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Next year in books: CultureLab's choicest reads for 2016

From state-of-the art views on cosmology and human morality, to radically rethinking parenthood and gender inequality, get ready to curl up with some great books

30 December 2015

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The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the new science of child development tells us about the relationship between parents and children

Alison Gopnik

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Overwhelmed by the demands of parenting? Guilty about not being good enough? Psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik lets us off the hook, arguing that 21st-century notions of parenting are nothing to do with caring for kids and everything to do with a multibillion dollar industry that turns childcare into an obsessive business. It’s wrong, says Gopnik: worse, it’s bad science.

Half-Earth: Our planet’s fight for life

Edward O. Wilson

W. W. Norton

The proposal is simple yet disturbing: to avoid mass extinction of all species, including humans, we must preserve biodiversity by giving half of Earth’s surface to nature. At 86, theorist and ant expert, E. O. Wilson has been making waves with this idea for a while, now it’s all in one place.

Can a beehive’s temperature control system predict market fluctuations, or a mammal’s heartbeat help us listen to the “heartbeat” of a city? It’s hard to overstate the importance of complex adaptive systems: John Miller’s “crude look” explores what to do when reductionism simply won’t work.

“What thinks? Should we admit cows, computers or even corporations to the mind club?”

Engineers of Jihad: The curious connection between violent extremism and education

Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog

Princeton University Press

The questions raised here could hardly be more timely. Why have so many Islamist radicals trained as engineers – and why do Islamist and right-wing extremism have more in common than either does with left-wing extremism? Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog look at the conditions that make people join extremist groups, at how the groups recruit, their ideology and the existence of a mindset susceptible to certain types of extremism. New Scientist featured their thesis in 2009, but the book promises the full story.

What works: Gender equality by design

Iris Bohnet

Harvard University Press

How fitting that interesting new answers on what to do about gender equality should come from a woman business professor at Harvard University. That is, after all, where Larry Summers, then-president of the university, caused uproar 10 years ago when he argued that men outperform women in maths and sciences because of biological differences, and that discrimination is no longer a career barrier for women. Iris Bohnet says that unconscious biases do hold women back, and argues for de-biasing organisations instead of individuals.

From the smallest molecule in our bodies to the number of animals and plants on the African savannah, rules govern the natural world. And the similarity of these rules points to a common underlying logic of life. Biologist Sean Carroll argues that it’s time to use the “Serengeti rules” to heal the planet.

The Mind Club: Who thinks, what feels, and why it matters

Daniel M. Wegner and Kurt Gray

Viking

We’re trained to assume that other humans can think, to admit them to the “mind club”. But what about the mind of a cow, a computer, even a corporation? What kinds of mind do they have? Social psychologist Daniel M. Wegner wrote the classic White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts, but he didn’t live to see The Mind Club published. If it is half as good, it will be a very fitting tribute.

Billed as a tour of the “greatest hits” of cosmological discoveries, expect everything from the formation of black holes to dark matter halos, the accelerating expansion of the universe, the big bang echo, exoplanets and the possibility of other universes. Our guide is astrophysicist, Priyamvada Natarajan, insider and newcomer to such wide-ranging outings.

A Natural History of Human Morality

Michael Tomasello

Harvard University Press

If you’re after a definitive guide to explain how humans became an ultra-cooperative and, eventually, moral species, this must be it. Evolutionary anthropologist Michael Tomasello has followed his last book, A Natural History of Human Thinking, with another hard hitter.

(Image: Kyle Thompson/Agence VU/Camera Press)

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