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Who We Are and How We Got Here
- Narrated by: John Lescault
- Length: 10 hrs and 50 mins
- Categories: Politics & Social Sciences, Social Sciences
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In our unique genomes, every one of us carries the story of our species - births, deaths, disease, war, famine, migration, and a lot of sex. But those stories have always been locked away - until now. Who are our ancestors? Where did they come from? Geneticists have suddenly become historians, and the hard evidence in our DNA has completely upended what we thought we knew about ourselves. Acclaimed science writer Adam Rutherford explains exactly how genomics is completely rewriting the human story - from 100,000 years ago to the present.
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Very informative. I loved listening
- By Ingrid Hurlock on 2019-06-03
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What makes you the way you are - and what makes each of us different from everyone else? In Innate, leading neuroscientist and popular science blogger Kevin Mitchell traces human diversity and individual differences to their deepest level: in the wiring of our brains.
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Great insights
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For too long, scientists have focused on the dark side of our biological heritage: our capacity for aggression, cruelty, prejudice, and self-interest. But natural selection has given us a suite of beneficial social features, including our capacity for love, friendship, cooperation, and learning. Beneath all our inventions - our tools, farms, machines, cities, nations - we carry with us innate proclivities to make a good society.
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enlightening
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Best Science Book I have ever read
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A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived
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Overall
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In our unique genomes, every one of us carries the story of our species - births, deaths, disease, war, famine, migration, and a lot of sex. But those stories have always been locked away - until now. Who are our ancestors? Where did they come from? Geneticists have suddenly become historians, and the hard evidence in our DNA has completely upended what we thought we knew about ourselves. Acclaimed science writer Adam Rutherford explains exactly how genomics is completely rewriting the human story - from 100,000 years ago to the present.
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Very informative. I loved listening
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Crave answers? A Feast of Science demystifies the chemistry of everyday life, serving up practical knowledge to both inform and entertain. Guaranteed to satiate your hunger for palatable and relevant scientific information, Dr. Joe Schwarcz proves that "chemical" is not necessarily synonymous with "toxic".
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Really fun and informative book to listen to!
- By Ryan Hunziker on 2019-02-15
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The Perennial Philosophy
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Fantastic Eastern Philosophy
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What makes you the way you are - and what makes each of us different from everyone else? In Innate, leading neuroscientist and popular science blogger Kevin Mitchell traces human diversity and individual differences to their deepest level: in the wiring of our brains.
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For too long, scientists have focused on the dark side of our biological heritage: our capacity for aggression, cruelty, prejudice, and self-interest. But natural selection has given us a suite of beneficial social features, including our capacity for love, friendship, cooperation, and learning. Beneath all our inventions - our tools, farms, machines, cities, nations - we carry with us innate proclivities to make a good society.
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Why do we do the things we do? More than a decade in the making, this game-changing book is Robert Sapolsky's genre-shattering attempt to answer that question as fully as perhaps only he could, looking at it from every angle. Sapolsky's storytelling concept is delightful, but it also has a powerful intrinsic logic: He starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs and then hops back in time from there in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its evolutionary legacy.
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Read this. Read it now.
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very glad I read this
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Civilization was born 8,000 years ago, between the floodplains of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, when migrants from the surrounding mountains and deserts began to create increasingly sophisticated urban societies. In the cities that they built, half of human history took place. In Babylon, Paul Kriwaczek tells the story of Mesopotamia from the earliest settlements seven thousand years ago to the eclipse of Babylon in the sixth century BCE. Bringing the people of this land to life in vibrant detail, the author chronicles the rise and fall of power during this period.
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A good introduction to the history of Mesopotamia
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The Story of Human Language
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Language defines us as a species, placing humans head and shoulders above even the most proficient animal communicators. But it also beguiles us with its endless mysteries, allowing us to ponder why different languages emerged, why there isn't simply a single language, how languages change over time and whether that's good or bad, and how languages die out and become extinct.
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Fascinating!
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An award-winning journalist and leading international social researcher make the provocative argument that the global population will begin to decline, dramatically reshaping the social, political, and economic landscape.
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Worth the Listen
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Biological Anthropology: An Evolutionary Perspective
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In this series of 24 captivating lectures, an award-winning teacher and acclaimed scholar delves into the story of how, why, where, and when we became human. You'll gain a fresh understanding of the forces that have shaped our species, as Professor King synthesizes the best that more than a century of scientific scholarship has to offer across a variety of disciplines to gain the insights offered by fossils, ancient skeletal remains, and lifestyle information like cave art and stone tools.
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Conservationist Rachel Carson spent over six years documenting the effects on DDT, a synthetic organic compound used as an insecticide, on numerous communities. Her analysis revealed that such powerful, persistent chemical pesticides have been used without a full understanding of the extent of their potential harm to the whole biota, including the damage they've caused to wildlife, birds, bees, agricultural animals, domestic pets, and even humans. An instant best seller that was read by President Kennedy during the summer of 1962, this classic remains one of the best introductions to the complicated and controversial subject.
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Still relevant today
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Simple but....
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Biology: The Science of Life
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- Narrated by: Stephen Nowicki
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One of the greatest scientific feats of our era is the astonishing progress made in understanding biology-the intricate machinery of life-a progress to which the period we are living in right now has contributed the most.As you read these words, researchers are delving ever deeper into the workings of living systems, turning their discoveries into new medical treatments, improved methods of growing food, and innovative products that are already changing the world.
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The Indignities of Being a Woman
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Best book on Audible so far!
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Escaping the Rabbit Hole
- How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect
- Written by: Mick West
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
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- Unabridged
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Author Mick West shares over a decade's worth of knowledge and experience investigating and debunking false conspiracy theories through his forum, MetaBunk.org, and sets forth a practical guide to helping friends and loved ones recognize these theories for what they really are. West puts his debunking techniques and best practices to the test with four of the most popular false conspiracy theories today (chemtrails, 9/11 controlled demolition, false flags, and flat Earth) - providing road maps to help you to understand your friend and help them escape the rabbit hole.
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Super repetitive
- By Igor P on 2019-06-06
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The Righteous Mind
- Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
- Written by: Jonathan Haidt
- Narrated by: Jonathan Haidt
- Length: 11 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way forward to mutual understanding. His starting point is moral intuition - the nearly instantaneous perceptions we all have about other people and the things they do. These intuitions feel like self-evident truths, making us righteously certain that those who see things differently are wrong. Haidt shows us how these intuitions differ across cultures, including the cultures of the political left and right.
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Interesting listen, repetitive
- By Pablo on 2018-06-30
Publisher's Summary
A groundbreaking book about how ancient DNA has profoundly changed our understanding of human history
Geneticists like David Reich have made astounding advances in the field of genomics, which is proving to be as important as archaeology, linguistics, and written records as a means to understand our ancestry.
In Who We Are and How We Got Here, Reich allows listeners to discover how the human genome provides not only all the information a human embryo needs to develop but also the hidden story of our species. Reich delves into how the genomic revolution is transforming our understanding of modern humans and how DNA studies reveal deep inequalities among different populations, between the sexes, and among individuals. Provocatively, Reich's book suggests that there might very well be biological differences among human populations but that these differences are unlikely to conform to common stereotypes.
Drawing upon revolutionary findings and unparalleled scientific studies, Who We Are and How We Got Here is a captivating glimpse into humankind - where we came from and what that says about our lives today.
A New York Times best-seller in Science Books. A #1 Amazon.com bestseller in the Biochemistry List.
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What listeners say about Who We Are and How We Got Here
Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Sky Edwards
- 2018-08-15
Great narrator, easy to digest and great prose.
This was a great listen. Easy to follow and the natrator was good to listen to.
5 people found this helpful
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- Eric Forest
- 2019-06-05
Great content, monotonous narration
I love this subject and the work that has gone into it is fascinating. But the narration is like a screen reader on downers.
1 person found this helpful
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- Devon Monkhouse
- 2020-08-17
Great book. Terrible Reader.
David's writing kept me engaged through Johns monotone droning. This books needs a re-record. I look forward to David Reich's next work.
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- Ben
- 2019-07-18
Too much genetics and not enough paleoanthropology
This book is far too technical for my liking although this should in no way detract from the knowledge and groundbreaking work of the author. For those who are more interested in genetics, this book is probably wonderful. But I wanted to get the paleoanthropological history of humanity without so much technical detail.
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- Thom Barnett
- 2019-05-15
Badly done
This is read as though by Noah Weather radio computers on a faulty voice activated recorder. I don’t think that a single sentence begins without half of the word not being recorded. It makes it very difficult to understand.
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- Anthony
- 2018-07-16
Great information in a very academic format.
Information is great in this book. Really makes you feel like we are about to explode into an entirely new world of understanding about our past and human genetic differences and similarities. Makes the world seem more interesting instead of everyone is the same narrative.
The issues with the book are the style and the audio presenter.
The book feels like an academic journal article. The info is great but sometimes I wish the author would have entered more of the academic info in footnotes instead of in long drawn out pages of how they did such and such etc.
The reader is also an issue. I really wasn’t sure at times if this book wasn’t read by some kind of computer program. Not easy to listen to an academic text book read by a computer. Otherwise a very good book on the new knowledge being discovered everyday.
32 people found this helpful
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- Jane W.
- 2018-07-15
Great Book, No Maps Available thru Audible
I loved this book. Just what I’m interested in. I did return the Audible version because Audible does not provide access to the illustrations and maps in the book. The maps especially are important for tracing human migrations.
77 people found this helpful
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- ultrunner
- 2018-09-17
Excellent book, awful reading
The book is one of the best I've listened to in a long time. Unfortunately, the reading, somehow computer-generated, is the worst I've come across. The story makes it worth to endure.
20 people found this helpful
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- D. Jinkerson
- 2018-08-14
Great book, not the best narration
I enjoyed this book but the narrator was very monotone and halting. I decided to continue anyway since I found the content interesting.
13 people found this helpful
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- Maxine
- 2019-04-08
Not What I Expected
First, this is a brilliant book, and I certainly recommend it! However, be warned that it gets pretty technical and (at least for me) difficult to follow at times. Also, I would argue that it doesn't quite address what one might expect from the title. It is a rather comprehensive survey of the state of the science of genetic history, giving a picture of relationships of archaic and ancient human populations and their likely distributions over time. How any of this relates to human nature (as I interpret the meaning of the "who were are" question) is impossible to tell without understanding of the nature of those populations or how such nature might propagate. But if you're at all interested in how sequencing DNA of current and ancient humans has shed light on the migrations and interbreeding of human populations, definitely read this! Although later in the book, the author speculates some on what certain traits might have a genetic basis and how we may discover it, this book's value does not lie in interpretations of genetic traits. It's beauty is in the unapologetic unveiling of what we know so far about our ancient ancestry.
8 people found this helpful
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- Andy G.
- 2018-11-02
Great but the narration lacks
I think the narrator does very well considering what is asked, and the content is fascinating and convincing. But it is not easy to listen to.
I am comparing this to a few "Great Courses" audio courses where the professors are the ones narrating. The narration of the professors is much more interesting, not because they gave other information, but because you could hear them emphasizing what points were most important in any sentence or chapter. They were passionate about it and it made a lot of difference.
17 people found this helpful
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- Paula
- 2018-12-11
Fantastic book - terrible reader!
I've been fascinated by the whole concept of ancient DNA and what this tells us about humanity and the intertwined history of 'modern humans', Neanderthals, Denisovans, etc. for some time - and have been moving from audiobook to audiobook as each author points me to a new and even more fascinating aspect. I came to David Reich's contribution from Svante Paabo's amazing book on the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome and couldn't wait to hear the next stage of the sage, until...
... the reader! Honestly! This is one of that class of readers who puts completely random breaks in every sentence without any logic whatever! This is my pet hate and I actually returned the book to Audible because I was so frustrated and bought the e-book version from Amazon instead. But because I live in the country and do a lot of driving and listen to audiobooks in the car, I had to move on to something different - and that, in its own way, was so frustrating that I came back and bought the book again (something I've never done before).
So: the book is marvellous and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in the whole ancient DNA / human paleontology subject. The reader is so truly awful that words cannot describe the depths of my distress in having to listen to him! I guess this goes to show just how good the book is.
7 people found this helpful
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- S&B
- 2018-12-11
Great content lamentable reading
This probably should have been read by the author. It sounded like computer voice software reading the content.
4 people found this helpful
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- Than
- 2018-11-20
Kicking Myself
I'm kicking myself for not writing a review of this book when it was fresh just after I finished it. This was SUCH A GOOD BOOK. This is the genetics/anthropology book I've wanted for some time now. It talks about all the most recent evidence (up to early 2018). Some people might find it too hard to keep up with the science but "I personally think" (famous last words) that most people will understand at least 90% of the science it talks about. What I liked too near the end of the book was the point he makes for studying 'racial genetics' not to encourage racism but as a means to break down racial stereotypes. He does so not from an emotional standpoint but from a scientific one using established science along racial stereotypes to discount them. If you want to know all the coolest new science in human anthropology and genetics along with where we need more study in the future then read this book!
3 people found this helpful
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- Keith
- 2020-12-03
Too much politics
Great information on the recent advancements in genetic analysis, but full of multiple chapters of apologizing for and justifying of the politically correct dogma of present day academia. Talk of nationalism, racism, sexism, and all manner of academic bigotry is peppered throughout the text. If you want to see how politics is corrupting science at the most basic level, listen to this book.
1 person found this helpful