Patrick Bateson, Paul Martin
Bateson was the first person to use the famous analogy of the recipe and the kitchen – that the experience of development ‘cooks’ an adult from a genetic ‘recipe’. Just as you cannot readily disaggregate a baked cake into its ingredients and its cooking, so you cannot attribute most psychological features to genes or environments. Ridley, like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, borrows this analogy.
Steven Pinker
Explores the overthrow of behaviourism instigated in the 1950s by Chomsky, and the wealth of evidence that language has innate components. Famously invokes the rapid development of creoles (fully-formed languages with coherent grammars) from pidgins as a testament to the existence of intrinsic syntactic ability. A seminal popular science book.
Richard Dawkins
Already a classic, this book (‘the sort of popular science writing that makes the reader feel like a genius’, said the New York Times) literally turned our perceptions of genes upside down by arguing that, rather than being shaped by selection and so subordinate to us, they are the strings to our puppets, intent on their own propagation. Dawkins also extended this view of life from a microcosmic (and molecular) perspective to information, characterising ideas as ‘memes’ that have to compete for attention and survival. For reasonably obvious reasons, Dawkins’ picture has since proved extremely beguiling to hackers and internet devotees.