What does it mean to "trust?" Is it possible to "trust" an institution?

As difficult as it may be to define, trust is essential to the formation and maintenance of a civil society.

This book looks back at the simpler versions of mental life in apes, Neanderthals, and our ancestors, back before our burst of creativity started 50,000 years ago. William H. Calvin takes stock of what we have now and then explains why we are nearing a crossroads, where mind shifts gears again.

This book nicely straddles the interface between popular neurobiology, paleoanthropology, and consciousness studies.

A major refutation of the almighty status of genes in evolution and human behavior.

As the title promises, this is all about sex, but not the way you might think.

We want to think of the family as a haven, a sheltered port from the maelstrom of social forces that rip through our lives. Within the family, we like to think, everyone starts out on equal footing.

In this groundbreaking book, Dalton Conley shows us that inequality in families is not the exception but the norm.

This pecking order is not necessarily determined by the natural abilities of each individual, and not even by the intentions or will of the parents. It is determined by the larger social forces that envelop the family.

Is the price of human life going down? Does it cost any less to protect the natural world?

Decisions such as removing arsenic from drinking water or weighing the risks of cell phone use while driving should not be left to back-room bean counters. Such issues call for informed public debate drawing on moral, philosophical, and societal considerations beyond market-based assessments.

The effective functioning of a democratic society—including social, business, and political interactions -- largely depends on trust.

Yet trust remains a fragile and elusive resource in many of the organizations that make up society's building blocks.

Edited by John Brockman, "Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist" is a fascinating collection of essays from twenty-seven of the world's most interesting scientists about the moments and events in their childhoods that set them on the paths that would define their lives.

What makes a child decide to become a scientist?

Everyone knows that while different cultures may think about the world differently, they use the same equipment for doing their thinking.

But what if everyone is wrong?

As Richard Nesbitt shows, people actually think about -- and even see -- the world differently because of differing ecologies, social structures, philosophies, and educational systems that date back to ancient Greece and China and that have survived into the modern world.

The creator of the famous "Obedience Experiments," carried out at Yale in the 1960s, and originator of the "six degrees of separation" concept, Stanley Milgram was one of the most innovative scientists of our time.

In this sparkling biography, Thomas Blass captures the colorful personality and pioneering work of a social psychologist who profoundly altered the way we think about human nature.

Nature is full of complex and complicated systems in any shade of color, consistency and complexity, from quasars to quarks, galaxies to snowflakes and microbes to minds.

How and why did the world become so marvelously complex?

Revolutions in evolution are possible because evolution gets stuck from time to time when a large fitness barrier is reached. Evolution waits until massive catastrophes break these barriers or single agents are able to cross them.through a tunneling process. The emergence of complexity has a price.