Showing results by publisher "-emdashery books-" in Evolution

Why can humans alone invent? In The Pattern Seekers, Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen makes a case that autism is as crucial to our creative and cultural history as the mastery of fire. Indeed, Baron-Cohen argues that autistic people have played a key role in human progress for 70,000 years, from the first tools to the digital revolution. How? Because the same genes that cause autism enable the pattern seeking that is essential to our species' inventiveness.

Join us on a journey through how we understand the universe, from its most basic particles and forces to planets, stars, and galaxies, and back through cosmic history to the birth of the cosmos. Conflicting notions about our place in the universe are defined, defended, and critiqued from scientific, philosophical, and religious viewpoints. The authors' engaging and witty style addresses what fine tuning might mean for the future of physics and the search for the ultimate laws of nature.

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.

Myth-shattering social scientist Brian Klaas dives deeply into the phenomenon of random chance and the chaos it can sow, taking aim at most people's neat and tidy storybook version of reality. The book's argument is that we willfully ignore a bewildering truth: but for a few small changes, our lives - and our societies - could be radically different. Offering an entirely new lens, Fluke explores how our world really works, driven by strange interactions and apparently random events.

An exciting and accessible new view of the evolution of human and animal life on Earth. From the author of national bestseller, Your Inner Fish, this extraordinary journey of discovery spans centuries, as explorers and scientists seek to understand the origins of life's immense diversity...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs and Steel examines the rise of civilization and the issues its development has raised throughout history. Having done field work in New Guinea for more than 30 years, Jared Diamond presents the geographical and ecological factors that have shaped...

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.

Richard Dawkins' brilliant reformulation of the theory of natural selection has the rare distinction of having provoked as much excitement and interest outside the scientific community as within it. His theories have helped change the whole nature of the study of social biology, and have forced thousands to rethink their beliefs about life.

With so much variation that can be handed down genetically, for better or worse, the way we understand our biology holds huge importance for how we understand our world and one another, including the biggest questions of our day, such as social inequality. Eye-opening and profound, Adaptable is a revolutionary reappraisal of an overlooked science.

In Why Are We Like This? science journalist Zoe Kean takes us behind the scenes of the evolutionary paradoxes that make up life on this planet. Exploring with scientists, whether freezing in Tasmanian sleet or in a laboratory of sleeping sharks in North Queensland, we see how these evolutionary mysteries might just uncover the secrets of a better life for humans and the creatures we share the planet with.

A marvellously engaging writer' – The Times From the winner of the 2022 Royal Society Science Book Prize, a thrilling and thought-provoking account of the rise and fall of humankind. For the first time in over ten millennia, the rate of human population growth is slowing down. The global...

Over 10,000 years ago there were fewer than 10 million people on the planet. Today there are more than six billion, 99 per cent of whom are better fed, better sheltered, better entertained and better protected against disease than their Stone Age ancestors. Yet, bizarrely, however much things improve from the way they were before, people still cling to the belief that the future will be nothing but disastrous.

The Development of an Extraordinary Species We human beings share 98 percent of our genes with chimpanzees. Yet humans are the dominant species on the planet -- having founded civilizations and religions, developed intricate and diverse forms of communication, learned science, built cities, and...

In this groundbreaking approach to the evolution of all life, Richard Dawkins shows how the body, behaviour, and genes of every living creature can be read as a book – an archive of the worlds of its ancestors. A perfectly camouflaged desert lizard has a desiccated landscape of sand and stones ‘painted’ on its back. Its skin can be read as a description of ancient deserts in which its ancestors survived – and, before that, of the worlds of its more remote ancestors: a genetic book of the dead.

In the Rutherford and Fry's comprehensive guidebook, they tell the complete story of the universe and absolutely everything in it - skipping over some of the boring parts. It's a celebration of the weirdness of the cosmos, the strangeness of humans and the very fact that amid all the mess, we can somehow make sense of life.

In the summer of 2022, Lee Berger lost 50 pounds in order to wriggle though impossibly small openings in the Rising Star cave complex in South Africa—spaces where his team has been unearthing the remains of Homo naledi, a proto-human likely to have coexisted with Homo sapiens some 250,000 years ago. Lead researcher Berger had never made his way into the dark, cramped, dangerous underground spaces where many of the naledi fossils had been found. Now he was ready to do so. Once inside the cave, Berger made shocking new discoveries that expand our understanding of this early hominid.

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.

'Exhilaratingly whizzes through billions of years . . . Gee is a marvellously engaging writer, juggling humour, precision, polemic and poetry to enrich his impossibly telescoped account . . . [making] clear sense out of very complex narratives' - The Times 'Henry Gee makes the kaleidoscopically...

A bold, provocative exploration of the tension between our evolutionary history and our modern woes and what we can do about it. We are living through the most prosperous age in all of human history, yet we are listless, divided and miserable. Wealth and comfort are unparalleled, but our political landscape is unmoored, and rates of suicide, loneliness and chronic illness continue to skyrocket.

What is human consciousness, and how is it possible? This question fascinates thinking people from poets and painters to physicists, psychologists, and philosophers. From Bacteria to Bach and Back is Daniel C. Dennett's brilliant answer, extending perspectives from his earlier work in surprising directions, exploring the deep interactions of evolution, brains, and human culture.