All the links on this page are to external sources that I have found valuable in shaping my own thinking. Maybe they will be of interest to you as well.
Richard Dawkins:
“The Selfish Gene Revisited” is science writer Richard Dawkins’ commentary on his groundbreaking book The Selfish Gene, originally published in 1976, as well as his 2016 update The Extended Selfish Gene, both published by Oxford University Press. Or simply visit his website.
Check out the Review by Dwight Garner of Dawkins’ autobiography, Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science. Dawkins’s sequel to his memoir “presents a public life more than a private one.”
Tor Norretranders:
Download a PDF copy of The User Illusion by Norretranders, the brilliant Danish author. As engaging as it is insightful, this highly enlightening book presents reason to believe that what you perceive via your senses is often not reality, but your substituted interpretation of reality, your personal “user illusion.”
Carl Zimmer:
Carl Zimmer has been writing about science since 1990. Visit his Articles Archive to read stories he’s written for The New York Times, National Geographic, and other publications.
Douglas R. Hofstadter:
Read Douglas R. Hofstadter’s paper, “Analogy as the Core of Cognition.” Hofstadter presents the argument that analogies are the backbone of our ability to think. “All we do when we think,” he says, “is to move fluidly from concept to concept — in other words, to leap from one analogy-bundle to another.”
“The study of speech errors and action slips can reveal a great deal about the hidden organization of the minds that produce them,” say Douglas R. Hofstadter and David Moser. Accordingly, they present their summary of such slips, collected over a span of years, and note that the errors simply reflect the normal operation of the mind.
Daniel C. Dennett:
Daniel C. Dennett is an American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist. Dennett’s research has focused on the workings of the mind, and on the philosophy of science in general – and biology in particular. He is especially interested in the evolutionary roots of cognition, and cognitive science. Visit his online home at Tufts University here.
Dennett is one of the most prolific writers on consciousness. He discusses consciousness in a manner that strikes some as detatched. A 2017 New Yorker piece by Joshua Rothman says: “A running joke among people who study consciousness is that Dennett himself might be a zombie… The implicit criticism is that Dennett’s account of consciousness treats the self like a computer and reflects a disengagement from things like feeling and beauty. Dennett seems wounded by this idea. “There are those wags who insist that I was born with an impoverished mental life,” he told me. “That ain’t me! I seem to be drinking in life’s joys pretty well.”
Antonio Damasio:
Antonio Damasio is a widely respected neurologist with a longstanding interest in the evolution and function of emotions. He is the author of several books, including the popular The Feeling of What Happens. A recent Scientific American article entitled “Feeling Our Emotions” summarizes Damasio’s views. The article clarifies his thinking about “the role emotions play in our decision-making processes and in our self-image. In several widely popular books, he has shown how certain feelings are cornerstones of our survival. And today he argues that our internal, emotional regulatory processes not only preserve our lives but actually shape our greatest cultural accomplishments.” Click here to read.
Nick Lane:
Nick Lane, a British biochemist and writer, is a professor in evolutionary biochemistry at University College London. He has published several books in the genre of popular science. These include his Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution, which won the 2010 Royal Society Prize for Science Books. Click here to download a PDF of his article “Origin of the Eukaryotic Cell.”