Nature cannot build organisms biologically prepared for every contingency they might possibly encounter. Instead, Nature builds some organisms to function as feedback control systems that pursue goals, make informed behavioral decisions about how best to pursue those goals in the current situation, and then monitor behavioral execution for effectiveness. Nature builds psycholog...(展开全部)

◎ 著者 马丁•詹金斯(Martin Jenkins) 生物学家、童书作家，毕业于剑桥大学，已经出版了多本童书，并屡获奖项。 ◎ 绘者 格雷厄姆•贝克-史密斯(Grahame Baker Smith) 2011年凯特•格林纳威奖得主，自由插画师，从事插画工作30多年。 ◎ 译者 梁艳 中国科学院南京地质古生物研究所副研究员，致力于在石头中寻找、探索、“利用”一群曾生活在远古海洋中的灭绝微体生物。 谭超 中国科学院南京地质古生物研究所工程师，没事画些古生物复原，偶尔给一些奇怪的生物做个雕塑或动画。

In this ambitious work, Philip Pettit offers a single, unified, and overarching theory of freedom. A puzzling topic, freedom extends from the individual and the metaphysical (i.e. free will) to the social and the political, yet a theory connecting these two realms has yet to be devised. In an elegant, accessible manner, Pettit presents a survey of available theories of freedom,...(展开全部)

One of America’s foremost philosophers offers a major new account of the origins of the conscious mind. How did we come to have minds? For centuries, this question has intrigued psychologists, physicists, poets, and philosophers, who have wondered how the human mind developed its unrivaled ability to create, imagine, and explain. Disciples of Darwin have long aspired to explain...(展开全部)

Codes have decided the fates of empires, countries, and monarchies throughout recorded history. Mary, Queen of Scots was put to death by her cousin, Queen Elizabeth, for the high crime of treason after spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham cracked the secret code she used to communicate with her conspirators. And thus the course of British history was altered by a few sheets of cryp...(展开全部)

Only recently did mankind realise that it resides in a world of networks. The Internet and World Wide Web are changing our life. Our physical existence is based on various biological networks. We have recently learned that the term "network" turns out to be a central notion in our time, and the consequent explosion of interest in networks is a social and cultural phenomenon. Th...(展开全部)

The surprising history of the scientific method—from an evolutionary account of thinking to a simple set of steps—and the rise of psychology in the nineteenth century. The idea of a single scientific method, shared across specialties and teachable to ten-year-olds, is just over a hundred years old. For centuries prior, science had meant a kind of knowledge, made from facts gath...(展开全部)

Review A dark horse, only in that one might not expect a book by Einstein to be a sales possibility for the layman. And that is what this is. It is ideal for the layman,and he needs little or no previous knowledge of the subject if he is willing to give the successive pages of the volume his careful attention. There is no necessity of struggling with mathematical equations, tho...(展开全部)

What is economic growth? And why, historically, has it occurred in only a few places? Previous efforts to answer these questions have focused on institutions, geography, finances, and psychology. But according to MIT's antidisciplinarian César Hidalgo, understanding the nature of economic growth demands transcending the social sciences and including the natural sciences of info...(展开全部)