THE MIND OF THE MARKET:
Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, & Other Lessons
from Evolutionary Economics

How did we evolve from ancient hunter-gatherers to modern consumer-traders? Why are people so irrational when it comes to money and business? Bestselling author Dr. Michael Shermer argues that evolution provides an answer to both of these questions through the new science of evolutionary economics

Drawing on research from neuroeconomics, Shermer explores what brain scans reveal about bargaining, snap purchases, and how trust is established in business. Utilizing experiments in behavioral economics, Shermer shows why people hang on to losing stocks and failing companies, why business negotiations often disintegrate into emotional tit-for-tat disputes, and why money does not make us happy. Employing research from complexity theory, Shermer shows how evolution and economics are both examples of a larger phenomenon of complex adaptive systems.

Along the way, Shermer answers such provocative questions as, Do our tribal roots mean that we will always be a sucker for brands? How is the biochemical joy of sex similar to the rewards of business cooperation?  How can nations increase trust within and between their borders? Finally, Shermer considers the consequences of globalization and what will happen if nations allow free trade across their borders.

WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE WEIRD THINGS:

Ever wonder why people believe in UFO abductions, mind-reading, reincarnation, urban legends, not to mention "scientific creationism" and the pernicious myth that the Holocaust never happened? Dr. Michael Shermer, the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, is a genuine ghost-buster, a relentless crusader against superstition and pseudoscience. Based on his bestselling book, Why People Believe Weird Things is filled with humor, insight, and personal anecdotes - a highly entertaining wake-up call that has proved a hit on college campuses.

THE SCIENCE OF GOOD & EVIL:
Why people cheat, gossip,
share, care & follow the golden rule

In The Science of Good and Evil, a lecture based on the third volume in his trilogy on the power of belief (the first two volumes were Why People Believe Weird Things and How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God), psychologist and historian of science Dr. Michael Shermer tackles two of the deepest and most challenging problems of our age: (1) The origins of morality and (2) the foundations of ethics. Embedded within these two problems are questions that have occupied the greatest minds in history: Is it in our nature to be moral, immoral, or amoral? If we evolved by natural forces then what was the natural purpose of morality? If we live in a determined universe, then how can we make free moral choices? Does evil exist, and if so, what is the nature of evil? Why do bad things happen to good people? Is there justice in the world beyond the social order? If there is no outside source to validate moral principles, does anything go? Can we be good without God?

In this stunning conclusion to an intellectual journey into the mind and soul of humanity, Dr. Shermer peels back the inner layers covering our core being to reveal a complexity of human motives-selfish and selfless, cooperative and competitive, virtue and vice, good and evil, moral and immoral. Shermer shows how these motives came into being as a product of both our evolutionary heritage and cultural history, and how we can construct an ethical system that generates a morality that is neither dogmatically absolute nor irrationally relative-a provisional morality for an age of science that provides empirical evidence and a rational basis for belief.

THE FLIPPING POINT:
The Conversion of a Global Warming Skeptic

In this dramatic lecture the bestselling author, Skeptic magazine publisher, and Scientific American columnist Dr. Michael Shermer recounts how he flipped from being a long-time global warming skeptic to fully embracing the theory that humans are dramatically heating the earth. With a Ph.D. in the history of science and a Master's degree in experimental psychology, Dr. Shermer is an expert on how belief systems work, how people come to change their minds and have conversion experiences, not just in religion but in science as well. Shermer shows why the environmental movement has for decades hurt its own cause by exaggerating claims beyond the data, but that in the past three years the evidence has accumulated beyond doubt that we need to act soon to halt global warming.

As Shermer wrote in Scientific American: "Data trump politics, and a convergence of evidence from numerous sources has led me to make a cognitive switch on the subject of anthropogenic global warming. My attention was piqued on February 8 when 86 leading evangelical Christians—the last cohort I expected to get on the environmental bandwagon—issued the Evangelical Climate Initiative calling for “national legislation requiring economy-wide reductions” in carbon emissions. After attending a 2002 Oxford conference on the science of global warming, the chief lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals, the Reverend Richard Cizik, described his experience as “a conversion…not unlike my conversion to Christ.”

Then I attended the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference in Monterey, California, where former Vice President Al Gore delivered the single finest summation of the evidence for global warming I have ever heard, based on the 2006 documentary film about his work in this area, An Inconvenient Truth. Because we are primates with such visually dominant sensory systems we need to see the evidence to believe it, and the striking before-and-after photographs showing the disappearance of glaciers around the world shocked me out my skepticism.

Four books then took me to the flipping point. Archaeologist Brian Fagan’s The Long Summer (Basic, 2004) documents how civilization is the gift of a temporary period of mild climate. Geographer Jared Diamond’s Collapse (Viking, 2005) demonstrates how natural and human-caused environmental catastrophes led to the collapse of civilizations. Journalist Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes From a Catastrophe (Simon and Schuster, 2006) is a page-turning account of her journeys around the world with environmental scientists who are documenting species extinction and climate change that are unmistakably linked to human action. And biologist Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006) reveals how he went from being a skeptical environmentalist to a believing activist as incontrovertible data linking the increase of carbon dioxide, CO2, to global warming accumulated the last decade.

It is a matter of CO2 Goldilocks. In the last ice age CO2 levels were 180 parts per million (ppm)—too cold. Between the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution CO2 levels rose to 280 ppm—just right. Today CO2 levels are at 380 ppm and are projected to reach 450 to 550 ppm by the end of the century—too warm. Like a kettle of water that transforms from liquid to steam when it changes from 211 to 212 degrees F, the environment itself is about to make a CO2–driven flip.

According to Flannery, even if we reduce our CO2 emissions by 70 percent by 2050 average global temperatures will increase between 2 to 9 degrees C by 2100. This rise could lead to the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which the March 24 issue of Science reports is already shrinking at a rate of 224 ±41 cubic kilometers per year, double the rate measured in 1996 (Los Angeles uses 1 cubic kilometer of water per year). If it and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet melt, sea levels will rise 5 to 10 meters, displacing half a billion inhabitants of coastal communities.

Because of the complexity of the problem environmental skepticism was once tenable. No longer. It is time to flip from skepticism to activism".

WHY DARWIN MATTERS:
Evolution, Intelligent Design, & the Battle for Science & Religion

Evolution happened, and the theory describing it is one of the most well-founded in all of science. Then why do half of all Americans reject it? There are religious and political reasons, and in Why Darwin Matters, historian of science and bestselling author Dr. Michael Shermer diffuses these fears by examining what evolution really is, how we know it happened, and how to test it. Shermer then discusses what science is through a brief history of the evolution-creation controversy—from the Scopes’ Monkey Trial of 1925 through the creationism trials of the 1960s and 1970s, to the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case of 1987, to the Intelligent Design controversies of the 1990s and 2000s—demonstrating clearly how and why creationism and Intelligent Design theory are not science. Dr. Shermer builds a powerful case for evolution as the theory that most closely parallels the Christian model of human nature and the conservative model of free market economics. Dr. Shermer was once an evangelical Christian and a creationist, and is now one of the best-known public intellectuals defending evolutionary theory, so Why Darwin Matters provides readers with an insiders ’ guide to the evolution-creation debate, in which he shows why creationism and Intelligent Design are not only bad science, they are bad theology, and why science should be embraced by people of all beliefs.

WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE IN GOD

In this lecture, arguably his most controversial subject that is based on his highly-acclaimed book, How We Believe, Dr. Shermer addresses a very old question in religion with the newest data from science, namely: why do people believe in God? As he attempts to answer the question using the best theories and data from anthropology, psychology, sociology, and evolutionary biology, Dr. Shermer also addresses the important role of religion in society, the historical roots of religion and why it arose around 5000 years ago as a co-equal partner to governments and states, the origin of myths and the importance of myth-making in human cultures, and what belief in God means for individuals and society. In his always conciliatory and friendly approach to deep and controversial subjects, Dr. Shermer nevertheless is not afraid to face head-on, and courageously confront our most meaningful questions that we all have about God, the universe, and the meaning of life.

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"Michael Shermer, as head of one of America's leading skeptic organizations, and as a powerful activist and essayist in the service of this operational form of reason, is an important figure in American public life."

--Stephen Jay Gould