With the year drawing to a close, It's time to throw out old ideas and bring in the new. Two mind-stretching books, The Secret of our Success by anthropologist Joseph Henrich, and The Crucible of Language by cognitive linguist Vyvyan Evans, will help you do just that. Both contain powerful ideas. The first forces a rethink of what makes humans special: the answer is not that we are terribly clever or able to do much with our big brains on our own. The second tackles one of the hard problems of science: how it is that language actually means something and can excite our deepest passions. The two books reflect the same broad trend. Overly simple ideas of "modular", innate human capabilities are fading away -whether of human nature as a toolkit of skills evolved for the key problems we faced during our long ancestry as hunter-gatherers, or of language as an instinct, with a universal grammar encoded in our genes.
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