Quora: Mind expanding books?

Not mentioned:

Why zebras don't get ulcers by Robert Sapolski.  This is the book of the last decade or two that actually changed my interactions with others.  Stress is a basic factor in social biology and it contributes something like 50% of your quality of life.  Our social interactions constantly play with our own and others stress levels so understanding stress is understanding a lot of what is being done to you and what you are doing to others. This covers the chemistry, physiology and biology of stress and it's role in social interactions and dominance.  I thought I understood stress but I didn't real get it.  This book provided clear insight in to social interactions in a new light so I could both soften up and toughen up, appropriately.

The Mating Mind by Geoffrey Miller.  Ever wondered why people make art, polish their cars, write poetry, etc.  I don't mean what peoples stories are about these things, but why they really want to do them.  Biological organisms have evolved to minimize energy use, to only expend energy when it counts.  Why did a species of great apes evolved the desires to engage in these weird waste-of-time-and-energy activities.  Find out.

Just about anything by John Gray but Straw Dogs or maybe The Silence of Animals.  We think of mythologies as belonging in historical times but we are embedded in modern myths so thoroughly that we can't see beyond them.

"Most people today think they belong to a species that can be master of its destiny. This is faith, not science. We do not speak of a time when whales or gorillas will be masters of their destinies. Why then humans?"

Science as narrative

I’ve spent a lot of time recently wondering why so many people just don’t get science. As a result, I’ve stopped thinking of science as a logically separate category of activity to other stuff we do. Science is a big multistranded narrative. Scientific laws are narratives. This is not to say that scientific narratives are equivalent to any old narrative, it’s just to say that narratives are how humans understand the world, and how we communicate our understanding: through these sequences of associations. What makes science science, and homeopathy or the Illiad not science, is simply the practice of testing the narratives against reality. Narratives that do not fit reality are discarded, or honed into a new version that works

From an evolutionary viewpoint, becoming narrative-capable represents a massive leap for a species. Individual actions need no longer be generated by the immediate local observed environment, or by habit, but can be driven by retained narratives. Collecting good narratives – that is, narratives that improve your decisions – is obviously adaptive.
A “good” narrative doesn’t have to be true – and in the Pleistocene it probably typically wasn’t – it just has to enable a better decision than you would have made without it. So we are beguiled by the story-tellers, driven to listen and collect narratives. Narratives can also create power for their power for their tellers: if I tell a believable story about why I am king, it secures my position. Therein lies our fall, we are seduced by the believable story and driven to make up stuff to control others.

Science provides a radical antidote to our weakness for seductive tales. No matter how beguiling the story, it must pass any test thrown at it to be retained. And for as long as it passes, it is Science.