"In The Disappearing Spoon, bestselling author Sam Kean unlocked the mysteries of the periodic table. In THE VIOLINIST'S THUMB, he explores the wonders of the magical building block of life: DNA. There are genes to explain crazy cat ladies, why other people have no fingerprints, and why some people survive nuclear bombs. Genes illuminate everything from JFK's bronze skin (it wasn't a tan) to Einstein's genius. They prove that Neanderthals and humans...

National Book Critics Circle Award—2017 Nonfiction Finalist
“Nothing less than a tour de force—a heady amalgam of science, history, a little bit of anthropology and plenty of nuanced, captivating storytelling.”—The New York Times Book Review, Editor's Choice
A National Geographic Best Book of 2017
In our unique genomes, every one of us carries the story of our species—births,...

Explores the origins of life on Earth, by studying the fossils of the past, from the early plants and animals, through the age of dinosaurs, and the coming of humans.

In this New York Times bestseller and longlist nominee for the National Book Award, "our greatest living chronicler of the natural world" (The New York Times), David Quammen explains how recent discoveries in molecular biology affect our understanding of evolution and life's history.
In the mid-1970s, scientists began using DNA sequences to reexamine the history of all life. Perhaps the most startling discovery to come out...

"Dip below the ocean's surface and you are soon confronted by forms of life that could not seem more foreign to our own: sea sponges, soft corals, and serpulid worms, whose rooted bodies, intricate geometry, and flower-like appendages are more reminiscent of plant life or even architecture than anything recognizably animal. Yet these creatures are our cousins. As fellow members of the animal kingdom--the Metazoa--they can teach us much about the evolutionary...

The million copy international bestseller, critically acclaimed and translated into over 25 languages. As influential today as when it was first published, The Selfish Gene has become a classic exposition of evolutionary thought. Professor Dawkins articulates a gene's eye view of evolution - a view giving centre stage to these persistent units of information, and in which organisms can be seen as vehicles for their replication. This imaginative, powerful,...

Famous for his radical new vision of Darwinism, Richard Dawkins paints a colorful, richly textured canvas of his early life from innocent child to charismatic world-famous scientist.

"Visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks... Fascinated by issues of aging and mortality, West applied the rigor of a physicist to the biological question of why we live as long as we do and no longer. The result was astonishing, and changed science, creating a new understanding of energy use and metabolism: West found that despite the riotous diversity in the sizes...

An overview of significant evolutionary transitions in the 4 billion-year history of life.