This is a brief list of basic books on science necessary to live in the modern world. The list will not make you a scientist or an engineer, nor does it even attempt to cover a broad swathe of scientific fields. It will, at best, only prevent you from feeling illiterate when you read a story on some scientific breakthrough in the newspapers. It might, hopefully, allow you to question the scientific assumptions people make when policy intersects with science.
I’ve included a few biographies in this list as well because I think an understanding of the men and women who achieved scientific greatness enriches our grasp on the science and most importantly, its context – I say this as someone who is not usually fond of the biography genre.
I have tried to keep history off the list. This is not because I find it boring, irrelevant, or useless but because the history of science is its own study. Thus, works like Joseph Needham’s magisterial seven-volume (27 books!) Science and Civilisation in China have been given a miss. Similarly, I chose to go with Abraham Pais’ biography of Robert Oppenheimer instead of another excellent work by Kai Bird, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. A couple of books will feel like textbooks, probably because they are. Sorry, you will have to dip into just a little bit of the good stuff to understand the broader arguments on psychology, economics, and policy. On the other hand, there are a couple of pop-science books on the list too – the discuss the use of science in everyday life and how we ought to think about it, an important aside most forget in their relentless pursuit of the technicalities.
- Alcock, John. The Triumph of Sociobiology
- Atkins, Peter. Four Laws That Drive the Universe
- Axelrod, Robert. The Evolution of Cooperation
- Bell, Graham. Selection: The Mechanism of Evolution
- Brown, Daniel. Human Universals
- Buss, David M. The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy is as Necessary as Love and Sex
- Changeaux, Jean-Pierre. The Physiology of Truth: Neuroscience and Human Knowledge
- —. Neuronal Man
- Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens
- —. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain
- Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design
- De Waal, Frans BM. Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals
- —. Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes
- Dyson, George. Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe
- Ewald, Paul W. Plague Time: The New Germ Theory of Disease
- Feynman, Richard. The Feynman Lectures on Physics (three volumes)
- —. QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter
- Gazzaniga, Michael. The Ethical Brain: The Science of Our Moral Dilemmas
- —. Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique
- Goldacre, Ben. Bad Science
- Hauser, Marc. Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong
- Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time
- Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species
- Kandel, Eric. Principles of Neural Science
- —. In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind
- Kenneally, Christine: The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language
- Ledoux, Joseph. Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are
- Lieberman, Matthew. Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect
- Low, Bobbi. Why Sex Matters: A Darwinian Look at Human Behaviour
- Mayr, Ernst. The Growth of Biological Thought
- —. This is Biology: The Science of the Living World
- —. What Evolution Is
- Mealey, Linda. Sex Differences: Developmental and Evolutionary Strategies
- Mukherjee, Siddhartha. The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
- Pais, Abraham. Subtle is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein
- —. Niels Bohr’s Times, In Physics, Philosophy, and Polity
- —. J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life
- Penrose, Roger. The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe
- Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Knowledge
- —. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
- —. How the Mind Works
- Provine, Robert. Laughter: a Scientific Investigation
- Ramachandran, Vilayanur S. A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers
- Richards, Robert J. The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin’s Theory
- —. Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior
- Ridley, Matt. The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature
- Sagan, Carl. Cosmos
- Sagan, Dorion. Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science
- Schubert, Glendon, Roger Masters, Albert Somit. Primate Politics
- Tammet, Daniel. Thinking In Numbers: On Life, Love, Meaning, and Math
- Trivers, Robert. Social Evolution
- —. Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers
- Widmaier, Eric. Vander’s Human Physiology: The Mechanisms of Body Function
- Williams, George C., Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought
- Wilson, Edward Osborne. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis
- —. On Human Nature
- Wilson, Eric. Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy
- Wrangham, Richard and Dale Peterson. Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence
