Brian Hare has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 10 ratings. The most-rated is The Genius of Dogs.
The Genius of Dogs
Summary
The perfect gift for dog lovers and fans of Inside of a Dog by Alexandra Horowitz - this New York Times best-seller offers mesmerizing insights into the thoughts and lives of our smartest and most beloved pets. Does your dog feel guilt? Is she pretending she can't hear you? Does she want affection - or just your sandwich? In their New York Times best-selling book The Genius of Dogs, husband-and-wife team Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods lay out landmark discoveries from the Duke Canine Cognition Center and other research facilities around the world to reveal how your dog thinks and how we humans can have even deeper relationships with our best four-legged friends. Breakthroughs in cognitive science have proven dogs have a kind of genius for getting along with people that is unique in the animal kingdom. This dog genius revolution is transforming how we live and work with dogs of all breeds and what it means for you in your daily life with your canine friend.
©2013 Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods (P)2013 Penguin Audio
Survival of the Friendliest
Summary
A powerful new theory of human nature suggests that our secret to success as a species is our unique friendliness. “Brilliant, eye-opening, and absolutely inspiring - and a riveting read. Hare and Woods have written the perfect book for our time.” (Cass R. Sunstein, author of How Change Happens and co-author of Nudge) For most of the approximately 300,000 years that Homo sapiens have existed, we have shared the planet with at least four other types of humans. All of these were smart, strong, and inventive. But around 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens made a cognitive leap that gave us an edge over other species. What happened? Since Charles Darwin wrote about “evolutionary fitness”, the idea of fitness has been confused with physical strength, tactical brilliance, and aggression. In fact, what made us evolutionarily fit was a remarkable kind of friendliness, a virtuosic ability to coordinate and communicate with others that allowed us to achieve all the cultural and technical marvels in human history. Advancing what they call the “self-domestication theory”, Brian Hare, professor in the department of evolutionary anthropology and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University and his wife, Vanessa Woods, a research scientist and award-winning journalist, shed light on the mysterious leap in human cognition that allowed Homo sapiens to thrive. But this gift for friendliness came at a cost. Just as a mother bear is most dangerous around her cubs, we are at our most dangerous when someone we love is threatened by an “outsider.” The threatening outsider is demoted to sub-human, fair game for our worst instincts. Hare’s groundbreaking research, developed in close coordination with Richard Wrangham and Michael Tomasello, giants in the field of cognitive evolution, reveals that the same traits that make us the most tolerant species on the planet also make us the cruelest. Survival of the Friendliest offers us a new way to look at our cultural as well as cognitive evolution and sends a clear message: In order to survive and even to flourish, we need to expand our definition of who belongs.
©2020 Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods (P)2020 Random House Audio