• The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve

  • By: Steve Stewart-Williams
  • Narrated by: Tom Lawrence
  • Length: 15 hrs and 32 mins
  • 4.8 out of 5 stars (263 ratings)

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The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve

By: Steve Stewart-Williams
Narrated by: Tom Lawrence
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Publisher's summary

The Ape That Understood the Universe is the story of the strangest animal in the world: the human animal. It opens with a question: How would an alien scientist view our species? What would it make of our sex differences, our sexual behavior, our child-rearing patterns, our moral codes, our religions, our languages, and science? The book tackles these issues by drawing on ideas from two major schools of thought: evolutionary psychology and cultural evolutionary theory.

The guiding assumption is that humans are animals, and that like all animals, we evolved to pass on our genes. At some point, however, we also evolved the capacity for culture - and from that moment, culture began evolving in its own right. This transformed us from a mere ape into an ape capable of reshaping the planet, travelling to other worlds, and understanding the vast universe of which we're but a tiny, fleeting fragment.

©2018 Steve Stewart-Williams (P)2019 Steve Stewart-Williams

What listeners say about The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve

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Good Book

This is a really good book, it has given insights into many of the things that I already knew.

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Fascinating and Insightful

Fantastic Book!
Remember that explaining something is not the same as saying it's good.

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wonderful!

great read! could definitely read again and again.
would recommend this book to anyone interested in such subjects

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2 people found this helpful

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Great book

It is a wonderful book. Comprehensive and thoroughly written. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand cultural evolution. The narrator is superb.

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So cool!!

Went down so smooth. A fine balance of solid pertinent info that isn't muddled, oversimplified or overly expert. loved it!

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    5 out of 5 stars

Very Interesting!

This may be the best thing to come out of Cambridge since Douglas Adams.

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Fascinating read

An interesting and fascinating book. Worth your time. Once you get the gist of the argument, it can be sometimes easy to infer where the author is going, but he still manages to surprise you on a regular basis. there were some arguments I did not agree with, but these were addressed later in the book. Some patience required 😄

I also like the delivery by the narrator.

Recommended.

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Life changing

Gives you greater perspective and insight !!! Highly recommend this book . Trust me you won’t be disappointed.

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FANTASTIC!! EVERYONE SHOULD EAR/READ

No more dogmas after reading this one! What began as a simply exercise of imagination, turned out to be so much more! Thank so much to Steve Stewart-Williams for this book!

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powerful ideas brillliantly communicated

this is exactly what I was looking for: a starting point for memetics and evolutionary psichology that is both accessible and engaging

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1 person found this helpful