Moral Minds : How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong

Temptation and control are like two players in an arms race, displaying competition like that between predators and prey, parasites and hosts, and Americans and Russians during the Cold War.

In this book, brilliant Harvard academic Marc Hauser evaluates recent developments in evolutionary biology, cognitive science, developmental psychology, economics and anthropology to provide a new way of understanding the tension between temptation and control.

In our own species, this battle is waged at multiple levels: among genes housed in the body, between different areas of an individual's brain, between individuals within a group or between different groups -- from small scale family feuds, to inter-tribal warfare, to coalitions among nations states.

Drawing on the most up-to-date research and myriad cultural references from Shakespeare and Dostoevesky to Spielberg and the Coen brothers and Calvin and Hobbes, Hauser shows us the roots of cheating, greed, promiscuity and violence in an enthralling and important new work of popular science.