Bøker av Nicholas Wade

The renowned New York Times bestselling author of Before the Dawn breaks down the startling ways that evolution explains why societies succeed and fail. In the modern world, human nature is seldom taken into account by those who would reshape society. Nicholas Wade argues that's a terrible mistake.Human nature, in the view of the progressive left, is easily ignored or else shaped into whatever the latest political doctrine may require. But the conservative view, that social engineering can never change human nature for the better, is not true either. In this deeply researched survey of biological and political history, Wade reveals the effect of ideologies that ignore human nature. Marx and Engels proposed to eliminate the family as a social unit. Their followers have sought to overturn the patriarchy and divert allegiance from the family to the state. In reality, while some policies influence human nature for the better, like those that have abolished tribalism, others, such as socialism, conflict with human nature and undermine the operation of a society.Combining the scope of Yuval Noah Harari with the political savvy of Francis Fukuyama, The Origin of Politics, Wade's work draws from anthropology, evolutionary biology, and historical analysis to explore how human nature shapes the direction of society--and how policies which ignore human nature risk chaos and even extinction.Political scientists agree that the roots of politics must lie in human nature, but then assume that human behavior is infinitely flexible. The Origin of Politics shows that limits set by human evolution cannot be ignored without penalty.

This book celebrates binocular vision by presenting illustrations that require two eyes to see the effects of cooperation and competition between them. Pictures are flat but by printing them in different colours and viewing them through similarly coloured filters (included with the hardcover book) they are brought to life either in stereoscopic depth or in rivalry with one another. They are called anaglyphs and all those in the book display the ways in which the eyes interact. Thus, the reader is an integral element in the book and not all readers will see the same things. The history, science and art of binocular vision can be experienced in ways that are not usually available to us and with images made specifically for this book. The study of vision with two eyes was transformed by the invention of stereoscopes in the early 19th century. Anaglyphs are simple forms of stereoscopes that have three possible outcomes from viewing them - with each eye alone to see the monocular images, with both eyes to see them in stereoscopic depth or rivalry, or without the red/cyan glasses where they can have an appeal independent of the binocularity they encompass. Through the binocular pictures and the words that accompany them there will be an appreciation of just how remarkable the processes are that yield binocular singleness and depth. Moreover, the opportunities for expressing these processes are explored with many examples of truly binocular art.

Did the Covid virus jump naturally from an animal species to humans, or did it escape from a laboratory experiment? In this essay, science writer Nicholas Wade explores the two scenarios and argues that, on present evidence, lab escape is the more likely explanation. His inference is based on specific research being conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Institute's lack of adequate safety precautions, together with the continuing absence of any direct evidence to support natural emergence.The essay discusses the failure of the mainstream media to penetrate the self-interested assurance of virologists that lab escape was a dismissible conspiracy theory. It also notes how the politicization of discussion impeded consideration of the scientific facts.

Both visual artists and scientists have produced patterns that perplex our perceptions and present us with puzzles that we are pleased to peruse. Art and illusionists presents these two poles of pictorial representation as well as presenting novel 'perceptual portraits' of the artists and scientists who have augmented the art of illusion.