Nicholas Wade

A history of humanity's ancient ancestry draws on ground-breaking scientific findings to offer insight into such debated issues as the evolution of language and race, the domestication of companion animals, and the defeat of the Neanderthals.

Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

Before the Dawn

Drawing on the work of scientists who have made crucial—and startling—breakthroughs in establishing the reality of recent human evolution, a longtime journalist covering genetic advances for The New York Times examines the genetic basis of race and its role in human history.

Genes, Race and Human History

A Troublesome Inheritance

Draws on a broad range of scientific evidence to theorize an evolutionary basis for religion, considering how religion may have served as an essential component of early society survival and that the brain may be inherently inclined toward religious behavior.

How Religion Evolved and why it Endures

The Faith Instinct

Irene Adler

William Broad

Jeanne Par

Monde du Gars

In this book a leading researcher and artist explores how we see pictures and how they can communicate messages to us, both directly and indirectly by making allusions to objects in space or to stored images in our minds. Originally published in 1990, Dr Wade provides fascinating examples of pictures that communicate hidden messages, either by implying something else, or by a shape or portrait which is carried covertly within another design. He analyses image processing stages in vision, demonstrating that the various stages may be related to styles in representational art. He shows how the way we have been taught to look at and recognise objects, affects the way we see them. The book lavishly illustrates with original examples of visual allusions and includes detailed practical advice on how photographers and designers can create them. Essential reading for photographers, designers, artists, people in film and television, and anyone involved in visual science , visual communication and advertising.

Pictures of Perception

Visual Allusions

Societies that ignore social disintegration and collapsing birth rates are putting their future in peril. So why are we ignoring the signs? ?In The Origin Of Politics, Nicholas Wade explains how our political systems compete with a more ancient set of rules for organizing society—those developed by evolution. Modern ideologies are in constant tension with structures inherent in human social behavior, such as the family, the tribe, and male-dominated institutions. This tension plays out in various ways. Sometimes nature prevails over politics, as in the proposal by Marx and Engels to eliminate the family, the basic unit of society. The founders of the kibbutz movement put this radical idea into practice, only to find that the conflict with human nature was unsustainable. In other cases, culture has successfully modified evolutionary behaviors, replacing polygamy with monogamy and dissolving the bonds of tribalism to make way for modern states. But the evolutionary framework of human societies is not infinitely flexible. The nation-state, especially in the case of the United States, is prone to disintegration if disruptive ideologies are allowed to undermine the cohesive affinities that hold its disparate cultures together. The worldwide decline in fertility in most countries except those in Africa signals a severe derangement in the behaviors evolution has devised for ensuring that a population will maintain itself. If the causes of this disruption cannot be understood and reversed, human societies will embark on an unsought path to extinction. Other fraught issues in which human biology and politics conflict include the innate specializations of the sexes, the stratification of society by ability, and the mismatch between the inequalities of wealth-creating societies and the egalitarian ethic inherited from our hunter-gatherer ancestors. We live in an iridescent bubble, the intoxicating richness of modern culture. Shielded from the natural world, we have lost our awareness of the evolutionary forces that still guide our motivations and shape the foundations of our societies. The Origin of Politics explores the risks of underestimating evolution’s fundamental role in human affairs.

How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of Nations

The Origin of Politics

Noted science writer Nicholas Wade offers for the first time a convincing case based on a broad range of scientific evidence for the evolutionary basis of religion.

How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures

Michael Swanston

This work covers the perception of location, motion and object recognition, and places the study of vision in its historical context. The machinery of vision is also described.

An Introduction

Visual Perception

We delight in using our eyes, particularly when puzzling over pictures. Art and illusionists is a celebration of pictures and the multiple modes of manipulating them to produce illusory worlds on flat surfaces. This has proved fascinating to humankind since the dawning of depiction. Art and illusionists is also a celebration of the ways we see pictures, and of our ability to distil meaning from arrays of contours and colours. Pictures are not only a source of fascination for artists, who produce them, but also for scientists, who analyse the perceptual effects they induce. Illusions provide the glue to cement the art and science of vision. Painters plumb the art of observation itself whereas scientists peer into the processes of perception. Both visual artists and scientists have produced patterns that perplex our perceptions and present us with puzzles that we are pleased to peruse. Art and illusionists presents these two poles of pictorial representation as well as presenting novel ‘perceptual portraits’ of the artists and scientists who have augmented the art of illusion. The reader can experience the paradoxes of pictures as well as producing their own by using the stereoscopic glasses enclosed and the transparent overlay for making dynamic moiré patterns.

Art and Illusionists

A collection of articles from the last twenty years of the Science Times section of The New York Times newspaper on insect behavior and biology.

The Science Times Book of Insects

Did the Covid virus jump naturally from an animal species to humans, or did it escape from a laboratory experiment? In this essay, science writer Nicholas Wade explores the two scenarios and argues that, on present evidence, lab escape is the more likely explanation. His inference is based on specific research being conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Institute’s lack of adequate safety precautions, together with the continuing absence of any direct evidence to support natural emergence. The essay discusses the failure of the mainstream media to penetrate the self-interested assurance of virologists that lab escape was a dismissible conspiracy theory. It also notes how the politicization of discussion impeded consideration of the scientific facts.

Where COVID Came From

Verzameling in begeleidende teksten geanalyseerde afbeeldingen van optische verschijnselen, gesuggereerd in zowel geometrische vormen als in door de kunststroming uit de zestiger jaren Op Art gelanceerde grafiek in zwart-wit

The Art and Science of Visual Illusions

Professor of Visual Psychology Nicholas Wade

Benjamin W. Tatler

Lecturer in Psychology Benjamin Tatler

Eye movements are a vital part of our interaction with the world. They play a pivotal role in perception, cognition, and education. Research in this field is now proceeding at a considerable pace and casting new light on how the eyes move and what information we can derive during the frequentand brief periods of fixation. However, the origins of this work are less well known, even though much of our knowledge was derived from this research with far more primitive equipment. This book is unique in tracing the history of eye movement research. It shows how great strides were made in this area before modern recording devices were available, especially in the measurement of nystagmus. When photographic techniques were adapted to measure discontinuous eye movements, fromabout 1900, many of the issues that are now basic to modern research were then investigated. One of the earliest cognitive tasks examined was reading, and it remains in the vanguard of contemporary research. Modern researchers in this field will be astonished at the subtleties of these early experimental studies and the ingenuity of interpretations that were advanced one and even two centuries ago. Though physicians often carried out the original eye movement research, later on it was pursued bypsychologists - it is within contemporary neuroscience that we find these two strands reunited. Anyone interested in the origins of psychology and neuroscience will find much to stimulate and surprise them in this valuable new work.

Nicholas Wade

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