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Author
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Description
"In Eve, Cat Bohannon answers questions scientists should have been addressing for decades. With boundless curiosity and sharp wit, Bohannon covers the past 200 million years to explain the specific science behind the development of the female sex. Eve is not just a sweeping revision of human history, it's an urgent and necessary corrective for a world that has focused primarily on the male body for far too long. Bohannon's findings, including everything...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? In this groundbreaking book, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for history's broadest patterns. Here, at last, is a world history that really is a history of all the world's peoples, a unified narrative of human...
3) The violinist's thumb: and other lost tales of love, war, and genius, as written by our genetic code
Author
Language
English
Description
"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...
Author
Pub. Date
2008.
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
Neil Shubin, a leading paleontologist and professor of anatomy who discovered Tiktaalik--the "missing link" that made headlines around the world in April 2006--tells the story of evolution by tracing the organs of the human body back millions of years, long before the first creatures walked the earth. By examining fossils and DNA, Shubin shows us that our hands actually resemble fish fins, our head is organized like that of a long-extinct jawless...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"The award-winning Caltech physicist and author of The Particle at the End of the Universe shares sweeping perspectives into how human purpose and meaning naturally fit into a scientific worldview,"--Amazon.com.
"Sean Carroll is emerging as one of the greatest humanist thinkers of his generation as he brings his extraordinary intellect to bear not only on Higgs bosons and extra dimensions but now also on our deepest personal questions. Where are...
Author
Language
English
Description
Our true origins are not just human, or even terrestrial, but in fact cosmic. Drawing on recent scientific breakthroughs and the current cross-pollination among geology, biology, astrophysics, and cosmology, Origins explains the soul-stirring leaps in our understanding of the cosmos. From the first image of a galaxy birth to Spirit Rover's exploration of Mars, to the discovery of water on one of Jupiter's moons, coauthors Neil deGrasse Tyson and Donald...
Author
Pub. Date
2019.
Language
English
Formats
Description
For too long, scientists have focused on the dark side of our biological heritage: our capacity for aggression, cruelty, prejudice, and self-interest. But natural selection has given us a suite of beneficial social features, including our capacity for love, friendship, cooperation, and learning. Beneath all our inventions -- our tools, farms, machines, cities, nations -- we carry with us innate proclivities to make a good society. In Blueprint, Nicholas...
Author
Language
English
Description
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,...
“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,...
Author
Language
English
Description
Cro-Magnons were the first fully modern Europeans--not only the creators of the stunning cave paintings at Lascaux and elsewhere, but the most adaptable and technologically inventive people that had yet lived on earth. The prolonged encounter between the Cro-Magnons and the archaic Neanderthals, between 45,000 and 30,000 years ago, was one of the defining moments of history. The Neanderthals survived for some 15,000 years in the face of the newcomers,...
Author
Pub. Date
2018.
Language
English
Description
Most historians study the smallest slivers of time, emphasizing specific dates, individuals, and documents. But what would it look like to study the whole of history, from the big bang through the present day -- and even into the remote future? How would looking at the full span of time change the way we perceive the universe, the earth, and our very existence? These were the questions David Christian set out to answer when he created the field of...
Author
Language
English
Description
This authoritative debunking of racist claims that masquerade as “genetics” is a timely weapon against the misuse of science to justify bigotry—now in paperback
Race is not a biological reality.
Racism thrives on our not knowing this.
In fact, racist pseudoscience has become so commonplace that it can be hard to spot. But its toxic effects on society are plain to see: rising nationalism, simmering...
Race is not a biological reality.
Racism thrives on our not knowing this.
In fact, racist pseudoscience has become so commonplace that it can be hard to spot. But its toxic effects on society are plain to see: rising nationalism, simmering...
Author
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Formats
Description
In Kindred, Neanderthal expert Rebecca Wragg Sykes shoves aside the cliché of the shivering ragged figure in an icy wasteland, and reveals the Neanderthal you don't know, our ancestor who lived across vast and diverse tracts of Eurasia and survived through hundreds of thousands of years of massive climate change. This book sheds new light on where they lived, what they ate, and the increasingly complex Neanderthal culture that researchers have discovered....
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Peter Godfrey-Smith is a leading philosopher of science. He is also a scuba diver whose underwater videos of warring octopuses have attracted wide notice. In this book, he brings his parallel careers together to tell a bold new story of how nature became aware of itself. Mammals and birds are widely seen as the smartest creatures on earth. But one other branch of the tree of life has also sprouted surprising intelligence: the cephalopods, consisting...
18) Leech
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
"In an isolated chateau, as far north as north goes, the baron's doctor has died. The doctor's replacement has a mystery to solve: discovering how the Institute lost track of one of its many bodies. For hundreds of years the Interprovincial Medical Institute has grown by taking root in young minds and shaping them into doctors, replacing every human practitioner of medicine. The Institute is here to help humanity, to cure and to cut, to cradle and...
Author
Publisher
Teaching Co
Pub. Date
©2008
Language
English
Description
Lectures by Dr. David Christian, Professor of History at San Diego State University. Surveys the past at all possible scales, from conventional history, to the much larger scales of biology and geology, to the universal scales of cosmology.
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