I swear, walking into my local Half-Price Bookstore is like giving a kid $1000 and sending them into a toystore. I always walk in with intention to browse or purchase one book, but end up walking out with a huge pile and considerably less money in my wallet. Oh well. I am going to be away for the rest of the weekend as I’m driving back up to college. The 11 hour drive just begged for some additional reading material.

Details after the jump.

Here are my recent purchases (with descriptions shameless stolen from Amazon.com):

Creation: Life and How to Make It written by Steve Grand
Blending aspects of philosophy, computer science, artificial intelligence, biology and computer gaming, Grand attempts to define life, discuss the nature of the human soul and demonstrate how it is possible to create entities that demand to be called both living and intelligent. A tall order indeed, and to wonderful effect, Grand draws heavily on his experience writing computer code. He is at his best describing the problems encountered and the solutions used to animate his virtual universe. He argues persuasively that life, both real and artificial, is an emergent property, arising inevitably from the interactions of its component parts and, as such, is something much greater than and qualitatively different from the sum of its parts.

I am 3/4ths of the way through “Creation: Life and How to Make it” and was pleasantly surprised to see how similar our ideas are. We differ on a few aspects (some of which Steve Grand acknowledges was cheating, mainly because he was creating a game for entertainment and not science) but for the most part share similar theories. A very good (and quick) read, would recommend it to anyone interested in the subject.

Others that I bought and honestly have no idea when I’ll get a chance to read them:

The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence written by Carl Sagan
Dr. Carl Sagan takes us on a great reading adventure, offering his vivid and startling insight into the brain of man and beast, the origin of human intelligence, the function of our most haunting legends–and their amazing links to recent discoveries.

Broca’s Brain written by Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan, writer and scientist, returns from the frontier to tell us about how the world works. In his delightfully down-to-earth style, he explores and explains a mind-boggling future of intelligent robots, extraterrestrial life and its consquences, and other provocative, fascinating quandries of the future that we want to see today.

The Selfish Gene written by Richard Dawkins
Inheriting the mantle of revolutionary biologist from Darwin, Watson, and Crick, Richard Dawkins forced an enormous change in the way we see ourselves and the world with the publication of The Selfish Gene. Suppose, instead of thinking about organisms using genes to reproduce themselves, as we had since Mendel’s work was rediscovered, we turn it around and imagine that “our” genes build and maintain us in order to make more genes. That simple reversal seems to answer many puzzlers which had stumped scientists for years, and we haven’t thought of evolution in the same way since.

Neurobiology written by Gordon M. Shepherd
“The author succeeded in performing what seemed to be an almost impossible mission: writing a comprehensive, updated and well-written textbook of neurobiology within reasonable spatial constraints….[An] especially attractive feature of this book is the delightful style of writing which makes reading a real pleasure….I strongly recommend this book as a textbook for undergraduate and medical students, or as a general reference book for neurobiology…it is far superior to other textbooks of its kind.”

The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention written by Guy Deutscher
Using language himself in a lively and engaging way, Deutscher, an expert in Semitic languages at the University of Leiden in Holland, identifies two principles—the desire to create order out of chaotic reality, and the urge to vary the sounds of words and their meanings—providing the direction by which language developed and continues to develop. Rather than search for the prehistoric moment when speech originated, Deutscher says we can most profitably understand the phenomenon by taking the present as the key to the past. Using a wide array of examples, he delves into the back-formation of words (making a noun into a verb), the evolution of relative clauses from simple pointing words (that, this) and the turning of objects into nouns. On the question of whether language is innate, Deutscher takes a middle path, asserting that our brains are wired for basic language, but that linguistic complexity is brought about by cultural evolution.