight on those portions of the world it must know in order to live to the next day, and surrenders the rest to darkness.

Wilson's book is about reconsidering the way we teach and pursue knowledge. He argues that our schools break subjects apart (math, english, biology, etc.) for somewhat arbitrary reasons and that this works against the design of the mind, which is more comfortable with holistic approaches to learning. Consilience, he says, is, "...literally a 'jumping together' of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation." The idea is that we shouldn't restrict ourselves to applying what we learn in computer-based neural networks to implementing better computer systems. We should ask what other phenomenon could be better understood by what we know about these inanimate, but elegant systems. It's about sythesis, and this, to me, begs a mental paradigm shift.

Wilson asserts that that the value of consilience is not something that can be proven with first principles or logical deduction. Its value is self-evident, as it has been chiefly responsible for most of the progress of our species. I can vouch for that in my own life. Any time I learn something new, I automatically ponder what this new information could bring to other things I've wondered about. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, for example, has so many other applications that counting them would be tough, and I thank Wilson for helping me think differently, about myself and the world around me.

3. The Science of Good and Evil : Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule
by Michael Shermer

From the Prologue:
Ultimate questions about social and moral behavior, while considerably more challenging [than questions about hunger and sex], must nevetheless be subjected to an evolutionary analysis. There is a science dedicated specifically to this subject called evolutionary ethics, founded by Charles Darwin a century and a half ago and continuing as a vigorous field of study and debate today. Evolutionary ethics is a subdivision of a larger science called evolutionary psychology, which attempts a scientific study of all social and psychological human behavior. The fundamental premise of these sciences is that human behavior evolved over the course of hundreds of thousands of years during our stint as hominid hunter gatherers, as well as over the course of millions of years as primates, and tens of millions of years as mammals.

In this book, Shermer takes aim at morality and ethics by arguing that humans came by the two long before religion or any codified social rules existed. In Chapter 5, called, "Can We Be Good Without God?", he addresses head on how we can rationally arrive at morality and be anchored to it as tightly (and rightly) as any religious person is to his or her morality. Throughout the book, the author calls upon all sorts of academic information, from evolutionary psychology to anthropology to sociology to make his points. And aside from the obvious benefits of seeing our tendency toward peity for what it is, he also brings out a really useful concept, using fuzzy logic to think differently about issues.

Shermer makes the point that the human tendency to dichotomize, to think something is either this way or that, must be guarded against, because life is simply not black and white. Better to think in terms of fractions. For example, at any given moment, I may be 20% altruistic and 80% nonaltruistic (selfish). Though, in the balance, I come off selfish at that time, it is incorrect to say that I am a selfish person. The situation may have called for selfishness. The bottom line is that circumstances have a lot to do with our morality. Being able to see people and ideas as shades of grey helps us to avoid moral absolutes that generally lead to division between people. This is a worthwhile message, to say the least.

So there you have it - three books that I think contribute to the enlightened caveman movement. There are more, but not too many, not to my knowledge. That's why I'm doing this. I'll finish my contributions in later posts. For now, I hope to learn about all the great books I've never heard of, books that will bolster my belief that here lies something big, something important.

Intellectual Property and Table Clearing

Here's where capitalism and the concept of intellectual property clash. The Time Life folks hit me with a Greatest Soul Ballads ad tonight, and it got me thinking. I'm not really interested in every song on the list, but there are quite a few that I'd love to have on my iPod. Wouldn't it be nice if someone had a website that provided the songlist for all these great compilations that get advertised on TV? You could just choose the ones you want and buy them for $1.05 - $1.00 goes to iTunes, and Mr. Easy Tunes (can I name a business or what?) keeps a nickel. Nice little money machine, right? Maybe not.

It's likely, I don't know (it's late - I been drinkin), that intellectual property laws could protect these lists so that it would be an infringement to use them without permission (and compensation). And if this is true, isn't it a bit much? Then what can't you claim as your own?

Tonight, after guests left, I inaugurated the one object under each arm (a pitcher and beer bottle) and four glasses in each hand clean up maneuver. It was an act of custodial ballet - the objects balanced just so, the glasses drawn together slowly as the grasp of each hand closed, and the deft pivot towards the kitchen. I've been around. I worked in restaurants, and I've been in surreal late night contests to see who could carry the most glasses, so I won't say my maneuver was ground breaking. But it was smooth, and most of all, efficient - the table was cleared instantly. Now what if I decided that that move was mine, and that I wanted to legally make it so?

Would it not be a series of ideas or memes (like a list) that were put into action (like selling a compilation album) that elicted a desired outcome - in this case, clearing a table in one fell swoop (like making money)? Of course, I know that folks probably won't be executing my move for financial compensation any time soon, but what does that matter? Bloggers can't take copyrighted photos and put them on their blog sites. There's no money in it for the bloggers, but that's still out of bounds. So where's the line? By the logic of list protection and copyrighted photo protection, could I not charge a nickel every time someone executed my maneuver? Seems like I could. (And you can bet I'd enforce it.) Maybe it's silly. But maybe it's not.

Any of you bottom dwelling lawyers want to weigh in on this?

Thin-Slicing and Attraction Triggers

Even though I finished it a while ago, I continue to dwell on the notion of thin-slicing that Malcolm Gladwell writes about it his latest, Blink. " 'Thin-slicing' refers to the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based upon very narrow slices of experience." Gladwell covers a variety of situations that exemplify how thin-slicing works, and more importantly, how it often works better than making decisions based upon a great deal of information. Indeed, this is really the point of Blink. But, upon further consideration, one example, the one I referred to in my appearance delta theory, has prompted me to extend the concept to include what I'll call attraction triggers.

Gladwell, in illuminating the "dark side" of thin-slicing, spends some time on how we often form our opinions of individuals based upon the slightest of information. Our visual first impression often has the effect of coloring our assessments dramatically. He refers us to a test some psychologists have developed called the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Subjects are given a list of words and are asked to choose which of two categories the words belong to. For example, the list may be a list of names and the category choices may be male or female. Subject responses are timed. Since most people have considerable experiences that say the name Mary is a female name, responses in this easy test are very fast (between 400 and 600 milliseconds). The association between name and gender is well established within our culture. But when the categories and words are changed, interesting things start to happen.

Suppose, there are two possible words for each category - say male or family on one side and female or career on the other. Then, the subject still has to put the words into one of two categories, but they have to figure out which is best by considering four alternatives, not two. Confused yet? Here's an example.

Male......................................... Female
or............................................... or
Family ......................................Career

.........................Babies.................................
.........................Sarah..................................
.........................Derek..................................
.........................Domestic............................
.........................Entrepreneur....................

So the subject simply has to place an X either to the left or the right of the word (Babies, for example) to indicate which category the word falls into. Interestingly, because we naturally associate maleness with careers and femaleness with families, this test is pretty tough. Our natural tendency is to want to put entrepreneur on the male side, but it is clearly related to career. That little mental wavering manifests itself in additional time to taken to make the choice - on the order of 200 to 300 milliseconds more than what is seen for a naturally strong association. The point is that, by pairing certain words together, the psychologists administering the IAT have found evidence of all sorts of inherent bias in how we assess things and other people.

One bias that we might not expect or want to accept is a racial bias. You can go here to take the Race IAT for yourself. (Be warned - you're likely to be dismayed by the results.) When the categories are European American or Bad and African American or Good, all hell breaks loose. When we should be able to breeze through a series of pictures and take no more than 400-600 milliseconds to make our choices, we take much longer. When we should be able to take words like Evil, Hurt, and Wonderful and easily place them into their proper categories in short order, we simply do not. It appears that our thin-slicing proclivities are very much a function of our personal experiences and of our assessments of cultural norms. Though tests like the Race IAT should give us some serious pause, I wonder if we could take the same idea and apply it to how we assess appearance deltas.

Though the IAT asks subjects to assign words to categories, it isn't very much different than the "hot or not" craze that has taken up residence in many corners of the Internet. In this case, subjects are asked if a person in a picture is hot or not. Now, they are not timed, so this isn't particularly rigorous experimentation. But what if they were? What if the point was to determine one's hotness or not hotness as quickly as possible, and the responses were meaured in milliseconds? Would be there be ways that we could manipulate the pictures to get faster or slower responses? I say there would, and they would revolve around attraction triggers.

Suppose we put up a picture of a girl with a dead-pan look on her face and then gave the test to 100 people. Then, we put up the same girl, but with a big smile on her face. Would she get more "hots" than she did in the first test? Who knows? If she was on the fence - say 50 out of 100 said she was hot in the first test - we should expect that number to go up on the second test (unless she had major dental issues). This is because, all things being equal, someone who smiles is more attractive than someone who does not, and we know it in a fraction of a second. Is there more?

Ever seen someone from a distance and thought they were attractive, only to learn as they got closer that you were wrong? Of course, it's happened to all of us. But can you put your finger on what it was that contributed most to the assessment early on? Maybe the person had an attractive walk, or maybe he or she was wearing a flashy outfit. Whatever it was, I think we can think of it as an attraction trigger, something that, when it is thin-sliced, leads people to think "hot." Of course, a distant attraction trigger often dissipates as the distance closes. But, is it possible that there are attraction triggers that are seen up close and contribute disproportionally to one's delta (or lack thereof)?

Teeth might be a good example. If someone has a brilliant smile, it may be so captivating that it offsets other features that might raise one's delta. And this is not insignificant. As Gladwell's book points out, the biases that are invoked when we're thin-slicing are not just fleeting impressions. They color how we behave going forward. So if we could do something to alter those first impressions in our favor, we may find interpersonal acceptance easier to come by.

Again, we find ourselves up against the sell-out conundrum - which is to say, is it worth it to modify our appearances to get what we want from other people? In some cases, whether we want to admit or not, the answer for all of us is yes. So the real question is when. And now, with the notion of attraction triggers, we can consider large-scale changes (such as dieting, exercising, and cosmetic surgery) and more subtle changes.

One friend of mine loves girls in pony tails. On a scale of 1-10, she can be a 6 but he'll go for her like she's a 9. It's weird really, but I'm convinced that most people have these quirks. So if an average girl happened to be interested in my friend, she would be well served to know his attraction trigger and wear her hair accordingly. This is a simplistic example, I know, but I'm just trying to throw another twist into the appearance delta concept. I think it's useful, even if as only a more descriptive way to observe and contemplate the human drama as it unfolds. Would a working familiarity with attraction triggers constitute enlightenment? Why not? Maybe it makes things just a little bit brighter.

Book Review: State of Fear

Crichton's latest finally boiled up to the top of my reading list, so I mowed through it in seven hours of plane rides to and from Puerto Rico. (Don't ask. I hate Puerto Rico.) As is my custom with book reviews, I'll get the important stuff out of the way. I'd absolutely recommend this book, and not just because it affirms what I've been saying (click here and here and here) about global warming and environmentalism. This book is good on two completely different levels - one is the pleasure reading level; the other is the "does this matter?" level. I'll deal with the first first.

Bottom line, Crichton knows how to push your buttons and keep you turning pages. I attended a writer's conference in San Francisco back in February, and the keynote speaker was a guy named John Lescroart. This guy has written several bestsellers. In fact, he said he submits a new book every year on May 1st, and he follows a very simple formula (simple in theory, of course). Lescroart was kind enough to divulge this formula, the six principles for writing a bestselling novel, as his keynote speech. I can't remember all of them, but the first three are ingrained in my head.

It all starts with a high-concept idea, which is to say, an idea that is almost universal in its appeal. A terrorist threat in this post 9-11 world is a high concept idea. So is a group of environmental activists bent on building a worldwide sense of urgency around addressing the global warming "crisis." That's the central theme of State of Fear, and its appeal is enhanced considerably by the fact that the "good guys" aren't the plotting environmentalists.

Cynical (and admittedly wise) book industry folks will tell you that you have to hook the reader on the first page if you expect them to buy the book. On this, Crichton does not disappoint. He essentially sets up the whole story in about three paragraphs - an island in the south Pacific is suffering because of rising oceans due to global warming, along with an American environmental group, they decide to sue the US, but the lawsuit never happens. The book is the story of what transpired. That's a solid hook if you ask me, especially considering how many people believe in the global warming crisis and who blame the US as the primary culprit.

As an aside, it is not insignificant that Crichton hooks the reader without letting on that he thinks global warming is a scam. Had he tipped us off to this on the first page, my bet is that his book would not be selling as well as it is (or is it? see below). It's sad that it takes a bait and switch to get contrarian views into the mainstream psyche. Nevertheless, State of Fear is high concept, and then some, but a good concept will only get you so far.

Lescroart's second step in his formula is character development. Once he's established a high-concept theme, he begins to think about who will be involved and what they'll be like. There are some key guidelines here. The most important is that readers want main characters who are larger than life. We're not talking super heroes, but we're not talking about immigrant gas station attendants either. Remember that this is about what it takes to write a best seller. If we're reading the great American novel, we want reality. If we're reading Clancy, we want a sexy, take-no-shit, been through the ringer and back, know-it-all, silent type with an axe to grind. Those are the kinds of characters Lescroart tries to create, and Crichton is no different, but he takes a little bit of a twist on it, and I think this is part of why his book scores well in the "does it matter?" category. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The main character, or at least one of them, is a lawyer who works for a rich environmentalist. Far from being a super hero, the guy is actually sort of a boob. Sure, he meets all of the basic standards of a character in a bestselling novel - he has a good job and he's good-looking - but he's significantly outdone by many of the other characters in the book. One such character is a Clancy-esque character, a scientist turned black ops military guy working against wacked out environmentalist extremists. He is the primary vehicle for Crichton's assertions about global warming and environmentalism in general. Other characters, the girls in particular, are either two-dimensional cartoon characters (not meant disparagingly - not every character needs to be drawn in color) or they are smart, athletic, tough girls who can handle themselves in hairy situations. Perfect. The stage is set. Now something has to happen to them.

The third part of Lescroart's formula is plot. You have to get things moving and keep them moving. On this, Crichton also delivers. The main characters find themselves in crazy situations, often in danger of dying, and you're right there with them - thinking about what you'd do or what the options are. That, to me, is how you know you've been sucked into a novel. Given his pedigree - books like Jurassic Park, Disclosure, and Rising Sun - it's pretty much what you'd expect. But State of Fear goes beyond the standard techno-thriller fare.

Since Lescroart was dealing strictly with writing a bestselling novel, he did not bother to mention anything about writing something that would matter in the long run. His point was, quite clearly, to educate us on how to extract as much money as possible from the fiction industry...today. Were Crichton giving the same speech, I wonder if he'd take an aside on using the bestselling novel as a springboard to do something bigger, for that may very well be what he's done here.

As I read the appendices that conclude the book, I found myself thinking about Ayn Rand. The book Atlas Shrugged was a mind-changing book for me. By the time I finally took the plunge, I was already well-steeped in classical liberalism with respect to economics - via Friedman and Hayek - but I had never done what Rand forced me to do. I had never considered what would happen if those who oppose capitalism and individuality (either overtly or unknowingly) actually got what they wanted, what would happen if the doers stopped doing and let the talkers run the show. Thinly disguised in a story about the daughter of a railroad magnate is a 1000 page polemic about the perils of socialism and collectivism, and it is so powerful that it sticks with you...for years and years. State of Fear could end up being similar in this regard.

There's a message in this book that extends far beyond the revelation of the holes in the human induced global warming argument. As Kenner, the black ops anti-extremist of the novel, repeatedly batters with facts the ill-informed purveyors of environmentalist talking points, he also drives home the point that the environment is a highly complex and dynamic system. He questions the notion that preserving the environment is either doable or even worthy of doing. The better approach, he argues, is to determine what we want out of our environment and then to assess the options in terms of cost and benefit tradeoffs. Then, and only then, should we undertake to do something. It's all about cost-oriented management. Unfortunately, this is quite a departure from the way things are done today.

Environmentalists, for the most part, base their views on the idea that our society is destroying the environment. We must, they say, at the very least, stop this process, and hopefully reverse it. But reverse it to what? To the natural state of the environment? What exactly is that? As Crichton points out - if we don't mow and manage our lawns, the natural state of our yard will be an overgrown mess. Since the environment is nothing more than a competition between life forms for space and resources, we can't naively expect that not impacting it will result in something we'd want to live in. Preservation is, therefore, a useless concept. A better one is management. This message, to me, is so unbelievably powerful.

You can take issue all you want with Crichton's position on the global warming debate. (Check out his website, particularly the message boards for some ongoing arguments. Also, here are a couple of pieces that take issue with his assertions - Click here, and here, and here.) But it's hard to deny his perspective on the environmentalist movement. Even if, as is stated in a couple of the linked articles, Crichton's exhaustive footnotes are ill-used, his larger point still stands - we'll all be better off if we look at the environment in a different way.

It is entirely possible to be passionate about taking care of our world while also rejecting the current state of environmental affairs. We first have to move away from reflexively accepting the crisis du jour that is regularly fed to us by the media. (The title State of Fear comes from the idea that political, legal, and media powers that be are occupied primarily with fomenting fear in the masses, fear of whatever will drive them to buy, think, or do what they want.) We also have to be realistic about the results of having our academic research paid for by parties interested in a certain set of results. This, argues Crichton, is why so many "peer reviewed" papers support the global warming hype. On this, of course, many will disagree. But even if they do, there's simply no disputing the fact that scaring people into supporting policies that usually do more harm than good is no way to get what we want. This is a message that matters.

As I said, State of Fear could become one of those books that transcends the standard techno-thriller categorization. It could become a book that changes the minds of the masses, as Atlas Shrugged did. It could become the kind of book that ushers in a new way of thinking about a set of issues that are badly in need of reasoned discourse. Alas, I have concerns that this will never happen. Putting aside the fact that our society often seems unable to absorb information that can't fit on a 3x5 card, I don't see State of Fear being promoted as prominently as, say, John Grisham's latest. Indeed, I've noticed an odd pattern in my travels recently.

As I am in and out of different airports several times a week, I have the opportunity to visit bookstores all over the country. State of Fear is not easy to find, at least it hasn't been for me. Copies abound from all the big name authors, but Crichton's book has consistently either been "sold out" or on the shelf with the older books - one or maybe two copies, at most. Now, I'm no conspiracy theorist, but this strikes me as strange. Michael Crichton is one of the biggest authors in this country, right up there with Grisham, King, and Clancy. Of course, it could be that he is so popular that his book is flying off the shelves. Fair enough, but how is it that I always happen into bookstores before the new shipment has come in? A coincidence? Maybe. Time will tell, I guess.