Ben Waber reviewed The strange order of things by Antonio R. Damasio
A Philosophical Exercise by an Uninformed Neuroscientist
2 stars
This book is best viewed as a work of philosophy, and a bad one at that. It could be retitled "Everything is Homeostasis" and you'd get the central thesis, and also probably figure out that in a book nominally about culture the author has probably read zero books by sociologists (or anthropologists, or archaeologists, and so on). The entire book should come with a "citation needed" label, and besides a decent middle third that focuses on neuroscience (the author's actual discipline) the rest is unmoored, with Damasio reasoning from first principles on everything from culture to organisms. Nearly all of the authors quoted here have been dead for at least fifty years and the median is probably closer to 200. You also have to be gravely worried about someone treating Hayek as a scientist, and unsurprisingly eugenics-curious arguments make a big appearance afterwards. You're better off reading almost anything else
This book is best viewed as a work of philosophy, and a bad one at that. It could be retitled "Everything is Homeostasis" and you'd get the central thesis, and also probably figure out that in a book nominally about culture the author has probably read zero books by sociologists (or anthropologists, or archaeologists, and so on). The entire book should come with a "citation needed" label, and besides a decent middle third that focuses on neuroscience (the author's actual discipline) the rest is unmoored, with Damasio reasoning from first principles on everything from culture to organisms. Nearly all of the authors quoted here have been dead for at least fifty years and the median is probably closer to 200. You also have to be gravely worried about someone treating Hayek as a scientist, and unsurprisingly eugenics-curious arguments make a big appearance afterwards. You're better off reading almost anything else