How can co-operation emerge in a world of self-seeking egoists - whether superpowers, businesses, or individuals - when there is no central authority to police their actions? This title explores this question, and its implications in this age of nuclear weapons and arms talks.

Why are people nice to each other? What are the reasons for altruism? This book explains how the human mind has evolved a special instinct for social exchange, offering a lucid and persuasive argument about the paradox of human benevolence.

Everyone knows what consciousness is: it is what abandons you every evening when you fall asleep and reappears the next morning when you wake up. But why should the physical events occurring inside certain parts of our brain give rise to the phantasmagoric world of conscious experience - a world that contains everything we feel, know, and are? In this short non-technical text, Edelman and Tononi reveal exactly how the vast panorama of consciousness arises.

'A magnificent challenge to conventional ideas' Financial Times 'I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It manages to be both challenging and entertaining: it is highly recommended' the Independent '(Greene) send(s) the reader's imagination hurtling through the u

What is the truth about human nature? Are we each born a blank slate upon which experience is written? Steven Pinker here argues that our usual explanations of human behaviour - stated most clearly in the human sciences of psychology, ethics and politics - tend to deny what is now undeniable: the role of an inherited human nature. Differences in personality or achievement, whether seen among races, ethnic groups, sexes or individuals, are routinely explained away as due not to differences in innate constitution but differences in experience. This work argues otherwise.

But the sensitive way in which systems respond to those basic laws, combined with feedback, can explain why, for example, just one vehicle braking on a motorway can cause a traffic jam; how a tiny genetic mutation or environmental change may make a species

As our knowledge of the brain grows beyond the wildest expectations, the time is ripe to explore pleasure in terms of workings of the mind. Pleasure is the most marvellous sensation, the most prized state, but also, properly understood, the most basic type of consciousness. Understanding pleasure suggests new ways of understanding consciousness itself - by looking at the neurological characte of our most primitive emotions.

Seventeenth-century England was racked by civil war, plague, and fire. A series of meetings of natural philosophers' in Oxford and London saw the beginning of a method of thinking based on proof and experiment. This is account of this unparalleled time of

Analyses what words actually mean and how we use them, and reveals what this can tell us about ourselves. This book shows how we use space and motion as metaphors for more abstract ideas, and uncovers the deeper structures of human thought that have been s

Craig Venter is no ordinary scientist, and no ordinary man. He is the first human being ever to read their own DNA - and see the key to life itself. This book tells the story of his life: from teenage rebel and Vietnam medic, to sailor and maverick researc