Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve
    The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve
    The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve
    Audiobook15 hours

    The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve

    Written by Steve Stewart-Williams

    Narrated by Tom Lawrence

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The Ape That Understood the Universe is the story of the strangest animal in the world: the human animal. It opens with a question: How would an alien scientist view our species? What would it make of our sex differences, our sexual behavior, our child-rearing patterns, our moral codes, our religions, our languages, and science? The book tackles these issues by drawing on ideas from two major schools of thought: evolutionary psychology and cultural evolutionary theory.

    The guiding assumption is that humans are animals, and that like all animals, we evolved to pass on our genes. At some point, however, we also evolved the capacity for culture - and from that moment, culture began evolving in its own right. This transformed us from a mere ape into an ape capable of reshaping the planet, travelling to other worlds, and understanding the vast universe of which we're but a tiny, fleeting fragment.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCambridge University Press
    Release dateMar 1, 2019
    ISBN9781108732765
    The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve

    Related to The Ape that Understood the Universe

    Related audiobooks

    Psychology For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Why Are Humans So Kind, Yet So Cruel?

      Mar 6, 2019

      Under different circumstances, humans can be the kindest, gentlest species or the most murderous. Evolution may hold clues to that Jekyll and Hyde nature.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Yes, Life in the Fast Lane Kills You: New insights into mitochondria reveal how life expends energy.

      May 5, 2016

      Nick Lane is an evolutionary biochemist at University College London who thinks about the big questions of life: how it began, how it is maintained, why we age and die, and why we have sex. Shunning the habit of our times to regard these as questions

      11 min read

    • Article

      Why Your Brain Hates Other People

      Jun 22, 2017

      As a kid, I saw the 1968 version of Planet of the Apes. As a future primatologist, I was mesmerized. Years later I discovered an anecdote about its filming: At lunchtime, the people playing chimps and those playing gorillas ate in separate groups. It

      17 min read

    • Article

      Atheism, the Computer Model

      Feb 16, 2017

      In the United States, the nones have it. The nones being people with no organized religion and increasingly no belief in God or a universal spiritual power. They have the momentum, attention, and an expectation that in the future they will become a m

      10 min read

    • Article

      The Myth of Rationality

      Mar 17, 2021

      Many years ago, I worked as a counsellor on a program that provided support to the families of sex offenders. In practice, that usually meant working with the wives of men convicted of child sexual offences. You might expect that my job would have co

      8 min read

    • Article

      Ingenious: Dalton Conley

      Jun 1, 2017

      When Dalton Conley, a professor of sociology at Princeton University, talks about race, his authority is based on more than academic research. Every day he straddled the lines of race in the New York City housing project where he grew up in 1970s, a

      19 min read

    • Article

      Why Misinformation Is About Who You Trust, Not What You Think

      Feb 14, 2019

      I can’t see them. Therefore they’re not real.” From which century was this quote drawn? Not a medieval one. The utterance emerged on Sunday from Fox & Friends presenter Pete Hegseth, who was referring to … germs. The former Princeton University under

      13 min read

    • Article

      Why Misinformation Is About Who You Trust, Not What You Think

      May 26, 2021

      I can’t see them. Therefore they’re not real.” From which century was this quote drawn? Not a medieval one. The utterance emerged in February 2019 from Fox & Friends presenter Pete Hegseth, who was referring to … germs. The former Princeton Universit

      13 min read

    • Article

      You’re Better Off Not Knowing

      Mar 13, 2023

      For many Americans, these claims sound self-evidently true: Information is good; knowledge is power; awareness of social ills is the mark of the responsible citizen. But what if they aren’t correct? Recent studies on the link between political awaren

      6 min read

    • Article

      Political Leanings Can't Be Reduced To Genetic Programming

      Jul 10, 2019

      Increasingly, the intellectual consensus seems to be that our political leanings are hardwired in our genes. There is some excellent research behind this thinking, and I've come around to believing that DNA plays a bigger role in our political worldv

      3 min read

    • Article

      Culture Clash

      Jan 12, 2021

      Culture Clash
      4 min read

    • Article

      Touchy-feely And Not That New Really

      Jan 27, 2022

      HOW ARE YOU FEELING? TIRED? Happy? Bored? How open are you about your emotional status? As a kid, I was always amazed by the difference in answers to the traditional “How’s it going?” greeting from both my English friends and Irish family. While the

      5 min read

    • Article

      Getting The Message

      Oct 31, 2021

      Getting The Message
      2 min read

    • Article

      Reason, Faith, And The Struggle For Western Civilization

      Jul 1, 2020

      By Samuel Gregg Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2019. Pp. xv, 192. $28 hardcover. Ongoing conflict with and within the Middle East has spawned a significant literature regarding the “clash of civilizations” between Western liberal democracies and Islamic

      6 min read

    • Article

      Varieties of Experience

      Sep 1, 2020

      THERE IS A PUZZLE at the heart of my academic work. I am an anthropologist, and among other things, I study the voices (or auditory hallucinations) of people in different countries who have schizophrenia. Their voices are clearly shaped by local cult

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Ape that Understood the Universe

    4.5/5

    24 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words