Category: Book Summaries
Book Summary: “Life’s Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos” by Peter Hoffman
Book Summary: “Revolutions That Made the Earth” by Tim Lenton and Andrew Watson
Book Summary: “Plagues and Peoples” by William McNeill
Book Summary: “The Origin and Evolution of Cultures” by Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson
Book Summary: “Convergence: The Idea at the Heart of Science” by Peter Watson
Book Summary: “Origins: How Earth’s History Shaped Human History” by Lewis Dartnell
Book Summary: “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World” by Daniel Epstein
Book Summary: “How Carriers Fought: Carrier Operations in WWII” by Lars Celander
Course Summary: “Principles of Human Ecology” by Peter Richerson et al
Book Summary: “Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West” by William Cronon
Book Summary: “The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility” by Gregory Clark
Book Summary: “Social Physics: How Social Networks Make Us Smarter” by Alex Pentland
Book Summary: “Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution” by Nick Lane
Book Summary: “Social Networks in the History of Innovation and Invention” by Francis Moon
Book Summary: “The Principles of Social Evolution” by Andrew Bourke
Book Summary “Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity” by Walter Scheidel
Book Summary: “Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism 1850-1940” by Daniel R. Headrick
Book Summary: “Why the West Rules-for Now: The Patterns of History” by Ian Morris
Book Summary: “Why Most Things Fail” by Paul Ormerod
Book Summary: “Violence and Social Orders” by North, Wallis and Weingast
Book Summary: “War: What is It Good for?” by Ian Morris
Book Summary: “Cultural Evolution: People’s Motivations are Changing” by Ronald Inglehart
Book Summary: “Human Societies: An Introduction to Macrosociology” by Nolan and Lenski
Book Summary: “Ecological-Evolutionary Theory” by Gerhard Lenski
Book Summary: “Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution” by Richerson and Boyd
Book Summary: “The Dictator’s Handbook” by Mesquita and Smith
Book Summary: “Why Europe?: The Medieval Origins of Its Special Path” by Michael Mitteraur
Book Summary: “The Wisdom of Crowds” by James Surowiecki
Book Summary: “Learning by Doing” by James Bessen
Book Summary: “The Origin of Wealth” by Eric D. Beinhocker
Book Summary: “The Knowledge Illusion” by Sloman and Fernback
Book Summary: “Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny” by Robert Wright
Book Summary: “Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human” by Richard L. Currier
Book Summary: “The Nature of Technology” by W. Brian Arthur
Book Summary: “Why Nations Fail” by Acemoglu and Robinson
Book Summary: “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond
Book Summary: “Why Information Grows” by Cesar Hidalgo
Book Summary: “Foragers, Farmers and Fossil Fuels” by Ian Morris
The Ratchet of Technology, a site by Michael Magoon 