Showing titles in Evolution

The scuba-diving philosopher and best-selling author of Other Minds explores the origins of animal consciousness. 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 flower-like worms, whose rooted bodies and intricate geometry are more reminiscent of plant life than anything recognisably animal. Yet these creatures are our cousins.

Humans live in landscapes of make-believe. We spin fantasies. We devour novels, films, and plays. Even sporting events and criminal trials unfold as narratives. Yet the world of story has long remained an undiscovered and unmapped country. It's easy to say that humans are "wired" for story, but why? In this delightful and original book, Jonathan Gottschall offers the first unified theory of storytelling. He argues that stories help us navigate life's complex social problems.

De la mano de uno de los historiadores más interesantes de la actualidad, he aquí la fascinante interpretación de Yuval Noah Harari sobre la historia de la humanidad. Bestseller nacional e internacional, este libro explora las formas en que la biología y la historia nos han definido y han mejorado nuestra comprensión de lo que significa ser "humano".

The Origin of Humankind is Richard Leakey's personal view of the development of Homo sapiens. At the heart of his new picture of evolution is the introduction of a heretical notion: Once the first apes walked upright, the evolution of modern humans became possible and perhaps inevitable. From this one evolutionary step comes all the other evolutionary refinements and distinctions that set the human race apart from the apes.

The Ape That Understood the Universe is the story of the strangest animal in the world: the human animal. It opens with a question: How would an alien scientist view our species? What would it make of our sex differences, our sexual behavior, our child-rearing patterns, our moral codes, our religions, our languages, and science? The book tackles these issues by drawing on ideas from two major schools of thought: evolutionary psychology and cultural evolutionary theory.

As physicists work toward completing a theory of the universe and biologists unravel the molecular complexity of life, a glaring incompleteness in this scientific vision becomes apparent. The "theory of everything" that appears to be emerging includes everything but us: the feelings, meanings, consciousness, and purposes that make us (and many of our animal cousins) what we are.

Resistance to malaria. Blue eyes. Lactose tolerance. What do all of these traits have in common? Every one of them has emerged in the last 10,000 years.

Astrobiology is an exciting new subject, and one, arguably, more interdisciplinary than any other. Astrobiologists seek to understand the origin and evolution of life on Earth in order to illuminate and guide the search for life on other planets. In this Very Short Introduction, David C. Catling introduces the subject through our understanding of the factors that allowed life to arise and persist on our own planet, and for the signs we are looking for in the search for extraterrestrial life.

In The Greatest Show on Earth, Richard Dawkins takes on creationists, including followers of 'Intelligent Design' and all those who question the fact of evolution through natural selection. Like a detective arriving on the scene of a crime, he sifts through fascinating layers of scientific facts and disciplines to build a cast-iron case: from the living examples of natural selection in birds and insects.

A place of exceptional diversity, rapid change and high energy, for the past 100 million years Europe has literally been at the crossroads of the world. By virtue of its geology and geography, evolution in Europe proceeds faster than elsewhere. The continent has absorbed wave after wave of immigrant species over the millennia, taking them in, transforming them and sometimes hybridising them. Flannery's exploration of the nature of Europe reveals a compelling intellectual drama, with a cast of heroic researchers whose discoveries have changed our understanding of life itself.

In this eye-opening work, Graziano accessibly explores how this sense of an inner being led to empathy and formed us into social beings. The theory may point the way to engineers for building consciousness artificially. Graziano discusses what a future with artificial consciousness might be like, including both advantages and risks, and what AI might mean for our evolutionary future.

In 1994, a team led by fossil-hunting legend Tim White—"the Steve Jobs of paleoanthropology"—uncovered the bones of a human ancestor in Ethiopia's Afar region. The findings challenged many assumptions about human evolution and repudiated a half-century of paleoanthropological orthodoxy. An intriguing tale of scientific discovery, obsession and rivalry that moves from the sun-baked desert of Africa to modern high-tech labs and academic lecture halls, Fossil Men is popular science at its best, and a must-listen for fans of Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, and Edward O. Wilson.

In 1994 Professor Bryan Sykes, a leading world authority on DNA and human evolution, was called in to examine the frozen remains of a man trapped in glacial ice in northern Italy. News of both the Ice Man's discovery and his age, which was put at over 5,000 years, fascinated scientists and newspapers throughout the world. But what made Sykes's story particularly revelatory was his successful identification of a genetic descendant of the Ice Man, a woman living in Great Britain today. How was Sykes able to locate a living relative?

What can fossilized teeth tell us about our ancient life expectancy? What can big data on fossils reveal about farming's problematic role in human evolution? How can simple geometric comparisons of skull and pelvic fossils suggest an origin to our social nature? In Close Encounters with Humankind, paleoanthropologist Sang-Hee Lee explores some of our biggest evolutionary questions from unexpected new angles. Through a series of entertaining, bite-sized chapters, we gain new perspectives into our first hominin ancestors, our first steps on two feet, and more.

Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion and a life-long committed Darwinist, abridges and reads this special audio version of Charles Darwin's famous book. A literally world-changing book, Darwin put forward the anti-religious and scientific idea that humans in fact evolved over millions of generations from animals, starting with fish, all the way up through the ranks to apes, then to our current form.

World renowned scientist Carl Sagan and acclaimed author Ann Druyan have written a Roots for the human species, a lucid and riveting account of how humans got to be the way we are. It shows with humor and drama that many of our key traits - self-awareness, technology, family ties, submission to authority, hatred for those a little different from ourselves, reason, and ethics - are rooted in the deep past, and illuminated by our kinship with other animals.

In A Story of Us, they present this rich narrative and explain how the evolution of our genes relates to the evolution of our cultures. Newson and Richerson take listeners through seven stages of human evolution, beginning seven million years ago with the apes that were the ancestors of humans and today's chimps and bonobos. The story ends in the present day and offers a glimpse into the future.

Long before space travel was possible, the idea of life beyond Earth transfixed humans. In this fascinating book, astronomer Jon Willis explores the science of astrobiology and the possibility of locating other life in our own galaxy. Describing the most recent discoveries by space exploration missions, including the Kepler space telescope, the Mars Curiosity rover, and the New Horizons probe, Willis asks listeners to imagine - and choose among-five scenarios for finding life.

With the trademark dramatic storytelling techniques of The Planets and The Universe, Andrew Cohen and Chris Packham narrate the biography of the Earth, revealing the most epic moments from its history, from the first seconds of its existence to the arrival of its most incredible inhabitants, us. But humans take a back seat for this story as the Earth takes centre stage. We’ll witness those moments where our planet’s future hung in the balance in the face of massive bombardments from space, extreme changes in climate, the collision of whole continents and more.

Naming Darwin's Black Box to the National Review's list of the 100 most important nonfiction works of the 20th century, George Gilder wrote that it "overthrows Darwin at the end of the 20th century in the same way that quantum theory overthrew Newton at the beginning". Discussing the book in the New Yorker in May 2005, H. Allen Orr said of Behe, "He is the most prominent of the small circle of scientists working on intelligent design, and his arguments are by far the best known."