Showing titles in Evolution & Genetics

An entertaining and enlightening exploration of why waste matters, this cultural history explores an often ignored subject matter and makes a compelling argument for a deeper understanding of human and animal waste. Approaching the subject from a variety of perspectives - evolutionary, ecological, and cultural - this examination shows how integral excrement is to biodiversity, agriculture, public health, food production and distribution, and global ecosystems.

How did human minds become so different from those of other animals? What accounts for our capacity to understand the way the physical world works, to think ourselves into the minds of others, to gossip, read, tell stories about the past, and imagine the future? These questions are not new: they have been debated by philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, evolutionists, and neurobiologists over the course of centuries. One explanation widely accepted today is that humans have special cognitive instincts.

A sweeping, paradigm-shifting account of how evolution is no longer driven just by nature but also by human choices Why are conditions like autism, asthma, obesity, and allergies exploding at unprecedented rates? Why are we living longer, getting smarter, having far fewer kids? If Darwin was...

From leading geopolitical expert and technology futurist Jamie Metzl comes a groundbreaking exploration of the many ways genetic engineering is shaking the core foundations of our lives-sex, war, love, and death. At the dawn of the genetics revolution, our DNA is becoming as readable, writable, and hackable as our information technology. But as humanity starts retooling our own genetic code, the choices we make today will be the difference between realizing breathtaking advances in human well-being and descending into a dangerous and potentially deadly genetic arms race.

In this provocative history of contemporary debates over evolution, veteran journalist Tom Bethell depicts Darwin's theory as a 19th-century idea past its prime, propped up by logical fallacies, bogus claims, and empirical evidence that is all but disintegrating under an onslaught of new scientific discoveries. Bethell presents a concise yet wide-ranging tour of the flash points of modern evolutionary theory. Bethell's account is enriched by his own personal encounters with of some of our era's leading scientists and thinkers.

This book, edited by biologist Ann Gauger, clears up common misconceptions regarding intelligent design, showing why it is an argument not from ignorance but from knowledge and how the evidence for God's design of the natural world is growing.

This pathbreaking book explores how life can begin, taking us from cosmic clouds of stardust, to volcanoes on Earth, to the modern chemistry laboratory. Seeking to understand life's connection to the stars, David Deamer introduces astrobiology, a new scientific discipline that studies the origin and evolution of life on Earth and relates it to the birth and death of stars, planet formation, interfaces between minerals, water, and atmosphere, and the physics and chemistry of carbon compounds.

Presenting scientific evidence from diverse fields, including anthropology, biology, and psychology, Fuentes devises a myth-busting toolkit to dismantle persistent fallacies about the validity of biological races, the innateness of aggression and violence, and the nature of monogamy, sex, and gender. This revised and expanded edition provides up-to-date references, data, and analyses, and addresses new topics, including the popularity of home DNA testing kits and the lies behind ‘"incel" culture.

Darwin's theory of evolution is accepted by most educated Americans as simple fact. This easy acceptance, however, hides from us the many ways in which evolution - as an idea - shapes our thinking about many things. What if this idea is wrong? What if "evolution" is just a word that covers up scientific ignorance of how the wonders of the world could have been created? Law professor Phillip Johnson looks at the evidence for Darwinistic evolution the way a lawyer would - with a cold dispassionate eye.

First published in French in 1907, Henri Bergson's L'évolution créatrice is a scintillating and radical work by one of the great French philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This outstanding new translation, the first for over a hundred years, brings one of Bergson's most important and ambitious works to a new generation.

Over the last three million years or so, our lineage has diverged sharply from those of our great ape relatives. Change has been rapid (in evolutionary terms) and pervasive. In The Evolved Apprentice, Kim Sterelny argues that the divergence stems from the fact humans gradually came to enrich the learning environment of the next generation. He develops a new theory of the evolution of human cognition and human social life that emphasizes the gradual evolution of information-sharing practices across generations and how these practices transformed human minds and social lives.

Genetics, Diversity, and the Biosphere is a college introductory-level text read in a conversational manner. Within each section key words and concepts are introduced, discussed and then reviewed. The audio format allows students to make the most of their time by giving them the freedom to study by listening. Genetics, Diversity, and the Biosphere is an ideal study guide for students who need to review introductory biology including those who need to review for the MCAT, DAT, Biology GRE, and AP Biology.

What makes us human? Why are we the only animals who wear clothes, drive cars, trawl the internet, and fly helicopters on Mars? It’s all because we’ve learnt to talk, yet remarkably, we still don’t know how we did it. Speech! suggests an answer that’s been hiding in plain sight - the simple yet radical shift that turned our analog grunts and shrieks into words. But, its consequences are far from simple: being able to share ideas through language was an evolutionary tipping point - it allowed us to link up our minds.

With stories that entertain as much as they inform, renowned evolutionist David Sloan Wilson outlines the basic principles of evolution and shows how, when properly understood, they can illuminate the length and breadth of creation, from the origin of life to the nature of religion. What is the...

Big History, the field that studies the entire known past of our universe to give context to human existence, has so far been the domain of historians. Geologist Walter Alvarez - best known for his Impact Theory explaining dinosaur extinction - makes a compelling case for a new, science-first approach to Big History.

In the vein of Randall Munroe's What If? meets Brian Green's Elegant Universe, a senior writer from Space.com leads readers on a wild ride of exploration into the final frontier, investigating what's really "out there." We've all asked ourselves the question. It's impossible to look up at the...

The landmark history of the Scopes Trial and the battle over evolution and creation in America's schools Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History “A riveting book.” —Frank Rich, New York Times In the summer of 1925, the sleepy hamlet of Dayton, Tennessee, became the setting for one of the...

An elegant, text-only edition of the New York Times bestseller that’s been hailed as the definitive authority on…everything by Richard Dawkins. Richard Dawkins, bestselling author and the world’s most celebrated evolutionary biologist, has spent his career elucidating the many wonders of...

Columnist and publisher Michael Shermer, once an evangelical Christian and a creationist, argues that Intelligent Design proponents invoke a combination of ad science, political antipathy, and flawed theology in their new brand of creationism. He refutes their pseudoscientific arguments and then demonstrates why conservatives and people of faith can and should embrace evolution. Why Darwin Matters is an incisive examination of what is at stake in the debate over evolution.

Over a century after Darwin published the Origin of Species, Darwinian theory is in a "vibrantly healthy state," writes Stephen Jay Gould, its most engaging and illuminating exponent. Exploring the "peculiar and mysterious particulars of nature," Gould introduces the listener to some of the many and wonderful manifestations of evolutionary biology.