Everyone:It might be a good idea for us all to begin the process of choosing our March and April 2003 book selection. Please make suggestions in this forum.Be sure that your book nomination sticks to our focus. You may wish to reread the ABOUT page, if you are a newcomer, so that you fully understand what type of book suggestions are appropriate.Target DatesIt would be ideal to have all of the nominations in by around Friday, February 7th. The poll can go up that night and we can all cast our votes over the weekend, with a final count occurring around Monday, February 10th.It is nice to give people plenty of time to go out and buy the book before the actual two-month reading period commences. With this schedule our members can order the new book through our Amazon.com links located all over the site. There should be no problem ordering the book and receiving it by March 1, 2003.I will send out reminders or "encouragements" to please order through the Amazon.com links as BookTalk earns a small referral fee for each book ordered through those links. You will really be helping me by using these links folks. Your cost is the exact same whether or not you use the links, so please consider doing so. Chris O'Connor Edited by: Chris OConnor  at: 12/14/02 9:27:37 am

Kaufmann, At Home in the Universe

Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype or Unweaving the Rainbow

The Feeling of What Happens by Antonio DamasioYou can read an excerpt here:www.cbi.cgey.com/journal/issue5/feature ... .htmlwhich has this to say by way of introduction:Quote:Although consciousness has historically been in the domain of philosophers, it is neurologists who are doing the breakthrough work right now. Antonio Damasio has written a book that will probably be in print a hundred years from now. Along with his wife, the neurologist Hanna Damasio, he has created one of the world's leading facilities for the study of neurological disorders. In his 1994 book, Descartes' Error, he argued that reason and emotion were not two separate things, that Platonic and Cartesian distinctions were not borne out by science. Using case studies and laboratory research, he showed that emotional deficiencies, from either accidents or disease, caused impairments in reasoning. The brain structures that process emotion in fact underlie the brain processes of thinking. It's not either/or any more.In The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (Harcourt Brace, 1999.) Damasio moves from emotion to consciousness itself. The book is made up of equal parts of scientific rigor, elegant writing, philosophical awareness, and deep-seated humanism. The following is an excerpt from the book, which was named one of the 10 best of 1999 by The New York Times Book Review.

btw, Jeremy, I did finally get that At Home topic up in The Academy if you don't want to wait

I'll nominate Dawkins Unweaving the Rainbow too.Chris

Pinker, the blank slate

I'm with the Pinker suggestion

The Feeling of what Happens is a wonderful book, that I heartily recommend. I found Damasio's first book, Descartes' Error, more comprehensive and a good backdrop to Feeling. My recommendation is that if most of the group has not read Descartes' Error, we read that one before The Feeling of what Happens.

The Complexity of CooperationAxelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation, is another outstanding work that illuminates much of the world around us. A series of contests were run, with computer programs playing "Prisoners' Dilemma" against one another. Prisoners' Dilemma, for anyone unfamiliar with the game, works something like this: If neither suspect tells anything, both go free. (Cooperation). The one who "defects", Tattles, first, however, is guaranteed freedom; and that person cannot know what the other person is going to do. The result is that in any single contest, self-interest is served by defecting as quickly as possible, before the other guy (or program) does. Where the game gets interesting is when you play the same "person" over and over