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...

"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...

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...

"Evolution has, ever since its inception, been one of the most ideologically fraught fields in all of science. It has given birth to the myth about biological racial "types," with distinct rankings of "genetic superiority". Evolution has always been mistrusted by religious fundamentalists, contributing to a rise in creationist education that dovetails with the mass scientific illiteracy we see today. And today the coronavirus is mutating into ever...

On December 27, 1831, the young naturalist Charles Darwin left Plymouth Harbor aboard the HMS Beagle. For the next five years, he conducted research on plants and animals from around the globe, amassing a body of evidence that would culminate in one of the greatest discoveries in the history of mankind-the theory of evolution. Darwin presented his stunning insights in a landmark book that forever altered the way human beings view themselves and the...

"Blue-blooded crabs? Platypus that sting? One-hundred-year old reptiles? Meet some of nature's longest-surviving species! Discover the stories of these incredible animals and find out how they help scientists piece together evolutionary history."--

"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...

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...

On a remote outpost of the Galapagos, where Darwin received his first inklings of the theory of evolution, two scientists, Peter and Rosemary Grant, have spent 20 years measuring the beaks of generations of finches--to prove that Darwin did not know the strength of this own theory. "Spark(s) not just the intellect, but the imagination".--Washington Post Book World. 50 illustrations. Map.