Two years ago the online magazine The Edge asked scientists and other specialists to state their "most dangerous idea", an idea "that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true" -- in other words, an idea which might well be true even if many people would rather it not be. It's worth going through all 119 ideas listed at the site, but the following four are a sample:

1. There is no such thing as blame or responsibility. (Richard Dawkins)

"Doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment. Don't judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?

"Why is it that we humans find it almost impossible to accept such conclusions? Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing? Presumably because mental constructs like blame and responsibility, indeed evil and good, are built into our brains by millennia of Darwinian evolution. Assigning blame and responsibility is an aspect of the useful fiction of intentional agents that we construct in our brains as a means of short-cutting a truer analysis of what is going on in the world in which we have to live. My dangerous idea is that we shall eventually grow out of all this and even learn to laugh at it, just as we laugh at Basil Fawlty when he beats his car. But I fear it is unlikely that I shall ever reach that level of enlightenment."

Trust Dawkins to shake things up with something like this, and don't miss his many books in the library's collection.

2. Zero parental influence. (Judith Rich Harris)

"Is it dangerous to claim that parents have no power at all (other than genetic) to shape their child's personality, intelligence, or the way he or she behaves outside the family home? More to the point, is this claim false? Was I wrong when I proposed that parents' power to do these things by environmental means is zero, nada, zilch?... The establishment's failure to shoot me down has been nothing short of astonishing. One developmental psychologist even admitted, one year ago on this very website, that researchers hadn't yet found proof that 'parents do shape their children,' but she was still convinced that they will eventually find it, if they just keep searching long enough."

For parents who love wisdom like this, the library has two books by Harris dealing with the issue.

3. Groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments. (Steven Pinker)

"Whether or not these hypotheses hold up (the evidence for gender differences is reasonably good, for ethnic and racial differences much less so), they are widely perceived to be dangerous. [Advocates have been] subjected to months of vilification, and proponents of ethnic and racial differences in the past have been targets of censorship, violence, and comparisons to Nazis. Large swaths of the intellectual landscape have been reengineered to try to rule these hypotheses out a priori (race does not exist, intelligence does not exist, the mind is a blank slate inscribed by parents)."

Pinker is a prolific writer on the nature-nurture controversy, and the library has four of his books.

4. Science encourages religion in the long run (and vice versa). (Scott Atran)

"Science treats humans and intentions only as incidental elements in the universe, whereas for religion they are central. Science is not particularly well-suited to deal with people's existential anxieties, including death, deception, sudden catastrophe, loneliness or longing for love or justice. It cannot tell us what we ought to do, only what we can do. Religion thrives because it addresses people's deepest emotional yearnings and society's foundational moral needs, perhaps even more so in complex and mobile societies that are increasingly divorced from nurturing family settings and long familiar environments... Religion is the hope that science is missing."

The library has Atran's acclaimed In Gods We Trust which attempts to explain the evolution of religion.