Evolution History

We’ve come a long way. The earliest human had a brain as small as a child’s fist; ours are four times bigger, with spectacular abilities and potential we are only just beginning to understand. This is How the Mind Changed, a seven-million-year journey through our own heads, packed with vivid stories, groundbreaking science, and thrilling surprises. Discover how memory has almost nothing to do with the past.

In 1856 Paul Du Chaillu marched into the equatorial wilderness of West Africa determined to bag an animal that, according to legend, was nothing short of a monster. When he emerged three years later, the summation of his efforts only hinted at what he'd experienced in one of the most dangerous regions on earth. Armed with an astonishing collection of zoological specimens, Du Chaillu leapt from the physical challenges of the jungle straight into the center of the biggest issues of the time.

Rethinking Evolution links Darwin's early insights to the molecular realm inside living cells. This updated evolutionary synthesis provides an accessible explanation for biological complexity that cuts through the confusion surrounding evolutionary theory in a practical way. In addition to a wide-ranging survey of proposed updates to the modern synthesis, this title provides extraordinary new insights, including emergent evolutionary potential and the generative phenotype.

Among scientists who write, no one illuminates as well as Stephen Jay Gould does the wonderful workings of the natural world. Now in a new volume of collected essays—his sixth since Ever Since Darwin—Gould speaks of the importance of unbroken connections within our own lives and to our ancestral generations. Along with way, he opens to us the mysteries of fish tails, frog calls, and other matters, and shows once and for all why we must take notice when a seemingly insignificant creature is threatened, like the land snail Partula from Moorea, whose extinction he movingly relates.

Offering a bold new understanding of who we are, where we came from, and where we are going, noted ecologist Mark Bertness argues that human beings and their civilization are the products of the same self-organization, evolutionary adaptation, and natural selection processes that have created all other life on Earth. Bertness follows the evolutionary process from the primordial soup of two billion years ago through today, exploring the ways opposing forces of competition and cooperation have led to current assemblages of people, animals, and plants.

Brains Through Time examines how vertebrate nervous systems evolved in conjunction with other organ systems and the planet's ecology. Surveying an enormous range of information on genes and proteins, sensory and motor systems, central neural circuits, physiology, and animal behavior, the authors reconstruct the major changes that occurred as vertebrates emerged and then diversified.

In 2018, scientists manipulated the DNA of human babies for the first time. As biologist and historian Matthew Cobb shows in As Gods, this achievement was one many scientists have feared from the start of the genetic age. Four times in the last fifty years, geneticists, frightened by their own technology, have called a temporary halt to their experiments. They ought to be frightened.

Strategy, Evolution, and War is a cautionary preview of how artificial intelligence (AI) will revolutionize strategy more than any development in the last 3,000 years of military history. Kenneth Payne describes strategy as an evolved package of conscious and unconscious behaviors with roots in our primate ancestry. Our minds were shaped by the need to think about warfare, a constant threat for early humans. As a result, we developed a sophisticated and strategic intelligence.

Les origines du shintoïsme est une ressource inestimable pour tous ceux qui s'intéressent à l'histoire et à la culture du Japon, ainsi que pour ceux qui s'intéressent au développement et à l'évolution des religions dans le monde. Le shintoïsme est la religion indigène du Japon, qui remonte à l'ère préhistorique. Les origines du shintoïsme propose une exploration complète des racines et de l'évolution de ce système de croyance unique, depuis les temps anciens jusqu'à nos jours. Le livre commence par une introduction qui donne une vue d'ensemble des sujets abordés tout au long de l'ouvrage.

Science is in trouble. Real questions in desperate need of answers—especially those surrounding ethnicity, gender, climate change, and almost anything related to “health and safety”—are swiftly buckling to the fiery societal demands of what ought to be rather than what is. Can true, fact-based discovery be redeemed? In Science in an Age of Unreason, legendary professor of psychology and biology, John Staddon, unveils the identity crisis afflicting today’s scientific community, and provides an actionable path to recovery.

In 1955, on a visit to South Africa, Robert Ardrey became aware of the growing evidence that man had evolved on the African continent from carnivorous, predatory stock - ones who had also, long before man, achieved the use of weapons. A dramatist, Ardrey's interest in the African discoveries sprang less from purely scientific grounds than from the radical new light they cast on the eternal question: Why do we behave as we do? Are we naturally inclined towards war and weapons?

Survival of the fittest or survival of the nicest? Since the dawn of time man has contemplated the mystery of altruism, but it was Darwin who posed the question most starkly. From the selfless ant to the stinging bee to the man laying down his life for a stranger, evolution has yielded a goodness that in theory should never be. Set against the sweeping tale of 150 years of scientific attempts to explain kindness, The Price of Altruism tells for the first time the moving story of the eccentric American genius George Price (1922-1975), as he strives to answer evolution's greatest riddle.

It was the most radical human-breeding experiment in American history, and no one knew how it turned out. The Repository for Germinal Choice, nicknamed the Nobel Prize sperm bank, opened to notorious fanfare in 1980, and for two decades, women flocked to it from all over the country to choose a sperm donor from its roster of Nobel-laureate scientists, mathematical prodigies, successful businessmen, and star athletes.

Bill McKibben, examines the dangers inherent in an array of technologies that threaten not just our survival, but our identity. Imagine a future where lab workers can reprogram human embryos to make our children "smarter" or "more sociable" or "happier." Enough examines such possibilities, and explains how we can avoid their worst consequences while still enjoying the fruits of our new scientific understandings.

In Born in Africa, Martin Meredith follows the trail of discoveries about human origins made by scientists over the last hundred years, recounting their intense rivalry, personal feuds, and fierce controversies, as well as their feats of skill and endurance. The results have been momentous. Scientists have identified more than 20 species of extinct humans. They have firmly established Africa as the birthplace not only of humankind but also of modern humans.

Scientists often challenge conventional wisdom and spark debates that last for generations. But no scientist has fuelled more debate than Charles Darwin. To some he is the revolutionary 'father' of evolution. To others he is the perverse 'originator' of modern eugenics. In The Darwin Myth: The Life and Lies of Charles Darwin, author Benjamin Wiker brings these conflicting identities to light.

In December 1929, in a cave near Peking, a group of anthropologists and archaeologists that included a young French Jesuit priest named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin uncovered a prehuman skull. The find quickly became known around the world as Peking Man and was acclaimed as the missing link between erect hunting apes and our Cro-Magnon ancestors. It also became a provocative piece of evidence in the roiling debate over creationism versus evolution.

Eggs are the origins of ninety percent of the Earth's organisms. They can be found as far apart as deep-sea volcanoes and in space. Yet despite their fundamental importance, eggs often find themselves an afterthought in the discussion of evolution of life on Earth as the interests of scientists congregate around the things that emerge from eggs rather than the eggs themselves.

Our ability to think about the future is one of the most powerful tools at our disposal. In The Invention of Tomorrow, cognitive scientists Thomas Suddendorf, Jonathan Redshaw, and Adam Bulley argue that its emergence transformed humans from unremarkable primates to creatures that hold the destiny of the planet in their hands. Drawing on their own cutting-edge research, the authors break down the science of foresight, showing us where it comes from, how it works, and how it made our world.

In the land of the Southern Hemisphere, where the Andes Mountains towered high and the Pampas stretched far and wide, there once existed a country of great and turbulent history. This country was known as Argentina, and its tale is as epic and enchanting as any told in Latin America. Come journey through the ages with this audibook. From the early indigenous civilizations to the arrival of Spanish conquistadors, from the heroic struggle for independence to the rise and fall of Peronism, this chronicle is rich with heroes, villains, triumphs, and tragedies.