sociobiology

"In You Are What You Watch, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and data expert Walt Hickey explains the power of entertainment to change our biology, our beliefs, how we see ourselves, and how nations gain power through entertainment. Virtually anyone who has ever watched a profound movie, a powerful TV show, or read a moving novel understands that entertainment can and does affect us in surprising and significant ways. But did you know that our most popular forms of entertainment can have a direct physical effect on us, a measurable impact on society, geopolitics, the economy, and even the future itself? In You Are What You Watch, Walter Hickey, Pulitzer Prize winner and former chief culture writer at acclaimed data site FiveThirtyEight.com, proves how exactly how what we watch (and read and listen to) has a far greater effect on us and the world at large than we imagine. Employing a mix of research, deep reporting, and 100 data visualizations, Hickey presents the true power of entertainment and culture. From the decrease in shark populations after Jaws to the increase in women and girls taking up archery following The Hunger Games, You Are What You Watch proves its points not just with research and argument, but hard data. Did you know, for example, that crime statistics prove that violent movies actually lead to less real-world violence? And that the international rise of anime and Manga helped lift the Japanese economy out of the doldrums in the 1980s? Or that British and American intelligence agencies actually got ideas from the James Bond movies? In You Are What You Watch, readers will be given a nerdy, and sobering, celebration of popular entertainment and its surprising power to change the world"--.

A study of human nature as viewed from the perspective of evolutionary psychology.

In medical charts, the term "N.A.D." (No Apparent Distress) is used for patients who appear stable. The phrase also aptly describes America's medical system when it comes to treating the underprivileged. Medical students learn on the bodies of the poor and the poor suffer from their mistakes. Rachel Pearson confronted these harsh realities when she started medical school in Galveston, Texas. Pearson, herself from a working-class background, remains haunted by the suicide of a close friend, experiences first hand the heartbreak of her own errors in a patient's care, and witnesses the ruinous effects of a hurricane on a Texas town's medical system. In a free clinic where the motto is "All Are Welcome Here," she learns how to practice medicine with love and tenacity amidst the raging injustices of a system that favors the rich and the white.

Argues that the gap between apes and humans is very narrow, and the insistence on seeing it as vast and unbridgeable is more a product of fashion and prejudice than of clear thinking.

Explores the advances and discoveries that were made in genetic research in the last half of the twentieth-century; includes information on popular theories in genetics and molecular biology, the Minnesota twin studies, and the link between genes and personality.

Contains eighteen articles written between 1997 and 2005 on the roles of genes, the body, and society on human behavior, exploring such topics as the roles of genes and environment in beauty, the impact of intense stress on the hippocampus, the effect of male behaviors on the mating choices of primate females, and apparent connections between climate and theology.

Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon arrived in Venezuela's Amazon region in 1964 to study the Yanomamo Indians, one of the last large tribal groups still living in isolation. He expected to find Rousseau's "noble savages" living contentedly in a pristine state of nature. Instead he discovered a very violent society. Men who killed others had the most wives and the most children. The prime reason for this violence was to avenge deaths and abduct women. Chagnon felt their violence gave them an evolutionary advantage, a controversial theory that was not believed by some cultural anthropologists.